Vyrmin

by Gene Lazuta

  Three short gasps.

  Then four.

  And done.

  9.

  When Cooper hit the pavement in pursuit of Cheryl Lockner, it was, for him, the absolute best of all sensations he’d ever experienced, rolled into a single, glorious instant. He had his gun—a .38-caliber Policeman’s Special that his father had given him when he first got out of detective training—gripped firmly in his hand. And he was actually “in hot pursuit,” just him and the suspect, one-on-one, and not a single computer terminal or telephone hookup in sight.

  He’d solved a lot of crimes in his day, but never once—or at least not since he had spent his obligatory six months as a beat cop before moving into his office on the seventeenth floor downtown—had he actually made an arrest. Even during his days on the street, he’d been assigned cake duty so that the department wouldn’t end up wasting four years of post-graduate schooling and two years’ special training on a guy who, because of an assignment mistake, was destined to walk into a bullet trying to break a domestic dispute.

  This was real!

  This was big-time!

  This was what it was all about, and hitting that pavement was like stepping through the curtain onto a brilliantly lit Broadway stage. All he needed was a fanfare. He could almost hear the applause.

  But the elation was short-lived, because no sooner had he caught sight of his suspect than he realized that he was really going to have to work for this one…no shit. God! Could she run or what?

  It had taken him two seconds, four maybe, tops, to leap over the sheriff’s prone figure, and already that crazy broad—he didn’t even know her name—had a good three-storefront lead on him. He could see her naked ass shining in the dark, and for an instant he hesitated, blinked, and duck-shuffled because…

  She ran weird…kind of loping, half on two legs and half on four, like a dog. It was physically impossible for a human being to run like that, but she—he blinked—had disappeared down an alley.

  Move it! his body demanded.

  And he did.

  The street was perfectly empty, but there were shapes watching from a few lit windows. He thought it was lucky that the hicks down here rolled up the sidewalks at nine, because, should he have to use his gun, he didn’t have any pedestrians at risk.

  Sliding a little on the icy concrete, he skittered around the corner and stopped, dead, at the mouth of the alley down which the woman had turned. It was wide and perfectly dark—a single tunnel of blackness, with the pale moon hanging overhead in a strip of night sky, that emptied onto a street about thirty yards ahead.

  He listened, heard nothing, and stepped forward, his eyes adjusting ever so slightly so that he found only the barest hint of garbage cans and rubbish lining the walls on either side. There wasn’t a sound in the air; just flecks of snow that seemed to enter the alley from above and disappear.

  His heart was hitting pretty hard in his chest, and his mouth was parched. He’d seen blood in the jail. He hadn’t seen enough to get a real handle on just what she had done to the deputy in his cell, but he’d seen a streak of red when the woman ran through the door, and that was enough to tell him that there was blood on her hands, and maybe—Christ Almighty, if it was true—on her mouth as well.

  Oddly enough, even with his heart hammering, the detective still felt calm.

  The gravity of his situation hadn’t sunk in yet, he supposed. According to everything he had been told by the old-timers on the department back in Cleveland, the biggest component of any chase was fear.

  “If you ain’t scared,” a grizzled old sergeant had once admonished after Cooper had pulled the most unforgivably stupid stunt of his life, which was approaching a car they had stopped on the street without his gun, “then you’re either crazy or dead. And being the first is the fastest way I know of getting to be the second.”

  But Cooper wasn’t scared. He hadn’t been back then, and even now, alone in the dark looking for a woman who may have had blood smeared on her face, he still wasn’t scared.

  Excited maybe.

  Tingling from head to foot, for sure.

  But scared…never.

  Maybe he was crazy.

  But God! This was living.

  At least it was until he reached the end of the alley, and then it almost became dying.

  He hadn’t been thinking. That was probably the worst part. He’d been daydreaming, savoring the excitement of his first confrontation more than he was paying attention to the gravity of the thing, and, as a result, he hadn’t even seen the bitch crouching in the gloom to his left. He’d walked right past her and she’d taken the opportunity to strike. She could have let him go by and sneaked back out the way he had come in. But that wasn’t what she wanted. She wanted to take him, and the alley had been a trap.

