They Thirst

by Robert R. McCammon

  L.A. could have been a ghost town chewed to shreds by the ravaging Mojave, Wes thought. A bright and glittering Xanadu laid to waste, a city of dreams gone bad, a stately pleasure-domed place that the desert and Evil had finally marched upon in tandem to conquer and destroy. Evil had always lived here, Wes knew, in the back rooms, in the sweltering tenements, in the meeting rooms and palaces. It had always watched and waited, using a Manson here, a Hillside Strangler there, a Roach thrown in for good measure, like hideous ingredients in a dreadful cauldron brew. And now this perhaps was Evil’s main course, the pièce de résistance poured out of that cauldron like a stew of rattlesnake heads and human blood. When darkness fell, the dinner bell would start ringing again. And Evil would shout through a hundred-thousand unholy, triumphant throats, Feast! Feast! For the banquet is spread and we are so very hungry…

  Wes realized that they had little to fight the vampires with now, just some water in a vial, the guns and that switchblade. What good would bullets and a knife be? Wes had hoped for some kind of protection from the crucifix, but now that they’d left it behind, they’d have to go on with what remained. He still had the little ball of stuff Solange had made for him; it had worked against the bikers, but what protection would the priest have?

  He thrust those fears aside, but they kept trying to gnaw their way back in like little ravenous weasels. He would have to deal with them later, but not now. Just looking at the fuel gauge told him they’d crossed the point of no return, probably way back when they’d come over the L.A. River. So there was nothing to do now but keep going, he thought, nothing to do now but give it the best shot Wesley Richer had ever given anything in his life. His palms were as cold and sweaty as the first night he’d stepped up on that stage at the Comedy Store, but this stage was a far more important one, and the hook that yanked you off would take you to your death…or worse.

  But death wouldn’t be so bad, he thought, not really, not when the alternative was to be like those things in the coffins. He’d already decided how to do it if that was the only way out—.45 barrel into the mouth and up, quick squeeze on the trigger, and boom! Jump the night train. Pull a Freddie Prinze. Hitchhike home in the hard rain. Suicide.

  He only hoped he could take Solange with him.

  ELEVEN

  Tommy’s head was aching, and Palatazin had to stop to catch his breath. He sat beside the boy in the dark, foul clamminess of the tunnel while Ratty took the lantern and scuttled on ahead. In another few minutes they saw the light coming back, just a yellow dot at first and then a spreading beam. Ratty knelt down beside Palatazin. “We’re almost under Hollywood Boulevard. You okay, little dude?”

  “Yeah. I’m fine,” Tommy said.

  “How much further to Outpost Drive?” Palatazin asked him.

  “Not far. Then we start climbing if the tunnel’s big enough. And you got to remember, I can squeeze into a whole lot of places you can’t. You two ready?”

  “Ready,” Tommy said and rose to his feet.

  Since crossing under DeLongpre Avenue the water at the bottom of the tunnel had increased from a slow trickle to what now seemed like a thick, muddy creek. The tunnel that Ratty had said ran underneath Sunset Boulevard was large and high, and it had amazed Palatazin that the lantern picked out spray-painted graffiti on the walls. At their feet slow currents moved around islands of brown sludge. Now they came to two tunnels splitting off in opposite directions. Ratty paused for a minute, shining his light around, and chose the right one. The ceiling dropped dramatically here, and they moved on with their backs bent. Occasional currents swirled over their shoes; the odors of sewage were nothing short of gruesome. Ratty splashed through the mess like a trout fisherman. “Not far!” he called back, waiting for them to catch up. “It’s just through here. Hey! Watch it, little dude!” He shone the lights at gray rats scurrying protectively around a nest in a crack between two sections of pipe just above Tommy’s head. All but two or three of the largest rats squealed and ran; they stared back defiantly, their eyes pink pinpoints. “Sometimes they jump for your face,” Ratty said when they’d gone on past. “They grab hold, you can’t shake ’em off for shit. One time I woke up after I’d crashed on yellows and found two of the little bastards tryin’ to dig a nest in my beard!”

