Vampirus (Book 1)

by Hamlyn, Jack

  Luke held her closer. “They’ll find a cure. It takes time.”

  “Are you so sure there is a cure for this?”

  He knew where she was going with that so he politely tried to steer the conversation into more harmless avenues. “It’s just a bug,” he said.

  “Is it?”

  “Yes, it is.”

  She shook her head. “It’s more than a bug I’m afraid of, Luke. It’s what carries it and what spreads it.”

  “Sonja,” he said. “Don’t pay attention to that crap out on the Internet.”

  “People are saying things, Luke. Not just out on the web but here in Wakefield. They’ve seen things.”

  “Ghost stories. They’re scared. It’s understandable.”

  But she was scared and so was he.

  And day by day, things only got worse.

  The country was in grave peril.

  When they first called Martial Law nationwide, people were shocked. For a time they took to the streets in protest. There were shoot-outs and insurrections and pitched battles. But in the end the soldiers always won. And with Martial Law in effect, you could be gunned down for the slightest provocation.

  None of it lasted. The germ was making the rounds and no one wanted to cluster together in crowds if they could avoid it. People were dying in numbers. Soon enough they didn’t even raise an eyebrow as the plague trucks came for bodies to burn in the pits.

  They had given in and given up.

  But what choice was there?

  The authorities kept saying the germ was viral in nature, even though they hadn’t been able to isolate it. The CDC, WHO, the Army Medical Research Institute, and every similar lab and agency across the world were working day and night, they said, to find a cure. But people were sick everywhere and Luke imagined the biomedical people were dropping just like everyone else, sealing themselves up in webby cocoons of plague, waiting for the kiss of death. By the time they found a vaccination or a pill, he feared there wouldn’t be anyone left to give it to.

  Things were getting worse by the day. When the germ made itself known in October and proliferated through November, he and his family avoided it. Thanksgiving, what there was of it, found Sonja, Megan, and he healthy and strong, uncontaminated.

  Then the first week of December, Megan got sick.

  Sonja took care of her and she got sick.

  Then Luke watched over both of them like a mother hen brooding over her eggs, waiting for it to find him, to reach out with cold white fingers and infect him. But it didn’t happen. For the past two weeks he’d been taking care of them and nothing yet. The hospitals were overcrowded, they were turning people away at the door as their own staff fell ill. There was nothing to do but nurse his wife and daughter at home. He did what the medical people told him. He gave Sonja and Megan injections of antivirals twice a day, kept them clean and the rooms antiseptic, got food into them whenever he could…and for all that, for his work and tears and despair and sleepless nights, he watched their temperatures spike, looked down in horror at their gaunt faces and staring, glassy eyes, knowing it would not be long for either of them.

  The only thing that he was thankful for was that they never went hysterical like some and went jumping around out in the streets. It was hard to imagine anything more gruesome than that.

  If they died—and he knew in the cold blackness of his heart that they would—then he wanted to go, too. Life without them would be a meaningless gray existence. He did not want that.

  He wanted the quiet and silence of the tomb.

  6

  A pounding at the door shook him from the shadows of his own mind and the thin sleep he found there. He dragged himself to the door and opened it, the wind cool and fresh in his face.

  A soldier in a badly-stained white Hazmat suit was standing there. He looked like some kind of cyborg in his mask. “Do you have anything for me today?” he asked.

  “No, nothing,” Luke said, shutting the door.

  The soldier cared not.

  The plague truck at the curb was already heaped with the dead. Luke could see a few trailing limbs dangling from beneath an olive drab tarp that snapped in the wind. They had plenty. So far, they hadn’t been forcing themselves into houses to extract corpses from the arms of loved ones or from death houses where the plague had taken everyone, but it was coming.

  If the soldiers themselves did not get infected, that was.

  The truck rolled on down the street and Luke sank to the floor, sensing death getting closer, coming to steal his girls away into the night. Knowing there wasn’t a fucking thing he could do about it, he began to sob.

