by Hamlyn, Jack
The doorknob jiggled.
With one aged, palsied hand he reached out for the stake, the crucifix, praying out loudly in his head to a God he was not even certain he believed in. The door swung open and in the thin moonlight he saw a hand that was bleached white with fingers like pale ribbons of dusty gauze.
It was Sonja.
She entered the room like a cluster of shadows, standing there at the foot of the bed, white and rising like a Welsh corpse candle, something molded from colorless wax. He could hear her breathing and it was a long, low sibilance like wind through a cornfield. He could see her eyes and they were glossy red.
And she was younger.
She had been thirty-three years old when the plague claimed her, but now she looked like a woman of twenty, having rejuvenated herself on the hot blood of innocents. Her blonde hair was shining over her shoulder with captured moonlight, her cheekbones high, her complexion flawless. Her mouth was red, the lips swollen, the teeth behind them perfectly white. Her eyes were not red at all now but that same electric shade of blue that had always made him feel weak in the knees.
“Come to bed,” he heard his voice say, knowing he wanted her like he had never wanted her before.
Wordlessly, she slipped beneath the sheets next to him and he looked into her face and nearly screamed. She was not beautiful. Her milky white complexion was almost phosphorescent like glowing corpse-gas rising from a grave. It was set with the scars and punctures of the Red Death. She looked like a living marble obelisk, a stone graveyard angel webbed by white threads. Her breath was ice-cold with the sickly-sweet smell of mortuary perfume, her eyes blood-red and translucent and filled with a shocking vulpine hunger. She was grinning, lips pulled back from graying gums, upper incisors grown long and gnarled and yellow.
As she reached out to snare him with splintered black nails, Luke threw himself to the floor, realizing he’d already dropped the crucifix and now clutched only the stake.
“My darling,” Sonja said in raw, ragged voice that sounded like her throat was filled with wet leaves.
She was under the sheets, worming forward like some human slug, getting closer, rising up now like a wraith from a burial ground, covered in the sheet which she wore like a shroud.
Luke ran at the door and hit it, knocking himself down and nearly out as he heard the slow rustling behind him. The door was closed. It had never been opened: his wife had slid between the door and jamb as only her kind could. He gripped the doorknob and threw the door open and stumbled out into the hallway.
“Wait for me, my love. Wait for me.”
Hysterical and nearly mad, he moved down the steps, his brain raging with echoing noise, his feet clumsy and slow as though he were stuck in a dream. It was as if he were moving sluggishly through tidal currents, fighting his way down with every step.
He looked back once and only once.
Sonja was coming down the steps in her shroud. It was billowing around her like it was filled with October wind, rustling and flapping. She didn’t seem to be so much walking down towards him as drifting. A malignant ghost in search of a throat to batten onto.
Megan was waiting there for him at the bottom.
She was still wearing the nightgown from her deathbed…except it was stained with gore and drainage. Dried whorls and splotches of blood were crusted on her chin and splashed up on her cheeks accentuating her corpse-white skin. Her eyes were like luminous pale green wicks floating in oil, her teeth gray and sharp.
“Daddy, do you want to play with me?”
“GET OUT!” he shouted. “GET OUT OF MY HOUSE! YOU DON’T BELONG HERE ANYMORE!”
In his stocking feet, he ran from the house and fell into the snow. Dressed only in jogging pants and a T-shirt, he knew he wouldn’t last. He saw his truck in the driveway. His keys were in it as they were always in it, something Sonja had warned him about and something he had ignored. He jumped in the cab and turned it over. Sonja and Megan were looking in through the driver’s side window. The truck stalled twice in the driveway with the cold, but then he got it in gear and four-wheel drive and pulled away down the street.
By then, they were in the street: his neighbors, those that had died and not gone into the burning pits. Alger was there with Anne whose eyes were huge and glowering. Her laughter was like broken glass ground into concrete.
