Vampirus (Book 1)

by Hamlyn, Jack

  She listens to the flies buzzing on the walls.

  She rolls over, away from the patch of sunlight that feels unpleasantly hot on her arm, and tries to think, tries to make sense of it all. She is surprised to find that Allen is not there as her fingers explore the empty quadrant of the bed. Then she remembers that he is dead. That the Army has taken him away. Was that last week or was it the week before? On previous days there were tears and grief and a crushing devastation that her husband was gone, but today there is only a quiet and easy acceptance.

  The babies.

  Oh yes, my loves, mama is coming, mama is coming.

  Maddie stands up, the room spinning on its axis for a moment before stabilizing. Her blurring eyesight clears. She moves towards the window. The sunlight is too bright, too hot, it makes her stomach roil in greasy waves of nausea. With slender, trembling fingers, she pulls down the shade and a comfortable dimness descends and something in the back of her mind—embryonic, unformed, but gaining a macabre sort of definition by the day—whispers to her of dark earth, cool soil, and the enclosing confines of concrete entombment.

  This makes her smile.

  She stumbles out into the hallway, so tired, so weak she has to lean up against the wall for a time to steady herself. She tries to remember the last time she’s eaten and cannot. She tried some soup a few days ago but the smell made her sick and the taste made her shake with nausea. When she swallowed it, just few spoonfuls, it all came rushing back up with a thin, watery vomit that smelled positively rank and diseased.

  “Mama’s coming,” she says in a hollow voice that she barely recognizes as her own.

  Her brain is reeling with conflicting thoughts and emotions—fear, guilt, horror, panic, worry—but none of it seems to make any sense suddenly as a shadow of stark alien impulses covers it, buries it in darkness. And for one frightening moment she cannot seem to remember where she is or what she is doing. There is something in the back of her mind, a subtle and worrisome sort of scratching at the back of her skull, that makes her want to run, to leap out the nearest window into the snow and shriek and whirl in the streets.

  She nearly does…then her motherly instinct supersedes.

  She goes to the children’s room, stands in the doorway for a moment with a blank look in her eyes. Vague memories parade through her mind. Something concerning her and a man decorating this room, stripping old mustard-colored wallpaper and replacing it with a festive paper of dancing balloons and clowns. She can see them laughing, touching one another, overjoyed with the beauty of what they have brought to being and what the future will hold.

  Gone, gone, gone.

  She sees another shape in her mind that obscures the memory. This shape is dark and fluid and she cannot say that it is a man exactly. She can only see the eyes, which are red and luminous as he moves towards her bed and presses his cold lips to her throat.

  But then it’s gone, too. In her mind there is nothing…just drifting fuzz.

  Maddie scratches at her head, pulling out strands of hair with her long, splintered nails. She rakes red welts down the side of her face. She stares down into the crib with glassy, unfocused eyes. She touches the punctures at her throat and they give her secret pleasure beyond name.

  What, what what—

  Her babies, her wonderful perfect beautiful babies, Jade, Jenna, and Jonah, the triplets, sleeping side by side in harmony like cold fish in a bucket.

  Cold?

  Yes, yes, Maddie looks across the room and the shade is moving. The window is open. Now why would the window be open? Brushing dead flies from the sill, she lifts the shade and the December sunlight hits her and she gags, gasps, nearly goes down to her knees. Cool sweat rolls down her face as she shuts the window and—thankfully—pulls the shade down.

  Back to the children.

  Somewhere in her brain there is a voice crying out in pain at what she is seeing, trying to warn her about something, but Maddie does not hear it. She looks down at her angels sleeping side-by-side, moon-faced, pale as cream, pink lips like juicy blossoms, their bright blue eyes wide open and staring up at the ceiling, sightless and soulless and somehow malignant.

  A fly, sluggish from the cold crawls across Jenna’s lips.