  Ratty stopped suddenly and sniffed the air. “That’s it. The big one under Hollywood.” They came to the end of the narrow tunnel and stepped out into another large one. At the bottom of this tunnel, the water was deeper, perhaps a foot or so, and swirled around every manner of dank, unidentifiable debris. Rats chittered in the darkness, and Palatazin could hear them splashing in the water like birds in a birdbath. Ratty sloshed forward without hesitation, aiming his light along the far wall; there were more tunnel entrances over there, each one bleeding out little streams of water. “Let’s see now,” Ratty said, narrowing his eyes in thought. The light moved from one tunnel to the next. “It’s that one,” he said, holding steady on the center entrance. “Yeah. I’m pretty sure.”

  Tommy said, “Don’t you know?” His voice crackled with tension. Being down here reminded him of the movie Them, about the giant ants that had made a nest underneath L.A.

  “Sure I know,” Ratty replied and tapped his skull. “Got the map right up in here. Just sometimes I tend to get a little confused, that’s all.” He giggled suddenly, his eyes burning like blue lamps from the pills he’d popped.

  “Let’s go,” Palatazin said irritably. “Come on!”

  Ratty shrugged and started forward. Tommy took three steps and felt his right foot slide over something softly hideous. He screamed and jerked his leg away, stumbling into Palatazin. “What is it?” Palatazin said sharply. Ratty turned and shone his light down. A man’s corpse was being laboriously pushed along by the westward currents. The rats were astride it, leaping and nibbling. Palatazin took Tommy’s shoulder and pulled him away. They crossed the tunnel, walking faster, and entered the tunnel opening Ratty had indicated.

  The tunnel crooked to the right and grew steadily narrower. Palatazin walked bent over, his lungs rasping, and realized that Ratty’s lantern was losing power. The beam of light had now dulled to a soft yellow. He could hear rats chittering behind them, closing up in their wake; he wondered how much more the boy could stand. But Tommy had made a man’s choice, and now there was no turning back for him. More tunnels, some only holes a foot or less in diameter, branched off from the one they moved through. Water trickled and dripped, the echoes as disconcertingly loud as footsteps. They came to a metal-runged ladder. Ratty aimed the light up at a manhole cover perhaps twelve feet overhead. “I better go up to find out for sure where we are,” he said, and gave Palatazin the lantern. Palatazin nodded, and Ratty scuttled up quickly, shoving the cover aside. A weak amber light came down from the opening, and then Ratty had disappeared into the storm.

  After a few minutes Palatazin said, “Tommy, I don’t think we’re going to make it before they start waking up. It’s already very dark up there. Too dark. When the sun’s rays get weak enough, I’m afraid they’ll start…prowling again.”

  “We can’t go back,” Tommy said.

  “I know.”

  “Will they all…wake up at the same time?”

  Palatazin shook his head. “I’m not sure. Possibly not. There are so many things I don’t know about them. The oldest ones may wake up first, or possibly the ones who are hungriest. My God, I hate to leave Jo unprotected…” He stopped suddenly because he thought he’d heard a sliding movement behind them. He shone the light in that direction. The light was too weak to reach very far, and the tunnel seemed layered with impenetrable shadows.

  “What is it?” Tommy asked nervously, looking over his shoulder.

  “I…don’t know. I thought I heard something, but…”

  Ratty appeared overhead and came down quickly. “Okay,” he said, breathing heavily, his beard and hair full of sand. “We’re under Franklin Avenue, but we’ve got to go east a little ways to pick up the tunn
el under Outpost. I’m not sure how big it’s gonna be.”

  “Just get us there,” Palatazin said and gave him back the lantern.

  They moved on, the uneasy tick of time hammering at the back of Palatazin’s skull. The tunnel crooked to the left, then to the right again, and grew narrower still. Seepage from the canyons sloshed noisily underfoot. Several times Palatazin said, “Wait,” and they stood motionless while he listened. When Ratty aimed the light back, the tunnel was clear for as far as they could see.