Luke drove through town and out to the main highway which had been plowed. He drove until dawn. Sometime later, he came home and there was no evidence that his wife and daughter had come in the night. He went out to the holding tomb at Salem Cross where he had put their bodies, but they were gone.
46
An infection, he got to thinking, that’s what this is: an infection. Like a malignancy invading the body and taking it cell by cell only the body in this case is the town and its cells are people.
Yes, it made sense, his analogy held true.
The infection was spreading and something had to be done before Wakefield was nothing but a diseased mass. He figured that if he could get together enough survivors, they might just have a chance. They could go neighborhood to neighborhood eradicating the dead like unsightly weeds, yanking them up by their black roots, dragging them out into the sunlight and staking them when there was no alternative. Billy McCready would help. Stubby might, too, and maybe Cliff Corbett. There had to be lots of others who’d stand with him and fight.
He’d start with Cliff.
Luke was actually feeling very positive about things for the first time in many weeks when he knocked at Cliff’s door. There was a chance now. Just a chance, but it was better than nothing. With a lot of hard—and grisly—work, they might just be able to save the town. Maybe Billy could get the National Guard involved. Maybe, maybe. Each day that passed, he knew, Wakefield inched closer to its grave and got that much nearer to the point of no return. There were many cities and towns out there that were graveyards now. If they didn’t act and act fast, Wakefield would be one, too.
He knocked on Cliff’s door and there was no response.
He pounded and hammered on it. C’mon, goddammit, Cliff, this is important.
The only sound inside was Bob, Cliff’s Border Collie, barking his head off. Barking? No, Bob was going absolutely berserk in there. Luke had never heard him carry on like that. Bob was easy going, good natured, and quiet. He rarely barked unless he was really excited and that was usually when somebody stopped by for a visit and he felt the need to herald their approach with great tail-wagging joy.
Shit.
Luke tried the door and it was open. That wasn’t necessarily a bad sign, but it wasn’t a particularly good one either. He let himself in cautiously. Even though Bob was a good dog and they had become pals through the years, he was still a dog and he sounded pretty wild and frantic and he might decide to defend his territory.
“Cliff?” Luke called out. “Cliff? It’s Luke from down the block.” Even Bob had stopped barking now. The silence was heavy. “Cliff?”
He edged his way further in, looking in the living room and seeing nothing…nothing but Bob peering from behind the couch with hackles raised and teeth bared. He looked as vicious as any animal Luke had ever seen.
“Bob…easy now,” he said.
The dog cocked his head, whimpered and came slinking over with his tail tucked between his legs, his head held low. Luke went down on his knees. “It’s okay, Bob, you know me. I’m a friend.” For a moment there he thought Bob had gone rabid, but it wasn’t that at all. Bob came over to him, friendly as ever, putting his paws up on Luke’s shoulder and peering at him with sad eyes. He continued to whimper and Luke knew without a doubt that he had been through something awful, that he was in fact sobbing out the depths of despair in his canine soul.
“It’s okay, Bob. You’re with me now,” he said, nearly choking up on his own words. “It’s okay, it’s all right. We’ll take care of each other.”
After he had soothed Bob a bit, he left him in the living room and went to look
for Cliff. Bob did not follow him, which was very unusual. He had the feeling that Bob would not have come with him even if he tried to drag him along. That dog was frightened. Something had happened and it had terrified him. Luke could just about imagine what that might have been.
The door to Cliff’s bedroom was shut. There were deep scratches in the panel. Bob, apparently, had been trying real hard to get in there. Luke opened it and felt the cold right away. Even the door itself was cold. And with good reason: the window was open.
Cliff was on the bed.
Luke heard Bob finally come down the hallway but he would not approach the bedroom. He stayed in the hallway and barked.
Cliff was fully clothed. Blood was soaked into the mattress and sprayed over the face of the dresser. Droplets of it had coagulated on the headboard. He had been bled white, his throat torn right open. There was no doubt that he was a corpse. His violation had been no subtle midnight sip at the throat, but a devastating and violent bestial attack.
