Vampirus (Book 1)

by Hamlyn, Jack

  Clenching his teeth, he exhaled and brought it down.

  There was the shearing, fleshy sound of penetration, and blood began to flow from the wound as the woman began to thrash. She writhed and hissed, teeth snapping, letting out a shrill agonized squealing. Blood gushed from her punctured chest, it ran from her mouth and nostrils and filled her eyes until she cried tears of it. Gouts of it shot into the air and sprayed against his face shield. Her hands clawed wildly, blackened nails scratching against his slicker. He brought the hammer down again and felt it go right through her and into the felt covering of the billiard table. She vomited out a spurt of blood that shot right over his left shoulder.

  She trembled while trying to rise but fell back down.

  The blood that flooded from her mouth went black and oozed like sludge. Her jaws snapped shut, fangs hanging over her bottom lip.

  Luke got well away from her at that point.

  She swelled up like she was inflated with helium and then there was a squealing eruption of gas from her mouth. She discolored quickly, sinking down into the pooling blood, becoming purple and black, her lips retreating from her teeth, eyes sinking away, a morbid gray graveyard fungus sprouting from her face and furring her breasts.

  The stink was hot, violent, and repulsive.

  He did the other woman and the boy in the same fashion. Then he took all their heads off with a hatchet and tossed them away out into the rec room where the sunlight found them and made a curious yellow steam rise from them as they shriveled brown like dried prunes.

  Sick as always, the smell down there making his stomach crawl, he stripped off his bloody garments and shoved them out the window with the face shield and followed them out into the bright white world. He stuck his face in a snowdrift and washed his hands with fresh drift.

  He sat dazed like that for some time as snowflakes drifted down and melted on his face. Bob licked him and nuzzled him. He was a good friend in the worst of times.

  “Okay,” Luke finally said. “We better get moving. We can’t waste daylight.”

  Washing his rain slicker and Playtex gloves off with snow, getting the blood that did not freeze and fall off, he climbed to his feet and dragged himself back to the snowmobile. He felt like he was eighty years old.

  61

  By noon, he bagged four more.

  They were easy kills. Two of them, both elderly men, Bob found in a garage sleeping behind a woodpile. Luke dragged them out into the sunlight and let them burn. They both writhed and shook and steamed, but other than that they went back into death nearly without a fight. And that was just another thing that he had learned: when you staked them, they got violent like wounded animals; but when they fried in the sunlight many of them never seemed to wake entirely from the corpse-like dormancy of diurnal sleep.

  The other two he got were a young couple laying in their bed beneath heavy blankets as they had done in life, clutching each other like lovers. He figured they had been in their early twenties. Although he did not know the guy, the girl had worked the counter at Donut World and she still wore her uniform. There were smudges of flour or powdered sugar on it along with darker stains of a more ominous variety. Her name tag said CRYSTAL. Luke stood there, holding the corner of the blankets he’d pulled off them, wondering how it had happened. Had she come home from work expecting a quiet evening when her boyfriend fastened himself to her neck? Or had he been woken in the night by her?

  Sighing, Luke threw the blankets to the floor.

  Then remembering how sometimes they tried to squirm back into them, he tossed the blankets out in the hallway. Then he yanked the heavy drapes from the window and the direct sunlight hit them. The result was instantaneous: they both let out a hoarse croaking sound and began to squirm and flop, arching their backs, heads thrashing from side to side. They smacked into one another on the bed, got tangled in each other in a flurry of limbs and obscene boneless gyrations like mating snakes.

  The girl fell off the bed and hit the floor with a loud thud and continued to move with a frightening worming sort of motion, not attempting to propel herself with her legs or arms, but moving with a repulsive side-to-side motion like a serpent. Her lips shivered open and Luke saw her fangs, the fat black tongue trembling behind them. Steam hissed from her that stank like boiled blood. Her skin went from a uniform white to a pebbly yellow striated by a livid purple vein networking. It began to split open like dry earth, an inky fluid seeping forth. Green mildew grew over skin and she began to swell up. She kept trying to find a patch of darkness with her mindless, wormlike squirming. She bumped into walls and the dresser, the back of her head pounding against the closed closet door. She continued to bloat up with the gases of putrefaction until the buttons on her uniform blouse popped free, one after the other, flying like pellets and striking the walls.

