Oddy was beginning to reply when the noises began. Sly, creeping-cautious noises all around, drawing nearer. Noises like a thousand small animals—rats, sightless moles—skittering over a crust of frozen snow.
“Lock and load,” Oddy whispered, shouldering the HK23. “Company’s coming.”
««—»»
Abruptly, the noises ceased. The men stood, weapons drawn. Nothing.
“Wait for it,” Oddy whispered. “Just…wait.”
A bony wisp of a man stepped from a copse of oaks. His flesh was the color of sun-bleached bones and his eyes, beneath dozing-caterpillar brows, resembled polished obsidian. He dressed in a manner Zippo would term “goth-fag chic”: dark trousers of gabardine wool, white silk shirt, a cloak of black velvet. The cloak hung open to reveal a stringy body that looked to be assembled from twisted coat-hangers. He appraised the men with a slight smile, regarding the weapons trained upon him as if they posed no more threat than a child’s toy pistol.
“Please, there is no need for unpleasantness.” He raised his hands in the manner of a surrendering POW. His wrists were bits of driftwood, fingers long and white, nails sharp and yellow. “May I sit?”
Oddy nodded. The man sat beside the fire, turning his palms to the flames. He grinned and shivered, as if the fire’s warmth conferred some comfort. The snow beneath him did not melt.
“Who are you?” Answer’s barrel did not deviate from the man’s skull.
“My name is Orlock. And, as you may have guessed, I am a vampire.”
“That’s all I needed to hear,” Zippo’s finger tightened on the flamer’s trigger—
“DON’T.”
The voice was monstrous, a thunderclap at close range. The men dropped their weapons and clapped their hands over their ears, certain their eardrums had ruptured.
“I’m sorry,” Orlock continued. “If you wish to resolve this situation… aggressively…you may do so in a moment. But first, please consider my offer.”
A quick consensus was reached to let Orlock have his say.
“Thank you,” Orlock said. “I’ll spare you the history of my race—suffice it to say, some of the stories you’ve heard are true, others falsehoods. I am unsure of much of it myself. We are an old race, so old that nobody knows anymore how we came into existence, or when, or for what reasons.” Orlock smiled. It was not a pleasant sight. “Our lives, as all lives, have benefits and drawbacks. So long as we feed, there is no limit to our longevity. I myself am several centuries old. There is no part of the world I have not traveled, no intriguing native custom I have not indulged in, no village virgin I could not bed. We are stronger than any human, our senses more attuned, our passions more fully realized.”
Movement in the darkness. Orlock hissed menacingly. The movement ebbed.
“Of course, we have to kill.” The old vampire grimaced, as if the admission caused him great pain. “Blood from any beast is satisfactory, although human blood is indisputably superior.” The ancient thing smacked his lips. “The blood of a young, spry body is…narcotic. There is nothing like it—not drugs, not sex, not the joy of killing itself. It is an addiction. A terrible, terrible addiction.”
Answer posed a most appropriate question: “If you’re so powerful, why allow yourself to be imprisoned?”
Orlock smiled in the manner of one who is constantly amused by the curiosity of lower life forms. “A hierarchy exists between all things. The strong subjugate the weak, the rich exploit the poor, the cunning manipulate the foolish. One must learn to accept one’s place in the order. And I am treated well enough to compensate for the boredom and solitude. I am provided wondrous sport.”
Despite the vampire’s apparent sincerity, Oddy couldn’t believe such a self-interested, arrogant creature would willingly endure imprisonment. “Why don’t you kill Grosevoir?” he asked. “Kill him and escape.”
“Grosevoir, hmm?” Orlock chuckled. “Is that what it’s calling itself nowadays? How European. Kill it?” The old thing’s voice lowered, as though afraid of being overheard. “No. Not by me. Not by you. Not by any force living or dead.”
Movement again stirred the fringing woods. Zippo swore he saw someone—a young woman, blonde hair, pale skin, eyes black, dressed in a shredded mackinaw and ice-glazed jeans—materialize from the darkness. Her neck was chewed up on the left side, as if some animal had been at it. A warning hiss from Orlock and she vanished like ether.
