They Thirst

by Robert R. McCammon

  Vampir? Silvera thought. The word struck him in the chest like a sledgehammer blow. Vampire?

  And then Palatazin was suddenly drained, like a bottle whose contents had just spilled all over the floor. He blinked, looked around, and then staggered back against the railing. Sully and Teal both rushed forward to prevent him from falling. Palatazin’s face was ashen, the sweat glittering on his cheeks and forehead. As Sully was helping him down the stairs, Palatazin lifted his head and looked back at Dr. Delgado. “Don’t take them to the hospital,” he said in a hoarse whisper. “Burn them. Burn them.” His head slumped forward.

  “Come on, captain, take it easy,” Sully said. “Watch that step now. That’s right, real easy.”

  “Can I go now?” Rico asked Teal.

  “Yeah, sure. But I may be talking to you again.”

  Rico nodded and hurried away without looking back. On the stairs he gave a wide berth to that big crazy cop, then moved past the dog the cops had had to kill because the damned thing wouldn’t let them into the doorway.

  “What are you going to do with them?” Silvera asked Dr. Delgado when the boy had gone. He was visibly pale and shaken, his hands twitching out of control, the fibrillations in his wrists now as well.

  “They’re going to Mercy, of course. Probably an isolation ward until we can…” She dropped her gaze to his sides and stared. “How long have you…?” she asked softly.

  “It started about three months ago,” he replied. “It’s getting worse all the time.”

  “You’ve seen a doctor?”

  “I’m seeing Dr. Doran at County General.”

  The full impact of that took a moment to sink in. Dr. Delgado said, “Doran? Isn’t he a specialist in muscular atrophy?”

  “That’s right.” He held up his hands and smiled grimly. “Very nice, sí? They tell me it’s what Lou Gehrig had.”

  “Gehrig’s disease?” she said softly. She knew immediately what that meant—this broad-shouldered, healthy-looking man would be dead in two to five years. “I’m sorry.”

  “Dr. Doran’s sentiments exactly. Now I’ll leave you to your work.” He moved past her, went down the stairs, and was gone.

  NINE

  Afternoon grayed into evening, and slowly the night approached from the east. Winds stirred lazily across the Mojave Desert and chilled as they swirled across the mountains into L.A. A slight tremor broke a few windows on Rodeo Drive, and made burglar alarms scream. After nightfall dogs began to howl in the hills—their music eerie and compelling, and pleasing to twice as many as had listened the night before.

  And in the sky, caught only briefly by shopping center spotlights or the bright glow from Sunset Boulevard billboards advertising new albums by the Stones, Cheap Trick, and Rory Black, the bats that had come from their mountain caves spun like a whirlwind of dark leaves.

  TEN

  Gayle Clarke turned off Lexington Avenue into the parking lot of the Sandalwood Apartments, and immediately saw Jack Kidd’s airbrushed van in its usual place. So, she thought, where have you been hiding? I sure could’ve used some pictures at Ramona Heights today! She pulled up beside the van and left her car, walking across the courtyard with its green-spotlighted palm trees. Though the lot was almost full, she noticed now that the apartments were dark. She reached Jack’s door and saw that his apartment was also dark. Maybe he’s gone out of town with friends? she wondered. Where would he go? With the Greenpeace people maybe? Promoting his film somewhere? If that was the case, Trace was going to hit the roof. Gayle found the key to Jack’s door on her key chain and was about to slip it into the lock when she realized that the door was already cracked open about two inches. Now that, she thought, is strange. Jack doesn’t trust people enough to leave his apartment door open. She pushed it wider and called out, “Jack? You home?” When there was no answer, she frowned, stepped into the dark room, and felt along the wall until she found the light switch.

