Vampirus (Book 1)

by Hamlyn, Jack

  18

  There was a knock on the door that evening and Luke found Alger waiting out there. He knew it was bad news, of course, for when was it not? That awful worn hangdog look on Alger’s face told him all he needed to know because he’d seen it on so many faces by then.

  Death. That’s what you’re bringing me, isn’t it, Alger? When they come to my door it’s always death.

  “Is it Anne?” he said.

  Alger nodded.

  Luke pulled on his parka, Sorrels, and gloves, trudged over to the house next door. He saw no other life on 13th Street. Anne was in an upstairs bedroom and Luke was reminded so much of finding Linda King that he had to stop once and lean against the wall to steady his nerves. Alger seemed to understand perfectly.

  Anne Stericki lay under the covers, a heavy, moist, feverish heat in the air. Like Linda King, she did not look dead. Not really. She was white as alabaster, lips almost gray, but beyond the deathly pallor there was nothing. Just the same disturbing lack of traditional indications of death: no surface lividity or bruising, no rigor, nothing. And although she had no pulse or heartbeat and was not breathing, there was a faint warmth to her flesh. Luke opened her eyelids with his fingers and her eyes were translucent…not milky or dun as death can make them, or weird like Linda King’s, but shiny and wet and almost transparent. He didn’t like it.

  When he lifted her head, a pencil-thin line of black juice ran from the corner of her lips. It looked like India ink.

  Luke didn’t let Alger see this. “I’m sorry, man. She’s gone.”

  Alger didn’t fall apart and start screaming and crying like people do in the movies. Plague survivors were different when they lost a loved one; there was no shock, they knew death was coming. When you’d been watching its grim progress for days and weeks, you were not surprised when it arrived. So Alger just nodded and went downstairs. Luke covered Anne up, wrapping her in the sheets until she looked like some sterile mummy-like package.

  “Did you have the radio on today?” Alger asked when he got downstairs. Luke told him he hadn’t and Alger said that there was an Emergency Broadcast System bulletin on about every half an hour.

  “We’re under Martial Law, Luke,” he said, but Luke already knew that. “We’re not allowed to dispose of our…our dead. They have to be incinerated.”

  “At least they’re admitting it, I guess.”

  “They’re burning them out at the old dump,” he said, spitting out that last word as if it were green with maggots.

  Luke understood the reasoning. Who didn’t? Plague bodies were essentially vectors of disease and when you didn’t know what the exact disease was or how it disseminated itself and you couldn’t even fucking isolate it, then you had to proceed with the worst-case scenario: destroying the infection by burning the bodies. He understood all that just fine. But bringing the corpses of loved ones to the dump to be incinerated…there was something almost obscene about that.

  Alger broke down crying for a couple minutes, then slugged down some whiskey and smoked a cigarette to steady his nerves. “I don’t want her to go there, Luke. I can’t bear it. She’s all I’ve ever had. She’s been the only good thing in my small, frustrating, fucked up little world. Can you understand that?”

  “Yes.”

  “I want her to go to Salem Cross. Why can’t she go out there?”

  “I heard they’re full up,” Luke told him. “And…given that bulletin, it’s probably illegal.”

  Alger looked at him with eyes like open wounds. “But the dump…oh dear God.” He shook with tears. “Anne…”

  Right then, angry and bitter and hurting in too many places, Luke decided Anne deserved better. They all did. “Unless, of course, we take her up to Salem Cross ourselves. Sneak her in there.”

  A sparkle of brightness touched Alger’s eyes. “Do you think it would work?”

  “All we can do is try.”

  Luke went upstairs to get the body ready for travel. He was pretty sure that Alger wasn’t up to it. He stood in the doorway for a time just staring at what was wrapped in the sheets, filled with a numb white silence. He couldn’t seem to make himself go in there. The idea of touching the corpse made him go bad inside, made his guts shrivel like worms twisting in sunlight. The feeling was huge and irrational. He could not think his way around it.

  But he had to. For Alger’s sake.