  All day long, it seemed, the trucks rolled through the snow, white-gloved fists pounding at doors and goggle-eyed masks peering through curtained windows. These were the collectors of the dead, faceless soldiers given a task that would have been morbid and unthinkable a scarce year ago but was now a matter of practicality.

  Good and bad, they said on the radio, good and bad. A double-edged sword cutting in both directions and drawing blood. Good, in that the December cold would theoretically slow the spread of the pestilence; but bad, in that people were crowding in houses now to escape the weather and the germ would pass freely from person to person and hand to mouth.

  Luke figured there were guys like him all over the country—and the world, for that matter—wandering around in a sort of fuzzy daze, scratching their heads, trying to make sense of things, trying to put the madness into some kind of uneasy perspective and failing miserably.

  He came into this world innocent and pink-cheeked, but as to how he would leave it…well, that’s what scared him. So far he didn’t have the germ, but how long could that last? How long before he was hopping around out in the snow, drooling and delusional, or lying pallid and glassy-eyed in bed sliding inch by inch towards the grave?

  7

  One theory after another was making the rounds, trying to explain it all. One of the most interesting was that the pandemic was of extraterrestrial origin.

  Though the germ had still not been isolated, they—the medical establishment—felt it was most certainly a virus of some type. The theory was this: that many of the great pandemics of history were caused by extraterrestrial spores. These spores were bacteria upon which nasty viruses had hitched a ride. Viruses were so small that literally thousands of them could fit comfortably on a single bacterium. When a bacterium detected that conditions were hazardous to its survival—like the cold depths of space—it began the process of sporulation: the formation of a tough, durable outer capsule called an endospore which was resistant to cold, radiation, just about everything. Dormant within this shell, the bacterium could theoretically sleep for a hundred years or a hundred thousand years.

  The scientists on CNN—one a biogeneticist, the other a virologist—claimed that every 300 to 350 years, the orbital path of the Earth carried it through a massive “Virosphere” of alien spore particles, possibly billions or trillions of these endospores, upon which stowaway viruses were hiding. Where these spores originated from no one could say, just out there somewhere in the great beyond. When the Earth passed through this Virosphere, the spores—some at least—were seeded into Earth’s atmosphere. Ordinary endospores were re-activated by favorable environmental conditions. Sunlight, for example, and a warm atmosphere would do it, breaking the cycle of hibernation. Then, the bacterium would begin metabolizing anew, rupturing the endospore case, and in the process, releasing the viral bodies which would seek new hosts. The human race, in this case.

  The scientists said this whole idea was something of an outgrowth from the theory of Panspermia, which said that life on this planet was originally seeded by extraterrestrial microbes in the form of bacterial spores.

  Very interesting stuff, Luke thought as he watched.

  They opened the lines and got quite a few callers. Some were just the typical nuts that liked to hear themselves on TV, but one was an anthropologist who asked them if they were aware
that most of the great pandemics of history were also times of fervid vampire hysteria. Which, he said, wasn’t surprising because during a plague people became terrified of the dead and it was one of the few instances where the dead actually could hurt you. The scientists thought that was very interesting given all the crazy nonsense about the walking dead being talked about on the Internet.

  With that new angle, the intrepid scientists gave the virus a name: Vampirus, which worked not only from a folkloric perspective but also from the perspective of the nature of viruses themselves: they are parasitic, draining and destroying their hosts while replicating themselves.

  The scientists were half-joking…but Luke could see something very grim and set about their mouths that was miles from humor. Regardless, within a matter of hours the whole Vampirus thing went…well, viral, and was the hot buzz all over the web.

