by Alan Spencer
CIDER MILL VAMPIRES
Alan Spencer
Cider Mill Vampires
Copyright ©2011 Alan Spencer, All Rights Reserved.
Cover Art
Copyright ©2011 Matt Truiano, All Rights Reserved
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons or monsters—living, dead, or undead— is simply coincidental.
No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form, with exception of excerpts for review, without expressed consent of the author or publisher.
Also by Alan Spencer:
The Body Cartel
Inside the Perimeter: Scavengers of the Dead
Ashes in Her Eyes
Zombies and Power Tools
PROLOGUE
1457
Wallachia, near Targoviste
Forest of the Impaled
Landowners, boyars, and the working class of Wallachia alike stood victim to the pike. Hundreds of corpses’ flesh puckered under the sun’s heat as Vlad the Imapaler stood beneath the shade of many tall standing trees, enamored by the sight of blood flowing down the wooden edifices and standing up from the earth in rich blacks and reds. Thoughts of avenging his father and brother who were murdered by the boyars a decade ago consumed him, and even now after the villains were tortured to the point of death, something else began to control the Prince of Wallachia.
Vlad couldn’t avert his eyes from the puddles of blood, nor was it his wish. He skulked between the rows of victims for a better inspection of the violence. The sharp edges of the pike had been forced between legs and completely out mouths, breaking jaws and rearing heads back in some of the harshest death poses in history. Others were killed the moment the wood penetrated them, while many suffered in prolonged agony in the burning hot sun.
Their torture wasn’t his concern anymore; the smell of the blood captured his interest. The iron tang was sharper than what clung to the best blacksmith of the land. He stamped through inches of blood, impelled forward by a force that was bestial and internal, hunger and instinct, passion and rage. The fierce prince stood in the center of the bodies, suddenly dropping to his knees and plunging his hands into the red of hundreds. He cupped the blood to his mouth with a fervor he didn’t understand, nor chose to, even years down the line when he turned into a vile ruler, a bloodthirsty fiend, and the lust for red finally cost him his head...
1
Dale Birchum removed his work gloves and massaged his calloused fingers the moment his watch read ten o'clock. Break time. He trudged down the path that led away from the apple nursery and the work of supervising his apple pickers. After a quarter of a mile, he stopped at the wishing well tucked under a heavy grove of shade trees. The well's slate-gray bricks were deteriorating into what would soon collapse. The bucket and rope had fallen into the hole years ago. Nobody had derived water from the landmark in decades.
He plopped down on his butt, resting his back against the crumbling bricks and readjusting his legs so he was completely under the cool shade. Being the owner of the Birchum's Cider Mill had its perks, he thought, falling under a sleep spell and snoozing longer than he had originally planned. Julio, his general manager, would guide the troops back into picking the juicy reds without his supervision.
Well past a half hour, he still couldn’t will himself up from the ground, and closing in on the hour mark, it was the perilous voice pleading from the well that forced him to stand up on two feet at attention.
“Somebody help me!”
He sprang to the well, turning his head down into the dark hole. His heart rate spiked as the words spilled out of him. “Take it easy. Take it easy, friend. We’ll get you out of there. You can count on it. What happened? How the hell did you fall in?"
He couldn’t see anybody down in the hole because everything was cast in deep shadow. Jolted by the next cry, Dale gripped his chest and staggered a half-step back.
“Oh God, the pain! I'm going to bleed to death down here.”
"No, man, no you won't," he kept saying, buying time to check up and down the woods. Nobody was within earshot; it was up to him, and only him, to take action. “I’ll call the police and get a rescue team down here. You sit tight. I'm not leaving you, I swear it."
Sobbing now, “Just throw down a rope. I think I can climb up. Please...the rope."
Dale finally embraced the hero role. He tore earth running to the shed just up the path. From the rickety shelves, he snatched a bale of rope—the kind an inch thick used to hang oversized baskets from trees—and cut a length with a pair of gardening sheers.
He prayed the man wasn’t too hurt to climb, or else he would have to call for help, thinking about how he wanted to mastermind the rescue himself. He wrapped the heavy duty rope around the thickest oak tree and tied an ox-bow knot.
He dropped the rope into the well, shouting down to the victim, “Heads up!”
Thirty seconds transpired, and nothing happened. He peered down in suspense, waiting for a reply or the rope to start shifting.
"Hey, you still with us, buddy?"
The silence carried on for a full minute.
“Hello, down there. Hello!" He blew out an impatient breath. "Ah, forget it, I'm calling the police. This ain't working."
He was ready to gun it back to the cider mill to reach a phone when the lifeline swiveled and jerked. Up from the black pit, a stark white figure climbed up from the hole. It poised itself like a gargoyle on the rim of the well. The revolting face had him racing in the direction of his workers who’d come to his aid; big burly men—big burly women too—who wouldn't mind putting their fists to an intruder.
Pumping his feet, though only actually moving at a jogger’s pace, the atrocity lunged at him and dug his fingers into his neck. The cat-sharp talons sprouted from the tips of its fingers audibly. Sinking in deep, he was blinded by the agony. Then kicked behind the knees, he was sent crashing down to all fours. No time to recover, he was spun onto his back.
