DRACULAS (A Novel of Terror)

by J. A. Konrath

Randall stopped and puffed his chest. “Seen it eighty-three times.”

  “Wait-wait-wait!” Shanna said, staring at Randall. “You were quoting some movie?”

  “He sure was, honey. You saw it. Aliens, remember? With Newt, the little girl who—”

  “You mean there’s two of you?”

  Clay wasn’t following. He looked at Randall. “I guess there’s hope for you yet.”

  Shanna looked ready to cry. “Can we get out of here, please?”

  “Yeah, okay.” Now that he was closer, he noticed Randall didn’t look in exactly top form, anyway. “We’ll settle this some other time.”

  “Count on it.”

  “You really dry?”

  “Bone. Day one hundred coming up.”

  If true, he deserved at the very least a pat on the back.

  “Well, good for you. Seriously.”

  Clay picked up Alice and the shotgun from where Shanna had laid them and shouldered the duffel. As he took Shanna’s hand and started for the end of the hall, he noticed Randall wasn’t following. He stopped.

  “You coming?”

  He shook his head. “Jenny’s down in pediatrics somewhere.”

  “Somewhere?”

  “She was with a bunch of kids. I think she’s hiding them.”

  Jenny…Clay had always liked Jenny, but Shanna was his number-one priority. And Randall looked kind of all in. He might need a little edge if he was going to bring Jenny out.

  “Can you shoot?”

  Randall smiled. “Not as good as I chainsaw, but I can pull a trigger.”

  Clay hesitated, then walked back to him.

  “Here.” He didn’t believe he was doing this, but he handed him Alice. “Four rounds left. She kicks like a mule. Make sure nobody you care about is behind whoever you shoot—or even in the next room.”

  Randall looked from the Taurus, to Clay, to the Taurus again. “You sure?”

  “Take good care of her. Don’t make me regret this.”

  He took one last look at Alice, then turned and walked away, wondering if Randall had enough left in him to get Jenny out on his own. Maybe not.

  “Be back ASAP to help you find Jenny,” Clay called over his shoulder.

  “You don’t have to do that,” Randall said.

  “Yeah, I do.”

  Benny the Clown

  BENNY the Clown was sad again.

  He hurt.

  His teeth were gone.

  Half of his tongue was also gone, and it made new blood while he licked up what was on his clown suit. His whole mouth was leaking faster than he could lap up the new blood. The taste had made him happy before, and he still wanted MORE MORE MORE but now he hurt too much to be anything more than sad.

  He realized that one of his siblings was gnawing on his leg. This made Benny the Clown even sadder.

  It was an old woman. Very old. He could kill her.

  Benny the Clown killed her.

  He drank her blood.

  He was happier now.

  But it didn’t last. He hurt again.

  He hurt so bad that he wanted to rip his face off.

  He tried, just a little, but it didn’t make him feel better.

  Not at all.

  Benny the Clown got up and walked down the hallway, looking around for something to make him happy. The screaming didn’t make him happy. The sobbing didn’t make him happy.

  Nothing made him happy.

  Except…

  He looked at the thing on the floor. He seemed to remember something like it. One of his friends used to juggle them. Or was it his mentor? If he remembered correctly, somebody got badly hurt juggling them, and the other clowns had been sad, even though it was kind of funny.

  He picked up the chainsaw and began to lick the blood off the blade.

  Nurse Herrick

  CARLA relocked the double doors and pushed the dressers back into place.

  What a night.

  The outbreak.

  The doctors gone.

  A woman dying on her watch.

  Another young woman, by herself, that patient already at seven centimeters.

  Could things get any worse?

  There was a part of her, growing stronger by the minute, that just wanted to hole up in a supply closet and wait for help to come.

  But she couldn’t do that. She had patients depending on her.

  A sudden scream erupted from one of the private rooms.

  She ran down the hall, the noise getting louder.

  Room 12.

  Brittany.

  Maybe she was finally fully effaced and ready to push?

  Carla opened the door. “How we doing, Brit—”

  What the hell?

  Brittany was pinned to the bed on her back by a little girl.

  “Hey!” Carla shouted.

  The little girl turned and looked at her and…hissed through a mouthful of hideous canines, her face a bloody wreck.

  Carla backpedaled involuntarily out of the room as the little monster hopped off of Brittany and crawled in her direction on all fours, coming faster and faster, talons clicking on the linoleum.

  “Lock yourself in, Brittany!” Carla screamed as the girl rose up on two feet and sprinted toward her.

  The door to Room 12 slammed shut and Carla heard the deadbolt turn as the little monster leapt at her, talons pointing toward her like a full set of knives.

  Hiss-screaming.

  Carla lunged out of the way as the girl crashed into the nurses’ station.

