“How do you know this will work?” asked Ashyer.
“I don't.”
Everyone in the room, listening to the approach of the vampires, sensing their presence on all sides, began their own approach toward Magaffey's body.
Stroud began a mantra, using the resonant sound of his grandfather's name, calling for his spirit to be with them in this hour of greatest darkness.
“Ananias, Ananias, Ananias...”
The others chimed in. First Lonnie, then Ashyer, then his wife.
Outside, the walls seemed to be shaking, the stones ballooning in and out, as in an earthquake.
Twenty vampires careened through Stroud Manse, knocking over anything in their way. Like a natural force, the power of the creatures sent them through walls and doors, tearing away hinges, sending chandeliers toppling along with furniture; glass cabinets exploded with the high-frequency sound waves emitted by the creatures. Smaller, scavenger bats raced about wildly along with their hosts like pilot fish accompanying sharks. They stormed everywhere, having learned that the cocooned bodies of Pamela Carr and the Bradley woman were not where Ray Carroll had said they would be. Banaker sent telepathic messages to the others, some of whom were sharp enough to receive, while others, fearful and distrustful of the night's work and the sudden new turn in policy adopted by their master after all these years, flew from the scene and back to the safety of their roosting areas spread around the city of Andover. But most feared Banaker and through this cord of fear, he held them to him.
“Find Carroll,” was his message, “and bring him to me.”
It was Dolph who found Carroll's remains, surmising that Stroud had once again overpowered one of their number there on the stone staircase leading to what seemed nowhere.
Banaker looked over the damage with a mix of fear--the sight of one like him being reduced to ash--and hatred. “He is here, just on the other side of this door,” said Banaker to the others. “We need only break it down, and we have him.”
“I'll beak it down, Father,” Dolph communicated to his father. The others backed a little away as Dolph, his energies fully recharged now, attacked the door. His entire power went at it but Dolph literally bounced off it and hit hard against the stone stairs at his back. He had not even touched the door. Some invisible shield around it had stopped him.
Dolph was stunned no less than his father and the others who witnessed this. Inside the room, they could hear the chanting, and they could make out Stroud's voice.
Stroud had been wise to maneuver himself and the others here. Banaker was frustrated. Even if he could get the legitimate authorities out here now, point to Stroud as a fiend, showing the evidence of Magaffey's mangled body as proof, Stroud still held onto the cocoons which would then expose him and the others. It was a stalemate, unless his people could find a way into the sealed room.
He set his army of vampires to the task of searching for weaknesses in the invisible armor of the place. He sent some to attempt to come in overhead, some from below, others in another direction. It was at this time he realized that he had some defectors in his ranks. These he cursed and noted, in order to deal with later.
Three hours later the vampires continued pounding from all sides, some changing into spiders, frogs, and fog in an attempt to seep into the room in one fashion or another. As rats they failed as well. Banaker finally put all of his effort into gaining entrance by becoming smoke to burn his way through and choke his enemies to death. He felt weaknesses in the walls where he worked, small chinks that allowed particles of him to seep through. He was only partially through the magic circle Stroud had sent around himself and his people when he realized that Stroud and the others were not alone. He did not see it so much as he felt it: the definite presence of Ananias Stroud.
The sensation so shocked him he pulled back as if touching glacial ice. Vampires liked cold, but despised places below a certain temperature for they could be frozen up in such places for eternity, neither wholly alive nor dead. It was for this reason he'd had to rip away the freezer door before the others dared enter it. Carroll himself had come out quivering and blubbering about it when he'd gone in and come out again with the information Banaker requested of him.
Not even the bone marrow elixir had been of any help in combating freezing temperatures on vampires, but not for lack of testing at the Institute.
And now Stroud had gotten in touch with his dead forebears, a thing no vampire, not even he, could ever do. The ghost, or soul of a vampire simply did not exist. All that a vampire might count on in the way of immortality was in this life. It was the one true advantage they had over his kind, Banaker believed.
