They Thirst

by Robert R. McCammon

  “Well, let’s hope she wasn’t.” He glanced down the list, which contained a few hundred names and addresses. “These are grouped by area?”

  “Yes, sir. Taylor thought the computers were going to blow up, but he programmed them to give us our information on the basis of twenty major areas. The first twenty-five or so addresses, for instance, are located in a grid from Fairfax Avenue to Alvarado Street.”

  “Fine. That makes it a little easier for the officers.” Palatazin counted down twenty-eight names and tore them off the list. “Split whoever’s available up into teams, Sully, and hand out as many of those names as you can. You and I will be taking these.”

  “Yes, sir. Oh, have you seen this?” He held up the morning edition of the Times. There on the front page in a black-bordered box under a headline that read “Do You Know This Man?” was the composite of the face they were seeking. “That should do some good.”

  Palatazin took the paper and laid it out on his desk. “I hope so. It’s flashed through my mind that this man might be an insurance agent from Glendale—a wife, two children, and a cat—who likes a bit of action on the side. If that’s the case, then we’re back at square one.” He looked up suddenly, as if he’d heard something, and stared intensely past Reece into the corner.

  “Captain?” Reece asked after a few seconds. He glanced over his shoulder—nothing there, of course. But nevertheless he felt a chill ripple between his shoulder blades, as if he sensed someone standing right behind him.

  Palatazin blinked and looked away, forcing himself to stare down at the list of names and addresses. Garvin, Kelly, Vaughan…he thought he’d seen something begin to stir in that corner…Mehta, Salvatore, Ho… where the apparition of his mother had stood yesterday afternoon…Emiliana, Lopez, Carlyle …but before he could focus on it, the faint movement like the sluggish motion of ripples through muddy water had ceased. He glanced quickly up at Reece. “What…uh…about that other thing I asked you to look into?”

  “Not much luck there. There’s nothing you can buy over the counter that would cause the effect we’re looking for. One of the pharmacists I talked to said airplane glue might smell like that and make you pretty drunk if you were to inhale a concentrated dose of it, but it wouldn’t put you under right off. The same with some of the ant and roach sprays on the market. Even hair spray.”

  “No, I don’t think that’s what we want. Maybe our friend knows a druggist who’s making him something special?” He dared to glance into that corner again. Nothing there, nothing at all.

  “Possibly. Another guy told me there used to be a salve you could buy that had a chloroform base. A couple of good whiffs and you were on your ass. But it’s not sold anymore.”

  Palatazin frowned. “We could be…what’s the saying? Singing in the dark.”

  “Whistling in the dark,” Reece corrected him. He took the rest of the printout and went to the door. “I’ll get these distributed. You eating lunch today?”

  “From home.” He motioned toward a paper sack half-buried in file folders on his desk.

  “Well, it’s about that time. Bon appétit!”

  “Thank you.” Palatazin looked down the rest of his list. He was certain many of these addresses would no longer be accurate. Some of these people would be impossible to find, some would probably have sold their cars. Regardless, the task had to be done, he had nothing else to go on. He put the list aside for the moment, reaching for his lunch and the Times Sully had left. Jo had made a ham salad sandwich for him today; there was a dill pickle, a nice red apple, and a can of V-8 juice. He knew his stomach would be roaring an hour after he finished eating, but he’d promised Jo he’d try to stick to his diet for a while. Last week he’d found himself slipping, sending out for chocolate-cream doughnuts in the middle of the afternoon.

  He looked again to the corner—nothing there, of course…if there ever had been. He turned and opened his blinds, then began to eat his sandwich while he paged through the paper. It took him about fifteen minutes to reach page eleven, and when he did, the headline “Vandals Hit Highland Park Cemetery” jumped out at him. He read through the story twice, his heart beginning to beat like a blacksmith’s hammer. Then he rummaged through a drawer for a pair of scissors and carefully cut out the article. In the middle of scissoring he remembered his mother holding a pair of scissors, too, going through the Times and the Herald-Examiner and the National Enquirer, the Tattler and the Star and Fate magazine and a dozen others, searching for articles she would clip and put away in a little metal box that now sat on the top shelf of his bedroom closet. He had brought it back to the house from Golden Garden after his mother had died. He read the story over once more, folded it, and put it in his shirt pocket. His temples ached with dull thunder; his stomach turned over when he glanced at his half-eaten lunch.