“In case you did not know,” Orlock continued, “my brethren and I are one of the first obstacles you’ll encounter on your journey around this godforsaken lake. Thus we have, how do you say…first dibs? Now, we are not greedy,” he said, mixing lies and deceptions with the deft touch of a master alchemist, “and want no more than our fair share.”
Fair share? Tripwire thought. What the hell is he talking about?
“There are others waiting for you beyond our confines,” Orlock said. “None of them, you will find, are nearly so refined as I. They will not ask. They will simply take—quickly, greedily, and without mercy. This is your only opportunity to discuss your fate in a rational, gentlemanly manner.”
“Get to the point,” Oddy snapped.
“Very well. All I ask is this: a sacrifice. One of you, and only one. You may choose who goes yourselves.” Orlock licked lips that resembled a pair of copulating maggots. The sight recalled a hungry borzoi. “Perhaps you’ll want to surrender the weakest link, the man who lacks the stomach for what lies ahead.”
Fear exploded like a mushroom cloud in Crosshairs’s heart. Who was weaker than a one-eyed sniper with the cardiovascular endurance of an asthmatic octogenarian?
“So that’s the deal?” Zippo asked. “Hand over one of our own with a bright red bow tied around his dick?” His tone made it impossible to tell if he found the proposal insulting, or outrageous, or acceptable.
“No need it be thought of as a death sentence,” Orlock said haughtily. “As I said, you will see and do things you would never experience otherwise. You will live forever. Soon we will be released, once again free to roam the earth, regain our rightful place—”
Answer said, “—and the only drawback is you have to live by moonlight and drain some poor bastard dry every once in awhile, huh?”
Even the ancient vampire was unsure how to take Answer. “You don’t have to become one of us,” he said. “We could, as you said, ‘drain you dry,’ killing you outright.” A shrug. “You are, after all, nothing more than food.”
It was the most truthful statement Orlock made all night.
“Food.” The word lodged in Oddy’s throat like a string of gristle. That’s all we are to these things, he thought. Why is he bargaining, then? It’s as ludicrous as a slaughterhouse owner bargaining with livestock. Unless the fucker takes some perverse pleasure in watching us cast one of our own to the wolves. “And if we stand and fight?”
“Then we kill you all,” Orlock replied.
Tripwire’s mind skipped like a flat stone on a pond. Is this how it was going to end for one of them—diplomatic surrender to some bargain-basement Bela Lugosi? It was unthinkable, no different than surrendering to the VC without a fight. He glanced at Crosshairs, saw fear etched into every crease of the sniper’s face. He thinks we’re going to give him up, Tripwire thought. Something rose up in him then, something clear and true and defiant:
No. I won’t give up my friend. I will not play the game by your rules. I’ll die first.
He could only hope the others shared his resolve.
“This is your choice.” Orlock kicked at the fire, agitated the men were taking so long to reach a decision. “This is your only choice. So. Choose.”
Oddy knelt beside the vampire. Orlock smiled, mistaking his posture as one of supplication. Oddy stared into the thing’s mineshaft eyes and saw nothing but hunger, and avarice, and capering amusement.
“Who will it be, young one,” Orlock whispered. “Who dies so the rest may live?”
“Here’s the thing.” O
ddy’s smile was wide, and genuine. His hand moved somewhere behind his back. “Grosevoir said we can’t be giving out no freebies. You blood-suckers got to work for your meal.” Orlock frowned. Oddy said, “So, as far as your offer goes, I guess I’m speaking for everyone when I say—” he cleared a Webley from his pants, cocking the hammer as it made the short trip around his waist, jamming it up under the vampire’s arrow-headed chin. “—no-fuckin-way.”
««—»»
The physics at play when a .455 Webley round is fired at point blank range into a human head are quite elementary: the head more or less explodes. But, as Orlock was not human, the effect was slightly different, if no less dramatic.
BA-BOOM.
The slug punched through the vampire’s chin at an acute angle on account of Orlock’s turning away at the last second. The pressure of impact ripped Orlock’s jawbone off with a sound like tearing burlap. It spun away from his face, a white horseshoe of skin and bone, landing in the fire pit. The bullet continued on, slightly flattened from impact, into the roof of Orlock’s mouth and through his nasal cavity before exiting his forehead in a puff of powdered cartilage.