Dale closed his eyes, denying his assault. Impossibly strong hands choked him, anchoring him. Hovering over him, the stranger opened its maw with a wet hermetic decompression. It exhaled hard, releasing a stale copper twang that engulfed his nostrils. Before Dale could attempt to turn his head and avoid what was coming, it spat into his mouth.
“Raaatch!”
Crimson splattered his face and the inside of his mouth in a foam consistency. The moment he swallowed in reflex, his neck was released. He could breathe easily again, and he went limp in ecstasy, his head resting on a pillow of dead leaves.
The monster was now gone.
It simply vanished.
The sky burned an ultraviolet red. He was somehow drugged, he believed, as the craving set in. He salivated for another swallow of what the monster had force-fed him, suffering from a new sensation of hunger deep down and exaggerated so that every part of him was starving. He pounded the ground with his fists for another drop, another smell, another hint of what stewed so decadently in his mouth. He reeled his head back and unleashed a yawp for more.
I know you crave more if it
“Who are you?” He called out, his skull echoing the words the intruder had spoken. Each syllable tickled his spine and delivered gooseflesh. That's when the red sky vanished back to blue, his euphoria terminated. His paralysis also reached its conclusion, and he returned to a defensive stance. He was calling out to no one, accusing the apple trees, “What have you done to me? What is this? Answer me!"
Find me.
He scavenged up the apple nursery’s cobblestone path, kicking aside the baskets strewn in the pathways
between rows of trees and the heaps of spilled apples, what amounted to hours of work wasted. Ladders were knocked to the ground. Torn clothing and rivulets of blood and flesh highlighted the tall grass and stone path. He spotted a KU basketball hat, the Jayhawk slathered in red.
It belonged to his son.
“What happened to Bruce? Where’s Bruce? What did you do with my son? I’ll kill you right now, you malicious bastard. Whose blood is this everywhere? Talk to me—answer me!”
You want another taste, correct?
Keep looking for me.
Dale clutched his head not in migraine, but in the awkward burning of his teeth, the quaking of his skull, and the strange metallic taste that kept building up on his taste buds. His anger digressed in the face of the increasing roar in his belly; it was near crippling. His tongue ached, throbbing and begging for another sweet taste.
He backtracked, taken by a rage coursing through him. Dale stole a shovel from the work shed and then stomped into the cider mill through the back exit. A red handprint was slathered onto the steel door knob, fresh.
Getting closer to the mill, it was then that a vision of blood entered his mind’s eye. That’s all he could see now. Blood flowing down the walls of the cider mill in heavy bullets. Blood churning in the water wheel, the crimson spattering onto the rocks and trees, painting them. Blood stewing at his feet in glorious puddles. The blue jays cleaned their wings up in the trees, their beaks dripping ruby as they cheeped in frenzy. The clouds billowed together in dark red puffs, fattened by their delectable load. He was clopping through blood with each step, stamping through deep puddles, and he realized the source had been sopped from the broken apples strewn on the grass, somehow oozing their juices.
“No, this isn’t real. It's not happening. I-it's not real."
He suffered a moment of fever, wavering in place by unsure feet. Somehow, he trudged on to solve the mystery of his missing workers and family. He conquered the hallucinations and pushed open the double doors. He clutched the shovel hell-bent to break it over the deviant’s face, wherever he was hiding.
Baskets of apples were stacked at opposing sides of him ready to be processed into cider. The workers who performed the task were gone, their chatter of broken English and Spanish now silence. Dale listened harder after hearing the patter of rain, but it wasn’t raining outside.
He edged between the steel stock tanks brimming with water. These were used as stations to wash the fruit by hand. The Birchum way, his father explained, is old fashioned, but the difference is in the taste, the cultivation.
He challenged the dripping by taking a practice swing, the shovel swooshing the air. “Show yourself!”
Take another step forward.
He halted, his mouth edging open in a silent scream. His search was over. The bodies of his workers, including his son, daughter, and wife hung upside down by their ankles above an empty stock tank. Their heads were severed crudely at the stump, the action performed by something other than a blade. Blood bubbled out their stumps. Dale gasped at the vilest sight yet; the baskets beside the steel tank were heaped with heads. Twenty-eight total.
Snarling, "You want to kill me? Then come on out and show yourself. You evil son-of-a-bitch, I'll bash in your face. I'll kill you like you killed my family!"
He kept turning in place, expecting the murderer to lunge out at him from wherever he was hiding. After pivoting awkwardly for almost a minute, he stumbled backwards after slipping on an apple. He picked himself back up and shirked from the cretin who suddenly approached. It wore a pair of tattered jeans and a soiled white t-shirt; the apparel belonged to one of his workers. The man's features were so beastly, he couldn't make eye contact long enough to fully take them in.
He refused.
Dale raised the shovel, but he was shoved backwards by the beast who moved so fast he was a blur of motion. He lost his ability to breath, and once he struck the ground, all he could think about was the awful end his family met. There was nothing he could for them except to dispatch the beast that killed them.