  Like an animal, she growled as she leapt, which gave him just enough time to produce a startled, “Huuhh?!” and begin his turn. But instead of using his gun, he reached out to grab her, thinking she wanted to run past him.

  He was wrong.

  With one perfectly liquid motion, she grabbed his throat with one hand and simply lifted him off the pavement. His gun clattered, his head spun, there wasn’t a lick of air in his lungs, and his brain—that perfectly reasonable, self-confident, highly analytical organ of his—all but announced to the rest of his body that it was all over.

  “We fucked up, guys,” it seemed to say. “See ya on the flip-flop!”

  The woman grabbed his crotch with her free hand.

  And then…

  The pain was fabulous.

  Actual sparkles of light dazzled him when she squeezed. He stiffened where he hung and tried to scream, but her iron grip had closed his throat so he writhed there as she smiled, grinned, and finally howled out her delight by throwing back her head and producing a plume of steam from her mouth.

  Her smell was evil.

  Her touch, foul.

  The pain almost put Cooper out, but somehow he held on long enough to see a gleam start in her eye and her teeth, like retractable cat’s claws, slide out to four times their length as she turned him sideways, brought her head toward his stomach...

  And…

  She bit me! his mind screamed, just before the lights went out.

  She bit me and made me blind! he just had time to think before he fell.

  In absolute darkness, he hit the ground, rolled, and groaned pitifully as pain charged up and down his legs from where his knees had cracked concrete. His hands sparkled with a thousand hot needles of impact. And he was choking.

  Then he stopped, lay still, caught his breath, and, in the dark, forced himself to listen.

  There were sounds, but none were close.

  He was trembling.

  He was alone.

  Where the woman had gone, he couldn’t imagine. How she had run like a dog, hidden so well, and lifted him over her head so easily—all were beyond him. How she had disappeared in the dark, leaving him to fall six feet straight to the ground as if she had simply dematerialized beneath him, he didn’t care. All that was important was that he was alone, and…

  He was bleeding!

  Germs!

  Spit!

  Disease!

  AIDS!

  Rabies!

  Blood!

  Spit!

  Disease!

  AIDS! AIDS! AIDS! AIDS!

  His mind whirled.

  His hands were on his stomach and he could feel the wet, feel the warm, feel the blood.

  AIDS!

  No pain.

  It didn’t hurt a bit, even when he touched it, and that, more than any act of conscious self-control, interrupted the roll of hysteria building in his head.

  It didn’t hurt?

  He sat up.

  It was still dark.

  Feeling with his fingers, he found his shirt torn, everything around his gut wet, and a series of rough, fleshy patches near his navel. Absorbed, he probed, actually inserting a fingertip into what he assu
med was a puncture wound, without producing the slightest bit of discomfort, and thinking, Vampire bats can do that. They’ve got something in their spit that anesthetizes the wound.

  Vampire bats?

  Jesus!

  He needed a doctor!

  Climbing to his feet, he swayed, stumbled, and banged into a brick wall, a clattering trash can, and finally a mound of something that crinkled like plastic. He looked up, but the moon was gone. So were the stars. He looked around, but there was no light at either end of the alley. Feeling his way, he followed the wall until he emerged onto a street, where he paused, blinked, and tried to make out at least a ghost of the town. But the darkness was impenetrable. It was as if a sheet had been drawn across his vision. As if a blanket had been thrown over the earth.

  But without his eyes to distract them, his ears became acute, and, frozen with his hand still on the corner of the building, he listened as a radio-theater mental picture of the street formed in his mind.

  A fairly large group of people were running, starting out together and then splitting up, so that the sound of their heavy footsteps on icy pavement seemed to disintegrate like the wings of pigeons, rising from the ground en masse. Some ran very close to him, and he reached out, only to snatch his hand back as an unbidden image of the woman’s terrible teeth rent it to a stump.

  Overhead something rustled, fluttered, and fell.

  A car door slammed.

  And the last sound, that of a car starting, was so abrupt that it made him gasp. In the dark it sounded like a rocket engine, nearly drowning the crunch of tires on dry snow as he craned his neck and tried to force the darkness away.

  And then a light came on.

