by Hamlyn, Jack
The lid did not creak.
And the box was…empty.
Nothing slept away eternity in that silken womb. There was only a depression of a head on the satin pillow.
He shut it.
He checked six of the caskets on the floor and five more on the shelves and every single one was empty as if waiting for an occupant. He knew empty coffins were not stored there, yet he kept clinging to the idea with false hope and rationalization that was worn thin as a wire. By the time he stepped out of the room, his heart was beating faster and sweat was coursing down his spine. His senses were heightened, every muscle flexed and every nerve ending thrumming with electricity.
The fear he felt was leagues beyond simple terror. This was white-hot and burning inside him, drying the spit in his mouth and making his scalp pull tight on the skull beneath.
Those strange sounds kept echoing around…whispering, sighing, now and again something that might have been a moan.
Steeling himself, Luke searched until he found the stairway leading below. He did not hesitate. He went straight down there, the fear thick in his throat like it wanted to suffocate him. His light picked out the storage rooms and what it found in them literally made his flesh crawl.
These rooms had been heaped with the unburied dead before, all of them wound up in shrouds like mummies. The shrouds were still there—heavy white sheets—but there were no bodies. The shrouds were lying on the floor, dangling from the shelves, tossed every which way…as were the toe tags. Hundreds of discarded white sheets cast-off like pupae.
He told himself the answer was simple—the Army had cleaned this place out and the bodies went to the pits.
But would the soldiers bother unwinding each corpse from its respective shroud? Did that make even one shred of sense?
He knew exactly where he had stowed Megan and Sonja. They were gone, too, and for the first time he began to think that the crematory pits might actually be a small mercy in comparison to the alternative.
In the second storage room, the trembling light on his gun picked out something he had overlooked: a single shrouded form pushed back in the corner. It was next to a great heap of sheets so he didn’t see it at first and maybe he didn’t want to see it.
He pulled the corner of the shroud away so he could glimpse what lie beneath.
It was a woman. In his light, Luke saw a sweep of bright red hair which framed a sunken face, the cheekbones jutting almost obscenely. He saw nothing to make him think she was anything other than a corpse and then…in what seemed the blink of an eye…her cheeks looked rosy, her lips full and pink, and her eyes were open, shining and translucent, the pupils gigantic, horribly dilated, the whites shot through with a networking of red veins.
He uttered a cry and let the sheet drop back over her.
Something was happening around him and he knew it. He could feel it like some malefic static charge was building in the air. He could barely breathe. The shadows slithered around him like snakes, coiling and whispering.
He stumbled back towards the doorway, very aware now of those echoing sounds in the mortuary, how stealthy they were as if their makers were playing some grim game of hide-and-go-seek.
Beneath the sheet, the body was moving.
He plainly saw the chest rising and falling with respiration. He heard a smacking sound like moist lips parted.
He ran. Up the stairs and into the corridor, stumbling wildly through those narrow marble hallways, bouncing off walls and falling through doorways, every inch of him electric and pulsing.
Out into the snow finally, casting wild insane looks around him. He pounded through the drifts, the wind at his back picking up sheets of snow and burying him in them. He had almost made the stone wall when something happened which nearly finished him, laying his mind raw and bleeding.
But he saw it.
There was no denying it.
All around him, from that perfect unbroken field of white, he saw gray hands rising from the snow like fingers breaking the mold of graves. Hands thrust from the frozen crust—dozens and dozens of hands like trembling bleached spiders—their gnarled fingers splaying out, twisting, wiggling. The dead began to rise all around him dressed in the icy cerements of the grave, some completely naked or wearing the simple shifts of the autopsy room. Men, women, children. Clots of snow fell from blue-gray pallid faces that were punched through with huge empty eyes. They smiled with crooked, jagged grins, lips pulling back from long white teeth that sparkled in the night.
Luke screamed when they called him by name in their hollow silver voices.
Again, he ran. They moved after him in a ghastly pale throng. The voices got louder and louder as the crowd drifted after him like wraiths free of the tomb, not a one of them ever breaking the snow with their weight.
The wind almost knocked him on his ass as he made it to the truck and reached out for the door, slipping and sliding on the snow-covered ice. That’s when he saw a little boy standing there, his face white as a corpse pulled from a river. Worse, Luke recognized him. It was Pauly Crossik, Jack and Janet’s eight-year old boy who had died from the plague a month before. He stood there in his little burial suit, his eyes glaring a dark blood-red, juicy pink lips pulled back to the gums from gleaming canines. He grinned like a wind-up monkey. “Cold, cold,” he said in a scraping black voice. “I’m so cold, Mr. Barrows.”
“Get away from me,” Luke told him.
But he only drew in closer. “Every night we play in the snow outside your house. Me and Megan. Tonight we’ll come inside and play.”
Luke brought up the shotgun and put the light on him…it seemed not to be reflected, but absorbed until his face was phosphorescent like a newly risen moon. Pauly hissed like a snake, black slime running down his chin, and then Luke pulled the trigger and…Pauly seemed to break apart into a million fragments that sought the wind, found it, became a whirling, screaming cyclone of snow and blackness that danced away off through the tombs.
