DRACULAS (A Novel of Terror)

by J. A. Konrath

  “Draculas don’t rip people up,” said Anthony. “Draculas just look unhappy a lot, and kiss girls like in that movie my sister watched seventeen gazillion hundred times.”

  “Those were dumb Draculas,” said Cecil. “But there are cool Draculas, like in Lord of the Rings.”

  “Those were orcs.”

  “Not those! The other ones!”

  “That was a Kraken!”

  “The horrible creature,” Hollis said, standing tall and raising his arms over his head, “was a werewolf!”

  “I thought werewolves just took off their shirts a lot like in that movie with the Draculas.”

  Hollis shook his head. “In real life, werewolves like to crack open the rib cages of little boys with their sharp claws and bite their still-beating hearts right from their chests. That’s what happened to Troop 192.”

  “If they were attacked by a werewolf,” said Anthony, “wouldn’t they become werewolves?”

  “Not if their bodies were shredded and thrown around all over the trees and lake and ground. If you’d been paying attention when I started telling the story you could have caught that little detail.”

  “What if a werewolf bit a skunk?” Theolonious asked. “Would it become a werewolfskunk?”

  “A werewolf wouldn’t bite a skunk,” Hollis said.

  “Why not?”

  “Why would it bite a skunk? Would you bite a skunk?”

  “I wouldn’t bite a skunk today,” said Mortimer, “but if I was a werewolf, I think I’d bite a skunk if there was one sitting there. You’d have to bite it gently, y’know, so that its whole head doesn’t come off, but I think, y’know, werewolves can bite gently when they want to, even though they usually don’t. They couldn’t use their whole jaw or, y’know, anything like that, but if they just used their front teeth and didn’t close them all the way, I think they could bite a skunk without its head coming off.”

  The other cub scouts murmured their agreement.

  “Y’know,” Mortimer added.

  “And what if the werewolfskunk bit a deer?” asked Theolonious. “Would it turn into a werewolfskunkdeer?”

  “I want to know how one werewolf ate all of Troop 192,” said Cecil. “How big is a werewolf’s stomach?”

  “Haven’t I already explained that twice?” asked Hollis. “The werewolf didn’t eat their whole bodies. He ate the best parts, then scattered the rest of them all over the place so that the kids couldn’t turn into little werewolves. Do you want a demerit? Do you?”

  “I need toilet paper!” Billy yelled from the woods.

  “Use leaves!” Hollis hollered back.

  “I tried! They’re all stuck to me!”

  Fredrick raised his hand. “Would a werewolfskunkdeer try to eat people? Or would it just forage for nuts and berries?”

  “You don’t even know what ‘forage’ means,” said Silas.

  “It means to search for provisions.”

  “Well, you don’t know what ‘tourniquet’ means!”

  “Yes, I do. We learned about them last week. It’s that thing you twist around your arm or leg to stop bleeding.”

  “Well, you don’t know what ‘hypothesis’ means!”

  “Silas! Enough!” Hollis clenched and unclenched his fists a few times. “Anyway…”

  Theolonious frowned. “So is a werewolfskunkdeer a person who changes into something that’s a wolf, skunk, and deer all at once, like it has fur and Bambi eyes and sprays skunk spray, or is it a person who can change into a wolf or a skunk or a deer?”

  “I have no idea,” Hollis said.

  “I think he changes into one of them, but he can’t control which one it is. So he’ll be fighting Bigfoot and he’ll want to change into a wolf because wolves are better at fighting Bigfoot, but he’ll change into a skunk instead and Bigfoot just steps on him. That’s probably why you don’t see many werewolfskunkdeers around anymore.”

  “What if a werewolf bit a Dracula who bit a zombie who then bit the werewolf?” asked Cecil.

  “My baby brother bit the babysitter, but she didn’t turn into a baby.”

  “Shut up!” said Theolonious. “That’s not what we’re talking about!”

  “But what if a werewolfskunkdeer bit a wolf? Is it a werewolfskunkdeerwolf, or does the wolf part just not matter because it was already a wolf?”

  “Werewolfwolfskunkdeer sounds better,” said Anthony.

  “Soon the full moon will rise,” Hollis said, raising his arms theatrically. “And then the werewolf takes its supernatural form and…”

  “You mean the werewolfwolfskunkdeer.”

  “No. I mean the werewolf. There’s no such thing as a werewolfskunkdeer.”

  “You forgot the extra wolf. It’s werewolfwolfskunkdeer.”

  “I did not forget the extra wolf. We aren’t talking about the werewolfskunk deer.”

  “The werewolfwolfskunkdeer.”

  “We’re talking about a werewolf! A regular old werewolf! That’s it. Just a man who turns into a goddamn wolf, okay?”

  The scouts went silent. Hollis knew he’d gone too far by using the g.d. word, but the punchline to his story was so amazing and they were ruining it.

  “Mr. Hollis, is this poison oak?” Billy asked, walking back to the campfire holding some leaves.

