They Thirst

by Robert R. McCammon

  They retraced their way through the wine racks, twice coming to solid walls and having to go back and start over. “This way!” Tommy said, pulling at him. “There’s blood on the floor!” Palatazin looked down and saw smeared droplets of blood that might have been either his or Benefield’s, but Benefield himself was gone. The shattered half of the man’s staff lay a couple of feet away. They found the door, almost hidden in the darkness, and started up the long stairway to the outside.

  The night was filled with screams. Fissures veined the courtyard, splitting even wider as the man and the boy ran for the iron-barred gate. Beyond Palatazin the black Lincoln Continental pitched into a crevice, metal crumpling like tinfoil as the earth ground it under. Vampires were running across the courtyard, their dazed eyes recognizing Tommy and Palatazin as humans, but their primary need now was for escape and safety. Some of them were walking, holding out their arms, and screaming for their Master. Palatazin saw several plunge through fissures and disappear.

  He hauled up the gate and locked the chain in place, then they went through, running along the cobblestone, driveway. From the forest a sand-whitened figure ran toward them, arms waving like a scarecrow’s. “Hey! Don’t leave old Ratty up here, man! This fuckin’ mountain’s coming apart!”

  Palatazin heard a hideous grinding and cracking sound, and when he looked back over his shoulder, he saw the castle’s uppermost towers sway, then crumple in an explosion of stone. The earth under his feet heaved, throwing him off balance. Half of the castle buckled and slowly began to give way, sliding over the cliff’s edge like a huge melting candle. Cracks split the ground at his feet, and now he knew the enormity of this earthquake would destroy Los Angeles. There was no way they could escape on foot. Going back into the tunnels, which had been his first idea, would be suicide. He remembered the stalled vehicle further down the road. If it had enough gas, if it hadn’t already gone over the side! But now they had no choice, for the mountain was shaking itself to pieces beneath them.

  They started down, Ratty’s face stark white with terror beneath the grime. Tommy fell, almost sliding into a fissure that hissed open at his feet; Palatazin pulled him away and now half-carried, half-dragged him. From behind there was a growing thunderous rumble that made Ratty whirl around and shout “Jesus!”

  Palatazin looked. The rest of the castle was going over, stones churning and boiling, rafters exploding into the air. It had vanished in less than three seconds, nothing left of it but a section of wall and the front gate. Above the noise of the castle’s destruction, Palatazin could hear a hideous chorus of screams and shrieks—the dreadful, agonized song of the damned. Looking out over the black plain of L.A., he saw with frightening clarity the ripple of green phosphorescence atop a wave that must have been at least 300 feet high, rolling across the city from the west. He heard himself cry out, more of a moan than anything else, as he watched that wave sweep onward across avenue and boulevard and freeway. The towers of buildings jutted up like new reefs before they were either covered over or broken off.

  Behind the main wave were others coming in at angles across the backwash, breaking together in thunderclaps of water that shot foam another hundred feet into the air. The L.A. basin was filling up, zigzagged with froth and green wake. And still the earth shook. Even larger waves were churning in from the ruined Santa Monica breakwaters over ten miles away. Palatazin knew Westwood Village, Venice, Century City, West L.A., and most of Beverly Hills would already be underwater. Under salt water, he realized, remembering the effect that had on the vampires. The vampires weren’t drowning down there because they couldn’t drown; they were being burned up. Palatazin shouted jubilantly to the sky. They were dying, most if not all of them trapped beneath fallen houses and buildings while the seawater roared in around them, searing them to the bone, blinding them, killing them.

  In another moment they saw the jeeplike vehicle. They started running for it, and suddenly the world gave a great heave beneath Palatazin’s feet that sent him spinning out into space. He heard Tommy cry out and grab his arm, and then they were both falling, sliding down into the crevasse where the road had been. Palatazin scrambled for a handhold on loose rocks and clumps of exposed roots. Suddenly there was someone above him, leaning over the precipice with an extended hand. Palatazin had just an instant to recognize who it was—his mother, her eyes dark and determined in a heavily creased, almost pellucid face. He reached up and caught her hand, feeling flesh against flesh, and then he was holding onto a gnarled root that looked like a closed fist. Tommy was gripping his other sleeve, both of them dangling over a black abyss.

