by Hamlyn, Jack
Question was: did Luke heed that warning or did he just keep pushing on where things would get far worse? Where he would perhaps come upon the creature that had killed this man?
4:28 now.
The wise thing to do, he knew, was to get out and leave the investigating for another day. Tomorrow, or instance, after the sun came up and he would have an entire day of sunlight to figure out how to deal with this. But, no, he had to know. He had to see. He crawled further, over more wreckage and around another heap of coal. He was in the cellar of the station now. There could be no doubt of it. He could nearly feel its weight poised above him, ready to fall. There was still snow everywhere but he could see the shattered timbers overhead, the ceiling having caved-in in places, piping and ductwork tangled in and out of the snow and rubble.
Two more bodies.
Yes, the other two riders.
They were hanging from a beam by the feet. Old square-headed nails were driven through their boots to secure them. They had no heads. They were opened from throat to belly, eviscerated, what had been inside their body cavities yanked out and thrown in the snow.
It was grisly and horrifying to see them hanging there in the flashlight beam, but what was worse were the undead sleeping in the snow around them. A naked woman with glazed staring eyes, the corpse of a child at her side. A pair of teenage boys covered in a light down of snow. A man whose feet stuck out of a drift. An elderly man who had tunneled into a coal pile, his head visible, blood at his mouth. They were everywhere. Luke figured there were a dozen or more of them. Atop a pile of rubble was what looked at first like a coffin but was more along the line of an ancient, water-stained packing crate. Like something that might have been used to deliver a refrigerator. There was a bloody drag mark cut through the snow leading to it as if something heavy had been pulled through there…or crawled through there.
This is what he had been looking for.
He climbed up the rubble and put his hands on it…immediately withdrawing them. It was like a shock had gone right up to his elbows. He could still feel it. But what he felt more than that was what oozed from the crate itself…a noxious psychic odor of decay and infection, a seeping eldritch evil that was equal parts misery, defilement, and malignance. It seemed to get inside him like a cool, slow-running poison, spreading out through his veins in toxic rivers.
He was sweating.
He was shaking.
Steeling himself, he wedged the flashlight between two broken planks so he could see what he was doing. Then he gripped the lid but he couldn’t get any purchase in his clumsy gloves. He stuffed them in his pockets and ran his fingers beneath the lip and pulled. It would barely come open. It was warped from years of weathering, swollen by decades of thaw and freeze and dripping water. He gave it everything he had and yanked it off. It clattered away in the wreckage.
A flood of something black like clotted sand poured over his knees.
No, not sand…flies.
Literally thousands and thousands of fat meatflies that were frozen solid. The crate was filled with them. But there was something more and he knew it. He thrust his hands inside regardless of how repulsive it was. He dug through the flies and his fingertips touched something that felt almost greasy and fleshy like tissue. He dug around it and saw some sort of black cloth that looked almost membranous like the skin of a bat’s wing. Whatever was under the flies was wrapped in it like a cloak. He pawed away flies from the top of the crate and saw part of a face that was gray and corrugated by lines and intersecting ruts like the bark of an old pine stump.
Then he saw a mouth.
It was open and filled with frozen flies. The central incisors were long and needle-like, curving backward like the fangs of a cobra. The lateral incisors and canines to either side were nearly as long, though not sharp. All of them were stained and discolored by midnight feedings, the gums shriveled back, ebon and puckered. Luke had no doubt that these were the teeth that had torn out the hunter’s throat. There could be no doubt of it. Some of the undead had teeth like that, but not to this degree.
More flies fell away and he saw gray misshapen fingers, splintered yellow claws at the end of them. He pawed more flies from the face and revealed a single eye that was like some huge succulent blood-cherry set with tiny black veins. It looked right into him with a rabid, pestiferous hatred that made his thoughts melt into one another and it was hard to say what might have happened if he hadn’t have lost his footing and fell backwards.
He pulled himself up and a voice said, “So it’s you, is it?”
Luke came around with the light, his other hand fishing out the Smith .45.
He thought for one frightening moment that the thing in the box had spoken. But no. It was not that creature nor was it its worshippers lying inert in the snow. The voice belonged to a woman in a heavy coat. She was bundled up tight and he could just see part of her face, which was dangerously pale, one eye that was bloodshot and going yellow as if with jaundice. A ribbon of saffron hair fell over her face. She was not one of them yet, but tonight she would offer herself and be drained and then tomorrow night—
“Who are you?” he said.
She kept that rheumy eye on him. One hand held a length of rusted iron rebar and she was going to use it. “Luke Barrows,” she said. “We know about you. We know what you’ve done, what you will do, and what you’ll soon be. They told us. They told us all about you and what sleeps now in the cellar of your house, waiting for you.”
Luke pulled himself to his feet. He didn’t have time for any of this. “Who are they? Is that fucking leech sleeping in the box one of them?”
The woman stepped forward. “I was hoping to be the one to get you. I know what you’ve done. I know how many you’ve killed. You were the one that killed my baby! My poor Sarah! You did! You were the one! You put that stake through her!”
