by Hamlyn, Jack
Megan and Sonja had not come since that night. He supposed when he had told them to get out of his house he had revoked any invitation they had.
He thought about that one a lot: the invitation.
He’d come to the conclusion that he could never know the exact mechanism behind such a thing but that it must have had something to do with the very nature of evil itself. Evil was much stronger, much more complete, when you damned yourself and took an active role in your own horrid desecration.
That’s how he figured it.
Them charging into your house would be somehow anticlimactic to the evil that drove them on; it was much more satisfying if you invited them in and took part in your own violation. Then they not only got your blood, but they siphoned off your soul.
All of which brought up yet another point he spent a lot of time thinking about.
Religious objects.
Crosses and the like were supposed to drive them off. He had tested it more than once. Sometimes, it actually worked. But he was of the mind that it was probably something psychological, something very tenacious in their human makeup that survived death in the dark vacuums of their minds. The ones that were frightened of the cross were probably Christians in life and maybe they were frightened because something in them told them they must be. On the other hand, agnostics and atheists could care less what you waved in their faces, you were prey.
Maybe the ones that were religious in life actually believed themselves to be tools of Satan.
He didn’t know and would never know, he hoped.
He had never been a religious man and religion in general, like politics, was something he steered clear of. Everyone had a different opinion and they hotly contested one another’s views in an effort to reinforce their own. That’s why he stepped around such matters, happily agnostic, which meant he was realistic in that he did not have all the answers and he was pretty sure he wouldn’t find them in any church.
Years before, his old man had said to him, “See, son? The Muslims don’t like the Christians and the Christians don’t like the Jews. Always been that way. Nobody can agree on who or what God is or isn’t. Even among Christians, the Catholics and Protestants can’t get along and the Baptists can’t stand either of them and the Methodists just shake their heads and sigh and all the crazy fundamentalist Bible thumpers think they’re all gonna burn in hell. And if that ain’t bad enough, the Muslims think all Christians are Devil worshippers. That’s why I don’t go to church—they ever manage to agree on something, I’ll be the first in line. Until then, what I believe and what I don’t will stay right inside my own mind where it belongs.”
But after the plague sacked the world, Luke began to give it all some serious consideration.
He had to.
He honestly believed there was a universal good just as he believed there was a universal evil, but what form these might take no man could know and no man had ever known. The plague germ was evil, he believed. It was much more than a mere microbe, but something ancient and possibly sentient from some black cosmic gutter of time and space that was contaminating this world as it had probably contaminated countless others.
That was all he knew and all he could know.
But back to the Carriers themselves. He had a vague understanding—right or wrong—of the religious objects, but as to whether any of the other traditional remedies were effective, he didn’t know. The old tales said they could not cross running water, that they could be repelled by wild roses and hawthorn, garlic and holy water. He had not tested any of these. But there was no doubting that they could not go out during the daytime and that a stake through the heart would destroy them. At night they were indestructible, capable of things that seemed supernatural; but during the day, just corpses, nothing more. Repellent, but essentially harmless.
But come sundown…
He sighed, knowing deep in his heart that he really knew absolutely nothing.
The only thing he did know was how to kill them.
He had gotten very good at that.
57
Another day: house to house to house, rooting them out, dragging them from their hiding places and doing what had to be done to contain the contagion. It was gory and disgusting work on a good day and the sort of thing that would tear a healthy mind open wide in a glistening cleft on a bad one. For Luke, there were very few good ones. Day after day was the same: cruising around the city on his LX, neighborhood to neighborhood, seeking them out and scribbling it all down in his battered green notebook—total kills, addresses, where they were found, anything unusual that might be pertinent.
It wasn’t much of a life, but in the wake of the plague vengeance was all he had.
Every week he spent two days doing no hunting. There were other things that required his attention—sharpening stakes on the lathe, cutting kindling in the garage for the woodstove, maintenance on the truck and snowmobile, inventory of supplies. To continue the hunt he had to survive and all the things he’d once taken for granted—and had been supplied by society for a price—he now had to get on his own.
He figured it would all be easier once spring came and the snows melted. The Carriers were taking full advantage of the heavy snow and burrowing down into it during the day and there was no way in hell he could go around poking every drift and snowbank.
Come spring, their hiding places would be limited.
And Luke was already considering a program of selective house burning to drive them out of their holes when the time came.
By ten a.m. that day he’d staked two and tossed another out into the snow and it had been pretty easy for the most part. Then, touring through the Grove on Wakefield’s west side, he came to a little brick ranch and pulled into the yard. He killed the engine on the sled and grabbed his duffel of equipment. Bob was barking his head off. Not so much as a path was shoveled to the door so that was a good indication that nothing human lived there. The Carriers were like ghosts…they did not leave footprints.
