Vampirus (Book 1)

by Hamlyn, Jack

He figured there was a chance that Anne had gone back there, thinking it was safe. He wanted badly to get her and end her reign of terror for once and all. He left Bob at home (something Bob, of course, wasn’t too happy about). But he worried about the dog. Though Bob loved to come with him and sniff them out, Luke worried that the stress was taking its toll on him. He didn’t seem to sleep much and some days he just picked at his food.

  It’s ageing him as it’s ageing you.

  Luke didn’t bother knocking at the Stericki door.

  He fought his way through the drifts and used Alger’s shovel to clean off the porch so he could get the front door open. Inside, it was cold. Like a refrigerated tomb. But even so, he could feel the noxious pall of the undead. When they were around, the atmosphere of a place soured like milk.

  He checked out the cellar.

  He checked all the rooms downstairs.

  He looked under beds and in closets, under any suspicious heaps of blankets or clothes. He even looked up the chimney because in his research he had read a vampire novel where one of them hid in a chimney. Nothing and nothing. Upstairs, room by room by room. He even checked the bathroom because he had once found a Carrier sleeping in a tub.

  It was the same as it had been the last time he was there.

  But he wasn’t relieved.

  There was one or more of them here and he could feel them, feel the taint they brought to the house. Finally, knowing he had to, he brought up a ladder from the basement and decided to look around in the attic. It was the one place he had never investigated. There was a vampire on the premises, he knew, and if it wasn’t anywhere else, it had to be up there.

  Lantern in hand, he climbed the ladder and pushed up the attic trapdoor. It swung back on hinges with a slamming noise that echoed through the house. As soon as it did, that roiling black putrescence came rolling out at him.

  “Jesus,” he said. “That smell.”

  It was like sticking his face into the belly of a dead woodchuck that was looping with worms. He let the stink settle until it wasn’t quite as bad. One trick he had learned from watching CSI shows was to shove Vicks Vap-o-Rub up his nostrils. The only thing he didn’t like about that was it took days to get the medicinal smell out of his nose. He went without, despite the tremendous stench that was nearly palpable in the air.

  His heart booming heavy in his chest, he went up into the attic. It was pretty Spartan: naked beams overhead, a few planks laid over the joists and blown insulation, not much else. Not so much as a box or an old trunk. The air in the lantern light spun with thick motes of dust. Luke’s throat was scratchy, his mouth dry.

  I know you’re here. Fucking show yourself already…

  The smell did not dissipate; it thickened until it seemed that the air in the attic was saturated with it. It was almost violent. He came around the chimney stack and there was a form stretched out under a sheet. He did not hesitate, he snatched it away.

  It was Alger.

  Or something like Alger.

  He was still dressed as he had been the night he visited Luke, but he had been feeding especially well. He was swollen like a pickle in a barrel, a great saturated sponge soaked with blood. It leaked from his mouth and nostrils, even from his ears. He lay in a frozen pool of it as if it had been leaking from his ass as well. His eyes were open and they had gone a dark, juicy red like cherries. They bulged from their sockets like they might explode if pricked. He was so bloated from his gluttonous feedings that his parka had burst open and the buttons of his shirt had popped free.

  He was an engorged leech.

  The stink of dark sweetness coming from him was heady in the air: the smell of blood, rich and coppery and sickening. But as bad as that was, it was positively minor in comparison to his appearance which filled Luke with absolute loathing and repugnance. In the books he had read, this was how they claimed vampires often looked when their coffins were opened.

  Sweating, gagging on the smell, his stomach rolling over on itself, he thought: This is what they are at their core…fucking bloodsuckers, leeches, disgusting parasites. I wish the vampire romance writers could see this, all the women who read Stephanie Myers and Ann-fucking-Rice and the rest of that silly bullshit. I wish they could look at the true nature of these things.

  But unfortunately, most of them probably looked much like Alger now, he knew. In the end there were no sweet kisses in the night but slobbering mouths and death-puffed lips.

