by Andrew Dudek
It was one of the addresses on Guinness’s list, though we hadn’t checked it out yet. When we realized that, an electric excitement coursed through the station.
The Family took turns staking out the house. There was no sign of movement. Mail piled up, snow melted on the sidewalk, and no one ever came to the door. The kids should have been going to school, the mother to work. But no one ever emerged and no one ever came in. For all intents and purposes, the house on 165th Street looked abandoned.
It was probably a false alarm. Maybe the mother was behind on the mortgage and, rather than face the humiliation of eviction, had taken the kids and ran. As for the missing teens…well, it was sad, but it happens all the time, even without vampires. There was no sense in attributing everything to the supernatural. There’s plenty of horror in the mundane world.
I know it seems ugly, but I was actually disappointed when it began to seem that there wasn’t a vampire nest in the house. The boredom that had settled into my bones had made me slow. Without the constant honing by vampires, I was already losing my touch, losing what had made me special. I was losing my purpose.
Hour after hour of staring at the silent, unmoving house was driving me crazy. I decided to give it a few days, then tell Nate we should call this lead bogus.
About a week into the stakeout, I saw for myself that this rumor had substance.
Just after midnight and it was as cold as the depths of winter. I was at a bus stop, watching the house. The neighborhood still hadn’t recovered from the losses it had taken during the vampires’ assault. People—the ones still alive and in their homes—were still afraid to go out at night. The block was silent. Nothing, no so much as a cop car disturbed the scene. From my vantage point, I was catty-corner to the house, so I could see both the front and back doors. There was a basement entrance, too, and a window high up near the roof to what must have been the attic. It was this window that opened suddenly.
I jerked up, rubbed at my eyes to make sure I was awake, that I wasn’t dreaming. Sure enough, a hand was opening the attic window. I waited a moment, unsure what to do.
The hand was followed by an arm, clothed in some dark fabric. A man pulled himself out of the window and crouched on the sill for a moment. It was late and clouds obscured the moon, so I couldn’t make out his features, but streetlights glinted in his dark eyes. I let my head drop, pretending to be asleep. When I chanced a look again, the man was descending on a drainpipe, crawling straight down the side of the house like some kind of gigantic spider.
He dropped into the yard, crouched so he was hidden by some overgrown brush. I waited a few moments, but he never reappeared. Still, that was enough for me. If the human spider routine hadn’t convinced me, the way that his eyes had sparkled like a cat’s had. The man was a vampire.
The Family was back in business.
The next night the whole Family gathered around the house. We spread out, watching as intently as any hunters in deer blinds. It occurred to me that this was more action than the neighborhood had probably seen in weeks. Maybe months.
There was no sign of vampires that night, but Nate trusted my instincts, and he gave the order. That morning we’d go in.
It felt good holding my ax in my hand. The smooth polished wood of the handle made me feel okay, like the last six months hadn't happened. I felt like we hadn’t missed a step, and that the Family was right back where we belonged. I couldn’t help but grin as we waited for the first rays of sunlight to reach the house, so the vampires would be trapped and we could slaughter them like the animals they were.
As always, when Nate gave the signal, I was the first through the door. I felt a pang of something like shame when I splintered the back door—this wasn’t an abandoned warehouse, it was somebody’s home—but there was nothing for it. The door shattered. The impact sent vibrations running up my arms, from my wrists to my shoulders and down my spine, and I grinned.
My smile faded as I went inside. The smell of the air wormed into my nostrils, heavy and pungent. It seemed metallic at first, a smell I recognized with horrible suddenness. The other scent, which followed right on the heels of the first, was also familiar, but it took me a moment to place it.
The first smell was blood.
The second smell was rotting meat.
I stalked through the kitchen, Luisa right on my heels. The refrigerator had a mirrored door, and I coughed a glimpse of myself. My face was gaunt, my cheeks hollow. My hair was long and greasy. The patchy fuzz on my jaw couldn’t really be called a beard, but it was the closest I’d ever gotten. I barely recognized myself.
