Vampirus (Book 1)

by Hamlyn, Jack

  Half-way down the hallway, he stopped and he wasn’t really sure why.

  Bob stopped with him, growing tense.

  Luke had a crawly sensation along the nape of his neck that told him that not only was he not alone but he was being watched. He could not convince himself otherwise and by that point in the game, he had learned to trust to his instincts because very often they were all that stood between him and an ugly, dirty death.

  And if he didn’t always trust his own instincts, he surely trusted Bob’s.

  Licking his lips, Luke said, “Is anyone there?”

  Bob started barking.

  Luke heard a door behind him creak open. He turned, knowing it was the closet he had just passed, and heard a sudden fffftttt sort of noise and something sank into the wall about three inches from his head. He had time to recognize it as a crossbow bolt before he threw himself to the floor and saw a figure jump out of the closet, bringing a crossbow to bear.

  “WAIT A MINUTE!” he cried. “I’M HUMAN! FOR GODSAKE I’M OUT IN THE DAYLIGHT!”

  The figure paused, lowering the crossbow. “Luke?” it said.

  He lifted his head up.

  The woman with the crossbow waited.

  And Bob went after her with bared teeth.

  63

  “BOB!” Luke cried out. “NO!”

  He just managed to get a hand on the dog’s collar as he launched himself. As it was, he was yanked forward with him, but Luke’s additional weight threw the attack off-kilter and he got Bob under control before he did any damage.

  “Easy, Bob, easy. She’s a friend.”

  Bob eyed her warily, but seemed to accept Luke’s judgment. At least for the time being.

  The crazy woman with the wild raven hair and the glassy green eyes and attendant crossbow was Stephani Kutak.

  “Luke, what are you doing here?” she asked. It was not a question really as if somewhere along the line she’d forgotten how to phrase a question properly. Conversation, like anything else, took practice.

  Luke pulled himself up. “I’m going house to house. I’m killing them.”

  Then he wondered if he should have said that because Steph didn’t look so good and that could have been stress and terror and it could have meant she was infected and the infected sometimes took an instant hatred to vampire hunters as if they knew who their enemies would soon be.

  And, realizing this, a voice that was faint yet loud said: Wouldn’t that be the kicker, you asshole? You survive the plague and you play hippety-hop day-by-fucking-day killing vampires and in the end you get killed by this green-eyed woman that gave you wet dreams when you were sixteen? Wouldn’t that be some kind of poetic justice? Instead of you penetrating her like you always wanted, she does the penetrating with a crossbow bolt and, everywhere, in tombs and cellars and black-shadowed closets, the vampires grin in their dormancy because you, the staker, has been most thoroughly staked!

  Steph lowered the crossbow and pushed greasy strands of black hair from her face. She was pale, yes, but who in Wisconsin wasn’t in the depths of winter? There was winter pale and then there was another kind of pale. Luke felt he could tell the difference and hers was the former.

  “Is your vicious animal friendly?” she said.

  He smiled and petted Bob. “He’s a baby. Just give him the chance.”

  Steph knelt down and called Bob to her. Bob looked to Luke and then went over to her, tail wagging and head held low. Steph petted him and, true to form, Bob pressed himself against her, laying his head across her knees. The love between them was instant and mutual. Steph ran her hands across Bob’s soft pelt. “You are one handsome fellah,” she told him, continuing to stroke him. Bob beamed at her, as if it say, don’t I know it.

  She led Luke into the kitchen and sat him down at the table. She had a little Coleman camping stove and she pumped up the gas and lit the burner. She put water on to heat.

  “We’ll have some coffee,” she said and from the tone of her voice it was something he was not allowed to refuse.

  She sat down and Bob glued himself to her.

  Luke checked his watch. It was 2:40, which gave him plenty of time to have coffee and maybe a chat before he checked out a few more houses. It wouldn’t be fully dark until around six so he had plenty of time. He kept looking out the window at the backyard with its blanket of unbroken snow leading out to the garage. He wondered if any of them were in there. In his mind, he saw the shadows thicken like gel and night come flooding out. He saw them standing out there. Sonja and Megan were among them.

  He shook that from his head.

  Nothing out there but snow and February icicles hanging from the eaves of the garage. That’s all. But out there somewhere, he knew, were his wife and daughter and he would stake every one of them if he had to in order to get them. Because he had to get them. They had not come after him in awhile, but he had a dark, almost prescient intuition that they would begin again soon and he didn’t think he could go through that so he had to get them as they slept.

  Shadows.

  They were all shadows at night.

  You could shoot holes through them but it did not harm them. They seemed to have no more true physical reality than sheets blowing on a clothesline in an October gale…it was only during the day when they were at your mercy.

  He looked up and realized that Stephani had been talking and he had been nodding, agreeing with her, and for a moment he wasn’t sure what any of it was about. But it was her husband…Bert or Bill or something. She was telling him how he had gotten the Vampirus germ and how he had laid like a corpse in bed for days, growing pale and weak and wild-eyed. And how, right before the end, he had gone crazy like some of them did, crawling out the window and dancing around out in the snow like a maniac. The Dance of the Red Death. That’s what people called it. A skeleton-frolic like something from an old Ub Iwerks’ cartoon or maybe even something more high-brow ivy league allegorical like Wolgemut’s Dance of Death where the cadavers dance happily into the grave.

