The Last Vampire

by Whitley Strieber

  She was a hunter now, off to the hills. She ranged down the turning street and to the secret steps that led down to FDR Drive.

  A car screamed past three feet away, then another and another. Leo darted out into the roadway. Two more cars came speeding toward her. She leaped forward just as one almost grazed her back. Then she was on the far side of FDR Drive, climbing the iron railing and going along the narrow promenade.

  A full moon hung over the surging East River, its glow touching the black, uneasy waves.

  She was absolutely frantic; she’d never felt anything remotely like this. By light-years, this clawing, flaming inner agony was the most intense sensation she had ever felt in her life. She ached the way people ache when they can’t get enough air.

  She dashed along, searching for a derelict like a pig snuffling for truf-fles. She was strung worse than she’d ever known anybody to be strung. This made you wild; it made you want to run and never stop; it seethed like ants under your skin; it pumped pure desperation straight into your brain.

  As she ran, she thought of home, the imposing house in Greenwich, her taffeta-and-lace bedroom, her daddy probably right now watching Monday night football, her mom reading.

  Home was lost to her, home and all she had known of the peace of life. Her feet throbbed; her heart raced; her skin felt as if it were being sandpapered. The taste of Paul’s blood lingered in her mouth, its scent in her nostrils. All she could think about was blood, the way it tasted, the way it felt going down, the way it had cooled the fire that was consuming her from within.

  Then she saw a clump of shadow on a moonlit bench. She went up to it. Just a mass of rags. Good. Man or woman? Man — not so good, they were stronger.

  She sat on the end of the bench nearest the head. Her hands almost shook too much, but she managed to get a cigarette lit. She’d quit two months ago, but that was before she met Miriam. Miriam smoked all the time. She didn’t care. Why should she? Keepers were immune to cancer.

  She dragged hard, wishing that the smoke was stronger. You could get a nice hit smoking horse in a cigarette, but she didn’t have any horse. She had to calm down on her own.

  She had the fleam and she had the victim. All she needed now was the guts. She looked down at a shock of dark, oily, lice-ridden hair. She knew he was dirty and that he probably stank to high heaven, but all she could smell was the blood, which was so good that she kept sucking in air and leaning closer.

  She took the fleam out, fumbled the blade open — giving herself a nasty little nick in the process. Before she had even sucked it, the wound closed.

  A damn miracle.

  Stealthily, she shuffled the rags aside. There was the neck. Not an old neck. She knew she was supposed to take them back to the house, burn the remnant in the furnace and all. But how could she get some drunk back across FDR Drive and up the narrow steps that led to their property? The business with the lady, whom she’d found on Fifty-fifth Street and First Avenue, had been difficult enough.

  She held the fleam close to the neck. She couldn’t see any veins. She dared not touch the guy. She tightened her grip on the instrument. Then she plunged it down. There was resistance; then it went sliding in — way deeper than it should. In fact, she almost plunged it all the way in.

  She was snatching for it as he rose screaming through clenched teeth out of his pile of newspapers and rags. He was face-to-face with her, his teeth bared.

  He was a kid. Maybe younger than she was. He had long eyelashes, and the moonlight shone in his dark eyes. His hands went to his neck, his head cocked — and a flood of blood came out of his mouth.

  Instinct made Leo go for it, but it was all over the ground already, splattering and splashing like spilled milk on the kitchen floor. He went to his feet, still screaming behind his clenched teeth, and began jerking and staggering, his bloody fingers slipping on the bloody hilt of the fleam.

  And then, incredibly, she recognized him. Not from the club, not from her present life at all. She recognized him from prep school, from Andover. It was Benno Jones. He’d been a performance artist. His family was wealthy but very conservative. Obviously, there’d been an estrangement.

  She was confused. But also now, desperate. She lunged at him; she got her fingers around the fleam and yanked it as hard as she could. It came partially out, dragging red gristle, followed by a gurgling black flow of blood.

