Bloodthirst in Babylon

by Searls, David

  “Not much more to say.”

  Oh yes there was. Todd wondered where she’d stashed her kids for the evening. What if it had been one of her own little urchins she’d trigger-happily plugged?

  “There’s nothing here, D.B.,” Jermaine shouted up at them.

  By now, a couple more Sundowners had found flashlights and brought them to life. D.B. took one and joined the two men digging footholds into the cantilevered soil like mountain goats. Others followed and, with a deep sigh of annoyance, Todd did the same.

  “Todd, get back up here,” Joy snapped, but he ignored her.

  “See. Nothing,” Denver said.

  “Give a woman a gun…”

  “I heard that, Dukey,” Kathy Lee said.

  Denver, who’d been scrambling up the hill, chose that moment to lose his footing and topple backward, slo-mo style. He rolled like a playful grizzly most of the way to the creek bed below, triggering hoots of laughter, beams crisscrossing his prostrate body like footlights.

  “Hey, look at this,” said a man with a last name so complex that the Sundowners had taken to simply calling him Ponytail Pete.

  Flashlight beams hit him. He’d slid several feet down the hill and anchored himself to a tree root. When a light found him, he was prodding at a couple saplings that had tried to cling to the side of the ravine, but failed. Their spindly trunks were snapped clean.

  “So?” said Carl.

  “These are recently broken,” Pete said. “Crushed. Like something big fell into ‘em.”

  “Something like a body?” Tonya Whittock asked.

  “Could be,” said Pete.

  “Bullshit,” offered Dukey.

  Hating himself for appearing to agree with the asshole, Todd said, “So where’s the body?”

  That was the worst moment, standing there watching them all take in that question and put together what it meant. The woods seemed darker, the flashlights weaker just then. Even the creek whispering below sounded like it was against them.

  “Blood,” said Ponytail Pete. Still gripping what remained of the snapped-off saplings, he stared at the fingers of one hand.

  And there it was. The flashlights found it. Moisture picked off a torn sapling, now turning two of Ponytail Pete’s fingers black and wet.

  Todd grabbed a flashlight from the nearest Sundowner and slashed the woods, the ravine and the motel grounds with its yellow beam, the sudden motion triggering gasps from all around.

  “Jesus, what is it?” Jermaine Whittock asked.

  It was nothing. Dark, dark woods, that’s all. Unseen, on the other end of those woods, the weird, fucked-up town of Babylon, Michigan.

  “As of now,” said D.B., “we’re setting up a night watch. We’ll need four people patrolling the place front and back at all times, sundown to sunup. We’ll switch off every, say, four hours.”

  “No way,” said Duke Gates, skipping quickly up the hill. “I’m out of here.”

  “You’re what?” Kathy Lee asked him.

  Todd waited for a response that never came.

  “What a chickenshit,” Kathy Lee murmured.

  For having incurred Kathie Lee’s wrath, the overbearing Dukey Gates almost earned Todd’s pity.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  The Highsmiths had turned into harmless hypocrites upon undertaking the raising of their son. That was the only explanation Paul could come up with for the visit the three of them paid to Monroe, the nearest city of any size, so they could attend Sunday services with the Episcopalians. They’d decided on that denomination after setting out early enough to find the church that charmed them most. This Sunday, the Episcopalians. Perhaps they’d become Catholics next Sunday.

  “It’s nice here,” Darby said as they cruised aimlessly along the Lake Erie coastline in Darby’s Jeep after the service. “Makes you almost not want to go home.”

  More than almost, Paul thought. He couldn’t help wondering why the most commonplace amenity of any town—at least a single church—had gone missing in theirs. And whether the Episcopalians’ omnipotent Creator was any match for the darker gods that seemed to be roosting in Babylon.

  Tuck was getting fussy in his car seat, so they couldn’t dawdle. Paul took I-75 to Michigan 151, crossing over the South Dixie Highway, the way he knew best. It occurred to him as they slipped into an unmarked road buried in the trees, that there were probably quicker routes in and out. But the thought of exploring the back roads surrounding Babylon left him vaguely ill at ease.