  He sat there staring at Alger, pitying him as much as he was offended by him.

  Though his skin—which appeared to be stretched to the bursting point—was of an even whiteness, it was blood-red just beneath, the cheeks ruddy, arteries and veins distended like fat, sluggish worms. He was so swollen that his face was straining over the skull beneath, the nose widened, the lips like two rubbery tubes pulled tight. The interesting thing was that despite the horror of his physical condition, there was no getting around one thing: he was regenerating just as Sonja had. If it hadn’t been for the bloating, he would have looked twenty years younger. The wrinkles and pouches of his face were gone, his once-balding pate now covered in lustrous brown hair that was thick and full, barely touched by gray at the temples.

  It was incredible.

  Absolutely incredible.

  But it had to end the same way and Luke knew it. He unzipped his duffel bag and pulled out a stake and his sledgehammer. He expected to feel something, some pain at what he was about to do. Alger had been his friend after all.

  But this wasn’t Alger; it was a tumescent human spider fattened on the blood of its victims.

  Carefully, Luke placed the tip of the stake just left of the sternum. He gripped his hand tightly on the shaft. He brought the hammer up. “Forgive me, Alger,” he said, and gave the hammer a vicious overhand swing.

  What followed was horrible beyond belief, much worse than anything he had seen thus far. It was like piercing a high pressure hose. The stake went in easily and Alger seemed to explode. Blood shot up from the entrance wound in great surging gouts and jets, spraying up onto the rafters and covering Luke in a red eruption. It flowed and gurgled and splashed. It gushed from Alger’s screaming mouth and spurted from his nostrils and evacuated from his ass with a wet farting noise.

  By then, covered in filth, Luke was screaming, too. He brought the hammer down again and again until the vampire was most surely impaled, its heart split in two like a cloven rotten apple.

  Alger’s entire body whipped and writhed like he was being electrocuted. Every inch of him was tense and straining. It was like his skeleton was trying to tear its way free. His screams became the squealing of boars. His fingers scraped at the joists below. A bubbling black fluid vomited from his mouth and a gray sludge spilled from his nostrils, enveloping his face in snotty threads. A moaning and sucking sound came out of his throat and he split open. Luke saw the seedy, stringy guts within, but they were not yellow this time, but red and black, dissolving into a muddy bile-colored ooze. His hands fumbled at the stake and a vile, stinking gas rushed out of him with a wheezing sound.

  He trembled.

  Slime coursed from him.

  His eyes popped like the juicy cherries they were.

  A great gassy black bubble expanded at his mouth and then it, too, popped.

  Alger—or more precisely the thing had become—was dead, destroyed, ended. His left hand rattled against the black flooring beneath with a sound of a man drumming his fingers and that was it. His face looked like a black, furrowed prune sucking into itself. His entire body seemed to deflate and go loose and slopping.

  Luke sat there on his ass three feet away, covered in gore and drainage. He could taste bile in his mouth and he knew he had vomited at some point. His eyes were wide, his lungs gasping for air. Blood dripped from the tip of his nose and ran from his hair. A trickle of it coursed down his spine. Droplets of it rained from the rafters overhead.

  Grabbing his duffel and hammer, he made it down the ladder and downstairs bef
ore he let out a cry and ran from the house, diving off the porch into the fresh white snow. He grabbed up handfuls of it and rubbed his face and hair with it until he felt marginally more clean, more human.

  Down the street, he could hear Bob howling as if he could sense his torment and disgust and self-revulsion. It took him some time before he could stand up without pitching over. He crawled through the snow for ten feet before he could get his legs under him.

  He had thought it would be bad staking Alger.

  He was wrong: it was worse than anything he could imagine.

  60

  Wakefield slept like the dead beneath its shivering shroud of white and the only thing that disturbed its slumber was Luke Barrows out on his Polaris, cutting down roads and flying over snowbanks, seeking out the pestilence by day that in turn sought him out by night.