  A rope came snaking down beside Palatazin. “Grab it!” he told Tommy. When the boy had transferred his weight to the rope, there was the noise of an engine starting, and Tommy was pulled quickly to the top. In another moment the rope was dropped again, and Palatazin grasped it, then was hauled up the same way. At the top he saw that Ratty had tied it to the front fender of that jeep, then started the engine—thank God it would start, he breathed—and backed it away to pull them up. “Saw that in a cowboy movie once,” Ratty said as Tommy climbed into the back and Palatazin took the passenger seat. “God bless old Hopalong Cassidy, man! Ain’t been in one of these bastards since Nam. Dig it!” He whooped and threw the thing into reverse, backing away from the deep pit. He was driving in the trench that the bulldozer had cleared out, moving faster in reverse than Palatazin could have driven in a forward gear.

  “You all right?” Palatazin asked Tommy.

  “Yeah,” the boy said, but he looked pale and stunned, and he was shaking very badly. Tears suddenly filled his eyes and streamed down his cheeks, but his lips remained drawn in a grim, gray line. “Yeah,” he said softly.

  “Thought your asses were cooked,” Ratty said. “You were in there a long time, man. Too fucking long! Then the bulldozer and the trucks came out, and Ratty dug himself a deeeep hole.” The ground shook. Sand and boulders were falling onto the road, the larger rocks rolling on off the edge and vanishing. Ratty, still driving in reverse, dodged the smaller ones as best he could with a skill that Palatazin thought might have shown how he’d gotten out of Viet Nam alive. He found a place to turn and spun the vehicle around violently, then headed down the mountain at breakneck speed. “We’ve got to get our asses out of here, man. Shit! Ain’t much gas, but I don’t think we’re going to find a station that’s open, do you? Christ Almighty!” He stomped on the brakes because water was churning over the road just ahead. The single yellow-glowing headlight picked out frothy waves littered with planks, roof tiles, a bright red lawn chair, and smoking shapes that looked like large snails after they’d been doused with salt. Palatazin realized with a shudder that those were what remained of the vampires. The jeep plowed through water that lapped up to the doors. A melted shape rubbed up against Palatazin’s door, then was swept away in the tides behind the jeep. The water climbed steadily toward the hood, but then they were out of the flooded area and ascending again. They passed a green road sign that said Mulholland Drive—½m.

  “Where do we go from there?” Ratty asked.

  “High ground. I think we should follow Mulholland west into the mountains and find a place to wait through the aftershocks up there.”

  The earth trembled suddenly, and Ratty yelped. “Shit! You feel that? This whole place is coming apart, man. Just splitting up into little pieces and going down like Atlantis!”

  “What happens if we run into any more flooded areas? Can we get through?”

  “I think so. This ain’t just an ordinary jeep, man. I drove something like this in Nam, but I guess this is an improved version. It’s an amphibious buggy, made for swamps, rice paddies, I guess even deserts. Sure don’t know what it was doing up there, but if the gas holds out long enough, we’ll be okay. Providing we don’t get swallowed up in a hole or covered over with a big wave. I think the aftershocks are gonna be rough.” He looked at Palatazin as if he suddenly realized the significance of what had happened.
“The vampires,” he said. “What’s going to happen to them?”

  “It’s over for them,” Palatazin said.

  “Over. Yeah. The whole city is over, man. Kaput! There must’ve been a…a whole lot of people trapped down there, too.”