  Taking Darrow Road into the outskirts of town, Paul made a conscious effort to ignore the Sundown Motel as they passed it. Babylon seemed both dismal and watchful that morning, but he knew his impression of it was colored by recent events. The sky was blue, the air mild as they drove through the same town that had so excited them just weeks before. It couldn’t have all gone that bad that soon—could it?

  Paul hooked a left blocks before the vast Drake Municipal Complex on Main View, noticing for the first time that the cut-through street he’d arbitrarily chosen was named Drake.

  Why not? Everything else was.

  He wished Darby would talk, really talk to him about all of this, but she had her back turned to him and was cooing with Tuck in the backseat. Anyway, what was he looking for from her? A serious conversation about vampires?

  “Who is it?” she asked him sharply as the Jeep turned down Crenshaw with its other large new homes sitting as far back off the street as their own.

  She meant the green Chrysler in their drive. Paul could hear the tension in her voice.

  Police Chief Bill Sandy, in street clothes, stepped out of the car as they pulled up. When the Highsmiths got out to join him, he made a stilted hat-tipping motion toward Darby even though he was hatless.

  “Morning, folks,” he said cheerfully.

  Paul provided a hurried introduction, then stood about awkwardly as Darby freed their son from his car seat. “What’s up?” he asked the cop, not even trying to mask his desire to wrap up whatever business it was that required the lawman’s presence on their property.

  Chief Sandy turned to glance at the house as Darby steered Tuck into it, but Paul ignored the hint and waited for him to speak from the driveway.

  “Both prisoners are sprung,” the cop said. “Released well before yesterday noon.”

  Saying it like he was looking for a pat on the back, but Paul wasn’t going there. “I know,” he said. “I’ve talked to them since.”

  He let the cop ponder this.

  Chief Sandy seemed to do so for a moment, then said, “I’d like you to meet someone.”

  “Oh?” Paul said it with a careful lack of inflection.

  “One of the town’s leading citizens. He’d like to meet you.”

  “Who would that be?”

  “Name’s Miles Drake.”

  Paul cocked an eyebrow. “You mean, like, Miles Junior? Or Miles the Third?”

  The chief looked momentarily lost. “I mean…Miles Drake.”

  Paul’s mind went back to those two old photos in the police station, the one mounted on the wall and the other in the chief’s office. Miles Drake from the 1940s, and from maybe three decades later. In both, a tall and slender but elderly man with a head of snow-white hair and a face that looked flushed with high blood pressure. He couldn’t possible still be alive. Could he?

  “Mr. Highsmith?”

  It brought him back. At least a little. “Um…sure,” he said. “But what does he—?”

  “Just a chat,” the chief said. “Say tonight at eleven at the police station?”

  Paul felt the lump of panic like it was a physical obstruction in his windpipe. Tonight. Eleven o’clock. Three hours past sundown.

  “No,” he said, getting past that lump.

  The cop’s face worked it over. “What do you mean, ‘no’?”

  “I mean,” Paul said, forcing more decisiveness into his voice than he felt, “that if Miles Drake wants to see me tonight, he’ll have to come here.�
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  “To your home?”

  What you must never do, Van Helsing would have warned, is invite the vampire in.

  Unless, of course, you needed home court advantage.

  “Yes,” he said. “To my home.”

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Darby yelped, a high hiccup of a sound, as the door chimed melodiously. “You didn’t warn me,” she cried out from an upstairs room.

  That was his job. He’d had his face pasted to a dining room window that overlooked the driveway for the past half hour. They’d latched all of the doors and windows and had put Tuck to bed hours ago.

  “He didn’t drive,” Paul said.

  Be prepared, he’d reminded himself often that day. But already they’d been fooled.

  Darby tripped down the stairs to lock sight on Paul as he came into the entry foyer, her eyes wide. “You didn’t warn me,” she said again, now little more than a whisper.

  This was the young woman who’d laughed off the talk he’d brought home with him from his meeting with the motel residents the day before. She’d scoffed until the sun went down.

  “Get back upstairs,” he said thickly.

