Bloodthirst in Babylon

by Searls, David

  “I’m okay, honey bear,” he whispered, holding a finger to his lips. “We’re hiding, remember? Keep your head down, Cris.”

  He’d spent plenty of restless nights in other people’s homes. Times when they’d lost their apartment and friends or relatives had taken them in for days or weeks. But despite his ample experience worrying about what the morning would bring, even his bleakest moments hadn’t prepared him for this. Joy and the three kids and him, hugging the floorboards in front of the middle seats of Mona Dexter’s van while being assaulted in a rubber band and paper clip volley by Kathy Lee’s two brats from their hiding place next to Highsmith, last row back. Kathy Lee drove, oblivious as usual to the commotion caused by her demonic offspring.

  The nine of them could be shot, jailed or worse at any moment. That’s what he’d brought upon his loved ones by taking the backroads to Detroit.

  Todd squeezed Melanie’s shoulder, then reached out to touch Little Todd. Joy took and held his hand until he pulled it away, as casually as possible, from the sun’s bite.

  Kathy Lee’s kids giggled louder as another length of paper clip wire zinged past Todd’s ear.

  “What’re you brats up to?” Kathy Lee drawled. Then, for the benefits of the adults stashed behind her, she added, “We’re almost there.”

  The van made a couple more lazy turns, Kathy Lee doing all she could to convince anyone who might be watching that she was in no particular hurry.

  Putting her behind the wheel was a risk they’d had to take, according to Highsmith. “Purcell’s daylighters aren’t real sharp and they’re spread pretty thin,” he’d said before they’d headed out of the Sundown. Word of the bloodbath in the apartment over the Winking Dog wouldn’t get out until nightfall, the theory went. Since the daylighter cops guarding the front of the Sundown had seen Mona’s van coming and going all day, they’d either not notice that Mona wasn’t driving or not care. Even if they knew it was Kathy Lee in the driver’s seat, they’d figure she wouldn’t be going far without her kids—as long as the cops didn’t spot them in hiding.

  A whole lot of ifs, probablys and hopefullys.

  Todd felt the van whine slightly as it took a sharp turn and a rise.

  Kathy Lee murmured, “Heads down, heads down…okay. We’re here.”

  No one said anything for several seconds. Not even Kathy Lee’s own kids, never at a loss for words. Todd peeked cautiously out a window while maintaining a tight grip on the stolen twelve-gauge stashed under the seat.

  The house stretched for the horizon, but soared high in the middle, a fairy tale structure of stone and timber and glass. And that was only the view from the back, the van idling where the long driveway ended at an attached garage that was larger and pricier than any house they’d ever called home.

  “Daddy, is that a castle?” Crissie asked in an awe-filled whisper.

  “No, honey, it ain’t.” Easy to say. Harder to believe.

  House like that, you’d have more bathrooms than you could count. No waiting in lines for three poky kids to quit splashing in the tub. There’d be TVs everywhere—flat screens—and central air and rooms you didn’t even know the names of. You’d go right through sunrooms and dens and family rooms and music rooms and libraries and playrooms. Go right through them and still have rooms waiting to be discovered. If that wasn’t a fairytale…

  Todd glanced at his wife. She, too, had risen to take in the view out the van windows, a dazzling smile playing in her eyes and on her lips as though the fairy tale castle had been built and placed there for her viewing pleasure. It was despair and a slow and untargeted anger that kept Todd from saying another word.

  With a motorized whir, the overhead garage door came down and lights lit the three-stall garage. The concrete floor looked newly poured. The riding tractor off to one side cost more than Todd’s last two cars. Tools hung from the walls over neatly stacked boxes. Damn if it didn’t feel air-conditioned out here, even.

  “Wait till I get the door open,” said Highsmith as he slipped out of the van.

  Todd watched him insert a key into the garage door and open it just an inch until a security chain stopped his progress.

  “Darby!” he called out in a stage whisper.

  Seconds later, the door opened and a young, trim and attractive blond had him in her embrace. Todd smirked as he tried picturing the woman with her arms around the old guy if he was a truck driver or drywall hanger.