  The Murray’s baby daughter was screaming at the far end of the corridor, and Carla scrambled back onto her feet and hauled ass toward Stacie’s room as the girl-monster climbed out of the nurses’ station and came after her.

  There was a delivery cart against the wall, and she opened the top drawer and grabbed the first thing she touched, a pair of episiotomy scissors—”bajango scissors” she called them on better days. She closed the scissors, took them by the end, turned, and threw them toward the little girl, knowing, even as the blades left her hand spinning end over end and catching glimmers of that weak, blue light, that stuff like this only worked in bad movies.

  The little girl suddenly stopped ten feet away and went quiet.

  She looked down at her chest where the scissors were embedded, and then up at Carla, and she made a sound like a mewling cat or a depressed banshee.

  There was an extension cord in the bottom drawer of the delivery cart, and Carla pulled it out, her hands shaking as they unwound the twist tie.

  The little monster-girl sat in the middle of the floor. At first, she’d been trying to pull the blades out of her chest, but her own blood seemed to be distracting her now.

  Carla approached slowly.

  “I’m Carla,” she said. “What’s your name?”

  The monster screeched something unintelligible.

  “Well, I’m a nurse, and you look like maybe you’re not feeling so well.”

  She was five feet away now, and getting her first look at this perversion of a child, wondering what kind of a virus could cause this. Something worse than Ebola.

  Carla had grown up on a ranch ten miles from here, and by God she’d hogtied a calf or two in her day. No this wasn’t anywhere near the same, but similar principles applied. Flip her on her stomach, hard and fast, knee digging into her spine, and get the cord around her wrists. Tie her ankles last.

  Three feet away now. She squatted.

  God, the closer she got, the more awful this thing looked. This wasn’t a little girl. Not anymore.

  Carla slowly uncoiled a four-foot length of cord, the monster eyeing her now with the distrust of a psycho cat, and licking the blood seeping out of her chest with a long, spongy-black tongue.

  The Murray’s baby wailed now, grinding down Carla’s nerves.

  She had to get back to Stacie.

  Now or never.

  She tightened her grip on the extension cord and lunged at the little monster, but it recoiled with
terrible speed.

  Carla felt something puncture the skin of her left arm, and by the time she looked up, the little girl had fled back down the corridor and disappeared around the corner that led to the operating room.

  Carla stood up.

  The bite to her left arm wasn’t too bad.

  Bleeding a little, sure, but considering those awful teeth, it could’ve been so much worse.

  She walked a little ways up the corridor and opened the door to the supply closet, grabbed a dose of Pitocin out of the refrigerator, praying it would stop Stacie’s bleeding. She should’ve already had the Pit ready for an IV-push just like she did for every single birth. What a fuck-up. If it didn’t stop Stacie’s bleeding, and without a doctor on hand to intervene surgically, the poor woman didn’t stand a chance.

  Lanz

  DR. Lanz exited the playroom through the broken window, his head clear and his thoughts surprisingly rational. Perhaps that zap to the head had helped alleviate the urge to feed. Or perhaps he’d sucked enough of his own blood to gain a bit of perspective on things.

  Because Lanz had a plan.

  It had come to him, semi-formed, while he’d been chewing his fingers. Halfway into gnawing off his thumb, his fangs worrying the proximal phalanx, he’d noticed his breathing had become obstructed. Not because of the injury he was doing to himself, or because of the physical pain involved with chomping on his own flesh and bone.

  His breaths were labored because his nose was growing back.

  Obviously, his increased metabolism had resulted in preternatural healing powers. It wasn’t unheard of in the animal kingdom to regenerate body parts. Insects, starfish, and newts could all regrow limbs. Humans could regenerate their liver, ribs, and even fingertips.

  Which gave Lanz an idea. An extraordinary idea of how to get to Jenny and those delicious little children. Plus, it would result in a bonus energy snack for him. Win-win.

  But first he needed clamps and a bone saw.

  He loped down the deserted hallway, heading to the Surgery wing, barging into Operating Room A. Unlike the rest of the hospital, which was spackled with gore, this area was so clean it shined.

  Lanz would rectify that.

  He raided the stainless steel equipment cabinet of two ring-handled bulldog clamps with curved tips, a scalpel with a no. 20 blade, and a nine-inch Saterlee bone saw. The hospital had cordless electric models, but Lanz couldn’t get his finger in the trigger guard with his talons. He’d have to do it the old-fashioned way.

  Lanz tore off the remnants of his lab coat and shirt and examined his left shoulder. He could have bitten his arm off without much difficulty, but he wouldn’t be able to get close enough to the glenohumeral joint with his giant teeth. Instead, he awkwardly picked up the scalpel and decided to make his first incision just above the acromion, on the end of the clavical bone. With a deft, precise stroke, he parted the skin and sliced into the deltoid.

