by John Skipp
This was not good, not good at all. The tables had turned much too quickly, and he was in danger of being cornered. He gazed around the room. Crosses were everywhere, blocking his path. There was only one reasonably clear choice available.
The window.
Peter stared, blank-faced with shock and horror, as Eddie hissed like a trapped animal and threw himself headlong into the window. It exploded outward, fragments of glass and wood showering down to the street.
Three floors below.
Peter stared at the gaping hole where his window had been. The chintz curtains fluttered harmlessly on the night air. From the street below, silence. No screams. No sirens.
Just silence.
As if the night had swallowed him.
He hurried to the window, poking his head out gingerly. The street was empty. If anyone had heard anything, they kept it to themselves.
He stepped back from the window. A life-size portrait of Bela Lugosi in full regalia, long before the Sterno-sucking days of his decline, loomed before him.
Bela had been a good friend. The greatest vampire and the greatest vampire hunter. That painting had been a gift. It was meant to dominate the room. Bluh, bluh, I vant to drink your blood . . .
Peter felt old, all used up. The cross was still in his hand, a smear of goo on one side.
Bluh . . .
Eddie limped along the sidewalk bordering Badham Boulevard, very much in pain. Foul sweat glistened on his forehead, the kind of sweat found on meat left too long out-of-doors. The brand on his scalp was growing sticky and congealed, stray slivers of glass and bits of crumbled leaf matted in it. It hurts, it hurts, oh God, it . . . The word God left a feeling like chewing on tin foil in his mouth. He needed help, bad.
This isn’t working out at all, he thought. Not at all like He promised.
The jet-black Cherokee pulled up at the corner, and Eddie staggered toward it as if it were Valhalla. Billy stepped out, leaving the motor running. He looked at Eddie with contempt and perhaps the slightest flicker of pity. “What happened to you?”
Evil Ed stood before him, breathing raggedly. “He . . . he had a cross. He hit me—”
Billy grabbed him roughly by the cheek. “I can see that. Did you kill him?”
Eddie shook his head piteously. Billy snorted, derisive, then grabbed the little vampire by the collar and hoisted him close. “You, my friend,” he whispered, “are in the deep shit now.” And hurled him into the Jeep.
Eddie hit the seat so hard the bars bowed. Billy jumped into the driver’s seat, shifted to drive, and sent the Cherokee roaring off into the night.
NINETEEN
Dandrige already knew that Eddie had blown it. You don’t live that many hundreds of years without picking up a trick or two. He sensed it, even as he strolled through the door of Club Radio. Peter Vincent was still alive; ergo, Peter Vincent was still available to play with.
Fine, thought the vampire, his frail-looking hands clasped together. It’s the chance of a lifetime. I was a fool to give it up.
He wanted to be staring into Peter Vincent’s eyes when The Great Vampire Killer flickered over into eternal hunger. He wanted to watch the transition. Letting Evil Ed do it would have been enough, in one sense—he liked the cast of the horde he was assembling—but turning down the chance to kill Peter Vincent was like passing up a chance to meet the Devil himself; it didn’t come up very often, and it was bound to be memorable.
So he would wait. He would maneuver it. For now, he had the nitwit and the virgin to dispense with. They had wasted enough of his time in games not of his own devising.
Now they would play by his rules.
He planned to enjoy it.
Very much.
The crowd at Club Radio was bursting with life. Hundreds of bodies swarmed over the dance floor, strutting and swaying to the primal groove. As far as Jerry was concerned, it was a wonderful thing. He genuinely loved to see people have a good time.
It made them that much easier to hate.
How long, since he had walked among ordinary men and not been a stranger? How long, since his last taste of camaraderie with the human race? How long, since his last glimpse of the sun? After four centuries and more, the questions had not gone away. Neither had the longings. They had become the worst part of his curse, the source of his only remaining nightmares.
Dying—real dying, forever and ever—was something that he prayed for. Killing was something that he’d learned to love. The only real horror lay in memory: of how much he had lost, of how little true humanity remained.
