by Hamlyn, Jack
71
In his dream that is not a dream, he sees Wakefield lying stark and cold like an unburied corpse, the streets that are its limbs sprawled stiffening in the winter winds. Trees droop beneath heavy blankets of white, clods of snow drop into the unbroken drift. It is midday, but the town is silent like the concrete depths of a crypt. Doors are shut, windows bolted, homes lined up like tombstones frosted white. The sky is the color of cobwebs. It seems to hang just above snow-heaped rooftops and ice-slicked steeples. Out on Castle Avenue, cows mull about. Unmilked and loose, they have wandered from outlying farms where their owners lie barely breathing behind shades pulled to keep the sunlight at bay. The cows paw at the snow. They wander through town, succumbing to the cold and starvation, dropping in snowbanks and side streets. In houses, the dead and dying outnumber the healthy and living. They tremble with fever, delirious and sweat-soaked, eyes like opaque balls of glass. They scratch at bedsheets and moan through graying lips as the pox sores of the Red Death open up like suppurating boils in their faces and chests and necks. The blood that trickles free is watery, a thin serous discharge hot with communicable virus. Some of them scream. Some foam at the mouth. Others disgorge clots of black-red glutinous blood. Each night, as though answering the siren call of lost souls upon the wind, many crawl out of windows and drag themselves out of doors and gather in the streets to dance beneath the cold eye of the moon. Most are dead within the hour. Street to street, avenue to avenue, the olive-drab trucks of the National Guard move sullenly up drifted roads like Medieval corpse wagons. Blank-eyed soldiers in Hazmat suits stained with the discolored drainage of the dead go house to house, dragging out bodies and tossing them up into the hoppers of the trucks, piling them atop dozens and dozens of other cadavers. Once the hoppers are filled, the trucks move in solemn formation like coffin trains out to the charnel pits of Hollow Creek Road to be cremated. Here, the pyres blaze through day and night, black smoke rising in rolling, stinking clouds that rain gray ash and charred bits of bone down over Wakefield. When the sun drops over the horizon and night sweeps over the town neighborhood after neighborhood, the trucks stop rolling. Those who dared the streets hurry behind closed doors where they shiver and wait for dawn as long-armed shapes rise from the snow and creep from cellars and crawlspaces and narrow attic breezeways. Throughout the night, they knock on doors and scratch at windows…and many of them are invited in.
72
In the depths of sickness, there is no time. It ceases to exist. Maybe it tick-tocks in some distant place like the low murmur of a heartbeat, but for the infected it is an abstract concept. There is only the sweating, distorted febrile dream that when sleeping you are awake and when awake that you are sleeping.
How many times in those days that might have been two or three or five or six or even one long feverish year of yellow illness Luke came awake and said again and again, “I’m not afraid, I’m not afraid,” he did not know. But it became a mantra. He tried to tell Stephani again and again of the headaches and weakness, the chills that froze him and the fevers that melted him, but there were no words to describe how he felt and no mouth to speak them with. His eyes were open a lot and looked around a room he had never seen before. The curtained window. The water stain on the ceiling in the shape of Italy. The nightstand. The picture on the wall of peasants working in a harvest field of amber wheat. And Stephani, of course, always sitting there, watching him with eyes narrowed like chipped emeralds. He could hear her voice speaking sometimes and it soothed him, though he could not comprehend the words. Like an infant hearing its mother, only the tone was important and the love behind it.
He thought of the vampires, of course.
During lucid moments he thought of nothing else. He knew the virus was in him and his body was fighting against it, but whether that would be enough he did not know. Yet, a calming voice spoke in his head from time to time told him that just because he had the virus did not mean he would become one of them. The virus was deadliest when the person in question was parasitized by a Carrier again and again, so much blood drawn off that they were in a severely weakened state and death was a given, the virus speeding it along. The virus sometimes killed the old and the very young without the help of a Carrier, but in normal healthy adults it was usually a combination of the two…though not always. Aunt Lucy had been destroyed so she would not come for him again. This is what the voice told him. It also told him that if he really fought, that if he really wanted to survive, he would.