  Because now he knew that they were here. Hiding in a city of over eight million, half the globe and many worlds away from Krajeck, Hungary. Lurking in the darkness, walking the streets and boulevards of Los Angeles in human shape, ripping through the city’s cemeteries in search of—My God, he thought, a shiver almost splitting him in two. What is to be done?

  Who would believe before it was too late? Because one of their greatest strengths, the strength that had kept them existing in a world that had come from ox cart to Cadillac and from slingshot to laser beam, was lack of belief in their existence. “Rational” thought was their shield of invisibility, because they stalked the land of nightmare fears.

  What is to be done? Palatazin asked himself, panic bubbling like a cauldron’s brew in the pit of his stomach.

  There was a knock at his door, and Lieutenant Reece looked in. “Captain? The teams are organized. We’re ready to move.”

  “Huh? Oh, yes. Of course.” He stood up, shrugged into his coat, and took the list of addresses from his desk.

  “Captain, are you all right?” Reece asked.

  Palatazin nodded brusquely. “I’m fine.” What is to be done? When he looked up into the other man’s face, he saw that Reece’s eyes looked concerned. Now he thinks I’m cracking, too, Palatazin thought, and then he heard the dark answer in his brain, Well? Aren’t you? Reece turned away, and Palatazin followed him out.

  SEVEN

  The building cast a deep shadow along Dos Terros Street In front of it, half up on the curb, was a rust-eaten old Ford standing on two flat shoes and two cement blocks. Overhead lines of clothes, stirred by a dusty breeze, hung from windows. As Father Silvera stepped out of Rico Esteban’s car, he saw a shirt break loose from one of these clotheslines and flutter to the earth, arms waving in eerie futility.

  On the front steps a thin, brown mongrel dog was sleeping, head resting on its paws. Rico stood on the sidewalk and looked up at the building. Several of the windows were open, but no faces peered down from them. “Mrs. Santos lives on the fifth floor, doesn’t she?” Silvera asked as he went up the steps.

  “Right. Fifth floor, Apartment D. Hey…”

  Silvera, halfway up the steps, turned toward him. “What is it?”

  Rico stared at the building. “I…don’t know. Something’s funny.”

  “Come on.” Silvera took another step, and the dog’s head instantly rose. Its eyes flared like bits of burning topaz. Rico said, “Father…” The dog stood up, turned to face the men, and bared its teeth with a low, vibrating growl. Silvera froze.

  “Kick that damned mutt,” Rico said, coming up to stand beside the priest. When Silvera didn’t move, he kicked out toward the dog’s side, but the mongrel simply dodged him, then stood its ground, the growl deeper and full of menace. “Get out of here!” he said. “Get away!”

  “Whose dog is this?” Silvera asked. Rico shrugged. When the priest moved forward again, the dog crouched down in front of the door, ready to leap. “Whoever he belongs to, he doesn’t want us to go inside, does he? I thing I’d rather try another door than risk having my leg chewed off.”

  “Ah, you shit!” Rico muttered to the
dog and spat at it. The dog didn’t move. Silvera was already at the alley beside the building, and Rico gave up after another moment to follow him.

  They found a locked door that led down into the basement. Silvera was about to go around to the rear when Rico kicked at the basement door, splitting the rotten wood. The door sagged on its hinges. Silvera gave him a grave stare, but Rico shrugged and said, “Here’s our way in, Father.” He stepped into the musty, low-ceilinged basement.

  It was almost totally dark inside, but in the murky light from the open doorway Silvera saw vague shapes—a tattered sofa lying on its side like a gutted hog, a couple of chair frames without cushions or backs, the shell of a television set, mounds of papers, and what looked like some rolled-up rugs and shower curtains. Cigarette butts and beer cans littered the floor. Rico and Silvera climbed a rickety, wooden stairway to another door, opened it, and found themselves in the building’s entrance hall. They could still see the dog crouched on the steps, but the closed door stood between them. Now the dog seemed to be sleeping again.