It made him angry, as he thought about it. It made him hurt. Most of all, it made him want to find little Charley Brewster and his childhood sweetheart: to quell the disturbance around his quaint new home, to incubate his plague of nightspawn without the glare of the public eye upon him.
He slid onto the dance floor, parting the waves of motion like a shark. His dark gaze went from face to face, searching. Finding nothing.
The ones he sought were not boogeyin’ down, which was as he expected.
But they’re in here, he thought. Oh, yes. They are.
And before the night is over, they’ll be mine.
The cops had been receptive, as usual. They were receptive to the idea of finding Charley a nice white padded room. Lieutenant Lennox had left word at the desk, and that was as far as Charley got; the desk sergeant dispensed warnings about the joys to be found in Thorazine and electroshock therapy.
Which left him, once again, with the amazing Peter Vincent. Which left him, once again, pressing a phone to his ear while every pointless ring reminded him of how hopeless it had gotten.
Amy was standing next to the cheap fucking plastic fern, keeping an eye out for Dandrige. It was the scariest thing about being back in this little cul-de-sac: short of the bathrooms, there was nowhere to run. He was grateful to her for keeping watch. It let him concentrate on freaking out about the endless ringing.
“Answer me, dammit. Answer me,” he hissed into the phone, turning away from Amy and the hallway.
When the monster found them, he didn’t even know it.
Amy caught the vampire in profile first, moving through the crowd. He was magnificent, every bit the godlike image he projected himself to be. She found herself marveling at him, even as the flesh began to crawl over her bones.
Oh, God, she heard herself thinking. How can he be so gorgeous and so monstrous all at once?
And that, of course, was when he turned and riveted her with his eyes.
It took less than a second. Supernatural vacuum tubes latched onto her will and began to suck away, draining her as she stood. Turning away, pulling Charley from the phone, drawing a bright red cross in lipstick across her throat and forehead: all of her options petered away in the light of Jerry Dandrige’s eyes.
It took less than a second of total consciousness and total helplessness (Come here, you’re beautiful, I want you tonight . . .) before she started to move toward him.
The phone stopped ringing. A moment of silence. Charley, hanging desperately onto the receiver.
“Yes?” A tremulous voice from the other end of the line.
“Mr. Vincent, please, this is Charley Brewster, you gotta listen to me.” A rush of words, no pause for breath. “We’re trapped in this club, you gotta come help us.”
“I’m sorry.” Peter Vincent. In terror. “I can’t.”
“What do you mean, you can’t?”
“Charley. Please. You’ve got to understand. Your friend Eddie is one of them now. He just attacked—”
“Omigod.” A sinking feeling, the ton of black despair reprised. Eddie. The alley. The voice on the phone.
“—a couple of minutes ago. I was almost killed. If I try to go out, he’ll—”
“If you don’t come out, he’ll kill us!” A scream, cutting through the distant dance-floor din. “Amy’s here, too, and, omigod, I know that he wants her . . .”
Tears, threatening to pour. Sile
nce from the other end of the phone.
Followed by a click.
And a dial tone.
. . . And she was stepping into his arms, the music pushing back the walls as it pounded into her nervous system, galvanizing her into motion that synchronized perfectly with his . . .
. . . As Dandrige held her close, hands playing lightly over her back, her hair, the sensations incredible, the abandonment complete, the wet heat in her panties and her heart testifying that she wanted him, she wanted him, whatever he was, whatever he wanted to do . . .
It was so easy. It was too easy, as it had been for what seemed like forever. All he had to do was want them, and they were his. The only challenge lay in the chase itself. The only change was in the scenery.
And in the taste of their flesh and blood, he mused. Let us not forget. Over the centuries, he’d become a connoisseur of great distinction within his milieu. He could trace a victim’s genealogy back five generations at a taste, pick out the tiniest subtleties of diet and relative health or disease. He’d been the first to publicly claim (to the vampire community) that chemical additives had actually upped blood’s nutritional value to the undead: there was something fundamentally unhealthy about it that vampires positively thrived on. Ever since, only nostalgia buffs went out of their way to feed on health-food freaks or members of the Third World.
