They Thirst

by Robert R. McCammon

  “Captain?” It was Zeitvogel at the door, mopping his pants legs with a couple of paper towels. “You okay, sir?”

  “I’m fine,” he said, but kept his head away from the man so he wouldn’t betray the fear that was still making one corner of his mouth twitch.

  Zeitvogel looked down at his lap. Christ! he thought. Wonder if I can make the department foot the cleaning bill? Fat chance! “For a minute there you looked like you’d seen a ghost, sir.”

  “Did I?” Palatazin rose and dumped the folders onto his desk. He righted Jo’s picture and the spilled row of pipes. Fishing for the keys in his pocket, he stepped out of his office quickly and locked the door. “Don’t you have work to do?” he said tersely, and then he was moving past Zeitvogel and out of the squad room, his shoes clicking on the tiled floor.

  Weird, Zeitvogel thought. He shrugged at the other men, swabbed at the worst of the stain, and sat down at his desk again. Before he returned to work, he wondered whether what he’d been reading in some of the papers and hearing whispered around the building was true, that the captain was being squeezed over this Roach thing, and the pressure was starting to crack him. He continued typing his report on a young man found shot to death in bed that morning and thought, Better him than me.

  EIGHT

  Night had filled up the barrio like black rainwater filling a bomb crater, and what stirred in its depths was unnameable. Chill, tortured winds gnawed at the corners of silently crumbling buildings; in the narrow alleys rats scuttled in search of food, their eyes catching red pinpoints of light. And three Chicano boys clad in tight black leather vests and black headbands crouched behind a spill of dusty bricks and watched a dilapidated, graffiti-smeared building less than a hundred yards away. In the distance the tenement buildings seemed to be standing at odd angles, like crooked rows of gray tombstones.

  “Ain’t nothin’ moved in there for over an hour Maven,” the boy on the left, as thin and dark as whipcord, whispered huskily. “Ain’t nobody in there.”

  “I say they are.” The one in the center was the largest of the three, his biceps and forearms bulging with muscles. On the left bicep there was a tattoo of an eagle clawing at a snake and beneath it the name MAVEN. Jet black hair spilled over his headband, and his eyes—set in a square, large-jawed face—were tight slits of animal cunning. “Oh yeah,” he whispered, “the enemigo is in there and tonight they gonna pay.”

  “They musta moved their headquarters,” the thin one said. “The scouts musta been wrong.”

  “They’re hidin’,” Maven said, “because they’re scared shitless of what we’re gonna do to them.” He gazed up at the surrounding rooftops; a few more Homicides were up there, keeping watch on the Viper headquarters. But Maven couldn’t see them; they were hidden too well. He looked back to the building and shifted because the .45 in his waistband was beginning to cut into his stomach. The other two, Chico Mapazan and Johnny Pascal, were equally armed: Chico carried a nine-inch blade and a pair of nail-studded brass knuckles; Johnny clutched a baseball bat with four-inch nails driven through it. “Who wouldn’t be scared shitless,” Maven said softly, “knowing the Homicides were huntin’ for ’em?”

  “Gonna clean those fuckers out,” Johnny whispered, fingers clenching and unclenching around the bat. “Gonna make ’em pay.”

  “I get the first shot,” Maven told him. “I get my revenge for what they done to Anita. Bastards probably raped her dead and dragged her body off to the garbage dump.” A muscle in his jaw flexed. “They want to play rough, we’ll show ’em what rough means.”

  “When do we go?” Chico asked, his gaze flaring with impatient fire.

  “When I say so. Right now we wait.”

  In about fifteen minutes the building’s front door opened. Maven tensed like a strip of barbed wire. Two boys—one in an Army surplus jacket and the other barechested, came out and sat on the front steps. They seemed to be talking, and in a swirl of wind Maven could hear their raucous laughter. “Bastards,” he breathed. “Gonna make you pay.” They sat there for a long time, then they both rose at the same moment and disappeared back into the building.

  Almost immediately a small figure came scrambling across the lot, ducking low and keeping close to the thicker patches of shadow. It was Luis Santos. He hit the ground and crouched next to Chico. “Everybody’s ready, Maven,” he said. “Zorro’s got some troops around at the back door.”

  “Good. He carryin’ his momma?”