Stephani treated the bite at his throat daily, washing it and disinfecting it, and that felt good because it cooled the wound which very often burned unmercifully. The fact that he felt pain from the bite was a good thing, he figured. When you felt no pain, it meant the virus had the upper hand and your body had admitted defeat. Stephani moved around like a spirit, making little sound as she cared for him. He often trembled and moaned and it felt like shards of ice were growing in his belly. It was only her hands that chased it all away and made him breathe easy and rest.
In those lucid moments, he would almost feel like himself again and Stephani would ask him how he felt and what she could do to make him feel better.
But he would say, “If it goes bad, do what’s right.”
“I will.”
“Don’t say it like that. Like it’s nothing. Think about what I’m saying.”
“It’s all I think about, Luke.”
“If I die, get me out of here. Use a stake. Use an axe. Make sure I don’t walk again or I’ll come after you.”
“I know what to do.”
And that would make him shake his head until the fever sweat ran and he thought he was going to drown in its brine. Yes, yes, yes, Stephani knew what to do but love blinds and he could feel her love for him, the devotion and care…but would she be strong enough to do the thing that must be done when the time came? He could only hope.
Well into the third day, Luke woke to the taste of blood in his mouth and he knew he had bitten through his lip. It was nothing, nothing, but it was not nothing because the blood did not taste unpleasant as it once had…for a moment it was darkly sweet and rich, teasing liquid copper ambrosia and he wanted to fill himself with its honey, he wanted to drown in it and bathe in it and soak it up like a sponge until he was round and leaking like a cask of dark red wine. But at the same time it pleased him, it offended him. And he did the most ludicrous thing: gathering all his strength, he slapped himself in the face again and again until his cheeks burned and the fatigue of it all dropped him into unbroken slumber.
And as he drifted off, he thought: Is that what it’s like for them? Do they switch gears and suddenly love the taste of blood? Is that how it is?
Sometimes he would wake in the dark watches of the night and even though he knew Stephani was sleeping across the room, his loneliness was like steel cutting into his belly. It was then he would feel them outside, watching the house as they always watched it, and he would feel like prey swimming in a dark pond with predator fish wheeling around him making ready to bite into him. Were they at the windows? At the door? They were always looking for an opening. Sooner or later, one that Stephani had innocently invited in years before would show up and renew the invitation.
Towards the end, he woke in the darkness, white with fear. Something was in the house, something was moving like a stillborn breath of October. He knew it and his heart leaped in his chest. Move! Get up! Make ready! Do something! But as he tried, he grew weak and fell back into bed, panting. He could hear the dead winter night circling the house like a banshee moaning at the eaves. But it was not the wind; it was something more. Then he could hear it coming up the stairs: quiet, careful, a thing of stealth and stolen midnights. The old house grew uneasy with the invasion. It held its breath, then let it out in a cool sibilance of despair. Joists creaked. Beams groaned. The brick chimney made a whispering sound. It was the sound a deserted house would make at three in the morning: ghost-memories parading down its warped hallways in stoc
king feet, hands sliding down banisters, laughter from a distant room, the shifting of heavy trunks in the attic, whispers on the back porch.
Yes, the sound of invasion, something breaking the fabric of night.
Luke lifted his head off the pillow and for once it did not pound. Okay. A weapon. Something he could strike with, but he knew there was nothing. His heart slammed in his chest, his limbs shook, shivers ran down his spine, his breath strangled in his throat.
The door opened and a form stepped in.
It was Stephani, just Stephani, but for a moment it was something else, something hideous and hungry in the form of a bent old hag with hair like trailing cobwebs and a face carven from yellow wax, teeth gnashing and claws dragged over the wall like ten penny nails. Hallucination. That’s all. That’s all. Stephani came over to him. “Can’t you sleep?” she asked.
