Bloodthirst in Babylon

by Searls, David

  Darby just kept impatiently nodding—she’d heard this all before—while her eyes flitted from window to window as the sun grew less intense. Made Todd feel a little better, at least.

  It was getting more difficult to follow all of this as his limbs grew wearier, his eyelids heavier. Highsmith prattled on and on.

  “Honey, use credit and debits cards and take ATM cash withdrawals for the first twenty-four hours only. Then cut up all of your plastic. You should be able to use Connie’s credit cards longer since it’ll take them awhile to trace her. Don’t stay with relatives or obvious friends, and keep moving. That’s the most important thing,” he said. “Keep moving.”

  Highsmith made his wife repeat the local phone number again and reminded her to place it from a throwaway cell phone at exactly nine that next morning. If Paul didn’t answer by the end of the third ring, they were to hang up and toss the phone.

  At a break in the action, Todd glanced at his watch. It was nearly 7:20, still time remaining till dark. Too much time, he thought, his flesh still tender from the midday sun.

  “One more thing,” he said, rising painfully to his feet. His shoulder throbbed with the movement. “I won’t be going.”

  There. He’d said it. It wasn’t so bad. Even Joy just stared at him with a distracted look that contained not a trace of alarm. Maybe it would go over a lot better than expected.

  “You mean you’re not ready yet, hon? What? You’ve gotta go to the bathroom?”

  Or maybe not.

  “I gotta be here,” he said.

  “No you don’t,” Highsmith barked. “You’ve got three kids and a wife depending on you.”

  “You got a wife and kid here, too,” Todd replied. “Two of them,” he corrected himself.

  Joy got in his face with her husky body like she wanted to tackle him. She probably did. He took a couple backward steps with her in his arms, and pressed her tightly To his chest.

  “You have to listen to me,” he whispered, embarrassed at their public display. “I’m staying for reasons you can’t even guess. I’ll be careful, but you gotta believe I know what I’m doing.”

  He could feel her head shake from side to side as she murmured “No, no, no…” into his chest. He burrowed deeply into her, unable to make eye contact for fear of losing it. It was worse than when Chaplin’s teeth sunk into his shoulder. Worse even than that godawful moment when he knew he’d been infected and there was probably no cure.

  But if there did exist an antidote of some kind, he would only find it here. That much he knew. And for that possibility he had to stay strong.

  And so they left him: Melanie and Crissie and Little Todd. The two younger kids were still sobbing quietly as they were packed into the Grand Cherokee, Connie Highsmith behind the wheel. Melanie’s tears had ended, but she hid her red face from him. He wanted to pull her to his lap like when she was a little girl and explain everything. Make her see how he had to do what he was doing.

  He said nothing. He turned to his wife, sharing the ample shade under the backyard oaks. “Last chance,” he said quietly. “I wish you’d go—”

  “I’ll see my kids soon,” Joy said, smiling through her tears. “We both will. Kathy Lee and Connie will take good care of them until we pick them up together. That’s what I promised Melanie, and it’s a promise I’m going to keep. We both are.”

  Todd thought of Jermaine and Tonya Whittock, their kids packed away in Detroit, and despair squeezed his chest. As Joy suddenly ran to the big SUV and reached in to hug her crying children one last time, he considered stepping into the last of the sunlight and shoving her into the van with them, slamming the door and waving the vehicles out of this godforsaken town.

  Thought about it, but then saw the grim set of Joy’s mouth as she returned to him and knew she’d never give him up that easily.

  “We’re losing sunlight,” Highsmith called out to the drivers. “Hurry up and get out of here.”

  From windows inside the huge home, Todd watched his escaping family until the minivan and SUV disappeared from view. His skin tingled as though he’d fallen asleep under a heat lamp. Wrapping one arm tightly around Joy, he could feel her shoulders heaving with the force of her silent tears.

  A nap. That’s what he needed.

  Chapter Forty-Five

  He was up and out, padding silently through the dark room. Too silently, too quickly, the room looking not nearly as dark as it should. He was weightless and now look at this: he was floating.

  He was dead.