  “Yeah.” Zorro’s momma was a sawed-off shotgun, stolen from a gun shop less than a month ago but already put to good use.

  “He may need it when those bastards run out the back door.” Maven took a breath and then said, “Okay. We go.” He lifted his head, put two fingers in his mouth, and let out a couple of short whistles. “You goin’ with me, little soldier,” he said to Luis. “Make ’em pay for trashin’ your sister, man.” He handed Luis a carved ebony switchblade that could pass for a butcher knife. Maven whistled again, long and low, ending in an ascending note. Instantly shadows filled the lot and began to move. Maven and the others got up quickly and began to run through the darkness, crouched low and ready to dive for cover.

  Nothing moved, no one fired a shot, as they approached the building.

  “Gonna catch ’em sleepin’,” Maven whispered. “Gonna wipe ’em out.” He reached the building first with Luis right behind him. Maven took one of his two black market grenades from his belt, pulled the pin, and lobbed it through the nearest window. Then he dove against the building’s side, flattening himself, and saw Luis do the same.

  When the grenade exploded with a hollow whuuump!, blazing white fragments of metal came whining through the window like hornets. In the next instant Maven was charging up the steps, followed by a horde of Homicides. He kicked in the door and leaped through, firing .45 slugs in a red-hot arc. Luis clicked open the blade, feeling it thrum up his wrist. He felt like the Ice Cream Soldier to Maven’s Sergeant Rock; his blood was boiling, his brain crystal clear. He leaped through the open doorway, followed by Johnny and Chico and the rest of the Homicide troops. Inside Maven was crouched on the floor in a blue haze of gunsmoke. He could see the holes in the hallway wall where his bullets had hit. But the entrance hall and the dim corridor leading back through the building were empty. He heard nothing but the clatter of Homicide boots, the fierce breathing of his soldiers.

  “Ain’t nobody here!” Chico wailed.

  “SHUT UP!” Maven shouted and rose to his feet, his finger twitching on the trigger. “They got to be here! Where are you, fuckers?” He saw the outlines of more open doorways further back along the corridor. “Bastards are scared shitless!” he shouted. “Come on out! We’re gonna have a little party!” He fired into the corridor and heard a rain of plaster. “Chico, you and Salvatore and about six more go on up them stairs and check out the second floor. Don’t let ’em jump you. GO ON, WHAT’RE YOU WAITIN’ FOR? Everybody else stick to me!” He started along the corridor, crouching like a panther, peering into one empty room after another. “Hey man,” somebody said behind him, “I don’t like this…”

  “Shut your mouth and follow me!” Maven said, but now there was uncertainty in his voice, and a couple of his men faltered. But Luis stuck close beside his Sergeant Rock. At the rear of the corridor, there was a padlocked door. Maven snarled a curse and stepped into the nearest room; he fired twice into a closed closet and then wrenched it open, expecting a couple of bleeding bodies to tumble out. But there was nothing but a clothes hanger dangling from a rod. Luis bumped into him, and Maven said, “Get back, kid!” He could hear the noise of boots overhead—his troops checking out the upper floor.

  And then he looked up.

  They were clinging to the rafters like bats.

  Maven shrieked and lifted his gun as the bodies began to fall. His shot went wild as something landed on his back and grabbed his hair. He fell to the floor, hearing a hiss very close to his ear. And now all over the building, there were s
hrieks, cries to God, angered curses, the noise of falling bodies, and gunfire exploding into wood and plaster. A heavy form hit Luis’s shoulders and drove him down, slamming his head against the floor. In a red-misted daze he heard Maven babble for mercy and then scream piteously, like a woman. A shotgun blast knocked the rear door off its hinges, and now Zorro’s troops were streaming in. Dark figures leaped through the corridor to meet them, and a dozen separate battles raged in the darkness. Gunfire cracked, etching quick, hot veins in the air. Luis, his head pounding, tried to drag himself up off the floor and caught a kick in the ribs; he doubled up, tears blinding him, his fingers searching for the ebony blade. Someone else began to scream, and the scream was echoed all through the building. A body hit Luis and crashed to the floor. Luis heard a moaning sound followed by a strange and terrible…sucking. His brain flared, I don’t want to die like this! I don’t want to die like…

  An icy hand gripped his shoulder and turned him over like he was made of straw. A figure crouched next to him, eyes burning, pinning him to the floor. And then Luis saw that it was Hotshot Zasa, the Homicide lieutenant who’d supposedly been trashed by the Vipers. Relief coursed through him, and he said, “Hotshot?” He wasn’t going to die after all, wasn’t going to die, wasn’t…

  Hotshot grinned.