  She latched on like a starving jungle leech. The blood seemed to flow into her almost automatically, pouring down her throat into her belly. Benno staggered along, his back bent, his hands made into fists, his barely-remembered acquaintance inexplicably sucking the life out of him.

  He went down like a staggered bull, to his knees. She pushed him over and dragged his head into her lap, bending the neck to give herself the best possible angle. Then she put her lips around the bubbling gouge and sucked as hard as it was possible for her to suck. She got lots more blood, and from his lips a gentle question, “Leo?”

  She did it again and it worked again. A third time and it worked, but less well. The fourth time, it hardly worked at all.

  But he wasn’t getting any thinner or lighter. He was still normal looking, except he was very dead. She tried again, sucking with all her might.

  Nothing happened. She sat back on her haunches. Only Miriam could dry them out. He was way too heavy to carry. He felt like a sack of lead.

  Then she saw, some distance down the promenade, a man walking about ten dogs. They were coming toward her and the dogs were going completely berserk. You couldn’t hear the man, but you could see him yelling at them. Their voices were a riot of barking and howling, and they were struggling so furiously to reach the kill that their paws were digging dust up off the pavement. They looked as if they had exhaust.

  She managed to get Benno to the railing and, with a massive, grunting effort, to roll him over and into the East River. Then she ran like hell, and as she ran, she began also to feel wonderful.

  Behind her, the dogs quickly consumed any small trace of Benno that she had left behind. She could hear the dog walker now, still screaming himself hoarse.

  Her body seemed almost ready to lift off. She could run and run without even getting tired. Incredibly, it felt as if there were somebody inside her, a living presence that was not her but was friendly to her and part of her. It was a grand way to feel as if you had your own angel in you.

  She did not see the solitary figure on the high cliff that separated Miriam’s neighborhood from the Drive, who had been watching her from the beginning. She did not see it put a small instrument away, perhaps a set of binoculars, perhaps a camera.

  She did not see it as it got into a car, nor did she see the car drive swiftly away.

  NINETEEN

  Trapped

  Miriam raced through the house screaming for Leo, her voice shrill and shattering. Sarah was terrified. She’d never seen her like this. She was crazed with fury; there was no other way to describe her. Then those awful, inhuman eyes were suddenly glaring at Sarah.

  “Miri, calm down. Please, Miri!”

  Miriam shot across the sitting room and grabbed her and slammed her against the wall. “Where in hell were you?”

  “I was with you, Miri!”

  “You let her out, goddamn you! You careless, foolish — ”

  She slapped Sarah so hard she went flying. Then Miriam was on her again, shaking her, screaming and smashing her head again and again into the floor. Sarah saw stars; the world reeled; she screamed, screamed again.

  Miriam went to her feet, lithe and quick, glaring down at her. Then she was back again, her eyes glowing, her narrow lips twisted in some expression so alien that Sarah couldn’t even begin to interpret it.

  She kissed Sarah. Then she lifted her and helped her to a chair. She knelt before her and kissed her hands. “I’m sorry. Sorry. I’m just — ” She made a small sound, the snarl of a hurt tiger. “I’m feeling things I’ve never felt before.” She laid her head in Sarah’s lap. Now sh
e was weeping. “When I last had a baby in me, I was so protected. We owned Egypt! We lived in walled compounds. The wealth, the power — you can’t even begin to imagine! But now — I’ve got my last baby and I need to feel safe and I don’t!”

  Sarah stroked her hair. She looked down at the lithe, powerful body in the magnificent butterfly robe, a garment made in China six hundred years ago, of thousands of individual bits of silk sewed together with tiny stitches. It was like a cloud of butterflies, this robe. Miri wore it casually, but that did not change the fact that it could easily be the most beautiful garment presently on earth.

  Sarah had always been a lonely sort of a soul, but Miriam was really alone. Her baby had been her hope — Sarah realized that now — her one hope to relieve the despair that lay concealed behind the elegance and the headlong decadence that filled her time.

  When she found out that this baby was a fata morgana, a mirage, she was going to be absolutely devastated.