Just to be sure, Luke pounded on the door before popping it open with his crowbar. Inside, another house sitting silent waiting for a family that would never return. Other than that, just the dirty low stink of the undead which he had come to know instinctively: damp decay and sweet fermentation like ancient wine gone bad.
They were here.
Bob growled in his throat in confirmation.
It was never easy going through houses knowing they had been fine homes once. Room to room, seeing kids’ toys, wall hangings, comfortably worn furniture, kitchens with GOD BLESS OUR HOME plaques on the refrigerators. By that point Luke was pretty tough, or told himself he was, but it never got any easier because it not only reminded him of his own family and what they had become but of how empty and wanting his life was, how the world was now a cesspool and he was just a crawling, wriggling thing surviving in its wastes.
He stood there in the dining room, staring numbly at the China hutch, the framed photographs of Thanksgiving dinners on the walls…all those happy, smiling people who had either went into the burning pits or were, even now, slumbering away the daylight hours so they could rise and feed.
He swallowed, made himself move.
He checked the rooms. He looked under beds and pawed through closets, investigated any heaped blankets on the floors. He found nothing, but he knew they were here somewhere. There was no denying the stink of the vampire.
In a windowless room at the back of the house Bob found them. He growled and took up his station outside the door. As always, he refused to cross the threshold. As far as Luke was concerned, that just showed how damn smart that dog was.
Patting him on the head, he entered the room.
Oh, God, not again, he thought as he pulled back the coverlet on the mattress and found them laying there, mother and child.
The children were always the worse and there was never any lack of them.
This time it was a mother holding an infant in her arms as she had in life, except bot
h were now undead and dreaming ensanguined dreams of bathing in rivers of blood.
The woman was young, early twenties, probably a new mother. Her hair was dark, her face pretty even in death. She was naked, long-limbed, and full breasted. As sick as it made him feel, he found himself studying every inch of her and feeling the old desires rising up again.
But she was a dead thing, a leech.
The stink of warm putrefaction coming from her was enough to ream out his nose and quash any desires of the flesh.
Her skin was shockingly white as was that of the child, though the baby—a boy—was mottled with ancient dark contusions in places. There was a rosy blush to their cheeks. Luke could plainly see a livid vein tracery just beneath the skin on both of them, which was especially pronounced on the woman’s breasts and just beneath the tawny blonde hair of the child’s head. Grotesquely swollen from their feedings, there were dark stains at their mouths and chins. There was a dried bloody thumbprint at the child’s cheek as if the mother had poked it there, my, what a fine fat baby mama has.
Their eyes were wide open, the lids a bright startling scarlet, the whites gone to a dun yellow and threaded with blood-filled veins. The pupils were horribly dilated so that the iris was nonexistent, swallowed in fathomless blackness.
The most obscene thing was the baby. The full, juicy pink blossoms of its lips were pulled away from two sliver-like fangs, the tip of a fat graying tongue shoved between them.
“What is it like for you two?” Luke wondered aloud. “Is there love between you or is it just some fucked-up symbiosis, a mutual need?”
He sat in a chair in the corner and just looked at them.
There was so much he did not know about the undead. He had staked them and dragged them out into the sunlight, burned them and decapitated them. But essentially, he was just mutilating corpses. They came to grisly, savage life when you staked them, but it wasn’t real life, it wasn’t the way a human would react if you plunged a stake through their chest. No, they reacted instinctually like animals—violent, screaming, howling, scratching, snapping their jaws, spitting and bleeding…but not with any true anguish or feeling. He often wondered if it was pain they felt or if the evil in them reacted with such hysterical frenzy because its days of destroying the living were at an end.
These things, like so many others, were mysteries.
Staring at the woman and child, he wondered again—silently this time—what it was like for them. Did they each wake exactly at sunset? Was it a few minutes before or a few minutes after like Cliff Corbett? Did they speak to one another or were they telepathic like in the old stories? Did they wake slowly like mother and child, cuddling, touching one another? Was the mother moved by maternal instinct to find food for her baby? Or was there no thought whatsoever, simply diabolic instinct? And how did they find their prey? Did they have some kind of infrared vision that allowed them to find warm blood in veins?
No answers.
There never could be answers.
He got up and, swallowing down his unease, took hold of the baby and found that he actually had to wrestle it from the stiffened grip of its mother. The corner of her lips trembled in a momentary tic as he did so.
He grabbed the child by the ankles and carried it down the hallway and to the front door. He refused to look down on it because he knew those eyes would be on him, staring, teeth anxious to dig into his throat and the tongue wanting only to lap at a ruptured artery. He brought it out onto the porch and it began to writhe immediately as the weak February sunshine struck it full. It moved with a convulsive, boneless locomotion like a wind-up toy and Luke tossed it away. It landed with a fleshy thump on a patch of ice, rolling over and over.
