Vampirus (Book 1)

by Hamlyn, Jack

  Good God. Body wagons. Siege mentality. It was fucking Medieval.

  22

  Megan was slipping away.

  Lying in her bed, she looked like a skeleton covered in the thinnest veneer of flesh. She was pallid, her skin a waxy, colorless membrane. It took real effort for her to draw in a breath. Luke couldn’t get any food into her. He didn’t know what the hell to do. How was a man supposed to sit there while his daughter died a slow, lingering death? How was he supposed to go on and face the days to come with such memories and such horrible guilt?

  He held her hand for over two hours, just watching her. Her flesh was hot and moist to the touch. She trembled and cried out now and again with dreams. All he really could do was hold onto her as he sat there in her room which was a womb of memories while tears rolled down his face and struck the back of his hand. There were posters of Tinkerbell and iCarly on the walls, Junie Jones paperbacks spilling from the bookshelf, Baby-So-Real and Littlest Petshop toys in the corner, abandoned. He could remember good times that made his heart ache and his soul bleed: reading to Megan before bed when she was smaller, Fox in Sox and Ten Apples up on Top and In a People House. He would make up crazy voices for all the characters and she would laugh and laugh, fresh from the tub with that sweet baby shampoo smell to her. Then they’d turn off the lights and he’d cozy her, making up crazy stories until Sonja would come up the stairs and say, all right, Luke, she needs to get to sleep. And sometimes by then he was already asleep himself, holding his daughter, warm and content with the love of her.

  Seven-years old. Seven fucking years old.

  And dying.

  Dying.

  His guts were being ripped out and he didn’t know what to do, God help him, but he did not know what to do. Sometimes he couldn’t stop crying and other times, there were no tears left.

  She woke around two in the afternoon for a few moments, putting her blue eyes on him. Those eyes had been brilliant as a summer sky not a month ago but were now worn, glazed, used up. He could literally hear his heart breaking.

  “I see him in the corner, daddy,” she said.

  Luke wiped the tears away, because he had to be strong. “Who, baby? Who do you see?”

  She stared off into space. “The man, the man. He was standing in the corner the other day…now he’s at the end of the bed. He keeps getting closer. I’m afraid.”

  There was no one there. It was a fever dream, a hallucination. That’s all it was and all it could be. He had to keep telling himself that. He could not read too much into it or let himself start believing that the Angel of Death had come for his little girl.

  There’s limits. Limits to what I’m willing to accept and I can’t accept that, because if I did, if I did…

  Megan closed her eyes after that.

  He was doubtful she would ever open them again.

  He could almost feel the icy shadow of what waited for her lying over the bed, growing longer, closer, darker with intent. The knowledge of which made him want to lay his wrists open.

  23

  Peggy sent him another YouTube video.

  It was called “The Walking Dead of Whisper Lake.”

  This one showed a bunch of people walking through a nighttime snowstorm in some little decimated town in Utah. It was captured by an automated night vision device that was similar to the NVDs he himself had used in the Gulf. The picture was green and pretty grainy, but there was no getting around one thing: many of the people in it were naked. Naked in the snow, marching along with their heads cocked weirdly to the side like they were listening for something. It gave him the shivers. There was something very creepy, very strange about them.

  He watched it three times in a row and it must’ve been a trick of the light or some kind of digital encoding error, but at times many of them faded into the shadows or shifted from shadows into people. The ending was the killer, though: they all stopped, turned and stared at the camera. Then, one by one, they just faded away and were gone. Then the image of the street whirled about like the camera was being violently jostled. And right at that point, there was one quick, fleeting glimpse of what looked like the face of a teenage girl—part of it anyway. Luke saw hair hanging and a single eye that was very black and shiny like something from a Japanese horror flick. Then the feed went dead.

  It was the eye that haunted him.

  He freeze-framed it and just stared at it while his skin crawled.

  Never had he seen such a blank, soulless eye in his life. It was like staring into the eye of a stuffed elk.