  They left the first floor and began climbing up, their shoes making the frail stairs whine. They had passed the second floor landing when Rico realized what was making the flesh on the back of his neck crawl—the place was as silent as a tomb.

  “It’s quiet in here,” the priest said at almost the same instant. His voice echoed along the corridor. “How many people live in this building?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe fifty or sixty. Christ, just yesterday there was so much noise in here you couldn’t think straight! Babies cryin’, radios, people fighting…” He looked at the stairs that lay ahead. “Christ, where is everybody?”

  In the third floor corridor Silvera knocked at a door that had “Diego” scrawled across it in green spray paint. The unlocked door creaked open a few inches, and Silvera peered inside. “Diego?” Silvera called out. “You home, man?” A table had been thrown over, and on the wooden floor flies crawled over the food that spilled from plates and glasses. Silvera felt his heart pound.

  “Wait a minute,” he said to Rico, stepping into the apartment. Newspapers had been jammed in around the windowsills and stretched over the glass; the sunlight was cut to a hazy murk. There was an unmade bed and a door leading to a bathroom. Silvera peered in and found himself staring at the shower curtain rod. It was bent, and several of the hooks lay scattered on the floor. The curtain itself was gone. When Silvera turned, Rico was standing right behind him.

  “The apartment across the hall’s open, too,” Rico said. “There’s nobody inside.”

  Silvera stepped past Rico and looked at the overturned table. “Diego was here, last night at least. That looks like what he must’ve been eating for dinner.” He glanced at the newspaper-covered windows. “This place is already dark enough. Why did he try to cut the light?” He went out into the corridor and tried a few more doors; all of them were unlocked, the apartments empty but showing signs of recent life—cigarettes and cigars in ashtrays, dishes in sinks or on the tables, clothes hanging in closets. A few doors had been broken open, the wood splintered around the locks. Several of them seemed to have some kind of scratches imbedded deep in the wood, as if made by an animal’s claws.

  “Anybody here?” Rico shouted at the stairway. His voice rolled on through the building and was unanswered. He stared at the priest, his face paled by fear.

  “We go up,” Silvera said and started climbing the stairs again. The fourth floor hallway was as quiet as all the others. Rico could see doors standing open, and in the dim light he could make out the same deep scratches that they had seen downstairs.

  Just above the fourth floor landing, Silvera stopped, his eyes wide, staring at the walls. New graffiti covered the old—HOTSHOT WAS HERE. VIPERS ARE KINGS. ZEKE SUX (HA HA). ALL FOR THE MASTER. BURN BABY BURN. Silvera reached out and touched the brown letters. “My God,” he heard himself say, his voice hollow, as if he were speaking from the bottom of a well. “That’s blood!” He continued upward, his senses coiled like a culebra de cascabel. For now his nerves were vibrating with the presence of something he’d felt a thousand times before—in a jail cell where two heroin addicts cut each other to pieces with razor blades; in a suffocatingly hot room where a drunken father had just beaten his three-year-old son to death with a baseball bat; in the smoldering, corpse-strewn ruins of a tenement razed by the arsonist’s match; in the greedy eyes of Cicero, the dealer of demonic dreams. That presence was Evil, and now Silvera felt it as he never had before, so strong it was a tangible thing that clung to the walls, holding the odor of blood and brimstone. His heart was pumping hard, and before he reached the fifth floor he could feel the twitching—fibrillations, the doctors called them—begin deep in his hands.

  The fifth floor corridor stretched out before them. Rico looked in through one of the open doors. The place was a wreck, and bits of a shattered mirror glittered on the floor like dusty diamonds. Silvera moved on ahead of him toward the Santos apartment and was about to push open the door—scratches, he thought, there are scratches in this wood—when something crashed violently behind a closed door on the opposite side of the hallway.

  “What the shit was that?” Rico said, twisting around.

  Silvera crossed the hall and put his hand on the doorknob. He paused for a moment, listening. From the apartment he could hear a muffled thump, thump, thump that was unlike anything he could identify. Then there was silence. “Who’s there?” Silvera called out. But there was no answer. He started to push the door open.