The others sensed Banaker's feelings of hopelessness, and more began to disappear from the scene. Banaker feared Stroud, and they all knew it, and now he had two Strouds to contend with, and they all knew it.
Dolphin had disappeared with the others, and Banaker felt quite alone in the bowels of Stroud Manse, and quite vulnerable as he thought of eternity without a soul, and as he thought of all that he and his father before him had accomplished here that only a Stroud could take from them. For the first time in his life Banaker felt truly afraid. And the others, sensing this, were leaving him. Apparently, even Dolph had gone, Dolph who had promised to give up his life to defend his father's right to lead, the colony.
Banaker felt like a broken, unfeeling object as he left Stroud Manse, the shambles all around him looking like the work of a devastating tornado. Outside, the darkness was strangely calm and the old world seemed to mock him.
-20-
Inside the circular chamber Stroud conversed with his grandfather's apparition which had risen on the vapors of Magaffey's blood. It was a silent conversation, a talk between two minds, as the others saw nothing and heard nothing beyond a whispering sail of wind in the sealed room and a coldness like standing below an air-conditioning duct.
Stroud saw and heard distinctly however, as Ananias dictated some truths to the inheritor of the manse and all that went with the title.
There were, apparently, all manner of nasty creatures the world over, some of which had taken up residence in Andover, others of which were halfway around the globe. Abe Stroud was told that he alone had the capacity to detect and put an end to such creatures as the vampires of Andover which had sprung up around the elder Banaker and now his son, to be passed on to yet another generation of blood-eaters.
Ananias's form transmitted all this and more to Stroud as the others continued the chant, and continued to draw more blood from Magaffey's body. Ghoulish as it may seem, the old black doctor's body was being made to serve just as Magaffey himself would have it serve under the circumstances if he could speak. With that thought, Ananias showed Abe Stroud that Magaffey's spirit was here, too, with Ananias.
“Friends in death as in life,” he said in that resounding voice that rolled around the coils or Abe s brain.
Abe then saw Magaffey's ethereal form alongside the fading one of his grandfather, the old black face calm and smiling and nodding as if to indicate that he approved.
Ananias's apparition then returned in strong focus and said, “You already know what to do, Abe. You know where to go.”
“No, I do not,” Stroud replied so strongly he shouted aloud. “I need your guidance.”
“At the hospital,” he said, “when you saw the blood bank, remember.”
It wasn't a question as in Do you remember? Ananias drew out the blacked-out memory from inside Stroud's head, somewhere the other side of the steel plate there. Stroud saw in his mind's eye the clear picture of himself a flight above the morgue, staring in through a door marked blood bank. It was Banaker's well-lit, modern facility and the place where his food supply was processed, stored, and kept.
“Of course, that's our only hope,” said Stroud over the chanting. At about this time he saw consternation pinch his grandfather's features, and he, too, sensed Banaker's presence. He smelled smoke and saw it seeping in at the wall through a
crack. The shield of safety around them seemed to be eroding, when suddenly the dark fog retreated and was gone. Banaker...
Stroud turned again to his grandfather, but he, too was gone. There was not so much as a sensation left in the room to tell he was ever there, nor for that matter anything but the smell of blood, and something unappealing, sickening to the senses coming from the corner where the cocoons were.
The chanting stopped and the people in the room felt a new presence. All around them there was silence. Had the vampires given up so easily?
“I've got to get to Banaker Institute,” Stroud told the others. “You'll be safe here until I return.” Stroud took up the bottle of S-choline from Magaffey's bag. “I hope this is enough.”
“I'll go with you, sir,” said Lonnie.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, Dr. Stroud.”
Stroud nodded. At about the same moment, they heard something like a tear, a rending noise below the blankets where the cocoons lay. Ashyer snatched away the blankets to find a vampire in full form gnawing at the Bradley woman's pod, injecting some venomous white worms onto the surface of the woman. The creature had already done this to what remained of Pam Carr, and the worms were destroying what was left of her. Some had long before gotten into the insides, and the body was becoming a milky waxlike substance that smelled to high heaven, right before their eyes.