  Maddie pulls the baby blanket up to their chins, smiling down at their dead faces, never once seeing them for the leeched husks they are and never once noticing the puncture marks in their soft, white throats or the bloody handprint on the crib rail that belongs to Anne Stericki.

  Maddie kisses their cold heads and stumbles off to bed.

  Sleep. She needs sleep.

  She knows she will feel better when the sun goes down.

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  The entire neighborhood.

  Anne spread it through the entire fucking neighborhood.

  Many had the germ already, but that didn’t stop her from fastening onto them in the night and sucking at their throats, drawing off blood from their already dangerously weakened bodies. Some of her victims went into the burning pits, Luke figured, but not all of them. He was certain, for a fact, that if he were to go over to the Skorenska house he would find Maddie and the triplets.

  “I’m not going to do that,” he said out loud. “I…I just can’t bear that. Not yet.”

  He realized Stephani was staring at him. She had watched him come out of his trip and now she was watching him talk to himself. “What can’t you bear?”

  “To go into the house over there,” he said, jabbing a thumb in its direction. “I know what’s waiting there and I know who caused it.”

  “We don’t have time today anyway,” she said. “It’s almost quarter to five.”

  He checked his watch. He had 4:46.

  He wondered then how long the trips actually lasted. He had assumed only a few minutes or so, but apparently they were like some kind of fugue or trance that went on for some time. When he saw Maddie and the triplets, it must have been in real time. How long had it taken her to wake up, to realize that Allen was dead, to finally get out of bed, stumble drunkenly down the hallway, confused and disoriented, and make it to the triplet’s room where she stood staring down at them for God knows how long? A healthy individual could have done the whole thing in minutes, but Maddie was hardly healthy.

  “How long was I gone?” he asked Stephani.

  “On your vision?”

  “If that’s what you want to call it.”

  She shrugged. “About twenty minutes. I was thinking I might have to throw you on the sled and take you home if you didn’t come out of it.”

  “When I see the things it must be in real time.”

  “What are you talking about exactly?”

  “The trips, the visions. I’m gone with them for however long the actual incident took place. I’m like a fly on the wall. I’m seeing something that has already happened and I’m seeing it in real time.”

  “Is that important somehow?”

  “I don’t know.”

  But, yes, it was important. If it were fifteen minutes to sundown, say, and he went on a thirty minute trip, then he was going to be in trouble. He sighed. He didn’t like any of it and he did not want any of it. Life was hard enough these days without going out of your head for extended periods of time and with very little warning. What good was any of it really? Where would any of it get him? Did it empower him in any way to know that Count RedEye had torn grooves in the wall of his house? Did it get him anywhere to know that Anne had indeed been slaking her thirst in the neighborhood, going from house to house? It was confirmation of what he already suspected, but it really advanced him in no way that he could think of. It just turned anxieties and worries into reality and that gained him nothing.

  “We should go, Luke.”

  “I suppose you’re right.”

  “Tomorrow we can come back and start early, go house to house and do what has to be done.”

  He nodded. “Okay.”

  He turned away with her in the direction of the sleds and he seize
d up. He could not move. It was like he was welded to the spot. He wasn’t going on a trip exactly, but a bolt of utter fear had shot through him. His heart skipped a beat and then another. A hollow terror rushed from his belly up into his chest. His mouth was opening and closing. No, this wasn’t a trip, this wasn’t knowledge of something that had already happened, it was something else. Something right now. Something important.

  “Luke,” Stephani said. “Good God, are you okay?”

  “Yes,” he managed.

  He stood there and something in him turned him around, making him face down the block at the houses down there. He was like a compass needle being drawn to magnetic north.

  The Pruitt house. You better get to the Pruitt house.

  He ran over to the sled and grabbed his duffel and stumbled through the snow down the block. Stephani was calling out to him, but he was not listening now. He could not hear her. His mind was focused and directed at something in the Pruitt house. He fought through the snow and up the porch, vaguely hearing Stephani trying to catch up with him.

  As soon as he got the door open, he smelled the corruption.