  She nodded, but didn’t move. He turned to the front door and stared at it. I’m walking, he told himself. Walking to the front door. And I don’t believe in vampires.

  The face looking in the window set into the carved door was white and craggy with age, stern as a monument. The mouth was a straight line, the eyes hard, dark.

  Paul glanced over his shoulder one final time to see his wife skipping up the stairs like a schoolgirl.

  His fingers moved numbly over the various locks. He gripped and turned and pulled the door handle prematurely, then had to eat up more time turning more locks until it would swing open smoothly and admit the face in the door panel.

  Miles Drake was not alone. A woman stood next to him. She was middle-aged and, though moderately tall, managed to appear short and squat next to the much taller and more slender man. Her hair hung limp, her face unremarkable, her expression put-upon.

  “My daughter Tabitha,” the elderly man said. He seemed to know that no self-introduction was necessary.

  Something chittered at the vampire’s feet, and Paul caught a quick glimpse of meaty bodies and slithering tails before Miles Drake shuffled past Paul and into the house ahead of his daughter. From the white foyer with its thirty-foot ceiling, the two surveyed the premises while Paul closed and latched the door with his eyes shut, anxious to see no more than he had to out there in the dark.

  Drake turned as he did. “Well?” he rumbled. The next move was obviously Paul’s.

  The man’s pressed blue slacks, his short-sleeved white dress shirt, dull necktie and scuffed shoes gave him the appearance of a minor bureaucrat or a fuddy-duddy grandpa.

  Paul motioned and led the way through the tall arch and into the family room and to the same sofa that had held three soggy old men just days before. He considered offering food and drink, but the protocol for hosting vampires was a mystery to him.

  This last thought came with a grim, hidden smile. This whole vampire thing…he was just playing along.

  “Please take a…” he finally murmured, but the two had already taken such action.

  While Miles centered himself on the offered sofa, his daughter sat alone on a wingback leather chair angled next to but slightly behind him. Paul backed into a chair on the other side of a Persian rug the color of sunlight.

  Even seated, Miles Drake loomed. Though not quite Paul’s six-two, the other man had a long neck, ramrod spine, narrow waist and lean physique, all of which seemed to lend inches.

  His slender hands caressing his knees, just as he had in his formal photo, Drake said, “You’ve heard stories.”

  His voice was rich, deep. Beneath the ceiling track lighting his face lost the ghastly pallor Paul had observed in his door pane. Quite the contrary, his complexion was ruddy, even mottled. His irises were of a non-reflective blue, the whites of them tinged with yellow. His thick hair was unattractively white, more like yellow snow, his teeth primarily that same unappealing color, but brown where tooth met tooth. He looked like his photos. No better, no worse.

  Meaning he closely resembled his appearance sixty years ago.

  “Like with most stories, most gossip, there’s truth and partial truth and untruth all mixed together until you don’t know exactly what to think. And so,” Drake said, rubbing his knees as tenderly as a lover’s breast, “I’ll tell you what to think.”

  Don’t look up, Paul told himself. Don’t lift your eyes to find Darby crouched behind the balcony railing, her sightline taking in this section of the family room visible through the tall doorway.

  But of course the command only brought about the action and he let his gaze flicker to the shadow he’d thought he’d seen peripherally—but he saw nothing.

  “I could do as the others,” the old man was saying. “I could promise you money, more than you’ve yet been tempted with, but I think you’re used to money and a generous offer would only make you wonder how much better the next offer might be.”

  As if reading Paul’s career trajectory.

  “There’s a limit,” Drake continued, “to my finances and my patience. And I won’t waste time issuing silly threats like my annoying friend Tolliver.” He chuckled dryly. “Oh yes, I heard about your meeting with my three ageless cronies. They do things the old-fashioned way, especially John.”

  Miles Drake moved his head ever so subtly, but the movement caused the track lighting to lose him momentarily, and his watery eyes to sparkle and gleam like some moist gem. Then the head turned back into the light and the sparkle was gone, and he was just an old man with rheumy eyes like his three old friends. Elderly, but strangely intense.

