by Hamlyn, Jack
VAMPIRUS
By
Jack Hamlyn
“No pestilence had ever been so fatal, or
so hideous. Blood was its Avatar and its seal—
the redness and the horror of blood.”
—Poe
This is for the vampire girls that scared the hell out of me on Grand Avenue, Halloween 1971.
1
In the long, gray days towards the end, Luke Barrows would sit in his chair by the window with his eyes closed, listening to the snow brushing against the pane like the softest of moth wings. He would hear this, but inside he was listening deeper, maybe for those things that were gone now and would not come back: the laughter of his daughter and the humming melodies of his wife.
The immense sharp-toothed silence outside would lay heavy over the world like a graveyard slab, blocking out the light. Sometimes it would be punctuated by the lonesome howl of a dog but rarely anything else.
Even at high noon, the town seemed dark and dim, peopled by ghosting shadows and described in cool gray tones. He would listen to the snow and it would sound like spirits from a long-dead world rustling over the drift, waiting for the last men to die out so they could rise up again and claim the land.
The loneliness, the emptiness, the lack of hope is what brought the real terror to him. The neighborhood and the house, both so familiar, were like alien things to him now. They made him feel like a stranger treading silently on a deserted, unknown street, hooded eyes watching from secret, dark spaces.
Though he was exhausted, he rarely slept, and when he did, it was usually in a chair because the idea of lying in the bed he’d shared with his wife was almost too much for him. On those few times that he had tried, he could not relax. His eyes would not stay shut. The room was haunted by shadowed memory and his heart rattled uncomfortably in his chest. The sleep of oblivion was denied him, stark reality never quite letting go, its red claws always tenaciously digging into the flesh of his mind and body. On those rare occasions when he did begin to drift off, he would see a white face of pestilence floating above, its voice scratching in his ears: I am the spirit of this world now. I’ll take everything and everyone you love one by one by one and there’s nothing you can do about it. Your science and your god cannot help you. I am eternal. I am disease and suffering and night without end. I pick my teeth with the bones of men and blow through the cities like crematory ash. In the end, there will only be you and I. The others will be dead. Then I’ll come knocking at your door.
Luke would come awake then, his skin damp with sweat, a silver scream shattering in his throat, and the face would be there…a drifting, crawling obscenity that had come to turn the world of men into a graveyard. It would not be satisfied until every town, city, and village was strewn with corpses.
It was evil.
It was ravenous.
And it had no name.
2
His routine was the same day after day.
He would pace the house, tending to the needs of Sonja and Megan as the plague set its red-stained teeth deeper into them. He would wash them, make them comfortable, give them injections and try to get food in them. Then at night, he would stare out into the barren, godless, wind-blown streets, watching, always watching, and for what he did not know. It was coming, though, and its name was Death. Then the night would end at last and he would stare with bloodshot eyes at the pale gray light of dawn and do it all over again.
3
By December, there was nowhere to hide from the plague.
When it broke out in Asia and Europe, the World Health Organization claimed the human race was standing at the threshold of a major pandemic, but the CDC in Atlanta claimed otherwise. A highly infectious viral pneumonia was making the rounds, they said, but it could be contained with Tamiflu and Relenza.
Which was bullshit, of course. And Luke knew it at the time.
Perception management. Spin. The government was trying to avoid mass panic and doing a very poor job of it. People were freaking out and barricading themselves in their houses and apartments, refusing to come out and you couldn’t blame them with the crazy stories that were making the rounds.
Then the plague hit with force and nobody bothered with official denial any longer. The truth was in the streets…along with a lot of bodies.
As of the first week of December, the CDC and WHO still had not isolated the germ. They claimed it was a virus, but that’s all they claimed.
Luke kept track of it all in a notebook. On December 5th he wrote the following:
—All international flights are grounded until further notice. Same goes for ships and sea traffic. All Americans abroad are not being allowed to return.
—There’s been no contact with China in over a week.
—Same for most of Southeast Asia.
—India has sealed its borders. Recent figures say that as many as 70% of the population might be infected.
—Africa: various guerrilla uprisings and border incursions have quieted now as plague sweeps across the continent.
—The Middle East, for the first time in memory, is quiet.
—Russia and its former republics are graveyards.
—Eastern Europe is dotted with empty cities and ghost towns.
—Central Europe is falling.
—The UK has isolated itself, but rumor has it that several plague ships from Iceland have tried to make it ashore. The Royal Navy sank every one of them. But with something like 3,000,000 already dead in the British Isles, it’s pretty pointless.
—Likewise, over here, groups of people from South and Central America that tried to make it into the Florida Keys were sunk by the Coast Guard and Navy. The border between Mexico and the US is heavily fortified. Anyone that tries to cross is gunned down. Rumor: Air Force fighter-bombers have hit entire Mexican convoys making their way to the border, dumping Napalm and cluster bombs on them.
—Closer to home, Wakefield is becoming a ghost town.
That’s what he knew. He kept reading and re-reading what he had written and each time it made him wither inside.