  He could hear snowflakes brushing against the window, the moan of the wind around the eaves. Beyond the pane night had fallen, a night filled with blowing, black death. They were going to take the corpse of Alger’s wife, steal it away like grave robbers, and sneak it up to Salem Cross to be interred. Luke thought of what it would be like up there with the snow and wind, the lonely snap of faded Memorial Day flags rising from the swell of white. The very idea of creeping through there with a body tucked in his arms nearly drowned him in the waters of the darkest fright he had ever known.

  But it was crazy and he had to get a grip.

  Just do the dirty deed, he told himself. Do it for Anne and, for godsake, do it for Alger. He needs this and you can’t let him down and still call yourself a man.

  Okay.

  Easier said than done. He was thinking of Linda King again. She was the black root of this garden of dread he was tending. The memory of her lying in that bed, white as tombstone marble, was nearly paralyzing. He could almost smell that dry, flaking stink of aged corruption, only it was far worse in his head…an envelope of rot and green decay. The very thought of Linda in that bed in the King house, lying cheek to jowl with the December night, made his hands shake.

  He picked up Anne’s shrouded form in his arms and she was incredibly light. The feel of her beneath the sheets was cool and rubbery. Rigor should have been setting in, but it wasn’t. That concerned him most of all.

  He brought her downstairs and placed her on the couch. Alger started to whimper at the sight of her.

  “We have to be strong now,” Luke told him and meant it.

  19

  He checked on Megan and Sonja. They were both lost in dreams. He put his pickup in four-wheel drive and bashed through drifts in the street that were so heavy he had to drop the plow to cut a path. Backing up to Alger’s door, he ran into the house, getting out of the gale. Alger was sitting there, waiting. He had his back to the sheeted form of his wife.

  And upon seeing this, a voice in the back of Luke’s mind said, I wouldn’t do that if I were you, Alger. And, of course, he immediately hated himself for even allowing such a thought.

  They carried Anne out and placed her gently in the back of the truck. Luke kept thinking of Sonja’s Austrian grandmother, Gretta, dead some five years now. That woman had been a wealth of old world superstitions. Until the day she died—she lived to be 96—she ran a boarding house up in Sewer Street. A lot of her lodgers were old pensioners, mostly railroad men, and from time to time one of them would pass in the night. Luke was there with Sonja when it happened one time. And when the undertakers showed from Bryce-Covick Funeral Home and took the body away, Gretta kept chiding them the whole way about taking the body out feet-first. It was an old superstition. If you took the body out head-first the corpse would remember the door and be able to find its way back; feet-first was the only safe way to keep the ghost from coming back for a midnight visit.

  It was the last thing Luke should have been thinking about, but he couldn’t help it. And what was worse is that he made sure the body went out feet-first. It was insane, but it made him feel better somehow.

  It seemed almost blasphemous to load Anne in the back of the truck like a cord of wood, but Alger was okay with it and Luke was glad for that because he just wasn’t up to riding with a body in the cab, having it bouncing around and bumping against his shoulder as they pushed through drifts,.

  Salem Cross was down towards the end of Cherry Hill Road, right across from a little park that was pleasant at high summer with its spreading oaks and juniper and the little creek that cut through it…b
ut in the dead of winter…by night…was a shadowy run of desolation. Just down the way was the Wakefield Middle School. Luke plowed a trail past the gates of Salem Cross, deciding it was probably not the best idea to go in through them. There were few houses out there, but he didn’t want to take a chance somebody might be watching. Salem Cross was bordered on one side by St. Joe’s church and on the other by a thick stand of hilly woods. They cut around down to Price Avenue, came up behind the church to the little picnic grounds there which brought them just behind the stone wall that circled the cemetery.

  “I don’t know if I’m up to this,” Alger said, wiping tears from his bleeding eyes.

  “You have to be,” Luke told him, digging out a flashlight and prybar from behind the seat.

  There was no way in hell he was going to do it alone.