  Paul knew he was alive because of the pain. From his waist to his neck, he was a mass of sheer agony. His breath was coming in light little gulps, but he felt no air hunger, so he knew there was oxygen running.

  He inventoried his body, working from training and long experience. He could wiggle his toes and hands, and lift his arms. That was good. He was too weak to lift his legs. That was not good. The left side of his neck ached. That must be a healing wound where that bitch had tried to suck his blood. His chest was gunshot real bad. There was bubbling when he inhaled, which meant that his lung capacity was dangerously low.

  He was looking up, at least, into the ceiling of a hospital room. He could hear monitors beeping, and he could see an IV.

  How the hell he had ever gotten himself to a hospital, he could not for the life of him imagine, but he damn well had. His self-evaluation told him that he had been shot in the left lung, which had resulted in aspiration pneumonia, caused by blood and debris. There wasn’t any fever, so whatever antibiotics were in that drip were clearly doing their job. Also, the pain was diffuse, not concentrating on a certain spot the way it did when you had a bullet in you. Okay, so he’d been operated on. How much of the lung was left in there he had no idea. Maybe none, the way it felt.

  Altogether, he had been in worse shape than this and come out of it okay. So, great, he was going to have himself a killing spree as soon as he recuperated . . . unless, of course, his presence in this intensive care ward meant that he was back in the hands of the Company.

  After a long five minutes, Miriam came up off Sarah’s lap. The red eyes glared up at her. Instinct made Sarah cringe back away from her. Miriam sucked in breath. Sarah realized what was happening: she was hearing something.

  “Is it Paul Ward?” But a glance at one of the monitors that had been set up in every room said that he wasn’t the issue. He was stirring from the woozy state induced by his Valium drip, but he came in and out of consciousness three or four times a day. His lung capacity was too low to allow him to be fully awake.

  Miriam came to her feet, catlike. In an instant, she was at the front door, listening against the thick mahogany. Then she rushed across the foyer into the music room, sat down at the piano, and — of all things — began to play Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata. The vision of the cloud of butterflies floating around that narrow, incredibly graceful being was heart-stopping. She played with a touch as soft as a dusting of snow.

  Sarah watched the great front door. The lock clicked. The handle moved. Leo’s face appeared. From its flush, Sarah knew at once that she had fed. Hearing the music, seeing Sarah sitting with her head back against her chair, Leo’s nervous face smoothed. All seemed well to her, all at peace.

  Sarah could not imagine the reason for the false tableau. It was as if Miri didn’t believe that Leo would come in unless she was lured by an artificial appearance of serenity. Perhaps Miriam overestimated Leo’s intelligence, because she was entirely deceived.

  She came strolling in, smiling a conspiratorial smile at Sarah. There was blood on her blue T-shirt, more on her jeans.

  “Where’s the remnant?” Sarah hissed. Leo tried to go around her. Sarah grabbed her collar. “Where is it?”

  “Leave me alone!”

  “Leo, where the hell is it?”

  Miriam played on, seemingly oblivious.

  “None of your business,” Leo sneered.

  “Did you leave it on the street — for God’s sake, answer me!”

  “If you must know, it’s in the East River. And so is that stupid toy of yours.”

  Sarah felt a nervous twinge in her left eye. “What toy?”

  “Oh, that thing — that stupid thing went all the way in his neck.”

  “You left my fleam in your victim?”

  “I couldn’t get it out!”

  “Jesus!”

  Leo tried again to go around her.

  That damn bunch of vampires had been smart, real smart. They’d played him like a piano. God only knew how many of the parasites infected that filthy club. And the house — this vampire was a rich bitch, wasn’t she? She was light-years beyond the others. Kill this one, and you got the queen bee. Just like that really human looking one in Paris. Just like Mrs. Tallman.

  Holy Shit — maybe they were one and the same. And maybe, if it was in any way still in his power, he was going to really strike a blow when he destroyed the damn creature. It had fooled him totally. Even making love to it had felt great, better than making love to a real woman. A fucking animal had tricked him into screwing it, and that made him even angrier.