  The living room coffee table was overturned, and on the floor was a candle in a puddle of wax, a broken Bong pipe, and a couple of books on Ansel Adams and David Hume Kennedy. “Jack?” Gayle called out again and then moved through the hallway toward his bedroom. The door was closed, and Gayle paused a few seconds, wondering what to do. The silence was thick and ominous; it reminded her of the silence at Ramona Heights Cemetery in the wake of what had been done the night before. She remembered the faces of the policemen out there; they’d been prepared to list it as just another case of vandalism, but when they’d seen those bones scattered in the warm, morning sunlight, their faces had turned alternately pale and greenish, and Gayle had overheard several of them speculating that a Satanic cult must be planning something really big, or some maniac like Manson was on the loose and doing this for kicks.

  Good material for her story.

  She opened the bedroom door and reached around for the light switch.

  Something grabbed her hand and yanked at it; pain exploded across her knuckles and up her wrist. She screamed and wrenched her hand back. It was covered with blood.

  And through the half-opened door came a crouching figure that stared at her with cold, hungry eyes. It was Jack’s dog, and when it snarled Gayle could see her blood flecking the animal’s teeth. She stepped away from the thing, backing into the wall. Two of Jack’s framed photographs clattered to the floor.

  Conan advanced, stalking her as he would a rabbit. The dog was hunched low to the floor, its back legs ready for the leap that would send his teeth directly at her throat. Gayle took her handbag from around her shoulder and—slowly, very slowly—coiled the strap around her uninjured wrist. She hoped that when the dog did leap, she could strike it in the face; although she didn’t carry much makeup, she did have a book in there, as well as a wallet bulging with photos and credit cards. Clout, she thought suddenly and heard crazy laughter echo at the back of her head. I’m carrying clout. She looked quickly to her side along the hallway to the living room and wondered whether she could beat the dog to the door. No way, she decided. He’d be on my back before I’d taken three steps. Christ! She looked back and saw that Conan had crept closer. Now the dog’s growling was low and guttural, full of real rage.

  “Conan?” Gayle whispered, her voice shaking. “It’s Gayle, boy. Stay back. Stay back.” She raised her arm carefully to position the handbag for a blow.

  The dog started to leap, then stopped less than a foot away from her. Its eyes had gone dull, and it was tilting its head like he was listening to one of those high-pitched whistles you get in pet shops. Without hesitation Conan leaped past Gayle, ran along the hallway, and squeezed out through the front door.

  Relief flooded her. God, she thought. That damned dog was going to tear out my throat! She let her arm fall to her side and looked at the wound on her other hand. Conan had taken all the skin from her knuckles, and there were punctures and scratches on two fingers. Blood was still welling up, but at least the mutt hadn’t pierced any of the large veins. Christ, what was wrong with that damned dog? Jack should have the bastard shot!

  She turned toward the living room and had taken two unsteady steps when she heard a noise—a muffled, unpleasant sliding sound. She stopped, listening. The noise again—it was coming from the darkened bedroom. She reached around, her heart hammering, and hit the light switch.

  The first thing she noticed was that there were no sheets on the mattress. Otherwise the bedroom looked as it usually did—slightly rumpled. She paused at the doorway and then stepped in. What was that sound? she wondered. And where was it coming from? She stopped next to the bed and listened. Silence. You’re imagining things, she told herself. Her hand throbbed. Fucking dog ought to have his ass kicked!

  And then something cold gripped her ankle.

  She looked down, her mouth opening in dumb bewilderment.

  A white, clawlike hand held her ankle like a freezing vise; it had snaked out from beneath the bed. And then there was that sliding sound again, slow and labored. Gayle saw the fingers mov
e. It was only then that she found her voice and screamed, instantly thinking Scream, fool! What good will it do? She kicked out, kicked again, and got her ankle free, then staggered backward while a shape wrapped in the white sheets writhed its way out with some difficulty. The free hand began to rip at the cloth, to work it loose from the thing that lay within. Run! a voice screamed in Gayle’s head. Run! But she couldn’t run. Her legs were made of rubber, and her mind had no control over them. She watched in horror as the hand began to wrench the cloth away from the head.