  8

  Sonja and Megan were slipping away and he was powerless to do anything about it. They slept almost all of the time and sitting there, watching them, pulled out his heart and squeezed it dry so he would make himself walk away before he lost his mind. He took to enjoying minor diversions like washing floors and re-varnishing chairs in the basement. Sometimes he’d cook for them, making stews and soups. He had no appetite and he’d dropped nearly twenty-five pounds by that point. Neither his wife nor his daughter would eat as the days rolled by, and so he’d either freeze what he made or throw it out. But he hated doing that. He’d grown up on a farm in Sawyer County and wasting food was like an unpardonable sin. Whenever he did it, he could feel his mother’s eyes burning at his back. There’s people starving in Africa, you know.

  Sonja wouldn’t have approved either.

  She loved her kitchen and Luke tried to keep it in a manner she’d approve of. Cookbooks were arranged by subject. Pot holders hung just so. Towels on the rod, not on the counter. He kept the floor clean and the countertops sparkling. He cleaned so much his hands smelled like Pine-Sol.

  When Sonja was in the kitchen she always played the radio but he couldn’t bear to listen to it. There was very little in the way of music these days. Mostly it was one bulletin after the other from the Pentagon, the CDC, the Department of Homeland Security, local stuff from Civil Defense and the police. All of it, depressing.

  In the kitchen, when he wasn’t scrubbing or cooking, the silence would be immense and if he listened hard enough he could almost hear Sonja singing and humming. When that happened, he would rush outside to catch his breath.

  9

  Rats.

  There were rats everywhere.

  On Main Street, he saw a pack of them in the broad daylight. He pulled over and stared at them with a slowly dawning horror.

  He knew there were rats in Wakefield just as there were rats in every other city in Wisconsin and the world for that matter. Where men set up their towns and hovels, the rats invariably came. Probably the only species that thrived as the human population escalated and wild habitats were decimated.

  In Wakefield, before they closed the old dump out on Hollow Creek Road—this was essentially an “open pit” type of dump where everything was burned in immense pyres—you could drive out there at night and your headlights would reflect eyes, hundreds of beady eyes, so many that you’d think twice about getting out of your car. They closed the dump back in the 1980’s, but before Luke’s old man died he had quite a few stories about the place. He was a cop for thirty years and back in the ‘50’s, he said, he and some of the other young cops would go out there at night and shoot rats for target practice. He said some of them were as big as cats.

  Luke himself had never doubted that for a moment.

  He’d been with Public Works for fifteen years and knew for a fact that there were rats down in the sewers. And some of them were quite large. About the time he started working there, the problem had reached a zenith of sorts. The sewer workers were reporting droppings everywhere and more than one encounter with the subterranean rodents. A couple guys had actually been bitten and refused to go down again until something was done. Poisoned baits were set out and, lo and behold, they worked: there were dead rats below and even some above that had crawled out of rainwater drains to die in the streets vomiting foam. The next step was cleaning out the dead ones and being that he was a Fucking New Guy, he pulled it.

  It was quite a job.

  There were five or six intersecting main drain lines that ran beneath the city. These were big enough to walk in. Feeding off of them was an elaborate system of secondary drains that you could only crawl through on your hands and knees. The dankness and moldering stink were nearly unbearable in these tunnels, which were close and suffocating. But to crawl into them to drag out dead rats? What a job. It took nearly a week to clear out the poisoned ones and in the end they filled over forty twenty-five gallon drums with dead rats—which were then very unceremoniously dumped into the backs of garbage trucks by Ronny Hazek and the other tailgunners and cycled through with a sound of crunching bones and pulping bodies.

  There was still a picture hanging in the city garage of Ronny standing next to barrels of dead rats, grinning as he held up two tomcat-sized rodents by the tails like a happy hunter (in the background, leaning up against the garbage truck was a very dirty and dour Luke Barrows who looked like he’d just crawled through the belly of hell).

  To this day, Luke still had claustrophobic nightmares about being lost in the sewers and he had an absolute aversion to rats. So when he saw them on Main Street that day, he got a cold chill. He could almost smell the dankness of the pipes again.

  The rats came out of a dead-end alley on Warehouse Street and Main and filtered down through an open basement window in the old Montgomery Wards building, which had been vacant for ten years or more. Place was probably swarming with them. People were saying that many of the old buildings were absolutely infested and that hordes of rats welled up through the sewer gratings at night.