  They came to a metal screen blocking their way. Palatazin took the mallet from the pack and spent a few minutes hammering it to one side. Further on the tunnel began to angle upward perceptibly; it veered again to the right, then straightened out and seemed endless. The ceiling dropped once again, and now even Tommy walked bent over. Palatazin, his spine already aching, stepped carefully to keep from slipping in the morass at the tunnel’s bottom as water and debris flowed over his shoes.

  And now he heard that noise again and turned, straining to see through the utter darkness. He was quite sure this time that he’d heard the muffled noise of cold laughter, quickly fading away. He made Tommy walk between himself and Ratty. The hairs at the back of his neck were standing on end now, because he feared that there were vampires down here who were already awake, sealed off from any hint of the sun. Possibly they were terribly hungry, and their hunger had kept them from sleeping; possibly they roamed the sewers in packs looking for victims. He remembered the matches and the aerosol can in the pack and, as he walked, he slipped his hand in and touched the can. Ratty’s lantern was getting steadily weaker.

  The tunnel angled upward sharply. They started climbing.

  TWELVE

  The house was filling up with darkness. It had come insidiously, relentlessly, and early. It was the hazed light that frightened Jo so much because she was so uncertain of when the vampires would awaken and from where they’d attack—the little house across the street? the one next to that? Over an hour earlier she and Gayle had heard the man next door crying out garbled prayers, then there’d been a long silence broken by a single shot. After that they didn’t hear him anymore.

  Now Jo sat in a chair away from the window, her face a grim mask. Her fingers moved around the small crucifix that hung from her neck, the gift from Andy. Gayle had pulled the curtains closed, but every few minutes she would interrupt her nervous wandering around the room to peer out at the thickening gloom. Sand scraped the glass like fingernails across a blackboard. Gayle kept Palatazin’s .38 close at hand. “Going to be dark soon,” she kept saying as if forcing herself to accept that inevitability. Every time she pulled back the curtains to look out, she steeled herself to expect a pallid, grinning face looking in.

  Jo found herself drifting into memories—she could recall the first time she’d met Andy’s mother, on their third date the night after a St. Stephen’s Day festival. The woman had been friendly enough, but so quiet and withdrawn; her eyes had seemed washed-out and blank, and they’d seemed to stare right through Jo at something coming up from behind. Now she understood why.

  And then something knocked at the door.

  Gayle’s heart leaped. She grasped the .38 and pulled it out of the shoulder-holster. She stared at Jo, her eyes widened into fearful circles.

  The knock came again, two fast raps on the door.

  “Don’t answer it!” Jo whispered. “Don’t make a sound!”

  “It might be Palatazin!” Gayle said and turned toward the door, one hand going out for the knob and the other gripped white-knuckled around the gun.

  “NO!” Jo said. “DON’T!”

  Silence but for the hissing of the wind. Gayle slowly unlocked the door, turned the knob, and opened it enough to look out. At first she couldn’t see a thing, so she opened the door a little wider.

  And then something from a Jules Verne nightmare stepped in front of her, a green-garbed monstrosity with huge bug eyes and a hoglike snout. Gayle cried out and brought the gun up to fire, but the thing reached in and grasped her wrist. “Whoa, Miss!” the thing said with a pronounced Texas drawl. “I’m Corporal Preston, US Marines. I’d take it kindly if you’d remove your finger from that trigger.”

  Relief flooded through her, weakening her knees. She realized the man was wearing an oxygen mask and goggles, and as he stepped into the house, she could see the tank on his back. The man closed the door behind him and pulled his mask up. He was just a kid, really, with a lantern jaw and acne scars on his cheeks. He nodded toward Jo, who’d risen to her feet in amazement. “How many people you got in here, Miss?” he asked Gayle.

  “Two. Just us.”

  “Okay. There’s a unit vehicle about three blocks from here. We’re going to be getting you out. I couldn’t find anybody in the house next door. Anybody live over there?” He motioned toward the madman’s house.

  “No,” Gayle said. “Not anymore.”

  “Okay. You two ladies just hang on awhile longer, you’ll hear the truck coming. You want to watch where you point that pop gun, Miss.” He slid his mask back down and started for the door, taking a small can of orange Day-Glo paint from the inside of his jacket.