I grimaced as I entered what would have once been the living room. From the smell that hovered ominously like a shroud I knew what I’d find, but that didn’t make it any less horrible.
The family of the house were dead in the living room. The mother had been opened, from navel to throat. Her entrails had been removed and flung around so they hung like perversions of Christmas ribbons. Her blood had soaked into the carpet, giving it a squishy feeling as we walked.
It took a moment to decipher the two objects hanging from the walls were, the gruesome decorations. The children had been nailed there, over the little dining table. Their skin had been pulled from their bodies, leaving a disgusting mess of raw meat. They’d been licked dry, all of the blood and moisture sucked from their bodies. Their muscles and bones showed teethmarks, as if something had been chewing.
Flies buzzed in the room, so many of them that the sound seemed like a solid mass.
“Madre de Christo,” Luisa whispered.
Painted on the wall in dried and streaked blood, opposite the corpse of the youngest child, a girl of about eight years old, was an enormous capital D.
The sight of the letter made the blood behind my eyes run free. Everything looked red. I tightened my grip on the ax until the wood creaked. Dimly, as if in an early-morning dream, I was aware of Nate’s voice calling me, but I didn’t respond. I couldn’t respond.
It was a different setting—a small house instead of a cramped apartment—and there were more bodies, but it could have been a sequel to a different massacre scene. Blood everywhere, with a macabre, almost mocking single-letter message scrawled three feet high across the wall. I knew, somewhere in the my gut, the knowledge heavy like a poison peach pit, that this was the work of the vampire that had killed my mother.
Without realized what I was doing, I started towards the stairs.
The vampire had come out of the attic. That must be where he was hiding.
The others followed me, pulling at my shoulders. I could hear their voices, imploring me to stop, but their words were lightweight and unimportant. It was like I was on some roller coaster track, and there was no turning around. I knew that the vampire that’d killed my mother was somewhere in the house. After a few moments the protestations stopped and my Family settled in around me.
The attic was accessible from a trapdoor-ladder in the ceiling of a second-story hallway. Nate, the tallest member, pulled the string and dropped the ladder. Before I had a chance, Nate swung around and began to climb.
He was giving me a chance to calm down. Smart, really, and if I’d been in my right mind I’d have been grateful: if I went up there full of as much numb rage as I was, I’d have been killed. I’d seen what happened to people who went into battle with blind anger. It slows your reflexes and makes you put more power into the attacks. You get more tired faster and you move slower. A good way to get yourself bloodied up. Or killed.
I took a few deep breaths, and Luisa started up the ladder. My heart still pounded in my chest, rattling the bars of my rib cage, but I was settling down. The anger was still there, but instead of a blazing inferno, it was a smoldering cooking fire. No longer something wild and uncontrollable, now it was something that could be useful.
Shifting the ax to one hand, I started up the ladder.
The attic was cold and dark. The air was thick with the stench of bodies living together in
close quarters—a smell with which I was very familiar. There was another smell in the air, too, something like rot, but it was faint and nearly unnoticeable. Like there something dead in the attic that was doing its best not to be noticed.
Nate and Luisa moved slowly around the room, checking behind boxes and tossing aside Rubbermaid storage containers. There was a pull-cord overhead, connected to a bare lightbulb. I pulled it, and the attic was bathed in harsh electric glow.
Something shrieked from behind a plastic Christmas tree, and a box of ornaments fell with a crash. A dark shape leaped over the broken glass and charged towards me.
I didn’t have time to think, just swung my ax. The blade connected just above the right ear with a sickening, splattering thud. The force of the blow lifted the figure off of his feet and threw him into a wall.
Nate moved, fast as a panther, towards where the monster was downed. There was a whoosh of air as he brought the machete down. I heard the thunk as the machete dug into the wooden floor.
I navigated the maze of household clutter to join Nate standing over the body.