Coupled with his seductive artistry (which was highly rated in that fiercely competitive field), Jerry Dandrige’s acute sensibilities made him the toast of the town wherever he went. He was afforded a great deal of independence to go with his acclaim. While most chose to stay at home, maintaining the low profile that their society dictated, Jerry was free to roam and explore in an almost unprecedented fashion; on top of everything else, he was regarded as something of an adventurer. His exploits were legend, even within that legendary species.
And here I am, he thought sardonically, getting into the swing of things here at Rancho Corvallis’s hottest nightspot. It was a lot like slumming. It really was. If he weren’t so fond of the area’s flavor . . .
The girl was grinding against him now. It brought him back to his body, the hunger it encased. Her eyes were rolling back in something like ecstasy, her undulations suggesting the same. It was a reaction he always savored.
Everybody needs a little lovin’, a voice in his mind began to sing . . .
“SONOFABITCH!” Charley bellowed, grabbing Amy by the shoulder and yanking her backward. Dandrige looked up, startled, his eyes beginning to flare up redly.
Charley had picked them out of the crowd, which had parted slightly around them without seeming to know why. Along the way, he’d run into every kind of person he’d never wanted to meet: cranky coke snorters, horny sexagenarians, militant lesbians, ornery Twisted Sister fans. The bar’s clientele was a mishmosh of types that seemed to hold no barriers sacred. Even vampires are welcome, he’d found himself thinking crazily.
Then he’d spotted them—Dandrige in total control, Amy humping on him like a poodle in heat—and the world had gone a brilliant shade of red. His interior dialogue funneled down to that one polyglot designation, which he repeated as he swung for the vampire’s face. “SONOFABITCH!”
Quicker than thought, the vampire’s hand snaked out, catching Charley’s fist in mid-flight. Pain flooded his wrist, his forearm, the network of nerve endings leading down to his spine.
“You shouldn’t lose your temper,” Dandrige scolded, grinning. “It isn’t polite, you know.”
The vampire squeezed harder, pulling him close. The pain became unbearable. Charley buckled and fell to his knees, whining. “You can’t kill me here,” he managed to say.
“But I don’t want to kill you here!” Dandrige exclaimed. “My idea was to have you join me at my house. With Peter Vincent, if you don’t mind terribly. Between the three of you”—doing a long vaudevillian grind against Amy’s still-bucking pelvis—“I’m sure I’ll have a wonderful time.
“So be there, if you want to see her alive again.” The vampire whipped off a vicious sneer at that point, squeezing even harder. Charley swore that he heard the sound of popping knuckles, but it was hard to tell through the seismographic pounding of the music. He let out a barely audible scream. Tears rolled out of his eyes.
“Up to you, Charley,” the vampire concluded. “You don’t have much of a chance, but at least it’s something. I’d take me up on it, if I were you.”
Then the pressure released, and Charley crumpled to the dance floor. Dandrige let out a tiny burst of laughter and turned, pulling Amy alongside him as he made his way to the door.
BASTARD! Charley thought, but he was hurting too badly to articulate it. On the video screens that surrounded him, a were-woman vamped through the woods while the boys from Duran Duran informed him that they were hungry like a wolf. Several hundred assholes shimmied and swayed while his hand screamed bloody agony, oblivious to the nightmare that was going on around them.
BASTARD! he thought again, and then he was running after them, the pain ignored if not forgotten. More quietly, the words Amy, I love you, I won’t let him get you played subtext to his rage.
And then the massive hand clamped down on his shoulder again.
“There you are, little bro’!” the bouncer said conversationally. “We was wondering when we would find yo’ ass!” Amusement was written all over his face. The quality of mercy was not. “Where’s your little girlfriend?”
“THAT’S WHO I’M TRYING TO FIND!” Charley screamed. “LET ME GO!”
“Don’t dick around with me, boy,” the bouncer assured him. “I might snap you in half.”