  Kathy Lee got out and rolled back the van’s side door so her kids could jam their way past Todd. His kids followed, cautiously, like mice peering from a safe hole. Joy laid a cool hand on his neck on her way out and he offered her a grim, unfelt smile. Clutching the stolen shotgun, he came out last.

  Trailing the others through the garage door, Todd found himself in a pitched, high-ceilinged stone and timber kitchen with gleaming copper pans and an array of stainless steel appliances. The sun lasered down through a skylight, its awful power unfiltered by a row of hanging ferns.

  Todd bit off a scream. His flesh stinging as though immersed in acid, he tripped past his kids as inconspicuously as possible and took a spot against the room’s best-shaded wall. Only when his breathing evened out again could he take in his surroundings.

  By an arched doorway that led to a dining room with too many windows, the bubble blond Darby Highsmith stood watching him, a young boy pressed tightly against her.

  “Todd, Joy, Kathy Lee…” said Highsmith. “Meet my wife, Darby.”

  Todd nodded and mumbled something. He felt awkward, standing there with a shotgun like some goddamn toothless hillbilly.

  “My husband will take that if you’d like,” said the cheerleader, nodding at the weapon.

  “Oh. Yeah.” Todd handed it over and it disappeared into another room, one presumably more child-proof than the kitchen.

  When Highsmith returned, he flitted from window to window in the dining room and beyond. The house went on forever, Highsmith’s footsteps echoing and fading and rising with his progress.

  “Coffee or something?” Darby’s voice was high and feminine, a perfect match for her petite form, but deceptively firm. “Something for the kids, maybe.” She nodded at the five youngsters. Even Kathy Lee’s kids looked quietly intimidated in the soaring structure.

  Todd watched his own for reactions. They wore expressions that were too old, too distrustful and experienced with danger to be as young as they were. They looked pale and pinched, nothing like the golden-toned toddler standing so self-assured in front of his mother.

  Joy answered for all of the Dunbars with a barely audible murmur. “Thank you, ma’am. We haven’t eaten,” she said timidly. She looked big and unkempt in the same room with the cheerleader.

  Darby responded with a gasp of sympathy and a burst of activity. She began pulling loaves of bread and crackers and cheese and fruit and lunchmeat from the vastness of her cupboards and refrigerator.

  “Help me, Joy. Kathy Lee. We’ll make sandwiches,” she said before the three women fell to the task.

  Later, Highsmith’s wife begged them to eat more. She was wearing short shorts and now she rubbed her hands along her naked thighs, the skin so shapely that Todd met the movement with an angry blush. She tilted her head toward the doorway through which her husband had departed twenty minutes before.

  “He’s expecting visitors,” she said when she noticed Todd tracking her gaze.

  She dropped both hands tenderly to her young son’s shoulders, a gesture that encouraged Joy to do likewise with Crissie and Little Todd. Even Kathy Lee made a half-hearted attempt to track down her two and yank them closer.

  The richly carpeted footfalls were so muffled that Todd didn’t hear Highsmith’s approach until he spoke.

  “He’s pulling in the driveway,” he said as he strode into the kitchen. “But there’s someone with him.” That last part didn’t sound like good news.

  Highsmith moved to a window over the sink where Todd looked over his shoulder for as long as he
could stand the sunlight. A navy blue SUV glided to a halt behind the van and both of the ample vehicle’s front doors opened at the same time.

  Highsmith squinted. “Who the hell…?” he said in a voice so full of wonder that Todd had to lean closer to the glass, shielding his eyes with an instantly sunburned forearm, to see what was happening.

  The driver was a black guy in his forties, maybe. Slightly shorter than average and on the soft side. He spun in a slow circle to take in the house, the yard, and finally his passenger as she emerged from the vehicle and rounded the front of it and came up behind him.

  Highsmith made a sound deep in his throat. “Wait here,” he said to no one in particular before rushing out the door.

  Todd turned on a sink tap to cool the sun’s sting from his wrists and arms while watching the confrontation.