  No cover to be had from the burning, infernal sunlight, her back arched one last time and her mouth opened, her teeth sliding from retreating blackened gums and she made a piercing, almost mewling sort of sound before vomiting out a gray slushy bile of rot. Then she went still and the only sounds were from her flesh continuing to split open as it went furry with mold, sagging off the bones beneath which had become unpleasantly prominent.

  Her boyfriend had also hit the floor, but he wormed his way under the bed. Steeling himself against the stink, Luke dragged him out into the sunlight and when he tried to tunnel under it again, he flipped the bed against the wall. That did it. There was no cover and he went in a similar fashion as his girlfriend.

  Outside, Luke painted a huge red cross on the front door with spray paint.

  Another house cleaned.

  He’d been at it nearly two months by that point and had cleaned over a hundred houses. But it was thankless work because even though he vanquished the original residents, others often came back to take their places. Regardless, he had a running body count of over 150 by that point. He had steeled himself to the job at hand, desensitized himself, but it never got easy. It never became a simple and mindless chore that did not affect him.

  His next stop was a saloon, a little neighborhood place with the amusing name of Sudz. He could remember it going by three or four different names since he was a kid. He hadn’t been in there for ten or twelve years and that had been for a bachelor party in the back room.

  The door was open and he went in, Bob at his side.

  They checked it out carefully, found nothing. No Carriers sleeping under pool tables or hiding out with the stacked cases of booze in the back. The bottles of Jim Beam, Cutty Sark, Captain Morgan’s, and UV Blue still waited attentively behind the bar. Cases of longneck bottles had shattered from the cold. The freezer was full of frozen pizzas, which were just as cold as the day they’d been put in there. Luke took them all and put them in his scavenging bag out on the sled. He went back inside and took a couple frosty shots of Jack Daniels, staring up at the calendar behind the bar. A buxom blonde in a swimsuit. He looked at her image for some time, knowing he should be feeling lust but in his mind there was only an image of her rising at night to feed.

  Enough.

  While he was lost in thought, Bob was all business. He sniffed out the cellar door and began to growl, then bark, then whimper.

  Luke knew what he had to do next and he dreaded it.

  There were no windows so it was as black as a mineshaft down there. He took a lantern with him and lit it at the bottom of the worn wooden steps. He could smell the undead right away. Even the cold of February could not cancel out the rank, fermenting stench of them.

  It drove Bob into a frenzy of growling and snapping. Luke had to pet him for awhile so he’d calm down.

  “Let’s just get it done, Bob, so we can get back out into the fresh air.”

  Creeping down in places like this that were utterly black and lacked windows to let the sunshine in was taking an awful chance. It was darker than night in the cellar. Who could say it would matter to the vampires? Would they only awaken at true sunset or wa
s any darkness acceptable? Would the lack of discernable light activate them? So far, he knew, they had obeyed the laws of folklore concerning such things…but he feared what might happen when they didn’t. They were manageable in their daylight dormancy, but at night you didn’t stand a chance.

  This is crazy and you know it.

  Maybe it was. He could feel the threat and menace, but he accepted it the way a maker of explosives accepts the fact that he may loose limbs.

  The cellar had a dirt floor and was crowded with a variety of discarded items: water-stained cardboard boxes, a heap of lumber against the far wall, a stack of old wooden dartball boards speckled with mold, a couple dirty signs from Sudz’s annual summer picnic. As he moved forward, he could feel a rising apprehension inside him like the ticking of the bomb. Though it was cold down there and his breath came out in rolling white clouds, he could still smell the vampires. Their odor made Bob tremble.