On December 8th, he wrote:
There are few people in the streets anymore. Most of the stores and shops are closed up. People are hanging crosses on their doors and in their windows. There are hex signs on the walls of houses and on the sides of barns just outside town and—even creepier—more than one bunch of garlic dangling from porch overhangs like something out of an old Hammer movie. People are terrified. Medical science isn’t giving them the hope they need, so they’re turning to superstition.
It’s like Europe in the Dark Ages.
The Age of Reason is on its deathbed.
The situation couldn’t have been more desperate.
4
The first indication that there was something far stranger than a worldwide pandemic in the wind, occurred about a week before Thanksgiving.
Although he was a heavy equipment operator for Public Works, which entailed plowing snow and leveling roads with bulldozers and digging up sewer lines with backhoes and excavators, Luke ended up on the garbage truck with Milt Penney. So many men had called in sick by that point that what there was of the crew had to take on just about everything.
Before the plague hit, there were four garbage trucks working Wakefield from eight in the morning until four in the afternoon and they had barely been able to keep up. Now there was just the one and every day less and less cans were pulled out to curbs as people fell ill, sweating and trembling in their beds.
When they reached Cherry Hill Road, Luke came up front and jumped in the cab. “Damn cold out there,” he said. “Can’t seem to warm up. That chill is going right up my spine.”
“Take the wheel,” Penney said. “I’ll work
the back.”
“That’s all right. Just gimme a minute to warm up. Don’t know how you guys do this day after day.”
Penney laughed. “We do it the same way you’re doing it: we bitch and complain and they we go get it done anyway.”
He pulled the truck up in front of the Paduk house on Cherry. No cans were out. Lester Paduk worked for Public Works but he’d been gone sick some weeks now and everyone at the garage was worried because, week by week, they were losing more of their own. Luke figured it wouldn’t be long until the whole town was sleeping like a graveyard and maybe the whole world at that.
“No cans,” Penney said. “You know what that means.”
“It means you’re going to throw this rig in park and we’re going to go in there and check on Les and his family.”
“Like hell I am.”
“Like hell you’re not.”
Penney shook his head. “They got the bug, Luke. We can’t go in there.”
“So we put on our masks and gloves, but we go in. We owe Les that much. You know we do. Les was best man at your wedding for chrissake. He’s the guy who got you your job. You know damn well if you hadn’t shown up in a couple weeks he’d be the first guy coming over to see why.”
“Okay, okay, quit with the fucking guilt trip.”
“Let’s go,” Luke said.
Penney snapped on his rubber gloves and a surgical mask and out they went into the cold. A blizzard had hit three days before and the walk still had had not been shoveled. They fought their way through knee-high drifts, the November wind brushing cold fingers against their necks. Luke knocked three times and then let himself in. Just inside the door, he paused, a nausea rising up in his belly and gaining ground, flooding his stomach with bile. The atmosphere was thick with something like a creeping dry rot that was sharp and dusty in his nostrils. It coated his tongue with a rancid taste. He couldn’t exactly put a finger on it, but it made him feel weak inside.
Other than that, they saw nothing but an ordinary house. A heavy Afghan was thrown over the back of a worn green sofa. A pair of slippers were abandoned before a rocking chair. A couple coffee cups were on the end table, a few discarded magazines. Some photos on the mantel. Perfectly ordinary…except for the immense silence which was broken only by the ticking of a clock. And that smell which was heavy and yellow and somehow almost violent.
“They…they must be gone,” Penney said, pulling down his mask and lighting a Camel.
“They’re here,” Luke said. “You know they’re here.”
Sighing, Penney followed him from room to room, puffing on his cigarette and exhaling big clouds of smoke. The harsh stink of the cigarette thankfully covered other things. Things Luke did not want to smell. The deeper they went into the house the heavier the atmosphere seemed to get until it became almost unbearable. The air was dank, thick. He could almost feel it in his throat. In his mind there was a building sense of irrational terror.
They checked all the bedrooms. Bathroom. Kitchen. Nothing. Luke even looked in closets and under beds. Penney did not ask him why and he did not offer anything, just that bright haunted look in his eyes.
“The cellar,” he finally said. “Down there.”
Penney tried to swallow and found that he couldn’t. He looked at the door Luke had opened, a channel of darkness leading below. It was like a waiting open grave to him, riven with spirits and crawling shades from beyond. The stink coming up from there was not dry rot but almost a sweet putrescence that even the cigarette smoke could not mask.
“This is bullshit, Luke,” he said, his voice frantic and desperate. “Why the hell do we have to go down there? Why would they be down in the cellar?”
“Because they’re not anywhere else.”
Luke tried the light switch, and got nothing. But they could see why: the light bulb high above was shattered as if someone had broken it. He borrowed Penney’s Zippo, flicked it and the flame marginally brightened the stairwell. He started down, grotesque shadows jumping over the walls. Penney followed him and by the time he got to the bottom, he was dizzy and reeling. He realized then he’d been holding his breath all the way down as if the cellar were a hot envelope of contagion.