  24

  Megan died on the morning of December 17th.

  She died in Luke’s arms.

  She was trembling badly and he held her, clutching her thin disease-wracked body to his own as if his own strength and health might shield her. But it did not. At the end she opened her eyes and looked into his face. There was pain in those eyes, pain and horror and confusion…yes, certainly confusion because he was her daddy and he had always chased away the night terrors, any fears she had or threats to her well being. But now…at the end…when she needed him to protect her this one last most important time, he was impotent. He was weak. He could not fight off the death that was taking her and laughing coldly in his face. He could not save his little girl and that’s how a great and necessary part of him died with her, leaving him soft and helpless, less than a man in the final analysis.

  Megan reached out and brushed his cheek with her cold little fingers as if to comfort him, as if she knew this was something that not even he could fight. She trembled one last time and died staring up at him.

  His baby was gone.

  His heart was frozen, stopped dead.

  He could not let go of her for hours.

  All that was left was a cheated hatred, an angry remorse colored by guilt and framed in grief. He lived after that day, but he was never truly alive again.

  25

  Two days later, he still could not straighten out his head.

  He could not get a grip on reality.

  He could not sleep.

  He could not eat.

  The world had a grim gray sameness that matched the color of his soul and he could only lay on Megan’s bed and cry. The pillow and blankets smelled like her, and the loss of his angel made him shake and cry out, his eyes red and wet and bleeding.

  He heard Sonja wake up in the late, late afternoon and he stumbled to her side, doing his best to pretend nothing was wrong, that their child had not died, that there was not a great empty hole eaten through him. Sonja was barely holding on. She did not need the shock. It would kill her. Megan had been the only thing she was staying alive for, the only thing that gave her misery meaning.

  Sonja’s hand was cool and soft to the touch.

  Luke held onto it and he could almost feel the last threads of life fighting beneath the skin, weakening, fraying. Her eyes were upturned, almost Asian, the most perfect blue he had ever seen, a soft powder blue. A gift from her Austrian grandmother that was passed down to Megan. Those eyes had owned him from the first time he had looked into them.

  And when he looked into them that day, there was still an intensity to them he could not deny. Please, oh God please, Sonja, don’t make me tell you, don’t make me put the pain into words—

  “Luke,” she said, her breath rustling in her throat. “Tell me about Megan. How…how is she?”

  The lie that came unbidden from his panicked mind was too big to fit through his mouth and came out fragmented in bits and pieces: “Fine…she’s…yes…doing better…fine, I think…I mean…”

  A single sparkling tear fell from Sonja’s left eye and ran down her cheek. He could see a devastating shadow pass over her face: she knew. “She’s gone, isn’t she? My baby is gone?”

  He couldn’t keep the act up; he simply didn’t have the strength. He buried his face in her soft wheat-colored hair and sobbed. It all came out of him and he was helpless to stop it. Dear God, his wife was on her deathbed and here he was pull
ing the last threadbare rug out from beneath her. She held him and they cried together, cried for the loss of their perfect angel. He did not let go and Sonja would not let him.

  “You have to go on, Luke,” she said. “There are things that need doing and you have to do them.”

  “I can’t…I can’t live like this,” he sobbed. “I’m not strong enough…I’m sorry, but I’m just not strong enough.”

  She trembled with a subtle whimpering. “Yes, you are. Don’t give up…give our deaths meaning and fight…do you hear me? Fight…promise me you will…whatever comes next…promise me…”

  He promised and she held onto him and stroked his head as she had done in other bad moments. Even a month in a sickbed could not sully her, for she still smelled as she had the first time he held her—like a fresh summer wind blown through fields of hollyhocks and wildflowers. As weak as she was, she hummed a melancholy song into his ear as her grandmother had once done for her. It was a traditional Austrian lullaby that Sonja used to sing to Megan when she was sick or scared at night. It was called Schlaf, Kindlein, Schlaf:

  “Sleep, baby, sleep.