First Nicole, now Cliff.
Nicole said Anne was standing outside in the snow calling to her. She said she was in her room at night, standing over her.
Yes, he could remember Cliff telling him that in the driveway that day. Nicole had gone into the burning pits, so it wasn’t she that had come for her husband. It was easy enough to put together, of course. Anne had come to the window and he had let her in. By then it was too late for him. Far too late. Anne had attacked with fury, emptying him like a fucking cup. She practically swam in his blood. All the while, Bob must have been outside the door hearing his master being killed and going ape shit because he could not get in to protect him.
You gotta find Anne. If you get no others, you have to destroy her.
He went over to the window and saw a bloody handprint on the sill. He pulled the window closed for all the good it did. Bob was moaning out in the hallway now. He knew his master was dead. He had known last night. Luke went over and stood by the bed. Anne had left her calling card: a dozen or so dead flies.
As Luke looked closer, he saw that Cliff’s mouth was filled with them.
Though it appalled him to do so, he pried open Cliff’s cold mouth with his fingers. Even with his gloves on, he could feel the chill coming off him. He turned his head to the side and flies fell out of his mouth.
He was as white as the proverbial sheet. Luke saw no signs of the Red Death—no sores or open pustules, no self-inflicted scratches or cuts, just that bitten-out throat. He had been healthy. Maybe like Luke himself, he was somehow immune to Vampirus. Anne had fixed that, of course. The only question was: would an immune victim stay dead or would the virus—if virus it was—reanimate him?
Luke was no coroner, but he had seen his share of corpses in the Gulf War. If he had to guess, he would have said Cliff had been dead at least eight hours. If that were the case—and the dried blood attested to that, it would take more than a couple hours to dry up that much of it—then he knew from his medical training that rigor should have set in by now. In three or four hours it became very noticeable and by eight or ten the limbs were board-stiff.
Cliff’s limbs were loose and floppy. It wasn’t a good sign.
Luke went over and dropped himself into a chair in the corner.
Goddamn Anne.
Goddamn fucking leech.
He wondered how many others in the neighborhood she had drained. He wondered, not for the first time, if she had gotten Megan and Sonja. They both had the germ, no doubt of it, but he had the darkest feeling that Anne had helped things along. True, he had never seen any bite marks, but that didn’t mean they weren’t there. It was quite possible, given his state of mind and the state of his overwhelming denial, that he had purposely not looked for them. He couldn’t be sure. He never really examined their throats or their wrists and he wondered if that was negligence on his part or something deeper, some subconscious drive that did not want him to see.
As he sat there, he thought about Anne.
She had been a very good, patient person and just about everyone in the neighborhood had wondered what in the hell she was doing with Alger who was considered a right pain in the ass. But Anne had loved him and he had loved her in his own way. Though Alger was pretty average, possibly even dowdy as far as looks went, his balding pate and glasses giving him the look of a stressed-out accountant or middle management type, Anne was nearly striking. She was tall, thin, heavy-breasted, her lips seductively full and her eyes a beautiful violet. She might have been a knock-out if she dressed for it and put some make-up on to accentuate what she already had, but things like that didn’t interest her. She spent most of her summer days in her garden dressed in baggy shirts and jeans, her pale orange hair pulled back into a ponytail. If she were aware of her looks, you would never have guessed it.
Luke had liked Anne.
She was very friendly, very funny with a perpetual sarcastic dry wit, and also very smart. She had a Masters Degree in education, but she wasn’t much interested in the halls of academia, preferring a part-time position as a substitute teacher. She couldn’t have children and was okay with it, applying her mothering skills to her garden. She had an amazing mathematical brain and could solve the most difficult anagrams and Sodoku puzzles in a matter of minutes as well as doing six-digit long division in her head.
That’s essentially who Anne Stericki was.