Using the lighter, Luke found a light behind the bar and turned it on. It wasn’t much, but it offered some illumination…dim, clustering with shadows, but illumination all the same. They were standing in a rec room and Penney crushed his burned-out cigarette into an ashtray, pulled his mask back up, and watched Luke: a tall bearded man who seemed absolutely fearless.
Penney waited near the door, something taking hold of him he could not define, freezing him up inside. His eyes were staring at a door across the room and he could not pull them away. For behind it…yes, behind it…that’s where it waited. The source of the contagion in the cellar. Luke went over to it and Penney followed him at a distance, hanging back as though he expected something yellow-eyed and monstrous to come leaping out at them.
The door opened and the smell of sweet putrescence came rolling out in a moist wave. It smelled like something had turned in there, like tomatoes and peppers gone to a juicy pulp of black decay.
Penney stepped back. “I can’t…I can’t go in there, Luke,” he said from behind his mask, his face shiny and sallow, pulled so tight over the skull beneath it looked like it might rip. Sweat ran down the bridge of his nose. It was ice-cold. “I just can’t do it.”
Luke nodded, understanding all too well, and stepped into the room. The light from the rec room gave precious little in the way of radiance. What he saw was simply a junk room with piled cartons, some plastic lawn decorations up against the wall, coats hanging from the beams above. But that stink…it was almost palpable. If it had been summer, he would have thought a squirrel crawled into the walls and died, boiling down to bones and fur.
But this was November.
The furnace was still going, but it was an old house and it was chilly in the cellar with its concrete block walls. The smell did not belong and especially in that room which was noticeably colder, so chill in fact that he could see frosting plumes of his breath.
He moved in deeper, spotting a canvas tarp in the corner with the bulges of shapes beneath it. It was pulled against the back wall as if whoever had put it there was seeking the darkest, coolest spot possible. As Luke approached it, he could feel each and every one of his forty years sneaking up on him, making joints stiffen, bones creak, and muscles tense. The atmosphere of the room was somehow malevolent and he could almost feel pale shadows sweeping around him, brushing their cold fingers against the back of his neck.
He grabbed the tarp and pulled up one corner, holding out the lighter so he could see what was beneath like a grave robber peering into a coffin in a midnight tomb.
A little cry escaped his throat, the nausea in his belly spreading out and filling his throat with a slow-sliding grease.
Lester Paduk lay there. He was wearing jogging pants and a flannel shirt that was open to the waist. His wife was laying next to him, completely naked, the nipples of her breasts just as gray as her lips. And sandwiched in-between, their two children, Chelsea and Ryan, both white as tombstone marble.
As Luke crouched there, his heart banging away in his chest and his hand holding the lighter trembling badly, he tried to imagine a set of circumstances where they would all lie down and die like this together and could not. Maybe in bed…but down here? That meant somebody must have arranged them and covered them. But that seemed pretty unlikely which meant…well, which meant they must have done it themselves.
“C’mon, Luke…my fucking skin’s crawling,” Penney called out to him.
Luke swallowed. “They’re in here. They’re dead.”
Penney called out to him again, but he ignored him. He could not take his eyes off the corpses…not a moment ago they’d looked gray and bleached and dead, but now, dear Christ, was it his imagination or did they lay there rosy-cheeked and full-blooded like they might wake at any moment?
Swearing under his breath, Luke turned and told him to zip it. He only averted his eyes for a moment but when he looked back they had changed again.
Not Les.
But the boy. He was smiling, lips pulled into a vulpine grin that was awful to look upon.
And Les’s wife…Jesus, her eyes were wide open, huge and dark and sparkling, all pupil, no whites.
Luke dropped the tarp and stumbled from the room, feeling things he could not properly catalog. The plague was the plague. You expected it. You expected death. You expected corpses…but you did not expect them to be playing games with you.
Something was happening here.
Something impossible.
5
He didn’t really get worried until about a week after he’d found the Paduk family lying in state beneath the tarp. That’s when he saw footage of soldiers burning bodies in Philadelphia and Chicago, Newark and San Francisco. That’s when it started to creep into him, getting into his blood like a cool death-feeling poison. That’s when he started getting scared. That’s when he started sleeping with one eye open—when he did sleep—like a gunfighter in the old west.
Because night was no longer just night anymore.
Out on the Internet, there were stories about things seen walking around after dark in London or creeping about in the subway tunnels of NYC. There were even tales that would make your skin crawl about entire villages being turned into ghost towns. Luke wrote it off as tabloid shit and left it at that. He had to think about his wife and daughter.
He had to be sensible.
Sonja wasn’t liking it, of course. Sonja was religious. She wasn’t hardcore but she did not deny the existence of things like the Devil. “It’s moving so fast, Luke. They say it’s a germ…but I think it’s more than just a germ,” she said to him one night while they lay in bed, a cooling sheen of lovemaking sweat still sweet on their naked skin. “A month ago, it was just stories. Halloween stories. But now it’s everywhere and it’s spreading. I don’t like it. I’m afraid.”