As Luke jumped into the cab, running hot and cold, he heard a voice out there in that blowing cemetery wind. A voice singing a lullaby and he knew it was Sonja’s, but it was no longer sweet and pure but profane and foul as the screaming wind carried it amongst the leaning headstones.
He nearly got stuck getting out of there, but he rocked the pickup free of a drift and pushed an accumulating wall of snow out of his way with the plow. He had almost made it out of the picnic grounds when he saw someone standing in the middle of the road, her hair blowing out around her, wild and serpent-like, a fiery orange in color that made her graying face look all that much more pallid. It was the woman from the mortuary.
The truck hit her.
It slammed right into her.
But she broke apart like the boy and became a whirling shadow-shape of snow. Luke thought he saw gloating yellow eyes and a grinning red mouth pull off into the storm, but he couldn’t be sure.
When he got home, he was pretty much out of his mind. The front door was open and he charged from room to room, filled with a raging anger at the violation of his home. He knew Sonja had been there and she wanted him to know she had been there. On the living room wall, in what looked like blood was scrawled:
WAIT FOR ME
He screamed his head off, partly out of terror and partly out of hate at what his wife had become. All he could hear was Sonja’s last words to him: Don’t give up…give our deaths meaning and fight…do you hear me? Fight…promise me you will…whatever comes next…promise me…
The dead were coming back. He could no longer deny it, much as his reasoning brain told him he must. Vampirus was more than a germ or a simple virus, it was the seed of evil. He might have laughed at that months before, but he was not laughing now. Because there was no denying it.
It was real.
It was active.
And it was taking the world.
As he stood shivering in his house, which was little better than a grim vault, he knew only one thing for sure. He had
made a promise to his wife and he would keep it. Because now he understood what she had wanted of him and his own mind translated it as such: his job was to kill them.
To kill every last one of them.
35
He was not sure how to think or how to feel anymore.
If the deaths of his wife and daughter turned his world upside down, then what he experienced at the cemetery turned it inside out. He was mired in superstitious dread, sinking deeper all the time, afraid he was going to drown. He couldn’t pretend that it was the mourning and grief that had brought him to this level, stripping the gears of his mind and destroying his ability to reason clearly.
The conversion to faith was a painful process.
All day long his brain tried to convince him that what he saw at Salem Cross was a nightmare series of hallucinations, but he knew better. Yet, his mind would not give up or give in.
C’mon, Luke, it kept saying, you can’t really believe that anyone can possibly rise up again. It’s fucking Medieval believing shit like that. From a medical standpoint it’s impossible and you damn well know it. Death brings about a series of changes that make resurrection a dire impossibility: soft tissues and organs corrupt, gravity pulls blood into the lowest parts of the body and solidifies it, the brain decays to pulp, bacterial action destroys nerve pathways. A corpse, quite literally, drowns in its own rottenness. You know that. You were a medic for godsake. You know there is no such thing as incorruptibility and reanimation. It’s comic book shit.
It all sounded so good.
He might have even believed it if Pauly Crossik hadn’t risen from the grave.
36
That night he listened to the wind howling outside, blowing across the world which was an ugly, sawtoothed cadaver entombed in a seam of gray brittle ice that no thaw would ever touch. Filled with despair and grief, he stared out the window into the moaning black darkness, watching gaunt shadows parade through it in a grim dance macabre. Reality was dead, reason sleeping, dark fantasy and nightmare awake and ravenous like hungry infants in need of night feedings. And through it all, Wakefield slumbered like a corpse in an icy winding sheet.
He was waiting for Sonja to come home.
For the soft tread of his daughter on the porch.
The idea of them coming into the house like a deathly breath of pestilence scared him white inside. Yet, there was exhilaration at the idea. He felt a morbid longing to be wrapped in the arms of his dead wife. He promised her he would fight, but, honestly, he didn’t want to fight anymore. He wanted it to be over with. He wanted the sunless, cold sleep of the undead and the joyless mirth of dancing through snowdrifts at midnight like a silent breath from tombs.
Mostly, he didn’t want to think anymore.
He didn’t want to remember.
He didn’t want to hurt.
He was working his way through his second pot of coffee. He liked it strong and black. Sonja used to say that it was enough to wake the dead. Luke found grim amusement in that now.
He sipped his coffee.
Stared out the window.
Waited.
There was nothing more. He envisioned a world where it would be like this night after night after night, a place where time had ground to a screeching halt and all clock hands were seized at midnight, shadows moving with the whisper of casket silk and Wakefield was a ghost ship bobbing in a dead sea. An unburied casket, lid sprung by white restless fingers, that rested uneasily in the open grave of the country which itself lay dead center of the cemetery that was the world.