  No, he was dreaming. Had to be, but it didn’t feel like that, either. And then he spotted the still figure on the bed and went over to investigate.

  Uh-oh. Bad news here. It was him, that still figure. Not dead. Just sleeping, the naked chest expanding and contracting with easy regularity, the blood-spotted bandage on his shoulder, the sheets tangled around his legs. He—the he on the bed—wore the same pair of cotton boxers he’d put on that morning.

  But there was no time for contemplating the sleeping him on the bed. He shot right out of the room, right through the closed door. A dream state with benefits.

  Voices down the hall. The hushed conversation of at least two men. He drifted toward the sound, transported by his dream’s mysterious means of locomotion through walls and doors until he found himself pausing briefly. He was high on the ceiling over a balcony railing where he overlooked two seated figures.

  Paul Highsmith on a leather lounger and his lawyer friend on the couch. They sat hunched, staring at one another, only feeble lamplight between them.

  “They’ll make it,” the lawyer was saying.

  “We won’t know until tomorrow,” came the glum reply. “I don’t know, Freddie.”

  It was the two-story family room of the Highsmith room. A carving knife and tennis racket sat on the glasstop table between the two men.

  Perfect. If the vampires broke in, they could volley the things to death.

  Freddie had added a pair of wire rim specs to his wardrobe since Todd had last seen him, an accessory that Todd must have added in his dream state. But what if, upon awakening, he was to ask Freddie if he owned a pair of wire rim glasses and Freddie said he did?

  What then?

  No time to think about it. He was on the move again, pulled from the room like a storm cloud. From another part of the huge home he observed Joy propped in a chair, a thin blanket tucked around her. She was in an upstairs room, staring at a large-screen television with the sound turned down. Todd called her name, but she didn’t stir.

  Then the dream took him out of the Highsmith home. It was still early evening, a shaft of light just dying in the west. As it did, the night came alive before him. He could smell the late-season lilacs, hear acorns falling from the oaks swaying in the slightest breeze. Crickets screamed, moths fluttered. He could feel their wings beating the cooling air, hear them touch down and even smell their dusty odor. He could see and hear and smell the night itself as if it was a different thing altogether from day and he’d know the difference even with his eyes closed. Owls glared, snakes slithered, bats fluttered in random flight patterns and red-eyed rats dragged their heavy tails through the grass. Mice and shrews and rabbits and nightcrawlers hugged the ground, their instincts honed to survival mode.

  It was a deadly stew of nature out there, and Todd loved it.

  He moved faster, whizzing seven feet off the ground. His eyes rose to the dim moonlight overhead, and he felt more powerful than that weak orbiting satellite. He chuckled soundlessly.

  Yes, it was a dream, but one of such vivid detail that it frightened him when he thought about it, so he didn’t. He let himself go, the cool night air soothing his sweaty flesh, caressing his bandaged shoulder.

  What flesh? What shoulder? He was nothing, and that wasn’t a bad thing. He was a dream wisp, an abstraction of existence. It was what he’d always wanted to be but hadn’t known it until now. He let his imaginary body drift higher to follow the tree-lined street out front o
f the Highsmith home.

  He floated over the residential streets, beyond the downtown and onto the industrial parkway with its sheet-metal buildings on both sides of Sennett Street and the untraveled roads beyond, and he kept moving. He flew faster and higher, until the treetops were green puffs under the vague moonlight.

  And now he’d left the town behind and was swooping down upon winking taillights, and he knew immediately whose he followed. It looked at first as though the two vehicles traveled bumper to bumper until he saw that his perspective was off and that a hundred yards separated them. But the trailing vehicle was closing in fast.

  Good, he thought. Hurry up and fall in behind Kathy Lee. She was the one with the twelve-gauge, so she shouldn’t allow such a gap between her Explorer and the Grand Cherokee ahead of her.

  Ford Explorer.

  Todd put his mind on rewind and saw the two vehicles reversing down the Highsmith driveway. Connie Highsmith and his own kids in the navy Grand Cherokee and the noisy Dwyer clan bringing up the rear in Mona Dexter’s maroon Dodge minivan.

  Maroon minivan.