  Then he had died.

  She found him on the floor, mouth hooked in an insane grimace, eyes wide open and staring at the ceiling like maybe he had seen beyond the pale and into the grave and this is what had killed him. He went to the pits then. Steph did not wait for the corpse trucks, she called and they came and off went her husband into the flames. Then it was just Steph and her son Peter and it had not been easy. No, not easy at all. Two weeks ago Peter had gotten it, too, and she had watched him go from a bright, red-cheeked boy with a wonderful stoic sense of humor and a natural talent for music to something thin and white with huge shining eyes. It was the germ, surely it was the germ. It could not be the others infecting him because she kept the windows and doors locked. None of the Carriers could have gotten in. But there she erred…for although there were no marks on his throat, there were on the underside of his wrist.

  “Maybe I wasn’t in my right frame of mind,” she said then, pouring hot water into cups with instant coffee in them and spilling so much that Luke did it for her.

  She sat across from him, shaking, eyes darting madly in their sockets, smoking one cigarette after the other….or maybe smoking one cigarette on top of another because this wasn’t chain-smoking exactly. She’d light one, take two drags, start rambling again in some breathless froth of words, light another and repeat the process. Neurotic? Yes, very. She was dancing on the tip of a pin and trying not to fall. She was living right next door to a complete mental collapse and who in the hell could really blame her?

  Luke drank the coffee and butted her cigarettes and heard her out, and even stressed, near-hysterical, and shaking he thought she was still an amazingly handsome woman and hated himself for even thinking that. Because her words came out in a torrent of cutting metal like razor blades and shards of iron that opened her up and made her bleed and as she spoke he understood, truly understood, because what she did was what he had done: she couldn’t bear the idea of her son going into the burning pi
ts so she had hidden him away.

  And that he knew was one of the biggest mistakes he’d made.

  Not just because of the horror it brought him but the living death it brought Megan. Through misguided love and parental tenderness he had spared her the cleansing flames and condemned her to an eternity as a night-walking seven-year old ghoul, an evil ghost, a fucking leech that existed to drain the life from her victims. An invasive, pathogenic virus in the form of a little girl. That’s what he had done with his soft heart. The thing he had loved best in this world had become the object of the greatest horror he could imagine: his wife was out there, too, and he had loved her with his heart and soul while she was alive, but never did she have the power over him that Megan had.

  That scared him.

  Because he could fight the others, but his daughter was a different story.

  Stephani went on and on about what she had done and Luke could feel her pain that was bone-deep and in his mind he could hear her words which had been the very ones he had told himself at the time: What was I supposed to do, Luke? He was my boy, my baby boy…I couldn’t let them do that to him. I just couldn’t. When I let them take Burt and put him in the pits, it tore my guts out, but to put Petey in there…no, no, no, dear God in heaven, no, I couldn’t allow it. It would tear out my soul. You can live without your guts, Luke, but you can’t live without your soul. Can you understand that? Can you understand why I did what I did? Can you? Can you?

  “I can understand,” he told her. “Believe me I can.”

  Stephani lit a cigarette as tears squeezed from her red-rimmed eyes. “I…I wrapped him in a blanket. I took him to my mom and dad’s house. They were both dead. I took him out in the garage and put him there under the shelf thinking I could bury him in the spring.” She laughed a cold, dry cackle. “Stupid, crazy, idiotic, bitch. I did it even though I knew what would happen…”

  But that was what love did to you and Luke understood it so well that he lived in Stephani’s skull as she poured out her torment, because her torment was his own. She waited after that, praying the Rosary like a good Catholic for her boy to be spared the evil of resurrection. She knew the old stories. She knew that the newly risen would come after their family first, they would seek their loved ones as they always had, knocking on their doors in the dead of night, standing there in the cerements of the grave. And why not? Grief is a terrible thing. The parting of death is traumatic. There’s nothing you want back more than your lost son or daughter or wife. Under normal circumstances if something from a tomb knocks at the door at midnight, you would not answer it. But grief has its own priorities and even if you know your beloved has returned as a festering malignancy, hope springs eternal and you will open that door, the depths of your pain will demand it, your suffering will compel you.

  Three days after he was interred in the garage as it were, Petey came home.

  He stood outside Steph’s locked bedroom door. “Mama,” he said. “Please let me in. I’m so cold. I’m so so cold. I’m freezing.”

  “I…I can’t,” Stephani told him, everything inside her breaking apart like white ice. “Please go back…go back…”

  “Mama…please. I love you…open the door.”

  “No…” Steph sobbed. “Oh no…”

  But already she had betrayed herself: she was standing before the door reaching for the knob. Then she looked at the rosary and forced herself back to bed.

  He scratched at the door like a dog will scratch to get in. “Mama, we can be together like always. It won’t hurt. Nothing will hurt again. You never feel anything again. There’s nothing. They make it so.”