  Yes, it was here.

  Something was here.

  The one he sought was hiding here.

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  He charged through the house, going from room to room and finding nothing. But he knew what he was looking for was on the premises. If Bob had been with him, he would have tracked the corruption to its source almost immediately. But Luke did not have Bob anymore. All he had was that internal compass and it had been pointing right at this house.

  The cellar.

  Of course, the cellar.

  By the time he opened the basement door, he heard Stephani come in the front door. “LUKE!” she cried out. “IT’S STARTING TO GET DARK! WE HAVE TO GO! WE HAVE TO GO NOW!”

  As soon as he climbed the steps down into the basement he knew there was a Carrier hiding down there.

  The odor was unmistakable: the smell of death and perhaps something beyond death. Once you smelled it, you’d never forget it.

  And smelling it, he felt the familiar tenseness take him over, making his heart pound and his scalp feel tight on his skull. It was part anxiety, part fear, and part exhilaration…because destroying them gave him a sense of purpose and a satisfaction that was nearly indescribable.

  It was a dirty, ugly job.

  But it had to be done.

  Flashlight in one hand and his duffel of goodies in the other, he searched the basement first in kind of a wild angry rush, throwing doors open and kicking boxes out of his way, swearing and puffing with the exertion…then settling down, knowing that he had to keep his head. Then he took his time, looking everywhere: behind the bar, under the pool table, in the backs of closets, beneath any blankets he saw piled.

  Nothing.

  Nothing.

  There were only four rooms down there—the rec room with the bar, the mechanical room with the furnace and water heater, a storage room, and a small cramped bedroom that had also become a storage room after Casey Pruitt went away to college three years before.

  He stood there, breathing hard, angry.

  He could smell them…but where were they?

  And it was then, as he was poised on the brink of tearing through every room again knocking down shelves and kicking in walls, that he remembered.

  The mechanical room.

  The root cellar.

  Anne Stericki was down there. He knew it for a fact.

  He had to give her credit for that; she was much craftier than a lot of them that holed up in the first dark space they could find, completely oblivious to the fact that they might be located and destroyed. There were many of them that Luke wanted—in fact, he really wanted all of them—but Anne Stericki had always been high on his list. Not just because of what she’d done to her husband Alger, and others in the neighborhood, but because much like his wife and daughter, she had returned from the dead with a certain amount of cunning.

  He feared the cunning ones most of all.

  And Anne had become, in a way, his nemesis.

  As smart as he thought he was, as careful and methodical was his planning, she was always one step ahead of him because she was desperate and desperation had its own intellect.

  Leslie Pruitt was always canning pickles and tomatoes and banana peppers from her garden out back. She used to bring over Mason jars of pickled dilly beans and Slippery Jim pickles in the spring. Nothing quite like them with beer. He recalled Doug Pruitt complaining about the many hours his wife spent canning and storing her preserves down in the root cellar.

  Luke went into the mechanical room.

  There were no windows to let in the sun and the power had been out for some time by then, so he had to find his way around with a flashlight. A tool bench. A stack of Rubbermaid containers. Boxes of Christmas ornaments. Halloween decorations. A shelf with a lot of Casey’s old toys and games on it.

  Where the hell was it?

  There. On the other side of the tool bench behind the boxes. He kicked them out of the way and there was the trapdoor. With barely any hesitation, he gripped the handle and pulled it up. There was an eyehook on the wall for it and he secured it.

  Crouching down, he played his light around down there.

  The smell hit him full force right away: pungent, almost violent.

  The root cellar was maybe fifteen feet long, six wide. Shelves of pickles and wax beans along the walls and in the center of the dirt floor, next to a pile of soil, there was a trench dug down about three feet. In it was a shape beneath a sheet.

  He checked his watch. It was 5:12.

  Jesus.

  The sun was either down or close to it.

  “LUKE!” Stephani cried out. “ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR FUCKING MIND?”