What she had become now, Luke figured, was anyone’s guess. If she woke from the sleep of death with her faculties intact, or even partially so, she was going to be a very methodical and dangerous vampire. Maybe some of the others were nothing but walking appetites, but she would be more in the Dracula category: an apex predator, cunning and vicious with a love of sport and mind games.
She would not be easy to locate, but somehow he had to find her.
But that brought Luke back to the matter at hand: Cliff Corbett and what he was going to do about him. If there were any chance he would rise, then Luke would have to destroy him. Yet, the idea of unnecessarily desecrating a corpse did not sit on him well. He was still too human for that, too hamstrung by moralities and ethics.
Which left only one possibility.
If he really wanted to know if Cliff was going to become a Carrier, then there really was only one way to find out.
47
It was suicidal, of course.
It was a downright stupid idea.
But if he wanted to fight them, then he would need to understand them. Know your enemy and all that, he figured. Basic Marine Corps knowledge he’d had shoved down his throat and packed up his ass at Parris Island.
He grabbed a couple cans of Alpo for Bob and a bag of dry food and they went over to his house. Bob stuck close to him, eyeing the houses in the neighborhood warily. When they got there, he refused to eat until he scoped out each and every room. He got very nervous at the closed door to Megan’s room and absolutely skittish around Luke’s bedroom.
He knows, Luke thought. He knows they’ve been here. He can smell or sense the undead even when they haven’t been somewhere for days. Their comings and goings might be mysterious to humans with their limited senses, but they can’t fool a dog. I bet with some training, Bob could sniff every last one out.
Bob scratched at the cellar door.
He would not settle down without a trip down there. By that point, Luke trusted in the dog’s sniffer quite completely. If Bob wanted to cast for scent in the basement, then so be it. He clicked on the lights and Bob led the way down, pausing at the bottom of the steps and sniffing around. Luke let him do his thing. He went into the junk room and nosed about at the old coats hanging there, boxes of stuff Sonja had been packing away for Goodwill—Megan’s old things—and boxes of Halloween decorations that Luke had put away not that long ago. He investigated the Christmas decorations that had never gone up this year and would never go up again. He found a purple inflatable ball that had belonged to Megan and he gave it a nudge with his nose, watching it roll across the floor.
To Luke, it was the most singularly haunting thing he had ever seen. It was as if Bob had picked up her scent, recognized that she was now gone. He would not play with the ball even though Luke knew he was crazy about playing with any ball. Luke remembered throwing it around with Megan in the backyard and the memory was like a knife in his guts.
Stop it, just stop it. You can’t keep tormenting yourself with the memory of her.
But it was not so easy. She lived in his heart and his absolute love for her made him silently bleed every day. Dear God, my baby, my sweet angel. He had to lean against the wall as emotion overcame him. Bob sensed it right away and came over, nudging him with his cold nose, his eyes huge and sad. Together, they shared pain that was beyond words.
Enough.
The hunt was resumed.
Bob sniffed around by the woodstove, was intrigued by something in the woodpile, probably the scent of a long-dead mouse. He lost interest in that and checked out the bar and stools, the ping-pong table, the dartball boards that had belonged to Sonja’s grandmother. Nothing of interest there either. His sniffer led him to the utility room and he checked out the hot water boiler and water heater, the washer and dryer and stationary tub.
It hurt to be in there and Luke had purposely avoided the room since the death of Megan and Sonja. He had dropped their clothes and bedding down the laundry chute and there they were on the floor. Emotion seized him again and he fought it away. Strange. There was Megan’s Barbie comforter, fitted sheet, and pillow case…but the flat sheet was missing. Though it hurt him to do so, he knelt down and looked through the laundry, most of which belonged to his dead wife and daughter.
The flat sheet was not there.
But he knew he had dropped it down the laundry chute. Bob sniffed around at the things Luke looked at it. He made a sound in his throat and he was off again, nose close to the floor. He followed the scent through the cellar to the old furnace room where a forced-air furnace had once brooded. There was nothing in there now. Bob went right to the door and began pawing, making a low whimpering in his throat.