It was skinny, almost sickly, as if it’d been on a starvation diet for months, except for the stomach which bulged pregnantly. The clothes were rags and I assumed he’d scavenged them from the attic. His hair was shaggy and russet-colored, in need of trim. There were two breaks in his pallid skin, one where I’d hit him and another where Nate’s machete had severed his head. Beneath the skin was something like fur, the same reddish color as the hair on his head. Nausea rolled my stomach, but I crouched and peeled the skin back.
The Family helped me strip the skin off the thing’s body.
This wasn’t a vampire. Whatever it was, it had been wearing human skin like a suit. Free of the human pelt, it looked vastly different: its limbs seemed longer and it had short, rodent-like snout. The hands were huge, each finger ending in a dull claw and the palms were hollowed and shovel-like.
“Ghoul,” Nate said. “It’s a carrion-eater.”
“It’s not him,” I whispered.
“They usually live near graveyards,” Nate said, “and they eat corpses. I remember my mom mentioning that they sometimes partner with vamp nests—the vampires take the blood and leave the rest for the ghouls.”
“It’s not him.”
Nate looked at me, as if he were seeing me for the first time.
“There has to be a vampire here somewhere,” I said. “This thing didn’t kill those people.”
“No, I know, but the vamps are probably long gone.”
“You don’t understand,” I cried, aware that I sounded hysterical. “That scene down there? With the D on the wall? That’s exactly what it looked like when my mom died. And I saw the vampire that killed her, and he’s got to be here!” I was shouting by the end, tears stinging my eyes.
Nate looked at Luisa, who shrugged unapologetically in a he’s losing it gesture.
“Nobody else here, boss,” she said. “The house is empty.”
“They’ve been dead a while,” Nate said. “The family downstairs, I mean. This…scavenger probably moved in once the vamps were gone.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, I guess. I just…I don’t know, when I saw that mess downstairs I thought…”
“You thought you had him.” Nate gave me a bitter smile. “I understand that.” He put a hand on my shoulder. “You’ll find him someday, Dave. I’m sure of that.”
Luisa coughed, loudly and purposefully. “This is all very sweet, but we are technically trespassing, and we don’t want to be here if some cop decides to be a hero.”
“Right,” Nate said. “Better split. You okay, Dave?”
I gritted my teeth into a smile that I’m sure everyone in the room saw as fake. “Yeah,” I said. “I’m fine. You’re right—let’s get out of here.”
I spent most of the rest of the day sitting by myself, thinking about the vampire that had killed my mother. I hadn’t given him much thought—Mom, either—in months. I’d been too busy trying to stay alive, to keep from freezing to death or getting eaten by vampires to spare brainpower for revenge or grief.
The image of his face—a face I’d seen only for a moment—was imprinted in my mind like the tattoo on my shoulder, but I couldn’t remember what my mom had looked like. I couldn’t remember the sound of her voice or the way she smelled. I’d lost the way she smiled or laughed, the way she yelled or cried. All I could remember, when I tried to think about my mother, was a gashed throat and a lake of warm blood.
He’d been there, I was sure of it, at the house on 165th Street. What were the chances that there were two different vampires so depraved that they’d decorate with their victims’ blood? No, this was unquestionably the work of the same one.
But if was going around, using human arteries as paint cans, that suggested a degree of intelligence. I’d known since the beginning that they were able to conceal their fangs through some kind of magic camouflage, but I’d assumed that was as human as they got. But, if this one vampire could operate with a pattern, they were much smarter than I’d thought.
It was nearing sundown when Nate joined me. We were in the subway station. The rest of the Family—what was left of it, anyway—were milling around, laughing quietly, eating cans of beans, and otherwise enjoying themselves. The Family’s leader and I watched them, together, for a moment in silence.
Finally, Nate said, “You okay?”
“Yeah. Fine.”