  Over a week had passed since he destroyed Alger and in that time, he had approached the killing of vampires with an almost obsessive zeal. Whereas a month before destroying a few of them a day was all he could handle, now he was killing at least seven or eight, sometimes as many as dozen. His daily high was sixteen, but he tried not to think about it in those terms.

  It was a cold morning and by ten the mercury had climbed to 15° before flatlining and staying there. The world was white and wintery, the sun barely making a showing in the hazy sky. The wind rose and fell, scattering the night’s snow and a scrim of ice particles down empty, drifted roads and against silent houses. It bit into his face and sent chill fingers up his spine but it hardly deterred him. Sometimes it sounded like something feral and alive out there searching for warm-blooded prey, bearing down on the town with hunger; other times as he stood out in front of lonely farmhouses outside of town, it was just a low droning in the distance like a generator on standby.

  For all intents and purposes, Wakefield was a dead town.

  It had the hollow, haunted feel of a ghost town.

  But he knew that while it was those things, it was not untenanted. They were here. Hundreds of them, maybe thousands. There’d been roughly 5,000 people in Wakefield as of the last census (something the city fathers hadn’t been happy about because they’d managed to lose 2,000 people since the previous one, mainly because the chair factory that had been purring along steadily since before the Second World War had finally closed its doors) and by Luke’s figuring, if even a third of them died of the pandemic and were cremated out at the pits, that still left a lot of fucking vampires out there. Of course, he knew they weren’t all bloodsuckers. There were normal human beings out there but most of them were in hiding, protecting their own. And there was one good gang of hunters out there because he’d seen the results of their work: gape-jawed corpses staked in the snow.

  Still…there were potentially several thousand of the undead and that was unsettling. Better than Chicago or New York where there were conceivably millions of them…but still, not something he liked to spend much time thinking about.

  A hundred, a thousand, two-thousand, he thought. What’s the difference? I’ll find them, one by one. I’ll drag them screaming into the light and stake them in their graves.

  One thing that did bother him however was that the Sheriff’s Department downtown was empty. No sign of Billy McCready or anyone else for that matter. Same for Public Works. There was every possibility Stubby was holed up at his house and maybe Billy was at his place. Both were out in the country and he had checked neither.

  By eleven that day, he’d already put down three of them and it hadn’t been easy.

  Some days he’d pull them out from under beds or find them holed up in closets and it would be real easy to drag them out and stake them or throw them out into the sun. Other days, he had to work for it…especially when he came upon some that were sly and crafty.

  Today was one of those days.

  He and Bob had been working Cherry Hill Road for what seemed weeks now. It was a major artery of Wakefield and snaked its way east to west, cutting right through the town itself. He found a house that hadn’t been checked off on his list. He saw no footprints in the snow, neither old nor new, no depressions as of a well-trod trail. That was always a good sign. The front door was open and he searched the bedrooms upstairs with Bob at his side, the living room and dining room and kitchen, closets and cubbies…nothing.

  But Bob was growling, sniffing about. The undead were here, somewhere.

  Bob got excited at the cellar door.

  It was locked from the other side and no amount of battering on his part could make it budge. If he had the shotgun with him, he could have blasted it open but he’d left it at home.

  He went back outside, circling around in the deep snow of the yard. Bob was leaping his way through, not making very good progress. Luke dug through a drift and found a cellar window that was blacked-out from the other side. He found another window like that, then another. It was all he needed to see. He kicked in the three windows he found, letting in the air and sunlight…what came blowing back out was a hot stench of moist rot and dry, sweet decay.

  There was only one thing that smelled like that.

  Bob was barking madly by that point and Luke had to sit there with him, stroking him until he calmed down.

  “It’s all right,” he told him. “More of the same.”

  When Bob was sufficiently mellowed, Luke tossed his duffel of goodies down into the cellar and then squeezed his way through a broken window, something that was not real easy in his heavy parka and boots. He slid through and dropped onto a sofa. He was in a rec room of sorts. A dusty, dirty place that had been unused for years even when people lived there.