  He climbed over the stone wall after knocking a foot of snow off it, then Alger slid the body to him. Alger carried the flashlight, Luke carried the prybar, and they carried Anne between them. The drifts came up to their thighs. The silence of the cemetery was ominous. The only sounds were the wind spraying snow against the monuments and the distant dinging of the cleats on the flagpole rope in the park. Leaning headstones and crosses rose from the ocean of blowing white as they made their way to the tall, brooding shadow of the mortuary itself. Alger kept falling and crying out and Luke yelled at him several times to keep quiet. He rather doubted the mortuary was guarded, but he was pretty sure that what they were doing was illegal as hell.

  He kept thinking of the soldiers from the other night. They would enforce the law. With the body count being what it was…what would a couple gunned-down corpse-snatchers matter?

  Luke was very tense, but he knew it had very little to do with breaking the law. His guts felt hollow. He was honestly scared in a way he had not been since he was a kid. Cemeteries were just cemeteries, but at night…in that goddamn storm…the terror he was feeling was deep-set and visceral.

  The wind had picked up considerably, grabbing the falling snow and throwing it in their faces like blowing sand. The wind was the real enemy. It made the cold that much colder and the blizzard that much more of a blizzard. It was driving the snow in sheets and twisting blankets, and sending spiraling snow-devils dancing amongst the graves. It created wild, jumping shadows all around them as it blew and howled with a voice that rose and fell, sometimes whispering and sometimes screeching, but always filled with a cutting primal hatred.

  About the time Luke thought they’d be piled under the drifts never to be seen again, they stumbled into the shadow of the mortuary building. It was high and gothic-looking, black windows staring out across the charnel wastes like the hollow-socketed eyes of a skull, dead ivy hanging down its face like hair.

  They went around back, fighting through drifts.

  There was a double-door there and Luke knew the sort of cargo it accepted. They set Anne in the snow and got to it.

  Halfway out of his mind from the cold and the shrieking noise of the wind that echoed in his head, he fitted the tip of the prybar beneath the hasp of the padlock, giving it everything he had. Maybe the frigid temperature had somehow fatigued the metal, but the hasp, lock included, snapped from its housing loud as a pistol shot and went spinning off into the storm.

  Forcing down an urge to run, he took hold of the green steel doors and pulled them open. It was no easy matter. A good three feet of snow had drifted against them and he had to fight and yank to get them open.

  The wind howling in his ears, Luke helped Alger get the body inside. Using the flashlight, they navigated through a maze of workrooms and marble corridors, offices, the chapel, then a huge storeroom with sturdy iron shelves running floor to ceiling, triple-tiered, that were packed tight with caskets. There had to have been fifty of them in there with more crowding the floor. Using the light, Luke saw that they were all tagged as to who resided within each box and where their specific burial plots were to be located.

  “Not in here,” Alger said.

  “No,” Luke told him.

  They moved off, the flashlight beam cutting through the darkness, shadows sliding along the walls. Everything echoed in that place. The air was chill, but there was a ghost of some sweet indefinable odor that the cold kept at bay. Luke kept hearing noises…thumps and scratching sounds. It must have been their own sounds coming back at them. He found a stairway leading below. They carried Anne’s corpse down there and found several storage rooms with bodies like Anne’s, all wrapped up like mummies, secreted onto shelves. Truth be told, they were stacked like cordwood, hundreds of them. They were toe-tagged, wound in sheets and blankets and plastic shrouds. Plague victims. It looked like a medieval morgue. A sheet had fallen away from a woman’s face and for a fraction of a second in the flashlight beam, he thought she was looking at him. But it was imagination because her eyes were closed. He was tired, that’s all it was. Just tired.

  “She’s like the others,” Alger said in a low wounded voice. “She don’t look dead.”

  She didn’t, not really. Though she was pale and mottled around the throat, her cheeks were pinched with color, her skin almost luxurious. That’s what Luke saw. But when he looked again, he swore she was different. Her lips had shriveled away from her long teeth, her cheekbones jutting, her eyes sunken. He pulled the sheet back over her face.