  Not a dark green Ford Explorer. Not even close.

  Todd somehow strong-armed his hijacked consciousness to move closer above the Explorer so he could peer into the driver’s seat. Voluntary movement was as difficult as steering a falling feather or sustaining an erection after too many Johnny Walkers, but by focusing sharply he could make his formless self move clumsily closer to the trailing vehicle.

  Barry! The young daylighter cop who followed Marty McConlon around like a duckling trailing its mother. That’s who was behind the wheel. But why, Todd wondered, would he be dreaming of the young cop closing in on his family in the dead of night?

  And where the hell was Kathy Lee?

  The glorious new freedom he’d seemed to possess just moments before felt like a cage now. His consciousness was a kite drifting wherever the damn wind took it. He had to get to the Grand Cherokee, get a warning out to his family.

  Just wake up. He was trapped in a horrible dream, that’s all. If he could pinch himself, thrash, open his eyes, it would end.

  Better be soon. The Explorer was picking up even more speed. He caught a wink of light in the car’s interior. Barry, the driver, grinning like a maniac as his foot crunched the gas pedal. Next to him, moonlight glinting off a long barrel. More moonlight in the backseat: two more long gun barrels.

  Jesus. Why had they waited till nearly dusk before sending the women and kids out? Secluded back road in the middle of the night. Great idea, Highsmith.

  Todd screamed with nonexistent mouth; nonexistent vocal cords. A silent scream of paralytic panic as the green Explorer with its cargo of death drew closer.

  As his consciousness flitted back to the SUV holding his family—now he could see his own kids dozing in the back—he almost missed the third vehicle.

  His attention returned to the Ford Explorer, the grinning men, and the maroon minivan that raced to catch up and pull parallel.

  The passenger window of the minivan rolled down electronically. Todd could see Kathy Lee steering with one hand, holding something with another.

  “Get down, kids,” she shouted.

  The men in the Explorer slowly turned their attention to the van, as if seeing it for the first time. Then came an earth-shattering explosion of glass and metal and flesh and bone obliterated by the twin-barrel roar of shotgun lead.

  “Everyone alright?” she shouted as the van sped up and drifted into the lane formerly inhabited by the Explorer which had, by now, plowed headlong into a century-old elm on the shoulder of the road.

  The question was followed by the hoots and cheers of her hellion kids.

  Jesus, you don’t mess with Kathy Lee Dwyer even in your dreams.

  Todd made a ferocious attempt to psychically pull himself into the Grand Cherokee with his wife and kids, and nearly made it before feeling himself snapping like an over-extended rubber band, in a return trip to Babylon.

  He flew past cars and foot traffic. He crossed the tasteful residential streets of Crenshaw, Tolliver, Drake, Appleby, Price, then whizzed across Middle View and flew higher over the nameless woods and the narrow, meandering creek so full of its own distinct nightlife.

  He hovered low over the ravine alongside the Sundown Motel, where he heard voices. Whispers. Giggles.

  He sniffed the air and found the heavy, male scent of sweat. A figure crouched ahead and just below him. The figure turned, ball cap pulled low over dark eyes. The blue-whiskered man pointed, gestured for someone to sweep to the right.

  It was Jim Zeebe who responded to Purcell’s command, the garage owner crashing out of the woods and ambling off.

  “We ready?” Jason Penney whispered.

  The man with the stringy blond hair and taunting voice stood shockingly close, but it didn’t matter. They couldn’t see him. The vampire’s pale face looked virtually unmarked, the effects of the afternoon tangle with daylight nearly gone.

  “At the signal,” Purcell muttered. “Now get outta here.”

  Even the insects seemed to whisper. To wait.

  With a flurry of mental effort, Todd lifted up and away for a bird’s eye view of the woods and the motel sitting high with nearly every light blazing. He saw half a dozen figures patrolling the grounds, armed with guns, ball bats, kitchen knives.

  Todd’s stomach twisted. He tried warning them in his never-ending dream, tried making his presence known in some way, but couldn’t. He wasn’t so much a kite as a baby bird trying out its wings for the first time, unsure of what he could and couldn’t do.