  When the wound filled up with blood, Lanz’s tongue extended on its own volition and lapped it up.

  Even better than a suction hose, he mused.

  Cutting deeper, his blade sliced through the coracoacromial ligament, then scraped tender cartilage. Continuing to slurp up his own blood, he wielded the bone saw and nestled it into the wound, between the humerus and the glenohumeral ball joint.

  The pain was exquisite, causing him to scream in between bouts of sucking at his own torn flesh. When he finally cut through the ligaments and joint capsule, he finished off with the scalpel, severing the infraspinatus muscle on the underside.

  Blood squirted like a fountain, and his insane hunger tempted him to stretch out his own brachial artery and suck it like a straw. Instead, he used the bulldog clamps to seal off the brachial, as well as the cephalic vein.

  Once the bleeding was under control, he shoved his severed arm into his mouth, chewing and sucking and drinking every last drop of moisture from it. Then he fell onto all fours (actually all threes) and vacuumed up every bit of blood he’d spilled onto the tile.

  Momentarily sated, he examined his handiwork. The wound’s edges were ragged, but already beginning to heal. He decided to leave the clamps on for the time being, fearing that taking them off would make him lose his self-control and drink himself to death.

  Lanz had no idea how long it would take his limb to grow back, but he wasn’t concerned. He had plenty of time.

  With his arm gone, he’d be able to fit through the tiny window in the storage closet door.

  He figured the blood of one adult and four children would sustain him for quite a while.

  Benny the Clown

  “ISN’T that burning your lips off?” Benny the Clown had asked, in another life.

  Rupert shook his head. His lips were cracked and covered with blisters. Either his fire-spitting trick was indeed burning him, or it was a ghastly case of herpes. “It’s not that bad.”

  “It looks painful.”

  “Sacrifices must be made in the name of show business. Stick with me, Benjamin, and you’ll learn a lot.”

  Benjamin hesitated. Rupert had gotten him this gig, and though it didn’t pay anywhere near what he’d made at Office Depot, he didn’t want to risk destroying his career as a children’s entertainer before it even started. But still…

  “Y’know, Rupert, most fire eaters don’t use rubbing alcohol. They use something like lamp oil. I mean, your lips are…they’re…I don’t want to tell you how to do your job, but what you’re doing could actually…you could get…can I see your tongue?”

  “No, you may not. I know it’s unsafe. I’m not stupid. But let me ask you a question, Benjamin: when was the last time you crashed on somebody’s couch and found a bottle of highly purified lamp oil in their bathroom?”

  “Never, I guess.”

  “Damn right, never. Now how many times have you found a bottle of rubbing alcohol?”

  “I don’t think I’ve ever looked.”

  “Well I have, and let me tell you, if that house has a woman, it has a bottle of rubbing alcohol. I spend four or five nights a week crashing on a stranger’s couch, and when I leave, they may check their jewelry case, but they aren’t saying ‘Uh-oh, better check the bathroom cabinet to make sure our rubbing alcohol hasn’t been pilfered!’ If you want to be successful at this business, you have to learn to cut expenses. So you go buy your fancy lamp oil if you want, but I’ll stick with a good old fashioned bottle of stolen rubbing alcohol.”

  “I’m sorry. Do you really need that much?”

  “Tell me, Benjamin, how many chainsaws do I juggle in my act?”

  “I haven’t seen it yet.”

  “Three. Three chainsaws. What do you think chainsaws run on?”

  “Gasoline?”

  “Have you seen the price of gas? It’s obscene. Flat-out criminal. But do you know what makes a chainsaw run just as well?”

  “Uh, rubbing alcohol?”

  “That’s right. You try to siphon gas from your neighbor’s car, you’re going to jail. You steal rubbing alcohol, nobody ever notices.”

  “Is it safe to juggle chainsaws that are fueled by…y’know, something that wasn’t really meant to fuel a chainsaw?”

  “Haven’t lost a limb yet.”

  “Yeah, but that can’t be good for the engine, can it?”

  “You need to quit worrying about that kind of stuff,” said Rupert. “Trust me. I’ll groom you into the funniest clown the world has ever seen.”

  Benny the Clown licked the last of the blood from the chainsaw blade.

  He hurt, but he was happy.

  He walked around for a while.

  He couldn’t smile any more, but he wanted to smile when he saw what was on the shelf.

  He took down the bottle. Stared at it for a while. Tried to remember.

  He remembered.

  He filled the chainsaw.

  He couldn’t wait to use it. It would be funny.

  Adam

  STANDING on the other side of the double
doors, he heard Nurse Herrick locking him out.

  Adam started down the corridor, making the sign of the cross as he passed what was left of the nurse in black scrubs who’d been chased down and slaughtered an hour ago.