I shrugged. I was hesitant to bring up my theory to Nate. I was a little embarrassed to be thinking about it—Nate was the brains of the Family, and if he hadn’t thought of something, how could I expect to get there first? Ah, screw it: if we were wrong, Nate needed to know more than anyone.
“Just…how smart do you think vampires are?”
He sighed, looking up at the dark ceiling. “I know exactly how smart they are, Dave: They’re as smart as people. That means some of them are really dumb, some are really smart, and everything in between. My mom taught me all of this, you know. She always said I should know it, just in case. I always said, ‘just in case of what?’ but she’d shake her head and go on with the lesson.” Nate laughed, a short, guttural sound that had nothing to do with humor.
“The thing of it is, Dave, the vampires we’ve been fighting have been the dumb ones. I don’t know what they’re doing here, but there are others out there, ones that are really, really smart, and they’re the ones that we gotta worry about.
“Did you know there are parts of the world that are literally run by vampires? They kill people as easily as we kill cows. I don’t know much, but I know what my mom said: ‘Sooner or later the vampires will realize they hate us more than they hate each other, and then the whole world will be in real trouble.’ She said they’ve tried it before.”
He looked at me, and there was something dark in his eyes, something that glittered dangerously like amusement. “It’s just a guess, but I think it’ll happen in our lifetimes.”
I tried to laugh. “So, what, it’ll be like World War Two with vampires instead of Nazis?” As I spoke the image lost its humor and was replaced with a dawning sense of horror.
“I guess.”
“Hell, man.”
“Yeah.” Nate took out his switchblade. He popped it open and showed it to me. “It’s silver. It hurts them, even if it can’t kill them.”
“I know.”
He closed the blade and offered the little weapon. “Take it.”
I blinked. “What? Why?”
Nate sighed. “I don’t know, Dave. Call it a hunch or a premonition or a prophecy. There’s a war coming and I know you’re gonna be an important part of it. I guess I just want you to have all the weapons you can get.”
With that, he stood up and slapped me on the back. “You had a tough day, Dave. Tomorrow will be tough, too, but you know as well as I do that the tough days are just that: days. You survive them and you move on to the better ones. Get some sleep, Dave, and hope there’s some goo
d days coming.”
I woke to screams.
Scrambling to get up, my feet got tangled in my thin blanket, and I went down, slamming my chin into the ground. A vibrating wave of pain slid into the depths of my face. Slapping the ground in frustration, I pushed myself to my feet and ran towards the screams. I got a few steps before I tripped on something and went tumbling onto the tracks. That one hurt. Dazed, light-headed, and confused, I looked to see what had tripped me.
Luisa’s body lay on the platform, her eyes staring sightlessly, her mouth gaping. Her hand hung off the platform, as if reaching to offer me a hand up. The wrist was slashed and blood trickled down her hands to drip off her fingertips. Her throat had been opened.
Another scream echoed oddly in the cavernous interior of the station. I pulled myself onto the platform, grabbed my ax, and, leaving Luisa where she’d fallen, ran towards the sound.
The center of the platform, the Family’s common area, was a battleground. A horde of vampires was crowding into the station. I’d never seen so many of the undead creatures. They clogged the stairs on both sides of the platform, hissing and slavering. I tried to count, but it was impossible: There were too many of them, and they all moved eerily fast.
The platform was slick with blood—red and black mixing together into a horrible brownish solution.
Nate stood in the middle of the fray, his machete moving with a mind of its own. He had four vertical cuts down the side of his neck, like he’d been slashed. Nearby I saw a severed hand, fingernails elongated and pointed like the claws of a cat.
Swinging my ax blindly with as much power as I could muster, I lumberjacked to the center.
A vampire landed on my back, slashing at my shoulders and biceps with his claws, snapping at the small of my neck. I dropped to one knee, grabbed him by the wrists, and twisted. The soft, fragile bones shattered audibly. The vampire howled in pain. I flipped him off of me and brought the ax down hard enough to split his skull.