  Luke moved slowly forward, step by hesitant step knowing that the lantern was the only thing that kept the boogeyman at bay. If he tripped over something and dropped it…well, he’d be trapped in the suffocating blackness with things that were perfectly at home in it.

  So he moved with extra care.

  Despite the cold, he could feel fingers of perspiration running down his spine. Motes of disturbed dust spun in the lantern light. All around him there was a fluid danse macabre of shadows. He was breathing hard and not from exertion. The stink became almost unbearable.

  Bob barked.

  There.

  One of them was lying in the dirt next to the furnace. He had been an old man, maybe seventyish. His face was pockmarked with old sores as if he had used lye as a facial scrub. Though his flesh was white as kidskin, his bulbous nose still bore the purple burst blood vessels of the veteran boozehound. His eyes were open. They looked like shiny white plastic in the light, the pupils like dark pinpricks. There was a smear of blood on his chin and two discolored fangs hung over his lower lip. Luke figured he probably slept down here even before Vampirus made him a nightwalker.

  Hanging his parka on the furnace, Luke donned his rain slicker, yellow rubber gloves, and face shield. He positioned the stake and brought the hammer down with a decisive blow. The old man shook and snapped his teeth, blood bubbling from the entrance wound. One more strike did it: the stake neatly severed his heart and he went still, stolen blood running from his mouth.

  That was one.

  The next one Bob found was around the other side of the furnace. It was a woman who had dug herself a little grave. She was nearly entirely buried in black earth, only her face and one ghostly white hand visible, the fingers spread out like the petals of a funeral lily. She must have buried herself back up each night.

  Luke dug the dirt away from her chest. She was naked and filthy. Again, he positioned the stake and pounded it home. She did not die as easily as the old man. She came alive, thrashing and kicking, throwing up clods of earth and gagging out a mist of blood. Her fangs were long and sharp, mottled with dark spots like the tongue of a dog. Her yellowed eyes fixed upon him, her seamed gray face hooked into a grimace, she snarled at him, spitting out steam and blood and rancid breath.

  Bob began to howl.

  Luke fell away from her because she was not dormant like the others: she had woken up. She was still sluggish with her daytime stupor, but there was no denying that her mind was awake and sentient. She looked at him with a flat, maniacal hatred. She rose up from her grave, hands fumbling at the stake. “They have made shells of your wife and daughter! They sleep in the dirt!” As terrified and shocked as he was, he knew he could not let her come out of it any more than she already had so he launched himself forward and slammed her back in the grave. He brought the hammer down and with two quick, powerful arcs he drove the stake through her.

  She let out a wild, piercing scream that became something almost like the baying of a hound and then she fell back into her grave, vomiting a gout of blood that sprayed against his face shield. She was dead again. He stumbled away with his light, gasping for breath and falling to one knee, trying to calm his heart, which was slamming away in his chest.

  Holding the light up, he looked around…Jesus, five, six, no seven more of them: men, women, even two teenage girls tangled in a naked heap as if they had gone to sleep in some romantic embrace.

  Bob was nearly chasing his own tail by this point.

  Luke shook his head. “No more,” he said. “I can’t do it.”

  He grabbed his things and climbed up out of the cellar and did not pause in his manic flight until he was outside in the fresh cold wind, burying his face in a snowdrift. He tore off the gloves, the bloody face shield and the slicker, and fell on his back staring up at the hazy sky, just breathing, just trying to think, just trying to get his legs back under him. The entire time he could hear her scraping metallic voice in his head:

  They have made shells of your wife and daughter! They sleep in the dirt!

  This was the first time one of them had ever woken like that in the daytime. They were supposed to be powerless. The woman had not come out of it completely or she would have attacked him, but she was awake enough to scare the shit out of him. He tried to tell himself that what she said was meaningless but he knew better. It had been very specific. Not a threat really, but a fact.

  They have made shells of your wife and daughter! They sleep in the dirt!