  But while he had less than ideal command of his presence, his senses were fully attuned. He could hear bushes rustling, twigs snapping underfoot and the stage whispers of the night creatures as they climbed out of the ravine and approached their target. How could the Sundown sentinels be so dead?

  “Now!” Purcell ordered in a thick whisper, and all pretense of stealth was gone.

  Todd watched, hovering helplessly overhead. He listened to the grunts of young vampires as they swarmed the outer perimeter of the building. Giggling as they drew closer to the first sentry, stationed at the cracked pavement surrounding the stagnant swimming pool. It was a game to them, Todd realized as he screamed out a warning which only his mind picked up.

  “They’re here,” the lone sentinel cried.

  Todd recognized the voice immediately.

  A gun barked, a vampire fell. More gunfire, more giggles, and another night creature toppled. Two more shots by the sentry, but wild, panicky shots that plowed earth as at least three of the vampires fell on the shooter.

  One of the attackers, Zeebe, wore a bullet-tattered and blood-soaked shirt. The other two elbowed the older man aside for a taste, but he growled through a mouthful of flesh and gore and the others backed off slightly.

  Noooo…

  Todd picked up other nightmarish sounds, the confused, alarmed cries of Sundowners, in the most lucid dream he’d ever experienced. Another shot rang out and Zeebe fell over again, drawing fresh peals of laughter from his inhuman friends.

  “Not again,” one of the creatures tittered while Purcell grabbed hold of the dazed mechanic and said, “Time to move, boys.”

  “Teach ‘em to fuck with us,” Jason Penney snarled as they swept the open field and slipped back down the ravine.

  “Let ‘em think about that,” Purcell said.

  “Shit, that last one stung a little,” Zeebe said as he dragged himself through the underbrush.

  The vampires hooted, slapping palms as they smashed through the night.

  Something crawled across the ceiling. A centipede or whatever else might have a hundred fuzzy legs. Todd watched its stop-jerk progress and wondered how it could travel upside down like that without the blood rushing to its head. That made him wonder whether or not insects even had blood, and that mundane thought made him realize he was awake.

  He blinked. Made a fist and drew a breath. Felt his fingers meet his
palm, his lungs expand, the mattress against his back. He knew he had his body back. He’d finally returned from wherever it was he’d been.

  The door snickered open and Joy tiptoed in. Seeing him awake, she sat on his bed, her eyes dark, their corners lined with worry.

  “What time is it?” he croaked, noticing it was still dark.

  He’d slipped upstairs and into a spare bedroom for what he thought was just a nap soon after the van and SUV pulled out.

  She didn’t answer.

  He had much to tell her. First he must explain the condition he was in and find a way to convince her it had its advantages.

  He knew by now he’d dreamed no dream. And that Tonya Whittock would never see her children.

  Todd reached for his wife’s hand and started to tell her all this, but she spoke first.

  “Honey,” she said, “you better get out here. There’s a bunch of those things outside and they’re trying to get in.”

  Chapter Forty-Six

  “I checked it. It’s locked,” the lawyer shouted from somewhere toward the back of the massive home.

  “How about the windows?” Highsmith asked from the living room.

  “Locked, too. You think the glass will hold?”

  Highsmith shrugged as he stepped into the foyer. “It’s not bulletproof.”

  The shrug couldn’t be seen by his friend, but Todd saw it from the second-floor balcony railing. He watched Highsmith prowl through the foyer and family room with a tennis racket gripped like a club. If that’s the best they could do for weapons, they were screwed.

  Walking felt funny to Todd as he shuffled along the railing. It seemed a laborious way of getting around, the constant tangle with gravity. The carpet felt rough and ticklish against his bare feet. He cleared his throat as he descended the staircase, but still managed to startle the homeowner. Highsmith wheeled and drew back the racket.

  “Easy, it’s me. What’s happening?”

  “It’s alright,” Highsmith replied, as though Todd were the one acting highstrung. “It’s the old folks under Drake. They probably don’t even know what happened at the Winking Dog. I saw John Tolliver in the crowd out there. I think this is his thing and he just wants to scare us.”