  “Yes, Billy. Put that down.”

  “I wish I’d picked different leaves. Can I go home?”

  “No. There’s some baking soda in the tent. Let me finish my story and I’ll get it for you.”

  “Could a werewolf eat a baby whole, in one bite?” asked Anthony.

  “I suppose one could,” Hollis said. Actually, he knew that one could. Firsthand. Heh heh.

  “So when it pooped out the baby, would the baby be a werepoopwolf?”

  “What if a werepoopwolf bit a werewolfwolfskunkdeer?”

  “It would be a werewolfwolfwolfpoopskunkdeer.”

  “Enough,” Hollis said. “The next person who says something gets a bad report to their parents and they won’t get to come on any more of these trips. Got it? See that full moon up there? That ties into our little story, doesn’t it? Do you see the connection between what happened to Troop 192 and the lunar cycle of today? You get it, right? Do you know what Troop 192 was doing on that fateful night? They were—irony alert—sitting around listening to scary stories from their scoutmaster! Do you get where this is going?”

  The scouts remained silent.

  Hollis stood up.

  “That’s riiiiiiiiight! The story I was trying to tell you is foreshadowing what’s going to happen tonight! Ha! How about that, you little brats? The reason there are so many similarities in the fate of Troop 192 and our situation at this very moment is because I am a werewolf!”

  He stood there, facing the moonlight, waiting for the inevitable transformation.

  “What story did you tell the other kids?” Cecil asked.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Were you telling them about another werewolf attack before that one?”

  “Yes. That’s right. It’s all a vicious cycle. Each story I tell the scouts is about the previous massacre. I’ll tell the next troop about you guys.”

  “If you killed all of those Cub Scout Troops, who keeps hiring you as a scoutmaster?”

  He adjusted his angle. Change, dammit, change!

  Theolonious raised his hand. “So if you bit a mummy—?”

  Screw it, Hollis thought. He’d brought an axe.

  Frederick was first, right in the middle of another stupid question when the axe caught him under the chin. It cleaved his jaw in half, his tongue waggling through the gap, blood spurting like a lawn sprinkler.

  Hollis pinned Billy under his foot and hacked his arm off, then dangled it above his face, teasing him.

  “Stop hitting yourself!” he yelled in Billy’s face, slapping him with his own hand. It was good fun until shock set in and Billy stopped screaming.

  Cecil got a straight chop to the throat, but the
axe wasn’t sharp enough to decapitate him fully, and his head flopped backward, still attached to some sinew.

  As he’d warned earlier, Hollis drove the axe head into Anthony’s ribcage, cracking it open, then diving in the feast on the child’s still-beating heart with his razor-sharp werewolf fangs that seemed rather flat and dull for the job. He did manage to bite off a piece of something that could have been a ventricle, but might have been an atrium. Hollis always got those confused.

  Theolonius watched, eyes wide, hugging his knees. He was covered in blood that wasn’t his own. Hollis raised the axe, ready to make a lupine feast of the boy’s small brain, when Theolonious began to scream.

  No, not a scream.

  That’s more like a howl.

  First the boy’s nose extended, becoming hairy and snoutish.

  Then claws burst from his fingertips, curving into the shape of scythes.

  Hollis dropped the axe, dumbfounded, as the miniature werewolf then grew…

  Antlers?

  Theolonious quickly spun around, lifting his giant black tail, one that had a white stripe running down it ala Pepe Le Pew.

  “Oh no…”

  The werewolfskunkdeer sprayed Hollis with its anal scent glands while the scoutmaster was screaming, and some of the spray got into Hollis’s mouth. The smell…the taste…was so bad, Hollis had no choice but to whip out his Swiss Army Knife, thumb open the mini scissors, and immediately begin snipping away at his own nose and tongue, snip snip snipping until…

  “Mr. Hollis? Is this the baking soda?”

  Hollis blinked away the daydream and stared at Billy.

  Hollis sighed. “That’s it, Billy.”

  Theolonious raised his hand. “Mr. Hollis? Will we get our fishing merit badges tomorrow?”

  “Yes, Theolonious.”

  “Is storytime over?” Cecil asked.

  “I guess.”

  Silas raised his hand.

  “What, Silas? Do you want to ask me what ‘transitory’ means?”

  “I want to know what’s wrong with your ears. They’re getting longer.”

  Hollis slapped his hands against the sides of his head. Indeed, his ears were getting longer. Longer and hairier.

  He jammed a finger into his mouth, tapping the quick growing fangs.

  It’s about time.

  Hollis leapt onto Silas, taking the boys whole head in his mouth. He squeezed his mighty werewolf jaws closed, feeling the skull bend inward, then crack suddenly, popping open like a walnut, squirting hot brains through Silas’s nasal cavity.

  With Cecil, he dug his snout into the boy’s belly, clenching his teeth down on a length of intestines, holding tight as Cecil ran for the trees. Cecil managed to pull out his intestines, both large and small, his colon, his stomach, and something that might have been a spleen, before keeling over.

