Applewood (Book 1)

by Brendan P. Myers

  Sometimes, he noticed, they would open their eyes in surprise after the stake had been driven home. Sometimes they would raise their hands in an awkward attempt to grasp the stake and pull it out. Every one of them issued some sort of audible grunt or whisper of some sort, like the sound of air escaping from a flat tire.

  Dugan went from nook to nook and cranny to cranny dragging along his knapsack. When he ran out of stakes in the first, he walked back to the cavern opening and grabbed the second. He stopped and looked around for a moment, hoping he had brought enough, smiling when he remembered that it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered anymore except the task at hand: saving his friends from the hell that he alone had allowed to grow unchecked. With only that thought in mind, he went back to work.

  When he was about halfway around the room, through the steadily dwindling light of the torch he noticed that a large gap or natural seam of some kind split two of the cavern walls. After pulling the flashlight out of his pants and flipping it on, he went over to investigate. He had to step sideways and brush against the slimy-wet walls of the cave to pass through. When he did, he found himself in a smaller natural cavern, not much bigger than his own bedroom. Another torch burned in this room, and in the middle of the room, there was another casket. He stared at it a moment before walking toward it, raising the mallet above his head, the stake ready in his other hand. After bending down to flip up the heavy lid, he found himself staring at the mortal remains of the Colonel himself. His head was snapped back. His eyes bugged open. Driblets of blood streamed over both cheeks. He had already been staked.

  “What are you doing?” a voice from behind him said.

  Dugan jumped and dropped his mallet. Turning around, he saw the woman from the Historical Society standing in the narrow opening through which he had come. In her hand was a small antique pistol that was pointed at his chest. After another moment, when his heart stopped racing, he almost laughed at the incongruity of seeing a pistol in this den of vampires.

  “I asked you a question, Mr. Dugan. What do you think you are doing?” She looked directly into his eyes again and this time Dugan did not flinch.

  He had thought she was kind of a tight-ass when they first met, but sort of liked her anyway. She seemed the no-nonsense type, all business. That was what Dugan had liked. She still was, but when he looked into her eyes Dugan realized that she was now totally insane, off the deep end nutso, and completely batshit crazy. But the scarlet in her cheeks alerted Dugan that she was still human, mostly anyway.

  She began to walk slowly toward him and the open casket, all the while keeping the pearl handled pistol pointed directly at Dugan. When she got closer and saw what had been done to the Colonel, she gasped and turned her deadly gaze in his direction.

  “What have you done?” Dugan watched her eyes fill with tears as she asked again, “What have you done?”

  Dugan didn’t dare answer, didn’t dare tell her he had found him this way, because he knew she wouldn’t buy it. Suddenly she leaped toward him. She threw herself on top of him, knocking him backwards, off his feet, to fall into the casket on top of the Colonel’s spindly legs.

  His back smacked against the edge and knocked the wind out of him. His ass was half in the casket and his legs were up off the ground as she lay on top of him, screaming, punching, kicking and slapping. He could find no leverage at all and could only watch as she raised the pistol and pointed it toward his head. Suddenly he realized that he had a stake in his hand. At the same moment she fired her shot, he plunged the stake into her back.

  Deafened by the roar, he felt half his head blown off, but he also felt the stake tear through her spine and he pushed even harder. It was only when he felt his own stomach and belly begin to rip and tear that he knew it had gone all the way through. He remained just conscious enough to watch the light fade slowly from her eyes and then extinguish completely.

  Her lifeless body toppled onto him. The dead weight plunged the stake meant only for her even deeper into his own body. Bellowing in pain, he managed to raise his arms enough to push her off to his right, where she fell face up, draped within the arms of her beloved Colonel. Dugan began moving his hands alternately over his wounded belly and to the top of his half-gone head.

  Grimacing in agony, he managed to roll over after a moment and push himself out of the coffin, collapsing in a heap onto the floor below, where he lay for a while writhing in pain. He began to hear a high-pitched keening sound of some sort and soon realized it was coming from him. His head was on fire and his stomach was on fire and his eyes were clamped shut against the ocean of pain that flooded over him in torrents. He tasted his own salty tears falling down into his open mouth, there to mix with the coppery taste of his own and other people’s blood, before he mercifully lost consciousness entirely.

  9

  Hunger

  When he awoke suddenly to another explosion of pain, Dugan turned his head to the side and began retching violently. He knew that what he was retching up had no business being other than dry heaves; he hadn’t eaten anything in more than twenty-four hours. But they weren’t dry, they were very wet, because he was coughing up and choking on his own blood along with other bits and pieces of gristle from his damaged insides.

  By sheer force of will, he stopped himself from vomiting and simply lay there a while, to wait for the pounding and throbbing in his ruined body to settle down. When he opened his eyes again, he saw that the light from the torch was nearly extinguished. He panicked for a moment at the thought of how much time might have passed and crawled around to find the flashlight. When he did, he turned it on and let it flood the room with a powerful beam of light. He choked back tears of pain and relief before coughing up a little more blood.