Like a boiling pot, vile-smelling steam rose from it in twisting yellow-green plumes as it flopped and thrashed on the cracked ice. It slid around in a ghastly half-circle, tiny hands with blackened nails scratching for purchase, legs kicking, lips pulled back from snapping teeth as it made a low bestial growling that soon became a high-pitched almost feline mewling. Its bulging eyes rolled madly in their sockets. Its face hitched up in agony, corded and seamed and hideously like that of a wizened old man at the point of dissolution.
As its eyes filmed over and fell in, its head rose one last time from the ice and its voice, tiny and pathetic and tortured, shrieked out one final cry: “Mamamamamamamama—”
And then it went still for a split second before expanding with the gases of putrefaction, its flesh going purple and blue. He could hear its skin stretching with a squeaking rubbery sound like a balloon inflated to the point of bursting. And then it did burst, its abdomen shearing open with a distinct popping noise and the cold winter air carrying away a wave of hot, moist decomposition.
That was it.
Bob let out a long, low howl in the house.
The child was twisted and blackened, limbs curled, mouth wrenched open and hollowed eye sockets wide.
Luke turned away from it, horrified and disgusted as always. He made it maybe three or four feet into the house before dropping to his knees and trembling as he hyperventilated and fought down waves of nausea.
When he made it back to the bedroom, the woman had moved.
Not much, but somehow she must have sensed the death of her child and it stirred her corpselike slumber. Her lips had peeled back from her fangs and one hand was hooked in a gnarled claw. In her eyes there was something noxious and hostile that was beyond mere hatred. They followed him like the eyes in old paintings as he came for her, grasping her ankles and dragging her down the hallway.
He tossed her near the mummy of her child and it all began again.
58
He woke that night from an oddly peaceful sleep, which was really just a matter of physical exhaustion rather than any peaceful sense of well-being. Bob was in bed next to him and he hadn’t even heard him jump up because he was so completely out of it. The dog was shaking and with good reason: the undead were outside the house in great numbers, shrieking and howling and baying like wolves, screaming into the night. It was an absolute chorus of the damned outside.
Luke lay there, stroking Bob and listening to it. He tried to shut it out but it was impossible. It was just after three a.m. Hours yet until dawn. He was just as terrified as the dog.
After it went on for thirty minutes or more, he took Bob downstairs to the cellar where the concrete walls would block much of the noise out. He took his .45 and a stake with him, Sonja’s crucifix because it gave him a connection to her, a spiritual strength that he sadly lacked.
On their way down, the screaming got louder as if maybe the Carriers knew that they had roused him and filled him with terror. He had not pulled the drapes in the living room and dozens of them crowded up to the picture window, watching him with flat reptilian eyes, their gray teeth shining in the darkness. They screeched his name, hissing and yowling, sounding very much like fighting cats in the night.
Downstairs, he shut the cellar door and locked it.
He lit a lantern and Bob and he checked every room to make sure none of them had gotten in. They hadn’t. Megan’s sheet was still lying on the floor of the old furnace room. It did not appear to be touched.
Down there, the shrieking was quieter.
He fed more wood into the stove and the low blaze fanned up. Bob and he sat on the carpet a few feet away from it and basked in its glow. Luke got some water for both of them and then broke into one of the boxes of beef jerky. Bob loved it. Luke didn’t know if it was good for dogs or not, but Bob relaxed as he chewed on it.
Luke smoked and watched the dog, knowing he loved his old mutt. It wasn’t the same sort of love he had known—and still knew—for his wife and daughter, but it was real enough. The dog made him feel calm, chased the loneliness away, and made his heart leap with joy at his antics. And this disturbed him because he knew the undead would slaughter Bob in the worst possible way if they got at him. That dog would have fought twenty of them to protect Luke, but if they got the c
hance they would kill him.
And they would do it to weaken Luke himself.
That’s what their game was. They couldn’t get at him—he hoped—so they would torment him. That’s why they were howling outside. They were vulnerable during the daytime, but at night he was the terrified rabbit that hid in its hole and they would do anything to multiply the fear he felt and rob him of his sleep. They knew that sooner or later, the anxiety and terror and lack of rest would finish him. Maybe they didn’t know it exactly, but they certainly sensed it.
But I won’t weaken, you filthy bastards. I won’t. And day by day I’ll kill more of you and there isn’t a damn thing you can do about that.
He stroked Bob and they chewed jerky and around five the undead gave it up for the night. There was still plenty of darkness left, but they had better ways to spend it apparently.
59
There were things he had been putting off for too long and mainly because the very idea of them depressed him. He had been cleaning out neighborhoods far and wide, one house at a time. He had already destroyed over sixty of them and that was just scratching the surface. The snow was the real problem. When spring came, it would be absolute fucking genocide for them. But that was months away. Before then, there were things he had to take care of.
Though it pained him a great deal, he went through the neighborhood knocking on doors. None were answered. Each house would have to be cleaned out and he had put it off for far too long. The last house he went to was the Stericki house.