What the hell was she talking about? Maybe he had. He’d destroyed dozens and dozens of children Carriers. He rarely staked them. He preferred to drag them out into the sunshine. But there had been a few. It was not killing in his way of thinking. Surely not murder. Maybe release, but definitely eradication. They were disease germs. That’s what they were. That’s all they were.
“Who appointed you God, Luke Barrows?” she wanted to know. “Who?”
He was not about to argue any of it with her. She was too far gone. He did not want to kill her, but he planned on getting out of this fucking burrow, this catacomb, and if she got in the way of that he would. Killing the undead and those who served them was second nature now and he did not fear it.
“Get out of the way,” he told her.
She kept advancing, looking like some kind of fairy tale ogre with her ragged coat and hunched posture, that one glaring eye, the rebar clutched in her blood-spattered fist. She kept moving forward, trying to get in close enough to use it. She was out of her head. Too far gone to bother with…yet, he wanted to know the things she knew but he knew she would never answer questions. He had had encounters with those infected many times and they were not exactly rational.
“Who are they?” he asked again.
“Those that will claim you, Luke Barrows. The time draws nigh.”
Nigh? Is that what she said? Who in the hell spoke like that anymore outside of a Shakespearean play? Maybe she was just mimicking the words of that monstrosity in the crate.
“They won’t claim me, bitch, I’ll claim them,” Luke told her. “I’ll get every fucking one of you. I’ll stake you one by one and drag your carcasses out into the sunlight. I’ll burn every goddamn one of you and there’s nothing you can do to stop me.”
The woman stopped and her coat fell away from her face. He did not know who she was and was glad for it. Her face was as yellow as her eye, the mark of the pox upon it: open sores and blisters. But more than that it was already looking cadaverous as if the evil had seeped in through every pore, giving her the look of something that crawled from a tomb.
“One more step an
d I kill you,” he promised her. “I’ll shoot out your guts and make you watch what I do to that fucking parasite in the box.”
Where it came from, he could not say…but in his head there exploded a horrible cacophonous braying that was inhuman and mocking, a hysterical laughter that bounced around in his skull, making his head ache and his teeth chatter, turning his thoughts to warm suet. His knees felt weak. The wind choked in his throat like a hot gust of desert sand. He almost went down to one knee but saved himself at the last moment, forcing the noise from his head by sheer willpower.
The woman’s mouth was hooked in a snarl, her eyes cloudy with mindless stark loathing. Her face went slack as if the muscles holding it in place had gone as limp as wet dishrags. She launched herself forward and Luke jerked the trigger twice. One round caught her in the belly and the other in the chest. She fell back, screaming with a wild keening sound that went right up his spine. He brought the Smith up again and put two more in her at point-blank range, one round going in through her left eye and the other just below her right cheekbone. The .45 caliber slugs bounced through her skull and then blew it apart. Her face splashed off the bone beneath and her head seemed to split, the halves falling in opposite directions and she fell into the snow, pissing out gouts of blood, her limbs still trembling.
This is what Luke saw as he stepped backward and lost his footing, his legs going out from under him. He was tossed backward and his head found a beam and struck it with considerable velocity. Then the blackness swallowed him and he saw no more.
The last thing he heard was Bob howling.
66
When he woke, he knew he was a dead man.
His eyes blinked open and there was absolute blackness all around him. It was now fully dark out and he knew it. They were already awake, perhaps waiting for him to move and then they would drain him dry. He fought the urge to jump to his feet and run. He was in a lair of vampires, in a tomb crawling with them. He didn’t have a fucking chance.
His boot skidded, loosing its hold, his leg straightening out.
It wasn’t much of a sound but in that silent womb it was louder than clanging metal or shattering glass, it seemed. He tensed up at the sound of it. Good one, dumbass. Real nice.
Oh, fuck it. They know I’m here. They’re awake and they had to have seen me sprawled here like a goddamn offering when they rose up. They see very well in the dark.
But if they were around him…then why didn’t they feed already?
Unless they had.
He performed a mental inventory of his body. Nothing. No soreness at his neck or wrists or anywhere else save the stiffness in his back from laying on the ice, the numbness of his bare hands.
He kept listening.
He could not hear them or smell them and his sense of self-preservation, which was quite highly tuned by that point, was sensing no danger. He worked his hands in and out of fists for what seemed ten or fifteen minutes, doing simple isometric exercises until they tingled and then began to hurt from the cold. He felt around him. It was all so easy: near his left hand was the flashlight, near his right the gun. It was almost like they’d been placed within easy reach.
Consider the following: you’re alive. You haven’t been touched. That in itself flies in the face of logic. There’s no way in hell you were simply overlooked. The Carriers are predators. They would ignore you no more than a starving man would ignore a juicy roast pig. But you haven’t been touched. And maybe the reason for that is worse than you can imagine.
That was food for thought.
He thought about the creature in the crate of dead flies. That it was a vampire, there was no doubt. But Luke’s instincts told him it was no recent acquisition to the world of the undead. That thing was far older than the recent plague and far worse than any bloodsucker he’d seen thus far. It was a Carrier of unholy vintage. It was one of the mysterious others, the they, that had been alluded to by the vampire woman in the cellar of the saloon and Stephani’s son. Luke knew one thing for sure: if he was alive then it was because that monster had forbid the others from touching him. Which meant that horror was saving him for something better.