  “No,” he told her, “but if I don’t get this one, I will be. Anne’s down here. She got Bob. She got everyone in the neighborhood.”

  Stephani’s green eyes were narrowed and he could see she wanted to lash out at him and tell him what a fool he was, but she didn’t.

  He could feel the hairs standing up on the back of his neck as he climbed down the ladder into the pit where Anne Stericki whiled away the daylight hours in the womblike darkness. He hung his flashlight from the pull string for the light bulb that dangled above. It provided pretty good light, but also made shadows crawl like slinking black cats.

  He pulled off his parka and winter gloves, set them aside. Beneath he wore the black rain slicker and yellow Platex gloves. He pulled a stake and hammer out of his duffel and hopped down into the trench, pulling the plastic dental face shield visor on, adjusting it so it would not slip off.

  Anne had gotten pretty good at hiding. He knew for a fact that she changed her hide every few days. Most would have been satisfied with the basement, but not her. She had to have a root cellar, a dug out grave, and a sheet. She had folded it under her and then pulled the rest over her like a sleeping bag.

  But it was no sleeping bag.

  It was a shroud.

  Very good, Anne. Very clever.

  Luke grabbed the edge of it and pulled it back, exposing her. Flies and dank, sickly-sweet smelling heat rolled off her and he had to turn away from the stench. He never understood the heat because they were always as cold as thawing meat.

  She had brought a reign of terror down on the neighborhood, she had become the local boogeyman…or boogeywoman. And to Luke, she was what Dracula was to Van Helsing. But she had been cunning and sly. A walking pestilence that returned from death with many of her reasoning faculties intact…which was something that could not be said for many of the others who did not even seem to understand what they were, only that they needed blood and would have it at any cost and seemed almost confused when you didn’t want to give it to them.

  Finding Anne was a great satisfaction.

  But also a great horror that brought with it a sense of loss that was incalculable. Because Anne had been his friend and poised there, wit
h the stake held high, he wanted to shake her awake and say, it’s all bullshit…right, Anne? None of this is true and you’re not really one of them. Please, please, please, Anne, tell me it’s not true.

  But it was true.

  And, dear God, did it ever hurt.

  He could not weaken. She had been a fine woman in life that made one especially nasty parasite in death.

  She was still wearing the same blue nightgown she’d been wearing when they put her in the mortuary out at Salem Cross Cemetery. Only now it was dark with crusty brown stains, torn and filthy with soaked-in blood as was the rest of her. She had fed well last night and was bloated up like a barrel, blood on her curled fingers, in her greasy hair, splashed over her mouth and staining her chin. It was even on her cheeks and forehead like ghastly warpaint against the graveyard pallor of her skin, which was an almost phosphorescent white.

  She must have bathed in it.

  An absolute blood feast.

  So much that it had leaked from her mouth and nostrils and even her ass and privates if the red-soaked sheet beneath her was any indication.

  Fucking leech, you goddamn fucking leech.

  He swatted flies out of his way, feeling them crawling over his neck and through his hair, buzzing at his ears. He could have used Stephani’s crossbow. It would have been a neater job.

  But this was personal.

  He wanted to feel the bitch die.

  He wanted to know her agony, experience her suffering.

  He looked down at the corpse in the trench. She stared up at him with huge red-veined eyes that were blank as glass. Holding down the bile in his stomach, he raised the sharpened stake above his head with both hands.

  “Long time no see, Anne,” he said, and brought it down with a twisted cry of vengeance, a weird combination of pleasure and hate and necessity, his mind filled with the faces of her victims.

  His aim was perfect.

  The stake pierced just left of the sternum, pushing aside rib slats and piercing her heart just as she began to move. The effect was instantaneous. She came awake howling with a wild screeching roar, white filth-stained fingers clawing at the visor that covered his face…but even with it on, he could smell her breath, which was hot and thick with stolen blood. She writhed and contorted with slick, greasy reptilian gyrations, head thrashing from side to side.