  Your father tends the sheep.

  Your mother shakes the branches small,

  Lovely dreams in showers fall.

  Sleep, baby, sleep.”

  And as the humming faded, so did Sonja. She went limp in his arms, gasping out a final, despairing breath. And that was how she died. He held her, needing more than ever to be connected to her. He kissed her cheeks, her hair. When he set her down he screamed at the top of his lungs, hating a god who could allow something like this to come to pass.

  His wife and daughter were gone.

  They were his strength, his blood, his wine and bread and he was never, ever hungry.

  Now he would starve.

  Now he would stuff himself on a banquet of guilt and cold, ugly hatred.

  26

  He took Sonja out to Salem Cross and found a place for her next to Megan. Though he was not a religious man—and what hope in a just and caring god that might have existed within him was now extinguished—Sonja had been a Lutheran as were all her people and she never missed a Sunday. So he read the 23rd Psalm over his wife and daughter, first in English and then in German as Sonja would have wanted it…even though his German left something to be desired.

  But he did his best.

  He took her body out there in broad daylight. No one tried to stop what he did and he would have hurt them if they had. But there was no need because not only was no one around out at The Cross, the rest of the town was just about as dead. Luke saw one car pulling into a driveway and a pickup truck loaded with furniture high-tailing it out of town.

  Run, go ahead and run, it’s the same all over, you idiot.

  He saw a guy snowblowing a sidewalk and a couple people bundled up in parkas chatting in a little group on Main. But that was it.

  Wakefield was about three inches from the grave and a foot from Hell, the way he was figuring things.

  After his little service at Holy Cross, he drove the streets in something of a daze, badly wanting to find his center but having no idea where it might be located.

  It was hard to believe that a year ago the Christmas season was in full bloom and the streets were busy with shoppers and money was changing hands and Salvation Army Santas were collecting donations in little red buckets on the street corners. And it was even harder to believe that his girls were alive then and they had a tree up and presents wrapped. God, Megan had been so excited. Before she was born, Christmas had kind of lost its sparkle for him, but Megan brought it all back. And then some.

  Twelve months ago the house was filled with hope and laughter, Sonja was playing Christmas music all day long, baking cookies, and Megan was writing letters to Santa and his own existence had some meaning.

  Now there was nothing, so he went home and got drunk, passing out in Sonja’s rocker by the window.

  Long after midnight, he was jarred from his sleep by something, which must have been a dream. His eyes opened for a moment or two. The night was quiet. Godawful quiet. Like waking in a vacuum.

  What? What did I hear?

  Winter brought a drawn-out silver stillness to the night that could not be replicated any other time of the year. A cool silence when the wind stopped blowing and the world was cold and hollow, suspended and breathless. The only light was the light of the moon playing off the snow and the dancing hellfire of the Auroras at the horizon. The only movement was the subtle shadow-play of iced tree limbs on a moonlit wall.

  That’s what it was like when he woke: a deathly, almost unnatural stillness.

  He blinked the sleep from his eyes, trying to swallow down something like a black bubble of dread in his throat. His skin was cold and hot. He was sweating and shivering and then he knew why: because he heard it again. So close it went up his spine like fingernails and so distant it sounded like it was echoing up from vast tomblike silences.

  Singing.

  A sweet and mournful singing that was beautiful and sad. Through the picture window he thought—for one fraction of a moment—he saw a narrow shadow standing beneath the oak tree in the front yard, but when he blinked it was gone.

  It must have been a dream or a nightmare.

  That’s all he could tell himself the next morning, because ever since Megan and Sonja passed away God knew he’d been having crazy fever dreams about eyes staring at him, bright shining eyes outside the window. So it had been a dream. He even went out in the front yard to check when the sun was up, but there were no footprints beneath the tree. The snow was undisturbed.

  It could not have been real, any of it.

  Who would be singing out there in the dead of night?