  Discomfited by the old man’s naked scrutiny of him, Paul turned his attention to Tabitha Drake. Or at least he assumed Drake to be her last name. He couldn’t imagine her giving up her name to a man as she sat slumped and sullen.

  “Threats from old men seem empty and toothless,” her father was saying.

  Drake leaned forward until he could stand all ten of his long fingers at attention on the glasstop table in front of him. “To fear a threat, you must first be convinced that the gun is loaded.”

  Paul heard a sound from upstairs. Maybe just Tuck tossing in his sleep. As he gave the possibility more attention, he heard everything: bumps, creaks, settling timbers, each sound more stealthy and portentous than the previous. He also thought he heard the rats outside, scratching to get in.

  It had seemed so easy, so heroic, to tell the police chief that if Miles Drake wanted a face-to-face, he’d have to face him here. So dramatic an act with the sun shining, the birds singing.

  But here he sat. Hunched forward to tent his long fingers, his aged eyes gleaming with unexpected depth. And the daughter so calmly contemptuous, watching him with the same detached interest and repugnance she might show apes fornicating behind glass at the zoo.

  “Paul,” the elderly man said, “for you to truly understand how loaded my gun is, you must hear my story.”

  Paul’s breath went ragged. The old man’s icy use of his name was like a chain binding him, as though his name had been captured, not merely spoken. He had no desire to hear whatever Miles Drake had to share. But he’d listen. He had no choice.

  “I was born…” the vampire began, flicking a tongue across his brown and yellow teeth, “…on April Fourteenth, 1836.”

  No. Paul very definitely did not want to hear this.

  Part Two

  The Vampires Drake and Darrow

  The few who survived were taken away to Babylon…

  2 Chronicles 36

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  “Those first forty-two years? There’s really nothing to tell. I recall having a wife and seven children and we were rather poor, certainly by today’s standards. But for the time, I suppose we were working class. There was such a chasm between the wealthy and needy
back then, but I suppose there still is. America, land of opportunity. I can tell you that has not always been the case.

  “I was a scrivener in Rochester, New York.” The vampire let out a breath, an exasperated chuckle. “Paul, I’m not changing the subject, but how many photocopies have you made in your life? You can’t even answer that, can you? You think nothing of slapping your document onto the glass and pressing a button for ten copies, whether you need them or not. What’s interesting, Paul, is that while the talking heads keep insisting that the world’s becoming more complicated, it’s really become less so. But you’d need perspective to realize that.”

  Paul hadn’t said a word since the old man had seated himself. He vowed to change that, to take back some of the control he’d lost, but he still couldn’t force anything from his constricted throat.

  The vampire said, “I was a scrivener for an insurance company, a human photocopier. I sat by a kerosene lamp all day writing longhand copies of letters, memoranda, policies, contracts, whatever was given me. Beginning at daybreak, I’d struggle through a stack of documents that never stood less than half a foot high. I was uneducated, so I scribbled all day to make neat sense of other men’s more learned scribblings. Yes, beside a wood stove in the winter, my tools a pen and ink pot, at least in the earlier days. It sounds positively Dickensian, I know, but all true.

  “Tell me, Paul: Did you make your own copies at that investment bank in Detroit?”

  Paul shook his head, slowly. Hypnotically.

  “No, of course not. You had a secretary for that. Probably called an administrative assistant in these more enlightened times, but she was almost definitely a she, and she invariably bitched at the occasional paper jam or complicated collating assignment. A greater sense of history would have reduced her complaints, don’t you agree, Paul?”

  Paul sat. Stared. Speechless.

  “My old job has nothing to do with my story,” the vampire grumped, as if chastising himself, “except that you must understand how dismal life was back then, mine no worse than anyone else’s. Which might have a great deal to do with what was to become of me, or maybe it means nothing. I was bright, but, as I said, uneducated. My family before me had been poor, so I was to be poor. Remember, Paul, Horatio Alger’s young rags-to-riches heroes of the nineteenth century were fictional characters. The poverty-stricken boys and young men reading those tales for inspiration would, for the most part, be further out the cost of the book as they lay dying in the same wretched poverty to which they’d become accustomed. Just a fact.