  Alger played the light around. They could see hair hanging from beneath shrouds, a few white arms that dangled stiffly in the air. Luke bumped into a small bundle and a child’s cold hand brushed over his own.

  It took all he had not to scream.

  The only reason he didn’t was probably because of Alger. He did not look good. In the flashlight beam, his face was contorted, lips pulled back from gums, eyes huge and glaring and wet. He looked about as near to insanity as anyone Luke had ever seen. If Luke had screamed, he would have, too, and he might not have ever stopped.

  They found a berth for Anne and got out as fast as they could.

  Alger lost it there for a moment and wanted to stay, but Luke dragged him off. And there was a reason for his haste. All those corpses made Luke uneasy, made his flesh crawl, but it was more than that. For just after they berthed Anne, he saw something that made him want to run right out of there.

  The sheet had fallen off that woman’s face again and she was grinning.

  Out into the snow they went. Alger was dragging his ass and Luke was practically pulling him through the drifts. The wind found them, throwing snow and granulated ice in their faces, sending icy fingers down their backs. They had to bow their heads to the gale to move at all. Several times, despite himself, Luke grabbed hold of a tombstone with one hand and Alger with the other and waited out the fiercest gales. More than once, through squinting eyes, he swore he saw figures moving about out in the blowing white death of the graveyard…vague, slumped, indistinct. But he could never be sure.

  Maybe it was imagination.

  Finally, they made it to the pickup. Visibility was down to maybe twenty feet, the headlight beams churning with wind-driven snow. Luke had to drop the plow to cut their way back out. Their tracks coming in were nearly gone. It was an absolute tempest out there, the wipers barely able to clear the snow from the windshield and the truck shook in the wind. As they passed through the picnic grounds Alger said he saw someone standing out there, watching them drive by.

  But there couldn’t have been anyone. Not in that blow.

  When they finally got back from Salem Cross, Luke got Alger into his house and got some whiskey into him, but he wouldn’t say a word. Then when Luke was leaving, he grabbed his arm.

  “Luke…I’m afraid.”

  “It’s all right. The worst is over.”

  But Alger shook his head. “I’m afraid…I’m afraid they’re going to come for me.”

  “Who?”

  But Alger would not say.

  20

  When Luke got home from Alger’s, he checked on Sonja and Megan. Nothing had changed. Except maybe himself. Dee
p inside he was thinking things he did not dare put into words. After an hour spent staring out at the storm, he took two sleeping pills that knocked his lights out for six hours. Somewhere in the night he thought he heard someone knocking at the front door downstairs.

  But it must have been a dream.

  21

  The storm petered out around noon the next day, but the wind still blew in fierce gusts. Luke forced himself to eat some soup and that’s when he heard a rumbling that shook the windows. Trucks were rolling up the street. Olive drab Army vehicles. Armored tacticals and Humvees with a 2.5 ton plow truck out front clearing the way. The trucks stopped and soldiers in white Hazmat gear climbed out. They were all carrying M4s, looking up and down the streets from behind their masks. Luke watched them go from house to house, knocking on doors. Very few opened for them. They didn’t kick any doors in or anything, but that was coming. He knew it was.

  When they knocked on the door, Luke answered it. He was thinking of hiding, pretending no one was home. But there was no point. He’d been getting medicine from the hospital like so many others and he was certain their names were on a list somewhere. The guy who came to the door was a staff sergeant with the Wisconsin National Guard, 32nd Infantry. He wanted to know if there were any dead in the house. They—the Guard—were tasked with collecting bodies.

  “What are they doing with them?” Luke asked.

  “They’re being buried to stop the spread of the germ,” was all he would say.

  Luke pressed him with questions but he was your typical pushbutton military automaton. He knew the sort. He’d spent plenty of time with them when he was in the Marines.

  Buried? This time of year?

  Bullshit.

  The sergeant said they’d be back, but Luke had no intention of opening the door for them again. Sonja and Megan were not dead but if things got desperate enough, he didn’t think such things would matter to the jarheads in charge: they’d just grab anyone that didn’t move fast enough.