The vampire that had succeeded in gaining entrance had done so in some unknown form, and had secretly taken its time to destroy the evidence against its race. Stroud instantly reacted. “Lonnie!”
Wilson snatched up the lance with the stake at the end and Stroud caught it as it sailed to him. Stroud approached the slavering creature that was now spitting up the white maggots, its unseeing eyes trained on Stroud nonetheless, its snout sniffing wildly, the mouth puckering in the now familiar O as it moved with Stroud's careful movement.
Stroud was trying to get it to move away from the others. He poked at it menacingly with the stake. It snatched at the stake with its deadly talons. One sure swipe and it would break the lance in two. Stroud jabbed at the eyes and slit one, the blood coming to the pupil but not slowing the creature that grabbed hold of the lance and snapped it in its bite like a twig.
Lonnie was fighting with Magaffey's bag, trying to get the hypo and the S-choline solution, perhaps their only chance. The bat was just about to dive straight for Stroud, destroying him instantly, when it suddenly began whirling around the chamber along the ceiling, taunting them, as if telling them now they were all trapped here with it, and it was going to devour them one at a time.
Mrs. Ashyer screamed which seemed to heighten this one's fun.
Stroud ducked as it came at his eyes, the talons like those that had killed Magaffey going for his throat. Stroud dove and came up beside Lonnie who'd nervously dropped the S-choline-filled hypo which skidded across the stone floor and shattered. The beast now landed over Magaffey's body and began, like a bird of prey, to pick over it, scratch about it, and dig at the wound. Stroud saw his chance. Grabbing the bottle of S-choline, he tore off the lid. He then doused it over Magaffey's wound just as the monster lapped at the dead man's blood, taking in some of the S-choline with it.
The thing reared up almost instantly, a gurgling sound came from deep within it, followed by a smouldering gas that it belched, turning it into a dragon of sorts. Perched over Magaffey still, it gave the appearance of a gargoyle as painted in medieval texts. If not a gargoyle than a vulture with bat's eyes and snout, winged by virtue of a membrane of skin that stretched between talons of each hand, its body covered in coarse, ratlike hair.
It lurched forward over Magaffey's head and onto the floor, reeling, bubbles bursting like small explosions within it, until suddenly its chest constricted about the heart area and was suddenly matted with blood that spurt forth where the heart had exploded.
A stake through the heart, Stroud thought, but coming from within, not without. As the creature lay there in its death throes, its face metamorphosed into that of Dolphin Banaker and back again, and then began the process of decay as had occurred with Ray Carroll, until there was less than enough dust left to sweep from the floor.
“Damn, that stuff works great,” said Ashyer. “We've got to get more.”
“Magaffey's office, the pharmacy, maybe,” suggested Mrs. Ashyer, who clung tightly to her husband.
“There may be more of them out there, above,” she said, “just waiting for us.”
“She's right,” said Stroud, “though I don't sense any more near. Dolph Banaker's reeked havoc on our proof for the outside world. If Banaker learns of this, we're finished. I've got good reason to believe he controls the police.”
“What're we to do?” asked Mrs. Ashyer.
“Our only hope is to salvage what we can of the evidence--”
“Cold storage?” asked Ashyer.
“You can bet the freezer upstairs is destroyed,” said Lonnie.
“Then we find another.”
“Andover Cold Storage. Fred Watts owns it. We could call him, meet him there,” said Ashyer.
“No, no ... we can't trust anyone now. We can only trust the people in this room,” said Stroud.
“Are you saying that all of Andover is ... are ... are those things?” asked Mrs. Ashyer.
“Not all, but they've infiltrated so well, like Ray Carroll ... how do you know without a blood test, or a cc of this S-choline?”
“Why do you suppose it ... it burst their hearts?” asked Ashyer.
“I don't know, but Magaffey told me--”
“Magaffey?”
“Yes, he ... he was here a moment before. He says the vampire's tissue, being that of a dead person, has high concentrations of S-choline already. Any additional and it triggers it to go mad in the monster's system.”