  It made no sense and, maybe, it made all the sense in the world. For the one thing he would not and could not admit to himself was that he recognized that soft and windy voice.

  It had been Sonja’s.

  27

  The frosty perfection of a winter morning sky—boundless, endless, lathered white with clouds—dirtied and made imperfect, smudged with soot, stained by two rising plumes of smog that gathered, hanging over the town, an enshrouding smoke ghost flaking away into a black rain of crematory ash that fell over field, farm, and outskirt.

  That’s what you could see from any vantage point in Wakefield: the smoke from the burning pits and corpse factories rising up like the filth from foundry stacks. The snow and reduced visibility of the past few weeks had concealed it but now that mask was removed like Poe’s Red Death and everyone who looked up could see the bleak and forbidding Grim Reaper visage growing in the sky.

  It looks like an omen, a really bad one, Luke thought upon seeing it.

  Alger said the Army was doing the burning out at the old dump on Hollow Creek Road. Luke decided it was worth investigating. The house was like a tomb without the girls. For so long he’d been taking care of them, seeing to their needs by the hour, and now that they were gone his life was an absolute sullen emptiness punctuated only by the ticking of the clock.

  Maybe he needed to see the pits.

  Maybe it would ground him to the unpleasant reality of his new world because Alger had been right about one thing: he was out of touch.

  Hollow Creek Road had been carefully plowed and was rutted from the passage of heavy trucks. The closer he got, the more the fields and wooded white hills were speckled with dark ash. When he was a quarter mile from the dump, he pulled off into the trees where the wind had worn the snow down to a few scarce inches and yellow slivers of grass poked out.

  As he climbed through the scrub and pines, the ash lying over the snow got heavier, darker, and he could almost feel its grit on his tongue and in his throat. The rising black towers of smoke were like pillars in the sky and the soot high above blocked out what there was of the sun, casting long black shadows over the white drifts. Now and again the wind would change direction and bring an acrid stench of burning bodies that nearly put him to his knees
.

  Keeping a lookout for soldiers, feeling like a commando sneaking into enemy territory, he approached the dump from the west, through crowded stands of maple, hemlock, and juniper. When he was a hundred feet from the dump boundary, the snow was no longer white. It was gray stove ash and fireplace soot speckled with black fragments that might have been bits of charred bone.

  There was still time to go back, but he was going to see it through.

  Ahead was a wooded rise. The pit would be on the other side. Half way up, using saplings to pull him forward through the dirty snow, a furnace-hot blast of air hit him dead in the face and he almost went over.

  Jesus, that stink, that horrible stink.

  In his mind, it smelled like burning hair and burnt chicken and blood boiled to steam. Gagging, he pulled himself up all the way and peered through the treeline, keeping himself in the shadows of the heavy brush.

  The pit.

  It was easily fifty feet deep and stretched for over two hundred yards in a jagged gully like some horrible festering wound cut deep into the flesh of the earth. Down there were green Army bulldozers and front-end loaders, excavators and dump trucks and fuel tankers all parked amongst camouflaged shacks and trailers in a wide clearing where the snow had been scraped back in mounded hills. Two roads—one in and one out—led back to Hollow Creek.

  The heat and stink made his eyes water and his nose burn. The heat had melted much of the snow on the hillsides and the trees were draped with icicles from the constant melting and refreezing. The soldiers below were wearing Hazmat suits and gas masks. And the pit itself…good God…forever burning and blazing like a coke oven, all that twisted-up, stick-thin cordwood and kindling smoldering and popping in the flames.

  This was the corpse factory.

  This was the plague pit.

  The human pyre.

  Luke had to stick his face in the snow now and again to breathe clean air when the wind shifted and the stink and gritty black smoke came blowing right up at him. He watched dump trucks emptying loads of corpses onto the hardpack. The dozers shoved them into the pits and then the fuel trucks hosed them down with hi-test and the flames came mushrooming up in seething hot fireballs that singed his eyebrows and the heavy growth of beard at his chin.