“I thought I heard something.”
“You heard me. I was double-checking things.”
“I thought it was something else.”
“It wasn’t.”
He expected to drift back off immediately or break into a sweat as he always did, as if the mere effort of speaking were too much. “Don’t you ever sleep?”
“I catnap,” she admitted. “Ever since…ever since this started I haven’t been able to sleep much.”
They chatted for a few minutes then he went out again.
The next morning he awoke and it was like he had never slept, like maybe he had only pretended to be unconscious. Regardless, it was over and he knew it. If he closed his eyes, he could still see the nightmare form of Aunt Lucy hovering over him, an evil ghost in a rotting shroud, crooked teeth jutting from pale gums.
But it was over and he let it be over.
It was all a bad dream and like any dream it would fade in time. He would let it fade because it was for the best. Somehow, in the blackness, he had found a single shaft of light and followed it out of the graveyard darkness and into the world of the living. He knew that light was Stephani. He had lost his own wife and daughter and now here was something else to covet and protect; he would not leave her to fight alone.
“You look better,” Stephani said.
“I think I might live. But I’m hungry.”
“That’s a very good sign,” she said, her eyes wet.
He swallowed. “Bob…did Bob come back?”
She shook her head.
When she went to get him some broth, wiping tears from her face, fraught with guilt that was unnecessary but deep-hewn, he took inventory of himself and knew that despite being a bit weak and dizzy-feeling in the head, he would be okay. Yet…something had changed. Something had shifted inside him and it would never be the same again.
He could not put a name to it.
He only knew that he was different. The virus hadn’t been able to claim him, but its legacy was still there. No, he would not sleep by day and knock at windows by night. This was a subtle thing, but it was there. It troubled him so he closed his eyes and remembered, trying to make sense of all that had happened.
But there was no sense to it.
Count RedEye had spared him. He was supposed to go home where no doubt Sonja and Megan were waiting for him. Maybe a dozen others led by Anne Stericki. The only thing that had saved him was coming here and RedEye had tried to punish him for that by putting Aunt Lucy on him. But that, it seemed, hadn’t worked either.
But Bob…where was Bob?
If they got him, they would have done horrible things to him, to that kind, loyal, smart old dog. The idea of that brought Luke as much pain as he’d known since his wife and daughter had passed away.
He calmed himself, letting his mind drift away.
It did not just drift, it rocketed right out of his skull.
73
He sees Anne Stericki in her deathbed, breathing shallowly, grinning into the night. In the room down the hall, Alger sobs in his sleep but she is oblivious to him. The virus is raging hot through her body, her conception of the world she occupied for so long is narrowing. It is being blocked out by the malefic shadow of something much bigger than herself, much as drawn shades block out the painful rays of the sun. There is a sound at the window and though she makes no sound, her lips part and form the words she must say, must utter into the velvet blackness of forever night. The window slides open and a rustling crow-black form slides into the room. It hovers over her like a human buzzard, its breath stinking of violated caskets and graveyard ditches. She coos words to it and it seizes her left hand in long yellow fingers that are colder than death. Its presses an unclean, gray-lipped mouth to her wrist and nips it with needle-like incisors. When the blood flows, it sips at the opened artery almost daintily as its black, pointed tongue jabs the wounds, widening them until her blood runs in hot, salty, crimson rivers that it battens its mouth to, gulping down obscenely, slobbering and sucking. Anne, barely alive, runs one trembling hand over its scabrous, narrow, rodent-like face, touching the blue-white flesh almost tenderly. She looks into its hollow-socketed eyes, which were a gelid white like bulging frog-spawn when it came into the room and are now a juicy ruby-red, luscious and bleeding. She smiles at her own desecration that is darkly sweet and secret. Had she been sane, she would have screamed…
74
Luke opened his eyes.
First, the dream of the town dying.
Now, one of Anne Stericki being drained by some malevolent haunter of the dark who could only be Count RedEye himself…or itself.