  In another moment she could see dark, tousled hair, a mustache and a beard against a face so pallid it was almost transparent. The other hand worked its way free, and now both hands were ripping the cloth away. “Jack!” Gayle said when she found her voice. She stepped nearer, but when that head swiveled around and she saw those dead, glittering eyes, she stopped, a knot of panic filling her throat. “Jack?” she whispered hoarsely and thought, It’s a trick! He’s trying on his Halloween makeup for me! That dirty sonofabitch!

  Jack—or the thing that had been Jack Kidd—shrugged off the rest of the sheets like a discarded snake skin and started to rise to his feet. His eyes were blazing, and suddenly a black tongue darted out and licked the lips. “Gayle…” Jack whispered, a sound like the quiet hissing of wind across newly fallen snow. It was the sound of that voice that snapped Gayle’s nerve. She’d never heard anything like it before. She was filled with cold, consuming dread. Jack stepped forward, a quick grin flickering across his mouth.

  Gayle turned for the door and ran. She could sense rather than hear him behind her; he seemed to be leaping for her through the air instead of running. She could feel his grinning face right behind her, radiating cold the way a radiator puts out heat. As she screamed and scrambled through the front door, she felt his hand grip her blouse. It tore, but Gayle kept running across the courtyard toward the parking lot. She was aware of shadow shapes lurking in the corners, of grinning faces daubed green by the spotlights. When Gayle dared to look back over her shoulder, she saw Jack’s face only inches away, floating like a green-lit moon. She stumbled and fell to the grass. Jack leaped upon her, gripping her hair and forcing her head back.

  “NO!” she screamed. “PLEASE NO!”

  “Darling…” he hissed, his face coming toward her relentlessly. “My darling…” She heard the cold, wet sound of his lips parting.

  Something dark whirled into Gayle’s line of vision. She heard Jack grunt, and then his weight lifted off her. Replaced by that of another figure, a larger man with a heavy, jowled face that was as pallid and terrifying as Jack’s; he leaned over Gayle and grinned, and within that grin Gayle saw the glitter of fangs that almost drove her over the brink into madness. She could smell a grave-rot about him. She screamed and twisted, trying to fight him off as those fangs moved closer to her throat. Before they could snap shut, Jack’s arm gripped the man’s throat, and he was hauled off Gayle. As she rolled away and got to her feet, she could see them fighting in the grass, their fangs snapping at each other like enraged animals.

  They’re fighting over me, she thought numbly. Both of them want to…want to…what sort of thing has Jack become?

  She didn’t wait to see who won. She turned and ran, losing a shoe. Something rustled in the bushes to her right, and off to the side she saw another figure—a woman in a glittery disco dress—steadily bearing down on her. Gayle reached her car, locked the doors, and started the engine. The woman, her hair dark and wild around a face that was fish-belly white, started clawing at the windshield, hammering at it with her fists. Gayle slammed the car into reverse and crashed into Jack’s van as she accelerated. Then she was roaring across the parking lot, the horror in her disco dress running after her. She made the turn onto Lexington with a screech of tires and looked in her rearview mirror only after she was four blocks away. A surge of tears blinded her, and her lungs were heaving so fast she thought she wouldn’t ever be able to catch her breath. She jerked the car to the curb, hearing horns blowing angrily, and sat with her face in her hands.

  In another moment something tapped softly at her window, and Gayle cried out when she looked up into the face of a figure standing by her car. “What do you want?” she shrieked, cowering. “What do you want?”

  “I want to see your license, Miss,” the policeman said. “You almost caused a three-car pileup back there!”

  ELEVEN

  Jo was sitting up in bed, a copy of The Thorn Birds in her lap, watching her husband unknot his tie and wearily get out of his shirt. She knew there was trouble—he’d come home from the office just after three this afternoon, something he’d never done in the eleven years of their marriage. He’d picked listlessly at his dinner, sat with a black cloud on his shoulder, and didn’t even watch Monday Night Football. During the course of the evening he’d hardly spoken to her, and though she was accustomed to his troubled silences when he was working on a difficult case, she could tell this was something bad; several times she caught him staring off into space as if dazed, or running a trembling hand across his forehead.