“Sounds exactly like what happened all right.”
“Lonnie and I'll take the pods to Andover Cold Storage, find a place for them there. We'll take Magaffey's remains as well. We'll stop by Magaffey's offices for more of the S-choline. Then we'll pay a visit to Banaker Institute.”
“Please,” said Mrs Ashyer, “take great care of yourself, Doctor Stroud.”
“Count on it if we can arm ourselves with this liquid stake of Magaffey's.”
His entire life, Dr. Oliver Banaker had perceived himself to be both a brilliant scientist and the quintessence of his race; he had come to think of his life as having meaning both before and after he had come into being, the product of the sexual union of two vampires--his father and his mother--both of whom had died at the hands of vampire hunters led by Ananias Stroud. Banaker had little memory of his mother, but he had always been told by his father of her beauty, grace, and intelligence. She, like his father, had been gifted. He had performed his entire life under the belief that his life had been predetermined, that the sexual union of his parents was part of a master plan; this plan was set in motion by the god of all vampires. He was a gift to his race. His son was to be the continuation of this bloodline and god-given course, to someday overtake the humans, out-number, and destroy them in order to become the master race. His mind had always overcome obstacles placed before him. He had made wonders and miracles through medicine and science that no one of his kind had ever done before. He had begun to believe in the dream to the exclusion of all else, including his son. And now, deep inside the pit of his vampire soul, he felt the pain and anguish of his inability to help his dead son.
He realized at the moment of Dolphin's death that the boy had remained behind, that he hadn't run from the battle, but rather hid there and patiently waited for Stroud to let down his guard. At the moment of Dolph's death he felt the blow that killed him, felt it physically as well as psychically.
Stroud had killed his son. Bastard vampire killer had killed his son....
He rushed for the Institute where he expected to find the others huddled in their morgue beds, cowards and sheep. He needed the sheep now, however. He needed their numbers,
idiots and all, to combat Stroud. He needed for them to draw on their instinct to survive at all costs. He himself had paid the dearest price. And with it his hatred for Stroud rose and rose and rose.
Stroud loaded his Jeep with Magaffey's bag and his own AK-47 assault rifle, hand grenades, and anything else he had in his arsenal, much of which he'd collected while on the force by way of confiscation. With his newfound wealth he had added a bazooka to his collection. This, too, he loaded into the Jeep as the others helped Lonnie Wilson get the pods out to the helicopter. The plan of operation was going into effect immediately. If they waited for another nightfall, they knew the vampires would return with twofold strength, and what little evidence left them--now beginning to leak from the pods--would be gone forever.
Stroud tore around to where the helicopter was being loaded. Ashyer, still in his black butler's attire, and Wilson, still looking the role of a simpleton, appeared not much of an army. Mrs. Ashyer had remained in the gutted and destroyed house going about the first tentative steps to put things aright again. When they had come up out of the underground circle--the psychic bomb shelter as Stroud had come to think of it--they found a scene of devastation where bats, large and small, had knocked over everything that was not nailed to the walls. Sofas and tables were overturned, expensive vases, paintings, and glass were everywhere. An occasional small dead bat was found. The lone items left untouched were the huge painting of his great-grandfather in the ballroom where everything else had been shattered, including the chandeliers, and a portrait of Ananias over the mantel in the drawing room. Stroud found this significant. He knew now that Banaker and the others feared the Strouds as they feared nothing and no one else.
Thanks to his meeting with his grandfather's spirit, now he understood this completely and perfectly. He had always had a penchant for fighting evil; it had always seemed his special talent, found deep within himself. Now he knew the why of it, that it was in his genes and his makeup, and that perhaps God had set his family to this task. Little wonder that the ghost of Ananias Stroud was upset with him for having still remained unwed and without a child. Who would carry on after him in a world rife with the demonic, the cruel, the evil and the vile? Who would act as predator to the snakes, if not a Stroud?
Vampire Dreams (Bloodscreams #1) Page 21