There were things happening tonight, but he preferred not to know about them. Earlier, there had been what sounded like a car crash followed by the blaring of a horn. Not too long after there were screams, deathly, hysterical screams that split the night. Not twenty minutes ago, he heard the long, lonely howl of a dog from several streets over. At least, he thought it was a dog. Given what was going on, maybe it was the baying of a wolf. He supposed that would have been more fitting.
He had Sonja’s crucifix.
He didn’t know if it would do any good. Even now, on the brink of the pit, he had no true faith. His agnosticism remained intact. If Sonja or Megan came through the door and told him to toss aside the crucifix like vampires often did in old movies, he would have. He would have done it without a second thought because, God, he was so tired and so very scared. And what terrified him the most was the idea of inheriting a dead world, of being the last man on Earth. It was too horrible to contemplate. He knew there were others, of course, lots of others, but at night when darkness enshrouded the town, it was all too easy to believe that he was the last one.
For months he had fought tooth and nail against the idea of Vampirus being a true vampire plague. What about the others out there? Were there other lost, grim souls out there that were still in denial? He wondered if any of them had a natural immunity to the Red Death as he seemed to.
Sighing, he closed the shades.
He couldn’t stand staring out into the black formless marrow of the night any longer. Too many moving shadows. Sooner or later, he knew, his light would draw one of them in like a beacon and he didn’t dare look them in the face. At least, not until he was stronger. Looking on them would be like looking on Medusa and no man was strong enough for that.
He drank his coffee.
He clutched the wooden stake he had whittled from ash.
And he waited for his wife.
37
What Luke knew about vampires came mainly from watching old movies on rainy Saturday afternoons. After the Vampirus plague got rolling and the stories began to spread and his own wife and daughter fell ill with it, he did something he would never have done before: he went to the library and grabbed a couple books on vampires and superstition. The library was closed by then—the librarians were either sick, dead, or in hiding—but being that he was employed by Public Works, getting the keys had been easy enough.
He found that vampire folklore differed depending on culture, so he concentrated on Central/Eastern European beliefs. A lot of stuff from the old movies was crap as he suspected—there was very little on the erotic vampire thing and not one recorded case of hot vampire women with their cleavage bursting from sheer nightgowns. Folkloric vampires were either walking corpses (and looked like them) or ghosts or a little of both. They were disgusting creatures, from what he read, that stank of the grave. They were often bloated like barrels from their feedings and blood ran freely from any and all orifices. They feared religious objects. They only came out at night. The preferred method of destruction was a stake through the heart (to not only destroy that organ but to pin them into their graves), though alternately you could tear their hearts out and burn them or cremate the entire body. It was a good idea to chop their heads off. Sometimes garlic could be stuffed in their mouths, lips sewn shut. Their coffins could be filled with hawthorn or wild roses, both traditional remedies for the rising of the undead. The coffin could be placed in running water because, according to tradition, witches cannot cross running water because it will dissolve their charms.
How much of any of that was true and how much was absolute bullshit was anyone’s guess.
In his green notebook he wrote: I have to remember they’re not vampires, but Carriers. It sounds so much better, so much more sterile.
38
The day he decided to start killing them, he went down to Shallberg’s Army/Navy Surplus and bought all the MREs they had left which was forty cases of 12 meals each. At three meals a day, it would feed him for over six months. He also picked up a couple Marine K-Bar knives, boots, jackets, gloves, handwarmers, axes, raincoats, a machete, two water purification kits, and even a set of Night Vision goggles. The guy working there—a young kid, face gone pale—was not surprised at any of it. Except for the rain slickers.
“Expecting a downpour?” he asked.
“Things might get wet,” was all Luke would say.
And maybe the kid understood a little bit
better than he was letting on because his eyes had the hunted, trapped look of a cornered animal that knew its last breath was not very far away.
After that, he drove to Home Depot on the highway. What customers were in the aisles were pale and listless, wearing sunglasses, their hoods zipped up tight as if they wanted to minimize the exposure of sunlight or UV on their skin. They did not take their gloves off even inside. Not everyone was like that. Luke saw others like himself that were stockpiling. The way things were going, in a week or so, he figured, you could walk into Home Depot or any other store in town and take anything you wanted. There wouldn’t be anybody left to stop you.
But that day, the day he began killing them, even the cashiers were listless, pale things.
He used his VISA card because he had a pretty good feeling that with the way things were going he’d never have to pay a cent of it. So he bought flashlights, lanterns, bottled water, candles, lantern fluid, and something called a Legacy Seeds Bucket which had 23 different types of vegetable seeds so you could grow your own self-supporting garden. He grabbed two of those. He also picked-up a 6,500 watt Honda generator—the last in stock—which could provide all the juice he’d ever need when the lights finally went out.
And it was there, filling the bottom of the cart with flashlight batteries, that he ran into Stephani Kutak.
Good old Steph.
Back in high school, he used to copy her papers in 10th grade algebra and she his in World Geography. The best thing about seeing her was that she looked healthy, untainted by the germ. Her cheeks had color, her lips were full and pink, her eyes burning with that green fire that had turned so many heads. But there was fear in those eyes and a tenseness around the mouth.