  With Billy, Hollis dug one of his claws through the child’s eye socket, then dug it through his skull and out the other eye, holding him like a six-pack. Then he pulled, tearing off the bridge of Billy’s nose.

  Theolonious cried out in horror, and Hollis ripped his lungs out of his chest, squeezing them like an accordion, making the scream go on and on and…

  “Mr. Hollis? Is that a werewolfskunkdeer?” Cecil asked, pointing at something in the woods.

  Hollis shook his head to clear it. The fantasies were getting more and more real. The medication wasn’t working like it should.

  “It’s not?” Cecil asked.

  “What are you pointing at, Cecil?”

  “That thing, with the horns.”

  “You mean the tree?”

  “No, the…oh, yeah. The branches looked like horns.”

  And then the transformation began. For real this time? Hollis bit down on the inside of his mouth as hard as he could. It hurt like hell—this was definitely real. Those little bastards were about to see what a true werewolf could do.

  The scouts stared at him. Their jaws dropped as one.

  The inside of his cheek was bleeding pretty badly. He shouldn’t have bit so hard.

  “That’s right,” he said. “Just like I’ve been hinting over and over, I am a werewolf! And on this night of the full moon, I shall enjoy a Cub Scout gore feast!”

  Cecil screamed. Hollis laughed and then, transformation complete, let out the howl of the beast he had become.

  “That’s it?” asked Billy.

  “What?”

  “You’re not very furry.”

  “My arms are hairy!”

  “Not that hairy. My dad’s arms are hairier.”

  “Look at my ears! Those aren’t normal ears anymore. Look at my fingernails! And my nose sort of looks like a snout now!”

  “I thought werewolves were supposed to be a lot scarier,” said Theolonious.

  “You know what? You kids suck! It’s not my fault that the werewolf who bit me didn’t break the skin all the way, and that I don’t do a complete change! You should still be terrified! When’s the last time you saw somebody’s fingernails grow a full half-inch within ten seconds? Never, that’s when? You’ve never seen somebody’s nose change shape like that!”

  “My sister got hit in the face with a basketball and—”

  “Shut the hell up! I have killed hundreds of Cub Scouts, and if you think your ridiculous werewolfwolfskunkdeermoosepygmy fucker is the height of terror, then you can all just…just…” No, no, no, I promised myself I wasn’t going to do this again. Please, not again. Don’t let it happen again…

  It happened again. Hollis succumbed to tears.

  There was a long, uncomfortable silence.

  “Mr. Hollis, can we go home and play Nintendo?”

  “Yes.” Mr. Hollis wiped the tears from his eyes. “Yes, we can.”

  THE END

  Serial

  A Bonus Short Story by Blake Crouch & J.A. Konrath

  1

  The hardest thing about killing a hitchhiker is finding one to pick up.

  Donaldson could remember just ten years ago, when interstates boasted a hitcher every ten miles, and a discriminating killer could pick and choose who looked the easiest, the most fun, the juiciest. These days, cops kept the expressways clear of easy marks, and Donaldson was forced to cruise off-ramps, underpasses, and rest areas, prowl back roads, take one hour coffee breaks at oases. Recreational murder was becoming more trouble than it was worth.

  He’d found this one standing in a Cracker Barrel parking lot. The kid had been obvious, leaning against the cement ashtray near the entrance, an oversize hiking pack strapped to his back. He was approaching every patron leaving the restaurant, practicing his grin between rejections.

  A ripe plum, ready to pluck.

  Donaldson didn’t even have to initiate contact. He walked in to use the bathroom and strolled out car keys in hand, letting them jingle a bit. The kid solicited him almost immediately.

  “Excuse me, sir. Are you heading up north?”

  Donaldson stopped, pretending to notice the man for the first time. He was young, maybe mid-twenties. Short, reddish hair, a few freckles on his face, mostly hidden by glasses. His clothing looked worn but of good quality. Donaldson was twice his age, and damn near twice his weight.

  Donaldson rubbed his chin, which he knew softened his harsh features.

  “In fact I am, son.”

  The boy’s eyes lit up, but he kept a lid on his excitement. Any hitcher worth his salt knew to test the waters before sealing the deal.

  “I am, too. If you’d like some company, I can chip in for gas.” He hooded his eyes and quickly added, “No funny stuff. I’m just looking for a ride. I was hoping to get to Ogden by midnight. Got family up there. My name’s Brett, by the way.”

  Well played, Donaldson thought. Friendly, a little desperate, making clear this wasn’t a sexual hookup and that he had people waiting for him.

  As if any of that would keep him safe.

  “How do I know you’re not some psycho?” Donaldson asked. He knew that wa
s pushing it, but he liked the irony.

  “There’s a gas station across the street. I can top off the tank, pay with a credit card. All gas stations have cameras these days. Credit card is a paper trail. If anything happens to you, that would link me to your car, and I’d get caught.”