  The four fangs in his mouth—two protruding from the upper gums and two from the bottom—were yellow and dripping with fluids. The lower fangs curved inward slightly, like fishhooks; the upper ones were slanted toward each other, making a hideously efficient V. Hotshot’s face glowed white, like the moon; his fingers, skinny and clawlike, dug deep into Luis’s flesh to keep him from twisting away.

  And now Hotshot was bending forward, the eyes in that terrible face starting to roll up into the head with greedy expectation.

  Luis screamed a single word, the word that had carved itself into his brain as if from a red-hot switchblade—“Vampiro!”

  Above him Hotshot cackled and bent forward to his feast. The lower fangs pierced flesh and hooked. Hotshot twisted his head a fraction to hone in better on the flaming river of life that flowed just beneath Luis’s chin. Luis’s hands came up to push Hotshot’s head away, but they moved too late with too little strength. When the V of Hotshot’s fangs came down, blood spurted across his face. He blinked, shifted his position again, and as if from a great distance Luis heard his blood being sucked, the sound like someone sucking Coca-Cola through a straw or sniffing fine cocaine from a golden spoon. Luis’s hands fluttered, one finger digging into the corner of Hotshot’s eye. Instantly he heard a voice in his brain, something dreamy and soft—Lie still, little brother. Lie very still. Luis’s hands fell to the floor like dead birds.

  He was beginning to feel cold, really cold, but where Hotshot’s lips were pressed against his flesh, an inferno raged. He lay very still while the arctic cold crept through his veins, inch by merciless inch. Winds were rising in his head, deafening him with their shriek. And by the time his jugular vein collapsed, as flat as a gutted worm, Luis was fast asleep.

  Gradually the hideous sucking noises that echoed through the many rooms were quiet. But in a few minutes they were replaced by another noise—the sound of bodies being dragged across the floors.

  NINE

  Roach—much younger, but with an agonized madness already fermenting in his brain—pushed open the door.

  In the small bedroom with its mustard yellow wallpaper and acrid smells of tobacco smoke and sweat, another stranger was astride his mother, riding her roughly with flesh-smacking thrusts. The man’s buttocks and thighs tensed and untensed like the action of a mindless machine. Bev’s hands gripped his shoulders, and the man’s broad back was gridded with scratches. The bed trembled, springs squealing beneath their combined weight.

  There was an empty whiskey bottle at the foot of the bed. Roach moved into the room, bent, and picked it up. He could see Bev’s face—blank, drunken, bloated. She seemed to be looking right at him, her eyes lascivious and brimming with invitation. His groin was throbbing that hateful bass drum beat of desire. He lifted the bottle by the neck and stepped forward, already choosing the spot he would strike. As the bottle came down, he heard Bev scream, “NO!” And then it had crashed down not upon the stranger’s dark-haired skull but across his right shoulder because he’d twisted with the scream. The bottle broke across a shoulder blade, jagged edges digging into the flesh. The man shrieked, “Goddamn it, you crazy little bas…” and then struck out with the back of his hand, hitting the boy across the nose and dropping him to the floor. Roach, blood stringing from his nostrils, scrabbled to his feet and, whining like an animal, rushed forward. The bottle was forgotten now, he was going to kill this man with his hands. The stranger twisted off Bev and drove a solid blow to the boy’s chin that lifted him off his feet and then down again like a heap of laundry. “You stay away from me!” the stranger shouted, bending quickly to retrieve the broken bottle. “You stay away or I swear to God I’ll kill you!”

  Roach started forward again, his beady black eyes as dead as marbles, but then Bev shifted in the bed, and he stopped. Her thighs were exposed, and between them her sex glistened like a gateway to all the pleasures he’d ever imagined in his tortured dreams. He turned toward her, the stranger forgotten now, and approached the bed on trembling legs. Bev’s face flushed red. She closed her thighs and pulled the sheet up to her neck. Her son stood at the foot of the bed transfixed, his hand moving in slow circles at his crotch.