  But until he saw them, Luke hadn’t believed it.

  There was so much bullshit flying around it was hard to know what to believe.

  A lot of stores were closed up and down Main, very few people in the streets. The Christmas decorations looked out of place, nostalgic and antiquated like relics from a long ago past. Luke stepped out of his truck, feeling the bite of December and remembering Christmases from long ago when he was a kid. And as he did that—standing on the street corner with all those forlorn decorations in the windows and the limp wreaths dangling from street poles—he stared down the empty streets and was hit, floored, by the absurdity of the situation. That everything, all that mankind had fought and strived for and believed in, was being destroyed by a fucking bug that you couldn’t even see.

  He leaned up against a streetlamp and laughed.

  He only stopped when he realized someone was bearing down on him. He turned and saw a man stumbling up the snowy sidewalk towards him—plague victim. No doubt about it. The guy was trembling and quaking, clothes filthy with his own drainage. His face was pale and waxy, raining perspiration. He reached out with a sallow, shaking hand and Luke backed away.

  “Luke, Luke Barrows,” the guy said in a croaking dry voice that kept cracking. “It’s me…it’s Danny…Danny, your cousin.” He staggered past, found a bench and there he collapsed, his breathing ragged, his face so shiny it looked like it had been oiled with Wesson.

  Danny was probably the only one in the family that had ever really, truly made anything of himself. He’d gone to college, got his degree in accounting, and signed on with a firm downtown. Within five years he’d become a partner and within ten he’d bought his partner out. He had money, lots of it, but he’d never acted like it, Luke knew, not that it won him any favors around town. In small Midwestern towns like Wakefield people had an instinctive distrust of anyone with money, sort of a reverse snobbery.

  Danny had brilliant green Irish eyes even though he was about as Irish as sauerkraut…but those eyes had faded and the light had been stolen from them.
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  Luke started to tell him that he hadn’t recognized him, but Danny wasn’t interested in any of that. “Listen to me, Luke. You’re not sick. You’re one of the lucky ones,” he said, looking up at him. “You have to find them. You have to seek them out and destroy them.”

  “Who?” Luke said, pretty well convinced that Danny’s mind was in no better state than his body.

  “The Carriers,” he said, panting and spitting out a clot of bloody phlegm into the snow. “The infected ones that come out at night. Find them. Drag them out of their hiding places. Destroy them. Burn the fucking town flat if you have to…it’s nothing but a pest-hole now. Do you hear me? Destroy them all…”

  He ranted on and on and made very little sense and then he went into some kind of fit and ran off waving his hands above his head and crying out. That cry was answered by dozens of others who began to crawl from their hiding places, all shrieking and hopping in circles. And there was something very unsettling about that.

  10

  Once upon a time in the days of his youth, Luke had been a hospital corpsman in the Marines. He served with the 2nd Marine Division in Kuwait as a combat medic. Everyone in the neighborhood knew it, of course, so he was unofficially appointed the local medical counsel. There wasn’t much he could do and he absolutely hated the idea of leaving Sonja and Megan for even a few minutes, but he could hardly turn his back on his neighbors. The way he was figuring things, they were going to need each other now like never before. It seemed on a daily basis he was called over to the Pruitts or the VanDannings, the Skorenskas or the Corbetts. And in the process, he’d had to pronounce six people dead in the last fifteen days—as if they needed him to do that.

  His next door neighbor was Alger Stericki. They had a history of territorial disputes, as Luke had always called them. Alger was one of those fussy lawn zombies with nothing better to do than Weed-n-feed his grass and prune his bushes. He reported Luke for everything from not cutting his grass to the ramshackle gardening shed out back to Luke’s leaves blowing into his yard. Not that Luke was totally innocent in the war—he once taken a bag of leaves in the middle of night and dumped them on Alger’s porch.