You can’t know that.
Oh, but I can, he thought. I surely can.
The thing was, he could feel the certainty of it building inside him in a black mass. There was no doubting the reality of what he knew. He thought: I wasn’t harmed because what fucking fun would there have been to leech me as I slept? I’d never feel the full horror of conversion that way and my new friend—Count RedEye—wouldn’t like that at all. This was his way of showing me his power. RedEye will take me when it amuses him to do so and not before and neither will any of the others.
Luke believed that absolutely.
And he wondered then if that’s why he had been laying here and not doing a damn thing to safeguard his ass. As if maybe he wanted RedEye and his minions to just get it over with, to force his hand.
Enough.
He pulled himself to his feet in the grainy darkness. He slid on his gloves, waiting for the feel of fangs in his throat but they never came. He clicked on his light. They were all gone. The box was poised above him on the rubble. There was nothing in it. Just a lot of dead flies and a lot of dirt. A portable grave. He figured that Count RedEye must have stood over him as he lay there unconscious. He had the feeling that horror had been grinning.
There was no time for this shit.
Bob was up there, Bob was waiting for you…
Luke turned away from the crate and sketched out his escape route by the beam of his flashlight. He crawled through the wreckage until he was free of the basement of the coal station and into the white pristine tunnel. No light came from its entrance to guide him. Soon, he was on his hands and knees scrambling for freedom. When he saw the stars above he knew he had made it. It took some doing, but he got up there, stumbling through the deep snow, scanning the light wildly around looking for Bob.
But the dog was gone.
Just gone.
He knew damn well that Bob would never have abandoned him. He would have fought and been killed, but he would never leave. Luke hoped against hope that he had just run off.
There was no time to look for him.
He stumbled through the snow to his Polaris. He didn’t cut through the building because he was immensely afraid of the shadows inside there now. It meant a lot more exertion. It meant straining and fighting his way through deep snow and drifts that were nearly as tall as he was.
Then he saw his Polaris, thank God.
You really think you’re going to drive out of here? That you’re going to make it to town? Even if you do, they’ll be everywhere. You don’t stand a fucking chance.
He knew he didn’t, but what choice was there?
He turned over the Polaris and, thankfully, it started. He was more afraid than he’d been since he first found that crate below. It was like it had been building up in him and now it was being released. His heart was pounding. His breath throwing out hot clouds of steam. His belly constricting with the flow of adrenalin. He brought the sled around so its nose was facing down the road and that’s when he saw a throng of them standing there, four women. One of them was a teenager and she was naked. In the beam of the Polaris they were ashen white, their eyes a luminous yellow. They were inhuman things, grinning like wolves with their lips pulled back from their long teeth and pale gums. He could feel the profane hunger coming off of them and knew they wanted badly to hang him up like a steer and leech him, open up his arteries and cover themselves with his hot blood.
But they didn’t.
He had a feeling they didn’t dare.
He pulled out and they didn’t bother to stop him. He could almost feel their icy invasive thoughts as he passed by them: a low, almost insectile droning. Then he was cutting down the drive the way he had come in and was out on Hollow Creek Road. The stars were bright and the moon was negligible. He realized with a rush of exhilaration and fear that this was the
first time he had been out at night in many, many weeks. Despite the absolute danger of it, he felt alive, really alive. At least until he hit the outskirts of Wakefield and they were in the streets, the vampires. All of them watching him with sullen moons for eyes, but none of them getting close to him.
He would not look at them.
He would not lose himself in their eyes.
If it were fated by Count RedEye that he survive this night only to meet a doom far more unspeakable, then so be it. At heart, he was a survivalist. And nothing more than that really seemed to matter anymore: stay alive another day, another week, another month to even the score and kill the Carriers. That’s all that mattered. He’d been given a reprieve and he took it.
He kept driving through the snow-covered streets, slicing through drifts and avoiding the white mounds of buried cars. Block after block after block. The houses were dark, white-shrouded tombs. His eyes were wide and stark, his cold-numbed mouth an open wound. The undead were everywhere, rustling shadows and evil ghosts and red-eyed night haunters.
As he drove, limbs stiff and body trembling from something far beyond the cold night, he was hearing the voice of the woman from the coaling station basement as he would forever hear it: They told us all about you and what sleeps now in the cellar of your house, waiting for you. Was that the game? Was that what he was saved for? Had RedEye left Sonja or Megan there for him?
In that case, he wouldn’t go home.
He cut away towards Cherry Hill Road and there were vampires everywhere. Something passed over his head like a swooping bird. He ducked, looked up, and there was nothing there.
But there had been.
Out of his peripheral vision he caught a momentary glimpse of something with huge ink-black wings like a predatory prehistoric bird. It angled off over the rooftops and was gone before he could really catch a good look at it.
The game was changing.
He wasn’t supposed to go to Stephani’s; that wasn’t part of the design.