  And now Palatazin admitted to himself what must be true and felt a sick, heavy sense of loss at the pit of his stomach. Jo was dead by now, and Gayle Clarke as well. So were possibly thousands of other people who’d been trapped by the storm and the earthquake. It had all happened so fast; certainly there was no chance they could’ve escaped. The vampires had been destroyed, yes, but at a terrible cost. His old apartment building, his house on Romaine Street, the house where they’d taken refuge must now be under at least seventy-five feet of water. The entire L.A. basin was gone, a new coastline scooped out. The aftershocks would probably send the water further inland all through the night as more earth collapsed. He was speared with agony and put his hands to his face. First it had been his father and, in a way, his mother. Now the vampires had taken his wife as well.

  He began to cry, emotions thrashing within him. The hot tears ran down his cheeks and softly dripped onto his shirt. Very soon he was wracked with sobs.

  Ratty and Tommy averted their eyes. When they reached Mulholland Drive, right at the crest of the Santa Monica Mountains, Ratty turned to the northeast and sank his foot to the floorboard.

  8

  * * *

  Friday, November 1

  THE BASE

  ONE

  When Gayle woke up screaming the second time, it was morning, and bright hot sunlight was streaming through the Venetian blinds into the barracks.

  Almost at once a tall, middle-aged man with close-cropped silvery hair and brown eyes that glowed warmly behind a pair of aviator glasses was standing beside her bunk He wore sharply pressed, dark blue trousers with scarlet and gold stripes down the sides and a light brown shirt with a crucifix pinned to each lapel. Gayle looked up at him fearfully, her mind still filled with shrouded shapes that writhed and contorted like hideous worms.

  “You’re going to be fine now, Miss,” the man said quietly. “There’s nothing to be afraid of anymore.”

  “Nightmare,” she said. “I was…dreaming…about them…”

  The man’s face seemed to pale slightly, his gaze sharpening. “I’m Chaplain Lott, Miss…” He waited for her to reply, carefully studying her face.

  “Gayle Clarke. I saw you last night, didn’t I? At the airstrip?” Her gaze rested on the crucifix on his left lapel. She was comforted by its presence, safe from danger, safe from the night and the things that lurked within it.

  “Yes, probably.” He glanced around. Most of the bunks were occupied or had suitcases and clothes thrown across them. It was one of the largest barracks on the Twenty-nine Palms Marine Corps Base in the Mojave Desert, about 150 miles from the submerged ruin of L.A. The barracks and most of the base’s buildings were filled with people of all ages and descriptions. There was very little talking, and no laughter at all. Those who had spent the night here or had been airlifted out of the Marine rescue centers at Palmdale and Adelanto had brought their own horror stories with them, and no one could take more than their share. The night had been filled with crying and sudden screams. The tales that Chaplain Lott had heard babbled from feverish lips had been enough to gray his hair and stoop him over as if shouldering a terrible, unholy burden. When the first groups had started coming in—just an hour or so after the beginning of the series of earthquakes that had pushed Los Angeles beneath the sea and left Santa Ana, Riverside, Redlands, and Pasadena as ghost towns on the edge of the Pacific—Lott had rationalized those tales as mass hysteria. But then as the cargo and troop planes came in, bringing hundreds of survivors every hour, he had seen in those shocked and haunted faces a truth that shook him to the center of his soul. These were not simply people who believed in raw head and bloody bones tales, these were people who had lived through them. The other base chaplains and Father Allison were hearing the same things. Then there were the marines who looked as close to madness as a man can be without going over the edge. They wanted to talk to Lott, wanted to touch the crucifix, wanted to be prayed for. They’d seen things, they said, and then they’d told him what those things were.

  The base had been closed off to the reporters, who flocked at the gates trying to wheedle, bribe, or threaten their way in. Someone said the governor had been there last night before boarding a jet bound for Washington, but Lott hadn’t seen him. Now there were rumors that the Vice-president was due very soon.

  Lott sat down on the empty cot to Gayle’s left, where Jo had slept uneasily and for only a few minutes at a time. Jo had calmed Gayle when she’d screamed herself awake the first time, around five in the morning, but now Jo was gone, and Gayle didn’t know where she could be. The barracks smelled of fear, like sweat and scorched flesh. She noticed that most of the blinds had been pulled up to let in the golden, desert sunlight. The light had never seemed as important or as beautiful as it did at this moment.