  When his breathing slowed and his hands stopped shaking and his mind finally cleared enough to become rational again, he sat up and tried to figure it out. What she said was true, of course, but the way she said it was like Sonja and Megan had not been simple accidental victims of Vampirus like so many others, but targets that had been infected on purpose.

  But that was crazy.

  He would not accept it.

  He could not let himself accept it.

  Yet, he thought: She said ‘they’ and does that mean the other vampires or was she referring to a particular grouping of them?

  It all brought back the memory of speaking with Alger that day now two months past. Alger said he had talked with Hawley Shanks, the folklorist. Luke had had very little interest in any of it at the time, but now he remembered the conversation:

  I ran into Shanks last week, Luke. You know, the guy who writes those books? Anyway, he had some interesting things to say. He said this outbreak of Red Death isn’t by accident. That it was planned.

  By who? Dracula?

  Or maybe something like him.

  It all gave him pause now, the idea that it had been planned. It was insane, yet something about it disturbed him because he felt there was an underlying ring of truth there somewhere. What scared him about it wasn’t that it might have been planned, but who would have planned such a thing. No, not Dracula, of course, but maybe…maybe something like him.

  Enough thinking.

  Bob was sitting there, watching him, his head cocked to the side. The meditative, introspective vagaries of human beings never ceased to surprise and amuse him.

  “We call it gathering wool, old pal,” Luke told him.

  Bob wagged his tail as if he understood all too well.

  There was a spare five-gallon gas can on the back of the sled. Luke ordered Bob to stay and went back inside Sudz and splashed gas everywhere, pouring a great quantity of it down the cellar steps. He lit up a flyer with a stick match and tossed it in there. The saloon went up pretty quickly, the fire raging within. He watched it burn for thirty minutes or more until the windows burst out into the snow and the flames were roaring, licking out the doorway. He thought he could hear the undead screaming inside.

  62

  Minutes later, he pulled the Polaris across Marble Avenue and continued cutting his path of destruction through Cherry Hill. There was smoke in the air now from the burning saloon and he wondered if it would catch the building next door on fire and then the one next to that. He figured it wasn’t going to happen with the heavy snow everywhere. The fire would probab
ly gut the saloon—and cremate the Carriers in its cellar—then burn itself out.

  The real burning would be in the spring or summer.

  Because after the April melt and the spring rains stopped and there was a good long dry patch, he was going to begin selectively burning sections of the town. He could think of no better method of vampire control than to burn them while they slept.

  He stopped before a two-story brick house.

  This one was more intriguing than the others he’d visited that day because there was a finger of smoke coming from the chimney and a clear footpath cut through the snow leading out to the street. Generally, when he saw something like that he did not bother. If somebody was living there, then it was their job to kill any bloodsuckers on the premise. But being that it had been something like a week since he’d actually talked with another human being, he felt a need for companionship.

  Best-case scenario: he’d make a friend today.

  Worst-case scenario: he’d get shot.

  And hell, he thought, if it’s the latter then I don’t have to worry about this shit anymore and I’ll be saved the pain of waking up into this fucked-up world tomorrow.

  He climbed up the steps to knock and noticed the door was open maybe an inch. There was snow packed around the jamb and it looked like it had been there for some time. Curious. He eased it open with his boot and found himself staring into a foyer whose carpet was filthy from melting slush. It was warm in there. He stepped in a few feet, trying to get a feel for the place. Even without the footpath or the chimney smoke he would have known it was occupied: it just had that feeling to it.

  Bob agreed: he wagged his tail. He was mellow and relaxed with the idea of entering the house. There were surely no Carriers here.

  “Hello?” Luke called out. “Anyone about?”

  His voice echoed into the stillness.

  He moved past a stairway leading to the second floor, a closed closet door, and down a short hallway. He could see a room at the end. A kitchen table. A couple chairs. He could smell cigarette smoke that was recent as well as food odors that were not so recent. But what he could not smell was that invidious odor of the undead: the stench of walking pestilence.