  And now it was almost nine-thirty and a long time before morning. She knew him well enough to know he’d have more nightmares if he didn’t talk to her about this terrible thing. Sometimes he confided in her things she didn’t like to hear—finding a murdered infant or another of those Roach victims—but she steeled herself because she was his wife, that was his job and that was how the world turned.

  “So,” she said finally, putting aside her book. “Do you want to talk about it now?”

  He placed his shirt on a hanger in the closet, then returned his tie to the tie rack.

  “I’m waiting, Andy. It can’t be that bad. Can it?”

  He drew a long breath and turned toward her, and when she saw his eyes, she thought, Oh, yes. Oh, yes, it can be that bad. When he spoke, his voice was tired, but somewhere within it, Jo could hear a nervous tremble that set her own nerves on edge. “I should have told you long before this,” he said softly. “I should have trusted you first, before all others. But I was scared. I am scared. I didn’t know until today that what I was thinking was right. I’d hoped I was wrong, that I was seeing shadows where there were none, or cracking because of the pressure. But now I know I’m right, and soon not even God Himself will be able to save this city.”

  “Andy, what are you talking about…?”

  He came over and sat on the bed beside her, taking both her hands in his. “I want you to leave in the morning. I want you to get away as far as you can go. When you’ve found a place, call me, and I’ll join you as soon as I can…”

  “Andy!” she said, shocked. “Why?”

  “Because they’re going to be in the streets soon, going from house to house all across this city. And some night—possibly not tomorrow or the night after, but some night—they’re going to come to our house.” His voice cracked, and Jo squeezed his hand.

  “What is it?” she pleaded. “Please tell me what’s wrong!”

  “All right. Yes, I have to tell you…” And then it all came out, from the incident at Hollywood Memorial to the living corpses found in East L.A. As he spoke, his voice became more and more frantic, more consumed with fear. Jo gripped his hands until she could feel the bones grinding. He finished by telling her of his outburst in the Dos Terros tenement, and how Sully Reece had driven him back to Parker Center in silence, glancing over at him once or twice as if he were one of those crazed transients who sleep on the grass under Beethoven’s striding statue in Pershing Square.

  He smiled grimly at her through haunted eyes. “My days on the force are numbered. I know that. I’m crazy, yes? Insane, just as they said my mother was. But my mother knew. For years I believed she shot my father because she was insane, but now I know differently. It took a great deal of courage for her to pull those shotgun triggers, but she knew that just because the thing looked like my father didn’t mean it was truly him. She was trying to save our lives, and because I didn’t understand th
at I…I hated her for…a very long time.” Tears sprang to his eyes and quickly he wiped them away. “Now I see them coming again. I see them conquering this city just as they conquered Krajeck. And when they’ve finished here…” New terror choked him “My God, Jo! They’ll number in the millions! No power on earth will be able to stop them…!”

  “Andy,” Jo said quietly, “when I was a little girl, my parents told me stories about the vampir. But those were legends, old tales that had been passed down from generation to generation. We live in a modern age now and…” she stopped, seeing the fury in his eyes.

  “You don’t believe either? Jo, can’t you see? They don’t want us to believe because if we recognize them in our midst, we can guard ourselves against them. We can hang garlic on the windows and nail crucifixes to the doors! They want us to laugh, to say ‘that can never be!’ When we close our eyes, we help them hide, and we help them come one step closer to our front door!”

  “You can’t be certain,” she reasoned.

  “I am certain. I saw those bodies today. They’ll be awakening soon, and the only thing I can do is rant and rave like a maniac. Oh, I can take a can of gasoline and a torch and try to burn them before they escape into the streets, but then what would happen? I’ll be locked away, and tomorrow there will be twice as many vampir as there are today.”

  “Have you told anyone else?”

  “No. Who could I talk to? Who would believe? I see in your eyes that you don’t believe either. You’ve always thought my mother was insane, that she shot my father in a fit of madness, and that whenever she rambled on about the vampir, they were the imaginings of a fevered brain. But it’s the truth! I know that now. I see it clearly!”