I know you want to cut my head off and string me up, but listen to your body. You're desiring blood. Your willpower will gone in minutes, if not sooner.
It's not that you don't love your family, Dale. I had to give up on the ones I loved too when I became this way. It's not a choice.
Dale clutched his midsection, and once the pain ended, he was thirsty again. Mad from being denied such prolific flavors. It would consume him. The monster was right; taking vengeance for his family took a backseat to this increasing dilemma.
Getting up, he asked the monster, “How did y-you kill everyone so quickly? My God, how could anyone?”
“You were paralyzed on the ground longer than you realize." The voice was serpentine in the delivery, and arrogant. “I had all the time in the world. I squeezed their necks,” he demonstrated by his hands, “and their heads came right off in my bare hands. Their flesh was as soft as soap.”
He desired to flee the unfathomable killing scene, but the man’s new promise staked him in place. If you want more of the blood, you must help me. Use that shovel to dig a hole. Dig it nine feet deep and sixteen feet in diameter. Then, you’ll get your fill. Enough for a thousand men.
Dale scanned the floor for the shovel he'd dropped. “And if I refuse?”
“There is much work to be done, understand? Our craving will become your craving. Help me or become my victim.”
He bent down, clutching the weapon in limbo.
Dig, my friend. Bury the shovel into the earth. Show me how much you crave blood. Prove you’re worthy of staying alive.
The bodies swayed as their necks oozed. The bottom of the stock tank was half-filled with crimson—crimson he could smell, and he masticated at the marvelous scent!—and the choice became obvious.
Yes—yes, be wise.
Be one of us.
He guided the shovel's edge into the earth, obeying the creature.
2
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Caleb hammered a nail through the neon green flyer onto the phone poll outside the Smithville, Kansas, unemployment office. The thick stack of papers in his hands would be posted at the local cafés, bookstores, libraries, taverns, ice cream shops, apartment buildings, grocery stores, and anywhere else he spotted while touring Smithville, Kansas. He had two weeks before he drove to Iowa to seek more fake news—what his manager Ross Hartley at "The Weekly Spectacle Digest" called, “Freaky bullshit people like to read.”
He traveled across the United States in constant search of tales involving citizens who happened upon alien space crafts, crop circles, ghost neighbors, houses with walls that dripped blood, grape yards whose fruit had already fermented on the vine, and babies born who could perform long division. Everybody had an engaging lie, he believed, and as long as they had a picture that corresponded with their claims, fabricated or computer enhanced or not, it was worth his time and paying them two-hundred dollars a pop.
The challenge of the job was connecting with people in towns full of strangers. He already received concerned and judgmental stares from by passers as he hammered another flyer to yet another light post. A beige uniformed deputy—pot-bellied and hanging over his belt—eyed him curiously as he tipped back his mug of morning coffee into his head. The patrons at “Mary’s Kitchen” spied him through the large glass window, hints of fear and awe springing in their eyes. A jogger in an electric pink windbreaker walking her Irish Setter failed to avert her stare and almost tripped over a break in the cement walkway. The mail man chugging down the road in his car nearly struck a parked car studying him so intently.
He was a drifter, an unwanted interloper who looked like a salesman. It was Caleb’s ensemble that alienated him. He wa
s required to appear official and legit. He was clad in a black Turlington suit and pants and hand-polished Edgar Hanover dress shoes. He exuded the esteem of a best man at a wedding, a pallbearer, or the FBI.
The sun burned the top of his shoulders after ten minutes standing outside away from his air-conditioned silver 2004 Sedan. He was about to enter “Lucky’s Pool and Pub” to post his flyer when a woman called out to him nearby, “What kind of job are you hirin’ for?”
The woman was between her twenties and her early thirties, though she’d seen hard labor and disappointment at an early age. She had one foot in the unemployment office when she read his flyer on the tack board. She wore a paper dress decorated in sunflower print that carried half-way down to her thighs. The spaghetti straps revealed she wasn’t wearing a bra, her breasts d-sized and pressing hard against the fabric. Her skin was shut-in white. The attribute was highlighted by her shoulder-long hair that was dyed raven black with bristle-blonde roots. She was sexy in a way he couldn’t place initially. She was also the first person to speak to him in Smithville, and he considered that person special in any situation.
He shook her hand, her grip softened by lotion. It was an effort on his part not to eye her generous cleavage. Her cheeks were freckled, again, adding to her child-like demeanor.
He finally introduced himself, saying politely, “My name’s Caleb Anthony. I'll put my terms out there, right to it. I pay cash. I’m not an official employer, so don’t put me on your tax forms. It all depends on what you know,” he smiled, “that determines what I can pay.”
“Any cash is good enough for me. My name’s Shannon Klenklen. I’ve lived here my entire life.” She was irked by the fact and not afraid to express it. “Twenty-five years I've wasted away in this hayseed piece of crap.” She dug into her cheetah print purse to claim an empty pack of cigarettes. She crinkled the box and tossed it onto the ground, muttering damn it. “You smoke?”