The vampire flipped over backwards, heels kicking twin spumes of snow. He sat up. His tongue flopped like an overfed flatworm, a neat hole punched through the center. Skin hung from his cheeks like ripped curtains. He made a noise deep in its throat, a growl of pain and rage.
Oddy shot him again. Orlock went down again.
Well, it’s on, Zippo thought. Let’s see who else is at this shindig. He unleashed a ripcurl of fire that threw the fringing wilderness into sharp relief. “Hail, hail, the gang’s all here…”
They roosted in the trees like crows, hunched low, backs arched, ghostly hands grasping the branches on which they balanced. Their skin was universally white and their eyes universally dark, but otherwise appearances varied wildly. The woman Zippo had glimpsed earlier was perched beside a swarthy man dressed in moldering Middle Eastern garb; a turban unraveled messily from his head like bandages from a mummy’s corpse. In another tree, a surfer-dude wearing board shorts and a Hawaiian shirt hugged a low bough. He looked a little like Eakins, the soldier who’d gotten his legs hacked to shit in that tunnel near Song-Be.
Zippo swept the flamer in a 180-degree arc. On the other side of the clearing a pair of vampires clung to either side of a scabby tree trunk. They appeared to have stepped out of a ’50s sitcom: the woman’s hair was done up in an outrageous beehive, she wore a blue-checked housedress, a frilled apron, and a pair of tortoiseshell glasses, the right lens shattered, strung around her neck on a faux-pearl chain. The man wore a plaid shirt, madras shorts, and beach sandals with a barbecue apron reading KISS THE COOK tied at neck and waist. They’d have looked ludicrous if not for the cold deadness in their eyes and the gaping, pink, fistulous caverns of their mouths. There were others, stewbums and honky-tonks and crewcut military joes, perhaps ten in total.
Orlock sat up. A massive chunk of his skull had been vaporized. His brain, white as cheese curd, glistened in the firelight. Welcome to my world, you son of a bitch, Crosshairs thought. The old vampire appeared disoriented. His tongue flapped and flopped. His hands clenched and unclenched in the air. He emitted obscene gargling noises.
The other vampires gawped in surprise. It was the first time they had sensed weakness in their leader. They attacked.
But not the men.
They attacked Orlock.
While living in Thailand, Tripwire once witnessed a feeding frenzy. He’d chartered a fishing boat, Daydream Believer, off the island of Phucket. At day’s end, the crew gutted the day’s catch on the deck, casting the offal overboard. Smelling blood, sharks came. Lemontails mostly, plus a few makos and tigers. They churned the calm waters of the Andaman Sea into a froth, snapping at the floating fish guts. When that was gone they fell upon one another, the stronger and faster devouring the weak and wounded. Tripwire was reminded of this brutal spectacle watching the vampires attack Orlock, thinking, I am witnessing the law of the jungle in its purest form.
The vampires set upon Orlock like animals, subduing him under the sheer force of their weight and numbers. The old vampire was still gargling. Zippo looked down at him. He was on his hands and knees. The beehive woman straddled his back with his head caught between her hands. She bit into his head, into the yawning hole Oddy’s bullet had made. Gleaming clots of brain flecked her fishbelly lips. She smiled. Her glasses were canted at a ridiculous angle. A wet ripping noise as she tore off a patch of hair and scalp. Orlock shrieked. Beehive hooked a finger through the hole in his tongue, twisting and pulling and ripping it out at the root. It looked small in her palm: a tiny white tombstone. She threw it against a tree, where it stuck for a moment before falling to the ground.
These were not the vampires of the men’s understanding. Where was the dark romanticism, the brooding mystery, the gothic beauty? These things were no more refined than a pack of dingoes.
The vampires flipped Orlock onto his back. Some held him down while others tore his clothes off. His body was cadaver-pale, limbs like splits of bleached wood, flesh hanging off the bones like bread dough off a dowel. His penis, childish in proportion, hung between quivering thighs. Tripwire watched the pretty blonde vampire reach between his legs and stretch it to excruciating tautness before snipping it off between her teeth. The old vampire howled.
Tripwire edged beside Oddy. “Got that holy water?”
Oddy pulled the vial from his pocket. Tripwire held his hands out. A white phosphorus grenade was cupped in each palm. “Douse ’em.”