  The young woman struck a casual pose against the side of the Grand Cherokee, her face locked in a smile that more closely resembled a grimace. She was tall, slender and tanned golden. Her sandy blond hair looked expensively tousled so that she had to keep removing strands of it from her eyes.

  “Interesting,” Todd murmured.

  Paul absently touched the black guy’s elbow, but his head was angled toward the hot young chick.

  “What have we here, a little competition for the cheerleader?” Todd asked himself.

  “What’s that, hon?” Joy asked.

  “Nothing.”

  He shut off the tap and bathed his face in the water on his hands. It helped, but only a little. He inched closer to the back screen door, stepping very carefully around the sunbeam in the middle of the room.

  “Todd, what are you doing?” Joy froze in the act of cleaning up the kids’ mess. “Don’t you listen in on them.”

  “I’m not,” he said, waving her off.

  From the doorway, he saw nothing but the branches of the young oaks, but he could hear conversation distinctly enough.

  “It was my decision, Dad,” the young woman was saying in a strong, ringing voice. “I told Freddie he could either give me a ride or I’d try to find your place on my own and probably end up lost.”

  Dad, Todd thought, vaguely disappointed.

  Highsmith said, “Let’s get in the house.”

  Todd skittered away from the door, yelping sharply as the sunbeam slashed a patch of exposed wrist.

  Highsmith, holding the screen door for his daughter, squeezed her shoulders as she walked in ahead of him. He said, “Honey, don’t get me wrong. I love seeing you, but now isn’t…it’s dangerous.”

  “That’s why I’m here,” she said.

  Up close, she looked about the same age as the old guy’s wife. Interesting development.

  “I didn’t understand a thing Freddie was saying, but I figured you needed more help than you’d ever ask me for. Whatever it is, Dad, you’ve got two lawyers from one of the most powerful law firms in Detroit at your service.”

  Highsmith chuckled and Todd did, too. In both cases, it sounded forced.

  “Well, you might as well meet everyone,” Highsmith said. “Before I get into my story I want you both to note that they all seem at least as sane as Freddie, here. That’s important because you’ll question our mental health by the time I’m through.”

  Chapter Forty-Four

  First Highsmith led a parade of kids and trailing adults to a finished basement room chock full of video games and old-fashioned penny arcades. There was a big-screen television on one wall and shelves jammed with kids’ books and DVDs on another. He found an age-appropriate movie for all of the kids and showed them how to operate several of the games.

  “That ought to hold them,” he said as he took the adults and his young son back upstairs and into a sun-drenched room with couches and plush chairs where Todd had to work hard to find a shadowy corner.

  Then Highsmith set off another hurried round of introductions. Connie Highsmith, Todd noticed, seemed to keep her distance from the young wife, who she apparently already knew, and to devote most of her smiles and attention to the toddler, who’d be her half-brother. After his initial shyness, the kid sat on her lap.

  “Alright,” Highsmith started, once everyone was settled and introduced. “We have an unusual situation here and not much time to explain it.”

  Unusual situation. Understatement of the day.

  Their host went into an impossibly brief summary of the last several days, but even this cobbled together version of events drew the wide-eyed attention of the two newcomers.

  And yet they hardly looked convinced. If the persuasive Highsmith couldn’t even win over family and friend, Todd was thinking, how the hell did they hope to alert the outside world?

  “Dad, you’ve got to be—I don’t know—mistaken,” said Connie.

  Highsmith grimly shook his head. “Honey, we’ve looked at this a thousand ways. Whatever you want to call these people, they’re dangerous. Trust me.”

  “Well, whatever’s going on,” the lawyer friend said, “job one is to get everyone out of here. We’ll need more than my Grand Cherokee. If we can also use that minivan parked in front of—”

  “I’m not going,” said Paul, his quiet words drawing shocked silence all around.

  Darby stood and took a couple nimble steps to her husband’s side. “What do you mean, Paul?”

  He gave his young wife a sad smile. “Darby, you heard what Drake said. That he’d find us wherever we went. I believe him. If I don’t handle it right here, right now, we’ll always be running. And I’m too old and easily frightened for that.”