“BUT . . .” Charley began at high volume, and then he spotted them: at the edge of the dance floor, less than ten feet from the door. “THERE SHE IS!” he bellowed, pointing wildly.
The bouncer grunted and nodded once. He bowled through the crowd like a leviathan engine, dragging Charley behind him. A second bouncer, shorter and thinner but no less black or bald, gave them the okeydoke sign and moved to block the door.
Both of the bouncers were supremely confident, stepping over the border into cockiness. Charley wondered, for slightly less than a second, why that failed to assuage his fear.
And then all hell broke loose.
“ ’Scuse me, muh man,” the skinny little black dude said. He had stepped away from the door and made his way up to them in the crowd. “I think your girlfriend an’ I gots to have us a word or two.”
“No,” said Jerry Dandrige. He was not in a trifling mood. Getting stopped at the door was not in the script. It pissed him off. It was the kind of annoying diddly-shit that made him wish for his home in Transylvania, where caterers took the bother out of mealtime.
“It ain’t a matter of dee-bate,” the bouncer insisted. “We got the Liquor Control Board snoopin’ around here tonight. If you wants to grab chicken, you just hang out like a good boy an’ wait ’til we’re done, or drag yo’ ass down to Elvira Boul—”
The bouncer never got to finish his directions for underage meat. Jerry Dandrige had had enough.
He began to transform.
The eyes, first: catlike, slit-irised and utterly inhuman. Then the first protrusion of fangs, contorting the upper lip while the lower jaw bulged and strained. The flesh turned gray and lizardlike. The hair receded, went greasily silver.
He held his right hand up to the bouncer’s face, so that the man couldn’t fail to see what was happening. Couldn’t miss the claws that tore out of the extended fingertips, razor-sharp and gleaming.
Couldn’t overlook the last few seconds of his life.
Then the vampire slashed forward, talons raking five jagged grooves across the bouncer’s throat. The carotid artery tore with a great sputtering geyser of blood. It jet-sprayed broad strokes of crimson graffiti across half a dozen passersby, spritzed into the eyes of a dancing couple and annointed every drink within a seven-foot radius.
The effect was a smashing success. The screams that erupted were
perfectly timed with the Duran Duran girl’s first wail of torment. His senses, sharpened by the heady scent of blood in the air, picked it up in Sensurround. Together with the flashing lights, the simple fact that he had an audience for a change, it made for one of the most enjoyable deaths he’d meted out in ages.
The dead man was still burbling as he crashed to the floor. The crowd was fanning out around him, still too stunned for a mass retreat. Another black man stepped out of it, much larger than the first. Jerry noted with amusement that Charley was beside him, looking slightly green around the gills.
Watch closely, boy, the vampire thought. He could feel the words impacting on Charley’s brain, could see the confusion and terror. Your death isn’t going to be this pretty.
Then the second bouncer was upon him, towering over him. It didn’t matter. The bigger they come . . . he idly thought, pushing Amy gently to one side and then bringing his right hand up again.
Once again, it caught the bouncer at the throat. This time, however, the claws didn’t carve. They punctured. The man’s huge face ballooned with pain and disbelief. His lips pulled back into a yawning, white-toothed oval.
And the lovely redness began to flow.
“Beautiful,” Jerry muttered, entirely to himself. Everybody else was too busy screaming or dying. He liked the dimples in the man’s neck, where all five claws were deeply embedded. He liked the way they trickled ever so slightly.
Effortlessly, he began to lift. Over two hundred pounds of limply flailing carcass rose an inch off the floor. Two inches. And more. When the man was well over a foot in the air, Jerry flung him casually into the middle of the dance floor.
Where no one was dancing.
Anymore.
. . . And the screaming was all around her now, a hurricane howling that shattered her thoughts and sent the sharp fragments soaring through her skull. Words like omigod, Charley jumbled together with help me and so that’s what it’s like to die, a subsonic morass that drowned in the screaming, but that was strangely okay, because she was screaming, too . . .