  His throat had the metallic taste that you get when you’re having electrolytes pumped through your body. He wanted water and food.

  “Nurse?” he called.

  He listened. Whatever hospital he was in, it was as quiet as a damn tomb. Probably an isolation ward for cases with classified material. He felt around for a call button, found one attached to the headboard.

  Thing was, when he pressed it, who was going to come through the door — a sweet little nurse or Justin Turk? His money was on Turk. They’d been on his tail, for sure. Whenever he’d gotten into trouble before, the Company had very kindly rescued him.

  So maybe he wouldn’t be free to kill the filth. Goddamnit, maybe he ought to get up and bust out of here before it was too late. Unless it was already too damn late.

  He actually started to raise himself, thinking to pull out the IV and take off. He felt pretty strong, except for his breathing. But if he tried this, he’d violate a rule that had kept him alive over his entire career: Never attack into the unknown. If all you knew was who was there, or supposed to be there, that was enough. But if you knew nothing, then you had to wait.

  So he’d get the lay of things, build up his strength. Right now, what he wanted was a big rib eye, but a cup of broth would do. He pressed the button again. Nothing happened. Typical, probably meant this was some VA hole. He pressed it again, harder.

  Sarah watched the monitor. Faintly, she heard the buzzing as Ward struggled to get some attention. He was more awake now than he’d been since the surgery five days ago. She thought, He’s healing. She could not help but feel a little professional pride. She’d brought a man back who should be dead.

  The music stopped. Miriam got up. She turned and came toward them, the butterfly robe billowing behind her, a cigarette fuming between her narrow lips, her eyes flashing. “Where the hell were you?” she snarled.

  “Me?”

  Miriam’s eyes met Sarah’s. “The remnant’s exposed,” Sarah said. “My fleam was left in the neck.”

  Miriam went up to Leo. Long fingers grabbed her throat. “This is how you repay me?”

  Leo pulled away from her. “I threw the guy in the fucking East River. He’s gone.”

  “A body is never gone unless it’s burned,” Miriam shouted.

  Once or twice, she’d alluded to the fact that she had done away with human companions who hadn’t worked out. Sarah thought for a moment that she was going to finish Leo rig
ht now, right here on the marble floor of the foyer.

  But then Miriam threw back her head and laughed. It was strange laughter, almost silent. “Come with me,” she told Leo.

  “Come where?”

  Miriam grabbed her wrist and dragged her off up the stairs. Sarah got up to follow. Miriam stopped her. “My husband is calling,” she said. “Can’t you hear him?”

  Paul heard a sound beyond the room’s closed door. He’d punched the call button about fifty times. He shifted in the bed. “Nurse,” he said. The single word ran him out of breath, and he sank back against his pillow sucking oxygen.

  When Sarah Roberts’s face came into his view, he was so surprised that he delivered a croaking “Oh, shit!”

  She was a vision of absolute beauty, her eyes glittering like coals. He tried to lift his arms, to strike out at her, but something stopped him.

  He was cuffed to the bed. “Christ!”

  “You’re healing,” Sarah said.

  He inventoried his situation. Both wrists were cuffed to a length of chain fastened to the bed, along with both ankles. He had about two feet of travel, which was why he hadn’t noticed until he began trying to move.

  “Where the hell am I?”

  “In my infirmary.” She came over to him. He got ready to grab for her. “I’m a doctor, you know.”

  “Yeah, that’s believable.”

  “You’ve survived a lung wound from a three-fifty-seven with an exploding tip. I think it oughta be damn believable.”

  “You kill people for food. How can you be a doctor?”

  Sarah came closer to him. “I need to examine the wound,” she said. Her tone, which had been carefully neutral, now seemed sullen — or no, sad. It seemed sad.

  He prepared to make a grab for her. He didn’t know what he’d do next. All he knew was this: he was in the worst situation he’d ever been in, and he had to do whatever he could to get out of it.