  “But we’ve got him,” she cried. “I thought we decided—”

  “It’s not enough,” Paul replied. “We need more, and I know just how to do it.”

  Huh? Todd felt lost. They had him? What did that mean?

  “Apparently you haven’t told us everything, Paul,” the lawyer said, pretty much echoing Todd’s thoughts.

  “There’s no time,” Highsmith replied.

  Darby looked like she had another argument in mind, but Todd watched it dribble from her face.

  “Well this is crazy,” Connie Highsmith said. “Vampires, conspiracies, dead people, fleeing town before dark.”

  “I was there,” her father told her firmly. “So were these other people.” He swept the room with a hand gesture. “Either it all happened like I said it did, or we’re all lying for unfathomable reasons.”

  Connie took the Sundowners in without looking at anyone directly. “Or…I don’t know. You’re all somehow imagining…” She let it trail off as if unable to convince even herself.

  Freddie Brace nodded. “Mass hypnosis. Like seeing the sun dance in the sky while the Blessed Virgin visits thousands.”

  “Christ, Freddie,” Highsmith said.

  The lawyer waved him off. “Hear me out. I’m not saying that’s the explanation. It’s too pat, too flippant to ever sell to a jury. Generally speaking, if someone I know and trust tells me he saw pink elephants in tutus crooning Perry Como tunes, and I’m convinced he’s not emotionally or chemically unbalanced—or pulling my leg—I’m going to think that there’s something damn strange and interesting going on. If it’s not a singing elephant in a tutu it’s… something.”

  “Then you sort of believe me?” Paul said in amazement.

  “‘Sort of’ being the operative phrase for now.” Freddie shrugged. “You’re too smart to be duped and I know you’re not lying. Also seems unlikely I’ve been dragged to the sticks to get punked. . So I’m staying here with you until I see those crooning, tutu-wearing elephants for myself.”

  “I wouldn’t recommend it,” Highsmith said.

  “You didn’t. Now let’s get everyone out of here. If I remember my Dracula movies, they have to be gone before sundown.”

  “Forget the movies,” Kathy Lee said. “The way things really are is more dangerous than anything you ever seen at the theater. In many ways, those things are more human than my own kids.”

  “But the sun really d
oes hold them off,” said Joy. “That’s why we’re relatively safe for now.”

  Then she described the attack at the apartment over the Winking Dog as Todd had explained it to her. She told how Jamey Weeks had been killed as a result of exposing the sleeping vampires to sunlight. One of the stories Highsmith had neglected to tell, maybe in deference to all the women present.

  At least Jamey’s death had been fast and final, Todd thought. He wouldn’t be in the process of making the transition from human to something far worse. Todd felt his heart hammering and knew he had to refocus his thoughts. He tuned back in to the conversation.

  Highsmith was giving orders, a role that seemed to suit him. They were to pile into the Grand Cherokee and Mona’s Dodge minivan. Todd would drive the Cherokee with his family aboard while Kathy Lee brought up the rear in the van with Darby, Connie, Tuck and her own awful twosome. Highsmith had found a Mapquest map he’d printed out before moving to the remote community—back when he had Internet access like the rest of America. He’d highlighted a path that would keep them off of what passed for main roads in this stretch of woods. As small as the town police force was, it was unlikely they’d have the chosen route covered. Or at least that was the theory of the moment.

  Highsmith turned to his wife at one point and told her to not forget the memory card.

  “What memory card?” Connie Highsmith asked the question, but it could just as easily have been Todd.

  “Not now, honey. Darby will explain it in the car.” Highsmith turned to his wife. “Just remember to call at precisely nine o’clock.”

  While everyone else in the room listened with blank expressions, Highsmith made Darby repeat a local phone number that Todd didn’t recognize. Under no circumstances, his wife and daughter were told, were they to tell him where they were calling from. But wherever they touched down, they were to find a wireless signal and Darby was to check for email.

  “I might have to find a Starbucks in the next town, but I’ll find online access somehow,” Highsmith said. “Later.”