  Steph shook her head, but again betrayed herself: “Come in, please come in…oh mama misses her boy…she loves him so much…”

  The door did not open. Petey entered the room by slipping between the door and the jamb like a waft of dark mist and then he was standing there. His face was pallid, his eyes huge and black and empty. He was smiling and she could see how his teeth had grown long and sharp in death. There were snowflakes in his hair. He held out his hands to her and they were pale with thorny yellow nails.

  “Mama,” he said. “Oh, Mama…”

  He should have had her but she would not allow it. Her hand brought up the rosary and she told him to go back, that he was no longer welcome in her house. He screamed and became a shadow that left the way it had come. She could hear him circling the eaves of the house like a fierce November gale or perhaps a banshee, screaming and screaming. Then he was gone.

  “When the sun came up,” Steph said, exhaling smoke, “I went to the garage. He was still wrapped in the blanket as I’d left him. His arm had fallen free but other than that it looked like he hadn’t moved. I carried him out into the sunlight and pulled the blanket from him. I heard him scream again and I ran until I couldn’t run anymore.” She sipped her coffee, spilling most of it. “I went back later…I saw something black and twisted in the snow. It was breaking apart in the wind.”

  Luke let her complete her tale and she seemed calmer as she got to the end and got it off her soul. The pain had been lanced and she needed that. Her story was like an instrument she strummed and she could not stop until she had finished her melancholy song and when she had, she burst into tears. Luke knew that the proper thing to do was to hold her, yet he was almost afraid to. He felt sick and weak. His breath would barely come. It was like the anguish pouring out of her was not hers alone, but his as well. All the sorrow and grief he’d felt was being channeled through her. He wanted to crawl deeper into his shell where it was cool and dark because he feared the light of her emotion and the glow of her heart. It shook the emptiness inside him and made him start to feel things he had not felt in months.

  It’s so easy to be a killer, he thought. So easy to be the beast of vengeance. To stuff yourself with hate and remorse and killer instinct and stake the undead. But it’s hard to come to grips with your feelings and admit your loss.

  Knowing this, he laughed at the boy inside the man and the man who would never really be anything but a boy. He took hold of her then, this woman who had been the girl of his dreams. He pulled her close and held her the way he had held his wife and daughter as they had died and felt Stephani melt into him and become part of him and that was the true face of his fear: emotional commitment. He was terrified to care and love. That path brought pain in the end. But she felt right in his arms and he did not let go of her.

  “Easy,” Luke said. “It’ll be okay. Easy.”

  But did he believe that? Did he really believe that? At that moment, yes, and it was enough. Let the fear and uncertainty that would come later take care of itself. Making a connection with another human being warmed him in places he did not know he was cold. He held onto Steph and the joy he felt was bigger than anything he had known in a long, long time. She unlocked him and he felt himself sobbing over the loss of Sonja and Megan and after a time it was hard to tell who was holding whom.

  Twenty minutes later, they broke it off before their communal commiseration became something else that they were definitely not ready for.

  He remembered the last time he had seen her. What he had said. “You should come with me so neither of us will be alone.”

  But she shook her head. “I can’t.”

  Luke felt something going cold in him again. “No?”

  “My Aunt Lucy is upstairs,” she said. “Her heart’s bad and she can’t take care of herself. She’s an old woman. She hasn’t been right since this started. I can’t leave her.”

  “No, of course not.”

  “I don’t think she has much time left. She hasn’t been doing very good.”

  They discussed that situation and decided they would leave things as they were for the time being. Luke thought about moving in there, but Stephani had not asked him to and he wasn’t going to force the issue. If she wanted him to, she would say so. And if she didn’t…well, maybe he was reading more into all this than there really was. As much as he wan
ted to warm to his feelings for her (which literally seemed to come out of nowhere) he knew he had to maintain his façade. It was important to who and what he now was.

  He checked his watch. It was 3:15.

  “You have to leave?”

  “Yeah. There’s one more thing I have to do before sunset.”

  “Can’t it wait?” Steph said. “I could make you something to eat.”

  Food sounded good, but he refused it. Maybe next time. There was too much to do and if he stayed and got comfortable with the domesticity of the situation it might make him happy and fat and lazy like a tomcat sunning itself on a window ledge. He could not allow that. He was not going to hunt any more Carriers this day. He knew that much. But he desperately needed to get out to the burning pits. That’s where he got most of his gasoline: from the big tankers parked out there in the snow. The fuel had been used to burn the dead. The National Guard was gone now, but their fuel was conveniently left behind.

  “Please stay,” Steph said.

  He shook his head. He wanted to. He very much wanted to. But he had the weirdest feeling that he needed to get out to the pits and he had long since learned to trust the instinct and intuition that kept him alive. This was important only he could not be sure why.

  “Will you come back?”

  “Yes.”

  He kicked the snow away from the front door so it could be shut and locked and then left. She watched him leave and it had been hard not to meet her eyes, but he knew if he did he would never leave again.

  He walked out into the snow, still pulling his gloves on.

  Bob wasn’t too happy about leaving, but once he got out in the fresh air, he began to do his happy dance: jumping and leaping for joy. On the road again, Luke. Just you and me gettin’ her done. That’s the way.