  “We can’t leave!” Jo said suddenly. “We’re…waiting…”

  The marine studied her through his goggles. “Ma’am,” he said patiently, “everybody who can git is already gone, making tracks to high ground. I’ve got orders to evacuate all the folks I can find, and let me tell you, I can’t find very many of ’em. What are you waiting for?”

  Gayle said, “There are two more of us. A man and a boy.”

  “Oh. They went out in this storm, did they?”

  Gayle nodded. Jo’s eyes were reddening.

  “I wouldn’t worry,” Preston said. “They probably got picked up by another unit by now. The trucks are all over the area. And nobody could get very far out there without…uh…” He trailed off. “The truck’ll be here in a few minutes.”

  He opened the door, letting in a hot swirl of wind and sand. On the outside of the door he sprayed a large numeral two, glaring orange against the bare, pocked wood. “You ladies just sit tight for a while,” he called over his shoulder before he shut the door. Struggling against the wind, he went on to the next house. The tire tracks where Royce had taken the Crab on up ahead were already gone. Preston could look back and see the faint yellow glow of the tractor’s high-intensity headlights approaching. At least, he thought, most of these folks have already gotten out one way or another. Nobody answered their doors, so they must’ve gotten to safety. But he wondered how, since there seemed to be a lot of abandoned cars, all of them covered over with blowing dunes. He was following orders, though, and searching door-to-door, and he didn’t have time to think about anything else. Nobody answered next door so he went on. His spray can hadn’t seen much use today.

  THIRTEEN

  It was almost five o’clock when Wes found the turnoff onto Blackwood Road. The sky had turned the texture of hard leather, as dull brown as the ox-blood shoes the pimps used to wear as they watched their low-rent merchandise parade on Whore’s Walk. It seemed low enough to scrape across the Crab’s roof. On either side of the road, trees bent and shivered, limbs ripping away and flying off down the hillside. The Crab’s tires fought for a sure purchase on the incline; it seemed to slip three feet for every two it gained. The wheel shuddered in Wes’s grip.

  “This is the way up?” Silvera asked him. “You’re sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  Silvera could only see walls of blowing sand all around them. Still, he had a feeling that the castle was somewhere close, looming overhead like a huge stone Vulture hanging to the cliff. Fear had coiled in his belly, a cold serpent undulating as it crawled up to enclose his heart in a freezing grasp. His nerve was slipping as badly as the Crab’s tires. But there was no turning back now, there had never been. He saw his way clearly and knew he was following it as it had been laid down, stone for stone, all the way from the Dos Terros tenement he
’d gone into with Rico Esteban. It was meant for him to be here, as surely as Wes was meant to commandeer this vehicle. This moment had been ordained for him during the tick of the clock in which Dr. Doran had told him he was dying. It was all part of the mysterious jigsaw puzzle that, when viewed close up, seemed to be nothing but meaningless colors and angles of movement. But when viewed from far away, perhaps over the shoulder, it became as tightly constructed and meaningful as the stained-glass window in his own church. He didn’t know what the future would bring; he dared not guess. But neither would he let fear strangle him.

  A howling gust of wind hit the Crab, almost tearing the wheel out of Wes’s hands. The engine whirred as sand shifted beneath the wheels, and the Crab hung motionless for a few seconds. The tires gripped and pulled, then lost traction again. Wes looked at Silvera.

  “The road’s too steep! Tires can’t get a…Christ!” The Crab skidded sideways toward a dropoff on the left side of the road. Wes pumped the brakes frantically, but the vehicle was being pushed by the wind faster and faster, as if shoved by a Satanic hand. “We’re going over!” he shouted, twisting the wheel.

  The rear slipped over, tires spinning in empty air. Wes glanced to the left, saw dashing currents and a shrub-stubbled ravine forty feet below. For an agonizing few seconds he felt the Crab tipping. He sank his foot to the floorboard; the front tires dug down through shifting sand. The Crab suddenly lurched as the right front tire scrabbled across concrete. It leaped away from the dropoff and met another wailing torrent of wind head-on. Then it was thrown to the side like a roller coaster that had jumped the tracks.