  “Father!” Rico said. “Don’t…!”

  But then Silvera started across the threshold, and something dark came flying into his face from the ceiling. He cried out, feeling a claw graze his cheek, and threw his hands up before his face. The thing tangled in his hair, then whirled off over his head like a swooping, gray leaf. Silvera spun around to watch it hit the corridor ceiling with that muffled thumping noise; it flew over Rico’s head and disappeared into shadows at the far end of the hallway.

  Silvera was shaken, but he felt like exploding with nervous laughter. A pigeon, he thought. I was frightened by a single pigeon. He looked back into the apartment and immediately saw the broken window where the thing must’ve flown in, on the floor a broken bottle and knickknacks spilled from a shelf that the pigeon had probably collided with. He went into the apartment, his hands shaking badly now—he wondered how he was going to keep Rico from seeing—and checked the bathroom. A mirror had been smashed, and Silvera stared at himself through a series of concentric cracks. Again he noted that the shower curtain was gone. The rod itself had been ripped out of the wall.

  Across the hallway Rico was slowly pushing open the door to Mrs. Santos’s apartment. He stood at the threshold and called out her name, but of course there was no answer, and neither had he been expecting one. It was just that he wanted to hear a voice in this place, something human in this silent vault. He stepped into the apartment, his heartbeat racing. A sheen of sweat clung to his face. He walked across the room and looked into the small, darkened bedroom. It was sweltering, the air hanging in heavy layers. Rico saw that the sheets had been torn off the bed. He felt the hair rise on the back of his neck suddenly and didn’t know why. Quickly he left the bedroom and went back out to the hall.

  Father Silvera had stepped into another room further along the corridor. In this apartment he found an empty cradle with several spots of blood on the infant’s pillow. When he stepped into the bedroom, he immediately froze. On the wall over the bare bed, written in blood, was ALL FOR THE MASTER. Newspapers were jammed over the single window, reducing the light to a pale, smoky haze. Silvera ripped them away. The light immediately strengthened, and he opened the window for some fresh air.

  And then something moved in the room—a bare whisper of a movement that made Silvera twist around from the window. But no one was there. The bedroom was empty. He listened, ignoring the increased muscle fibrillations that ran through his hands, making his fingers twitch like claws.
Again that noise, somewhere close. A sliding, cloth-on-cloth sound. He stared at the mattress. No sheets. Where are they? he wondered. Did these people leave their homes and belongings, taking with them only sheets and cheap plastic shower curtains?

  But when the noise came again—very softly—he knew where it was coming from, and something within him recoiled.

  Under the bed.

  “Rico!” Silvera called out, his voice sounding hoarse and hollow in the small room. When Rico came, the young man’s eyes were haunted, gleaming bright with fear. “Help me,” Silvera said and moved to push the bed aside.

  Beneath it was an oddly shaped cocoon, the bed sheets wrapped tightly around what might have been the body of a two-headed man.

  “What’s that?” Rico said, his voice cracking. “What’s that thing?”

  Silvera bent and gingerly touched it. The form seemed to radiate a chill. He slowly began to work the sheets loose, and now Rico could see the disease in his hands, but he didn’t care. The sheet caught, and Silvera ripped at it.

  “Hey, Father,” Rico said. “I don’t like this, you know? I say we get out of here and call the cops. Okay? I mean, I’m not chickenshit or…WHAT’S THAT?”

  A hand and arm, as bone white as marble and veined with blue, slithered out in front of Silvera. The priest checked his impulse to leap away and continued tearing at the sheet. In another moment he could see grayish hair and a pale, heavily lined forehead; then a second scalp, this one black-haired. He pulled the sheet free from the faces. It was Joe Vega and his thirteen-year-old son Nicky, entwined together. Their faces were as white as carved stone, but what made Silvera almost cry out with terror was the fact that he could see their eyes through the thin, almost clear membranes of their closed eyelids. The eyes seemed to be staring right at him; they filled him with cold dread. He forced himself to reach down and feel the chests for heartbeats.