  Bob peered in through the window, not liking any of it very much.

  “Man your post, pal,” Luke told him.

  He stooped over and examined some of the glass he’d kicked in. Spray paint. The windows had been spray painted a flat black from the inside. Very cunning. It was the sort of thing Anne Stericki might have done.

  On top of a dusty TV set was a can of Krylon spray paint.

  There were grubby black fingerprint smudges on the white can. Whoever had painted the windows had gotten some on themselves in the process.

  The stink down there made him wrinkle his nose and grit his teeth.

  He took a flashlight out of his duffel and found the stairs. The door at the top had been boarded-over very meticulously. No way he’d have ever gotten through it. Just no way. Even the shotgun wouldn’t have been much use.

  He found a small cubby-like bathroom, an unused bedroom, then some kind of game room with a pool table in it. On it, lying beneath a heavy musty-smelling comforter were three corpses. Two middle-aged women with a small boy sandwiched between them. They slept stiffly with arms at their sides. Their faces were all clown-white with ghastly staring eyes that were shiny and blank with that horrible catatonic glare to them that Luke often referred to as Bela Lugosi Eyes. The boy had abundant freckles and they had gone black in death, standing out against his white flesh like tiny inkspots.

  Luke just stood there, staring down at them, knowing they’d have to be staked. He might get the boy through the window but never the women and the idea of having to handle them made his stomach roll over.

  Keeping his gloves on, he examined their hands.

  He was glad he could not feel the porcelain skin. Sometimes it felt too much like human flesh and other times like rubber or thermoformed plastic mocking the same.

  “You’re the one,” he said, holding up one of the boy’s hands. There were black smudges of spray paint on his fingers.

  Luke always made a point of studying the cunning ones in some depth, forever wondering what made some of them such adept and calculating predators while others were just hungering dead things with barely enough sense to get out of the sun.

  He turned the boy’s hand over and as he did so, the boy’s lips curled up in a smile that made something catch in Luke’s throat. He dropped the hand and stepped back. No, the boy was still a corpse and woul
d be until he was staked or sundown came. These were the only things that could break them from their slumber.

  Yet…he was still smiling.

  The mocking, wooden grin of a puppet.

  Luke told himself it was simply reflexive action, but there was such an air of hunger to that smile that he could not make himself believe it. He took the woman on the left first. She was swollen with blood much as Alger had been. Like some fattened, bloated spider astride a web of leeched flies. Trickles of red had run from the corners of her mouth and from one nostril. Her fingers were stained pink like she’d squeezed the juice from ripe cherries. He took out his K-Bar knife and pushed her lips back. Her teeth were red, too, the spike-like incisors looked like they’d been dipped in red wine.

  He turned away from her, putting his knife away.

  He took out a stake, his hammer, and the rest of his equipment. After Alger, he’d learned to wear protective gear. He stripped off his gloves and parka, unfolding a black rain slicker and sliding on yellow Platex gloves. He put on the dental face shield and made ready.

  The woman was no longer pale: her cheeks were rosy with life. Her lips no longer gray but plump and pink. Other than those staring, cadaverous eyes, she looked very much like a woman asleep.

  Now you want me to think you’re not a monster. That you’re just a woman and if I believe that you’ll get inside my head and I’ll happily curl up next to you. Then when the sun goes down…

  He had seen it before, of course. Sometimes they did that. They looked like corpses, but if you turned your back on them they suddenly became very life-like. Was it some “natural” defensive mechanism? Did it mean they were aware of your presence in their dead, dreaming brains and were trying to disguise themselves as harmless sleepers? Or was it some sort of hypnotic thing that existed only in your mind? An image they projected? Luke did not know.

  The woman was dressed in flannel pants and a Wisconsin Badgers hoodie. Feeling like a deviant, he pulled the hoodie up until her breasts were revealed. Blood had leaked from her nipples, he saw. He positioned the stake properly to the left of the sternum, clutched it tightly, and brought up the hammer. It had a heavy dead blow weight of over four pounds.