  “Who were you brought in with?” Lott asked Gayle. “A relative?”

  “No. A friend.”

  “I see. Is there anything I can do for you?”

  She smiled grimly. “I’m sure there are others who need you more.”

  “That’s nice,” Lott said.

  “What’s nice?”

  “You smiled. Not a very big smile, nor even a good one. But a smile all the same. That’s about the first smile I’ve seen since all this began.”

  “So what do I get, a medal?”

  He laughed. It felt fine and seemed to push back some of the shadows that had gathered within him. “Good, that’s good. At least you’re not catatonic like some of them are.” He opened his breast pocket and brought out a pack of Winstons. When he offered it, Gayle took a cigarette, almost biting through the filter, and leaned toward the lighter flame Lott offered. He lit one for himself and then put the pack down on the cot beside her. “Here you are,” he said. “In lieu of a medal.”

  “Thanks.” Gayle slipped her shoes on and laced them up. “How many have come in so far?”

  “Classified information,” Lott said.

  “You don’t know?”

  “They won’t tell me. But all the extra barracks are filled up, there are people jammed into the gym like sardines, and I understand there are just as many at Fort Irwin and Edwards Air Force Base. The planes are still landing, two or three every hour, and the Seabees are putting up a hundred or so prefab Quonset huts. Offhand, I’d guess there are upwards of fifty thousand here.”

  “The quake’s over?”

  “For now, yes. I understand all the coastal areas are being evacuated. San Diego was hit pretty hard, and I imagine the topography of San Francisco has been altered a bit, but the quake seemed to be centered right in L.A. It wasn’t as devastating as the experts had been predicting for years, thank God, but it turned Los Angeles into a hundred-foot-deep tidal pool.” His eyes darkened, and he regarded the ash of his cigarette. “It could’ve been worse. Things always can be worse.”

  Gayle looked around at the other people crammed into the barracks. Babies were crying, their mothers and fathers trying to console them or each other. There were sleeping bags on the floor with exhausted people still curled up in them. A few cots down from Gayle a pretty Chicano girl with amber eyes had wrapped her arms around herself and was staring off into space, her face totally blanked with shock; beyond her a little boy was playing on the floor with a plastic dump truck, occasionally stopping to look up at his mother, who stood staring out a window with red, swollen eyes.

  “The mess hall’s open,” Lott said. “You can get some breakfast there if you’d like.”

  “What’s going to happen now? Can I get a ride out of here?”

  “No. The base has been closed off indefinitely. And a good thing, too. The reporters are snarling around outside. You wouldn’t want to have to answer any questions now, would you?”
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  She grunted. “I was…I am a reporter myself.”

  “Oh. Well, I’m sure you understand then.”

  “Who ordered the base closed?”

  “Classified,” Lott said and smiled faintly. “But I imagine everyone will have to stay here until some kind of official investigation or statement or…whatever…is released. Which could be a long while.”

  “So nobody out there knows about the vampires yet, do they?”

  Lott drew deeply on his cigarette and started looking around for something to put the ashes in. He found a paper cup beside another empty cot, then glanced back at Gayle. “No,” he said quietly. “They don’t. I’ve been briefed on my official stance. The United States Marine Corps does not believe in vampires, nor do we wish to verify any of the rumors that will be created out of mass hysteria. Those are the key words, Miss Clarke. Mass hysteria.”

  “Bullshit,” Gayle said and rose to her feet. “It’s that kind of attitude, that disbelief, that made them so strong! We laughed at the legends, we called them old wives’ tales that came about because of some childish fear of the things in the night, but they were there all the time, just waiting to strike. We helped them because we refused to believe in what we couldn’t see. Well, I’ll tell you—I’ve seen enough in these past few days to last a lifetime, and from now on I’ll be real careful in deciding what not to believe—”