  “My God,” the stranger whispered, droplets of blood tapping to the floor. “My God…how long…has this been going on…?”

  “It’s not what you think, Ralph!” she said, avoiding her son’s languid gaze. “Please…!”

  “You…and him?” The stranger’s eyes moved back and forth between them. “Your own son?”

  “Not long, Ralph…I swear to God, not long!”

  He saw it all then. “You…you like it, don’t you? Jesus! You like it with your own son?”

  And suddenly it all came bursting out of her before she could stop it, the anger and fear and black guilt that was her legacy to her son. “YES, I LIKE IT!” she shrieked. “I like it when he touches me! Don’t you dare look at me like that…get out of here! GO ON! GET OUT!”

  The man was already struggling into his pants. He grabbed his shirt from the back of a chair and shrugged it on over his injured shoulder.

  Bev was screaming now, a high, whiskey scream, “I’m glad we do it! He’s more of a man at thirteen than you’ll ever be…!”

  “Sure, sure,” he said, working his shoes on. “You’re both nuts, aren’t you? Christ, I knew he was off his rocker, but you, too?”

  “GET OUT!”

  The man paused at the doorway, fumbling with his wallet, and flung a few bills at her. They spun like dead leaves at the boy’s feet. “Maybe they’ll give you the same room at the nut house,” he said and whirled out. A door opened and closed, and then there was silence but for Bev’s harsh breathing. She stared at her son, tears beginning to slide down her cheeks. “It don’t matter,” she said softly. “Not a bit. We’ve got each other, don’t we? We’ll always have each other. They don’t understand how bad it is to be alone, do they, Waltie? Nothing matters. Come on. Hurry.”

  And he did.

  The bedroom and Bev and the mustard-colored walls rippled like a pond into which a stone has been tossed. The ripples strengthened, moved faster and faster, and suddenly the whole scene vanished as if it had been sucked to the dark depths of a whirlpool.

  Roach rubbed his eyes and sat up in bed in his dank apartment. It was still very dark outside, and somewhere jukebox music was playing. He could hear the black cockroaches scrabbling in their cages. He stood up and went to the window, looking down on Coronado Street. Dreaming about his mother made him nervous; sweat had come up on his face. It made him angry, though he couldn’t exactly figure why. Perhaps it was because he knew now how much of a liar she was; she had left him after all, and because she ha
d, they had sent him off to a place—the Crazyhouse—where people laughed and shrieked all the time, where he had to take pills and drink a lot of water. Something within him needed but hated that need. When he found his mother, as the Master had promised him he would someday, he wouldn’t have to fear going back to the Crazyhouse again. Everything would be all right.

  He walked across the room to the table on which sat the little cages filled with roaches. Their backs glistened like black armor in the darkness. He picked up a match-book, struck a match, and held it to one of the cages; the roaches scrambled away. When the flame died down to a red pinpoint, he could hear them scurrying back over each other again.

  Walter Benefield was dead now. His name was Roach, and it was a name he liked. Ever since he’d gotten the job at Aladdin Exterminators four months before, he’d been studying them in their death agonies when he sprayed Dursban or Diazanon in cracks between floors and walls. Sometimes the roaches would flood out in a strange kind of dance, flopping and running and falling as the chemical began to drown them. Often there would be large, black roaches, the bulls of the nest, that would start to recover and scurry away; they were the ones he would catch by hand and drop into a plastic bag to bring home for his experiments. He was awed by their strength, by their sheer tenacity; very few things could kill a massive, three-inch bull. The Diazanon might make them crazy for a little while, but without a good second spray they would recover. Even stomping on them couldn’t do it; they played dead for a few seconds and then zipped away with their guts hanging out, like relentless tanks. They were so fast, natural survivors that had remained virtually the same for millions of years. Over the months he’d burned them, tried to drown them in the toilet, tried to suffocate them, cooked them in a pot of boiling water, and performed a dozen other experiments in death. Very few things worked. It had just been luck that he’d had a bag of them in his car the night he’d picked up that first girl. After she was dead, he wondered whether the roaches would suffocate inside her mouth, and so he went to work. They had, finally, and he’d been very pleased with himself. Doubly pleased when he realized the papers were calling him Roach. It was an honor to him, and so he continued doing it just for fun because the papers and the police seemed to expect it.