Again, his mind had gone on a trip and no longer did he believe it was simple fever delirium left over from the bite Aunt Lucy had given him, some lingering after-effect of the infection itself. No, this was nothing as simple as hallucination. The infection had passed. His body had beaten off Vampirus. Maybe he would never know why, but it had and he was healthy again, he was whole, and the trips—as he called them—were not part of the sickness. That was gone now. Whatever they were, they were part and parcel of who he now was.
Sitting there in Stephani’s house, staring out the window at the snow, he realized how rigid he was. The muscles of his stomach weren’t just tight, they were clutching hard like a fist. He forced himself to relax, to unwind inch by inch. Whenever he came out of a trip he was like this. Easy. Breathe in, breathe out. Better. Yes, this was the legacy of the bite. He pressed his fingers to the puncture wounds at his neck. They had healed, yet he could still feel them. And when he went on a trip, they tingled, sometimes they burned. It was connected. It was all connected.
The trip he had taken was incredibly vivid as they all were.
They seemed to come and go with shocking regularity. He had them during his illness and he was still having them. Three-minute mind movies that came at night, in the day, whether he was sleeping or wide awake. Each time he would come out of them gasping and terrified.
He had had visions of burning pits and corpse factories, death-dancing plague victims, empty towns and cities…and now Anne Stericki being drained by that thing.
Coming out it, he felt a rage inside of him for Vampirus, for its invasion and infecting of the body of the world, the death and horror and madness it had unleashed. The grief. The pain. The terror. But more so, he felt an absolute ice-cold hatred for the Carriers themselves. Maybe, realistically, he should not have hated them for they were victims, vectors the virus used to spread itself…yet he did hate them. He wanted to kill every one of them.
It’s not all of them you want, though, now is it? You want Sonja and you want Megan and Anne, of course. There’s no peace of mind until your wife and daughter are returned to death and you know it.
“Yes, that’s the priority,” he said aloud. “That has to be the priority.”
He reached over for Stephani’s cigarettes and lit one, drawing in deeply. It tasted like shit, but the smoke was not what he wanted: it was the nicotine. Even now, his smoking was sporadic…but the nicotine, yes, now there was a miracle drug if ever there was one. Caffeine couldn’t hope to compet
e with it. Already, he could feel his thoughts sharpening, his powers of intuition focusing, his brain working like a machine.
“Are you talking to yourself again?” Stephani asked as she entered the room. “I just threw a few logs into the woodstove.”
“You don’t have to do that anymore,” he told her. “You have a man in the house now.”
She smiled at that. “I prefer to feel useful.”
She sat next to him on the sofa and they held hands. Her own was smooth-skinned, delicate-feeling in his own callused mitt, the fingers long and thin. It felt good to hold her hand, this woman who had been his high school fantasy and was now his friend and lover. This woman who had shot a crossbow bolt into the hag that was feeding on him and then selflessly nursed him through the infection at great danger to herself. He still missed his own wife, but Sonja was gone now and Stephani was here. He drew strength from that because he knew Sonja would not want him to be alone.
“Did you have another one?” Stephani asked.
He nodded, pulling off the cigarette. “But I’m beginning to understand.”
“They’ll go away. You went through a lot.”
“No,” he said, “It’s more than that. That bite did something to me, Steph. I’m not the same person I was before. Something in me has changed.”
“You’re scaring me.”
He almost laughed at that. Scared? This woman? The one who had killed her vampiric aunt, dragged her corpse out into the snow and beheaded it, then still had the energy—and sanity—to nurse him through his malady. It was hard to imagine her being scared. In his eyes, she was tough, capable, and infinitely resourceful…but not scared. He decided then that fear was part and parcel of their existence in the world of the thirsty dead. It was not something to cringe from; it was part of their toolkit. What was fear anyway? Just instinctive terror, an early warning radar system that tried to keep you safe from harm. No, it was an instinct to be cultivated, a faculty to be developed.