  He managed to sit up halfway, then bum crawl over to lean against one side of the cave, wheezing heavily from the exertion. When his breathing calmed down, he dared hold the beam of light directly down at his lower chest and cringed at the starburst of deep, rich blood revealed there. After another moment, he lifted up his shirt and looked into the gaping wound in his belly before dropping the shirt again. When he felt ready, he raised his left arm and began to probe the right side of his head to see how much of it was left. Flinching at the touch, he learned that his right ear was now missing. Only a ruined stub remained. He felt the deep groove the bullet had carved into his head, pointing straight at the place where his ear had once been and from where a stream of warm liquid now seeped.

  What the thing in the river had been unable to do, the thing in the casket had accomplished. He began to smile and then to laugh, beginning to lose control of himself just before a sharp stabbing pain in his stomach prevented any further mirth. He remembered that he had never been that good looking to begin with, anyhow. With that thought in mind he gritted his teeth, pulled his legs up against his butt, and began the long journey to his feet.

  Using the side of the casket for assistance, after a minute or so he was finally able to stand half-erect. The wound in his belly prevented him from achieving the full homo sapiens sort of erectness but he was proud of himself anyway. He turned around to glance inside the casket and saw a kind of orgasmic bliss on the dead woman’s face. Feeling nothing for her, he reached down and tore at the frilly white cloth around her neck, ripping away enough of it to bunch up into a ball. Before allowing himself to consider it for even a moment, he shoved the ball underneath his shirt and stuffed it all into his open wound.

  He bit his tongue against his scream and was again knocked down onto his knees. Opening his eyes after a moment, he realized how convenient that had been, to have been knocked down, because he had to go down there again anyway to pick up his mallet. He grabbed it and then, with the help of the mallet, stood up again. Using the mallet as a cane, he began to walk slowly and gingerly out of the smaller cavern and back into the larger one.

  The flaming torch had almost burnt itself out in this cavern as well, and he began to feel nervous wondering how much time had truly pas
sed. He moved the flashlight down to his wrist and glanced at his watch, seeing then that it had been shattered, forever to remain at 1:20. Whether that was a.m. or p.m. he did not know, for there had been many opportunities for his watch to be shattered over these past few days. He smiled for a moment, remembering how he had laughed at vampire movies where the heroes always managed to somehow screw it all up, finding themselves in the den of the king vampire just as the sun was about to set. They always managed to lift the lid of the casket as the last rays of the burning sun disappeared over the horizon, and just as the hero was about to stake the king vamp, the thing always opened its eyes.

  Dugan grinned and decided he wasn’t going to laugh at those guys anymore, because he knew now just how easily that could happen. The grin froze on his face when another sharp, stabbing pain hit him in the gut and he realized that very soon, he wasn’t going to be laughing at anything anymore.

  What the hell, he thought. He knew this had been a suicide mission all along, his way of doing penance for all the stupid things he had done wrong. It looked now as if this was the one thing he was at least going to succeed at. His flashlight took that moment to dim away to almost nothing, before brightening again to about half its previous strength. It was as good a gauge as any of whatever the hell time it was. He hobbled his way over to the second knapsack and leaned on his mallet while kicking it open. There were only a half dozen stakes left in the bag.

  He looked up into the remaining nooks and crannies, noting there were still more than a dozen of the creatures left. He grabbed tight to the round end of the mallet and brought himself to his knees while cringing from the pain. He reached over to grab a stake and stood up again, almost passing out from the effort. He knew he was both out of time and out of stakes, but somewhere in the back of his mind he remembered that killing the king vamp could make a big difference. Maybe it would send the rest of them to scatter and fend for themselves. He liked that idea. Again using his mallet for a crutch, he began dragging himself over to the raised dais near the back of the room.

  He was only halfway there when he shuddered for a moment and knew instinctively that his blood pressure had begun to drop. He felt lightheaded and dizzy, but in a good way, a way that he knew would lead ultimately to all of his pain going away forever. First in his mind, and then before his wide-open eyes, he again saw the bright white light, and heard his mother calling out to him. He knew somehow that this time, it was really her. Smiling, he began to walk toward the light before he stopped and shivered. He blinked the whiteness out of his eyes and then began to move again.

  “One last thing to do, Ma. Gimme a minute,” he said aloud in a voice he didn’t recognize. It could hardly be called a voice at all now. It was more like a blood-choked whisper, but he knew that she would understand him. She was the only one that ever really could.

  He dragged himself closer to the coffin. When he finally arrived there he leaned on it a minute to catch what was left of his breath. He took another moment to gather up the last remaining strength he knew he would ever have, in this life anyway, then reached down and began to raise the lid. The creak of the hinges echoed throughout the cavern like the shot from Skunk’s Enfield. When it was only half open he had to bend down and use his shoulder to open it the rest of the way. When he did that, he felt his stomach wound open again and a warm wetness dribbled into his groin like he was going to the bathroom in his pants, and then he thought that maybe he was, because isn’t that the last thing you do?

  Raising his arm, he pushed the top completely open and then looked down into the coffin. He was not disappointed when he saw the new king of the vampires, thinking strangely, “The King is Dead! Long Live the King!”