Freeing an arm, Orlock raked his nails across surfer-dude’s face. They sank into surfer-dude’s left eye, slitting the retina open. Surfer-dude’s hands flew to his face like flame-stung moths. Surfer-dude’s burst open eye drooled out of its socket. Surfer-dude’s eye-jelly, black and syrupy, poured down his cheeks. Orlock slashed again, opening up surfer-dude’s neck, digging inside the wound, yanking the esophagus out. It dangled to surfer-dude’s breastbone like an obscene necktie.
The turbaned vampire clamped his teeth over Orlock’s nose. It tore free with a dreadful splintering noise. Turban spat it into the snow and went back for more.
Oddy spilled holy water over the grenades. The other men assembled in a loose battle formation behind Tripwire. Answer pulled a stake from his pack and the others followed suit.
The man wearing the KISS THE COOK apron was pulling Orlock’s stomach apart. The ancient vampire’s flesh tore with sickening ease and a sound like old newspapers. He laid the skin-flaps across Orlock’s ribs and dipped his hands into the chest cavity, squeezing and mashing as Orlock bucked like a bug on a pin. The organs KISS THE COOK tore free were desiccated, like withered pieces of fruit. He crushed one in his fist and it burst apart in a cloud of dust.
The holy water froze around the grenades, encasing them in a thin glaze of ice. Tripwire pulled the pins, whispered, “Fire in the hole,” and lobbed them at the massed vampires.
They landed softly: Beehive’s attention was drawn to the fist-sized holes in the snow for a brief moment before returning to the matter at hand. A white vapor-trail rose from the holes and a heartbeat later—
B-Ba-BOOM.
A momentary radiance followed by a lethal hailstorm of whizzing metal. The men shielded their mouths and noses against the deadly phosphorus fumes. The noise of the explosions gave way to a wild and horrified screaming, a sound so shocking in its intensity it seemed as though the screamer’s lungs must surely burst from the strain.
The vampires, almost every one of them, had been struck by shrapnel. The effect was violent, bizarre, and instantaneous. Thick, green-tinted smoke poured out of every wound. It was as if a tiny woodsman had kindled a fire inside of them, stoking it heavily, until the resultant smoke was forced from any vent it could find. Smoke hissed from bloodless slits in chests and arms and legs; smoke billowed out of mouths and—cartoonishly, horrifically—from noses and ears; smoke surged out of a gash in surfe
r-dude’s forehead with a steam-whistle’s shriek.
The vampires spun in pain-maddened pirouettes. The internal combustion was so fierce that the hair of their heads and underarms and even their crotches burst into flame, crackling and glowing like piles of burning twigs. The pretty blonde vampire hacked up gobs of her lungs, the black, smoking clots spattering the snow.
Ironically, only Orlock avoided the shrapnel, on account of his position at the bottom of the pile. Amazingly, he stood.
“He’s not going to be the next Barker’s Beauty,” Zippo said.
Indeed he would not: all that remained of Orlock’s face were his eyes and upper palate, a few lonesome teeth, half an ear. The flaps of skin that had once sheltered the inner workings of his mouth caught the breeze like freakish sails. Viscera spooled out of the hole in his gut in petrified spaghetti loops.
He pointed at the men. A good many of his fingers had been bitten off, somewhat spoiling the effect. He said, “Glaaa…”
The monosyllabic moan acted as a rallying cry.
The vampires came at the men.
Zippo was a loner. Zippo was self-centered. Zippo did not have friends, he had business associates. Zippo knew who he was, and was generally comfortable in his skin. Hearing Grosevoir’s proposal, he’d secretly hoped to be the only survivor left to collect the bounty. He didn’t hate the other men. He wouldn’t try to kill them, or see them abandoned. Yet, at the core, all they represented was a million dollars that could be his.
This mindset persisted up until the very moment the vampires came for his old unit members. Then it all changed. Suddenly he was twenty again, back in the jungles of Vietnam. Suddenly these men’s lives had a value beyond mere dollar signs. A moment ago they’d meant nothing to him; now he would willingly go through hell for them. It was the kind of knee-jerk reaction he might make spying a child playing on the street in a speeding car’s path—unpremeditated, almost thoughtless. It had little to do with friendship, or love, or compassion. It was something different altogether, and it functioned under the understanding that they were all in this together. Live or die, they did it together.
The Preserve Page 17