  Dugan had already known who it would be. The filthy green army jacket the thing wore only sealed the deal. But when he looked closer, he saw that something had happened to Stephen Harris’ face. It had been burned and disfigured like someone had thrown acid into it. For some reason, at that moment a clear vision of Larry popped into his head. Instead of feeling grief and mourning for all that had been lost, Dugan began to feel a sense of peace flood over him as he realized that very soon, he would be seeing his friend Larry again. At that same moment, the flashlight in his belt gave up the ghost, but the white light was still there, illuminating everything.

  With what he knew would be his last breath, Dugan placed the stake over Stephen Harris’ heart and raised the mallet high over his head. In the glow of the shimmering white light, Dugan slammed the mallet down just as another hand appeared like a flash to grab the mallet from his fist. Dugan turned his head and found himself looking into Stephen Harris’ eyes. They weren’t dead shark eyes any longer, but yellow wolves’ eyes, very much alive. Dugan heard the sound of wood shattering against a wall as Harris leaped from the coffin to grab him by his shoulders. Harris brought Dugan close to him, close enough to kiss, and in the creature’s breath Dugan smelled the refuse of this and all other worlds.

  With his last heartbeat, as his world exploded in a brilliant white light, Dugan began to hear familiar voices. The last thing Dugan saw in the moment that Harris sank his fangs deeply into his neck was the swing of another croquet mallet. His last human thought was a prayer, offered up to anyone that would listen, that it wasn’t really murder if the people you killed were already dead.

  Five

  Census—Epilogue

  1

  Census

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grantham%2C_Massachusetts

  Grantham, Massachusetts

  From Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia

  Grantham is a town located in southeastern Worcester County, Massachusetts, about 140.25 km (87.15 mi) from Boston. The population was 13,747 at the 2000 census.

  Grantham was first settled by English immigrants in 1625 and was originally part of a larger land grant given by King Charles II. The area was subsequently broken up to form the neighboring towns of Dutton and Granger. Incorporated as a town in 1731, Grantham retains its original town meeting form of government, and a board of selectmen oversees the town’s day-to-day affairs.

  Among its most famous citizens are Colonel Alexander Pope (1801-1865), a one-time Lieutenant Governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and Civil War veteran; and Andrea Rourke, a correspondent for NBC news, rumored to be the next in line to take over hosting duties for that network’s morning show.

  When in 1646 the Massachusetts legislature passed an “Act for the Propagation of the Gospel Amongst the Indians,” Grantham was host to the most outlying of the “Praying Indian” villages that resulted from that law’s efforts to convert the native peoples to Christianity. In the aftermath of King Philip’s War, (1675–1676) all Native Americans were forcibly removed from the town and its vicinity.

  Throughout much of its early history, Grantham was best known for the quality of the local granite, but by the beginning of the twentieth century, economic factors caused quarrying to cease. Stone from its quarries can still be seen today in the Bunker Hill Monument, in the pylons of the Brooklyn Bridge, and in many local buildings still standing in the town. High school sporting teams from the town are known to this day as the “Grantham Granite.”

  Although thoroughly debunked, stories persist that a series of strange incidents occurred in the town during the early nineteen eighties, resulting in the sudden and unexplained disappearance of several local residents. Believers insist that the whereabouts of those persons, and the reason for their departure, remain a mystery. The story lingered for a while as fodder for supermarket tabloids and can still be heard discussed occasionally on late-night alien invasion radio talk shows.

  For geographic and demographic information on the census- designated place Grantham, please see the article Grantham (CDP), Massachusetts.

  Geography

  According to the United States Census Bureau, the town has a total area of 72.9 km² (28.2 mi²). 68.8 km² (26.6 mi²) of it is land and 4.2 km² (1.6 mi²) of it (5.82%) is water.

/>   Demographics

  As of the census of 2000, there were 13,747 people, 4,486 households, and 3,695 families residing in the town. The population density was 194.0/km² (502.5/mi²). There were 4,596 housing units at an average density of 66.1/km² (171.2/mi²). The racial makeup of the town was 96.33% White, 0.69% Black or African American, 0.15% Native American, 1.66% Asian, 0.04% Pacific Islander, 0.29% from other races, and 0.84% from two or more races. Hispanic or Latino of any race were 1.33% of the population.

  There were 4,486 households out of which 49.7% had children under the age of 18 living with them, 73.6% were married couples living together, 6.1% had a female householder with no husband present, and 18.5% were non-families. 15.2% of all households were made up of individuals and 5.4% had someone living alone who was 65 years of age or older. The average household size was and the average family size was 3.33.

  In the town the population was spread out with 33.1% under the age of 18, 3.4% from 18 to 24, 34.0% from 25 to 44, 22.6% from 45 to 64, and 6.9% who were 65 years of age or older. The median age was 36 years. For every 100 females there were 97.4 males. For every 100 females age 18 and over, there were 92.9 males.

  The median income for a household in the town was $49,281, and the median income for a family was $62,550. Males had a median income of $51,207 versus $32,360 for females. The per capita income for the town was $31,469. About 2.3% of families and 2.7% of the population were below the poverty line9, including 2.6% of those under age 18 and 4.2% of those age 65 or over.