  Yellow.

  He blinked at it, thinking for a moment that the moon had fallen very low before realizing that this amber eye was a traffic signal hanging over the street. He had followed the alley back the way he had come and was now facing the jail from a spot just to the left of the Thunderbird Café. The light was weak, but when compared to the depth of darkness form which he had just been sucked, it virtually exploded in his vision, filling his eyes with glorious yellow that defined exactly enough of the street for him to see the black shape of a car crawling away from the jail, heading south on Main.

  There were two people inside: a woman in the passenger’s seat, and a man who was driving.

  As the car moved, more lights came on. Exactly as it would pass a spot, a light—in a window, on a pole, over a doorway—would snap, creating a flowing, liquid impression of motion behind the vehicle, as if the car were rolling back the darkness, or taking it along, out of town. As each light came on, the back of the car became more visible, and Cooper studied it from where he stood, leaning on the café wall, squinting for a license plate, a model, or a make, some distinctive feature until…

  “Wood…” he burbled, trying to call out but finding his tongue uncooperative.

  The car was getting away, picking up speed, heading south. Overhead, the stars were twinkling back, also in time with the…Pinto—he could see it now—the Pinto’s advance.

  “Woodie!” he croaked, his voice coming as if unwillingly from his throat.

  He took a wavering step forward.

  “Woodie Norris!” he shouted out at last, his voice thin and shrill. “Woodie, come back!”

  And then he noticed a form hanging in the doorway of the jailhouse, arms akimbo, legs wobbling. It was looking not at the car, but at him, and it was Sheriff Conway, hardly able to stand, but watching him nonetheless. Watching, and, Cooper knew suddenly, listening.

  Then Woodie’s Pinto disappeared around a corner.

  The moon flashed back on overhead.

  And Sheriff Conway stepped into the street, moving through the puddles of light thrown by streetlamps—bright to dark to bright in a dozen steps. His short grey-blond hair was wild, his eyes glaring and focused, the entire front of his uniform covered with puke, and his gun—a big, old, Korean war-vintage Colt .45—dangling at his side. In a flash he crossed the street, grabbed Cooper’s collar, and dragged him away from the alley and into the glare of a streetlamp, pointing his gun at his face and snarling, “Take off your shirt!”

  Cooper reflexively drew the front of his overcoat tight around his stomach, glanced around, and noticed that, despite all the commotion, not one curious citizen had poked his or her head out to see what was happening. In truth, there were fewer lights on then there had been just a moment before. And curtains were being drawn. It was as if he and the sheriff had the town to themselves… as if Woodie’s Pinto had taken more than the light with it when it drove away.

  “Take it off!” the sheriff commanded, drawing the hammer back on his gun with his thumb and producing a threatening, no-nonsense click.

  Cooper allowed his coat to open.

  And Conway lunged, spinning him around as he yanked and pulled and finally threw the coat to the ground before he tore the man’s shirt off his back and left him standing, shivering in the cold, while he cursed, “Damn you!” through clenched teeth.

  It was at that instant that Cooper decided that it might be a good idea to ask what the hell was going on, so he raised his hand to get the sheriff’s attention and said, “It’s…”

  To which Conway responded by thrusting out his gun and demanding, “Silence!”

  Which Cooper gave him.

  Still holding his gun, the sheriff stepped forward and, with the heel of his boot, traced a rough circle in the snow around where Cooper stood. When he was finished, he moved back about six feet, looked down at the detective’s feet, made the sign of the cross, and said, “Take two steps toward me. Two steps, and no more.”

  Cooper didn’t move.

  “Now!” Conway roared.

  Two steps…and not an inch farther.

  Conway looked into his eyes sadly, sighed, and said, “May God have mercy on your soul.”

  TWO

  10.

  “But I need a goddamn doctor!” Cooper bellowed over and over again as Conway sat behind his desk and made a series of phone calls that took him nearly an hour to complete. Ignoring Cooper’s pleas, he dialed each number by memory and said, “The witness is dead. Come if you’ll do no harm,” before replacing the receiver and doing it again. Once he said more, but the detective didn’t hear the particulars. And once, he used the phone in a back room and talked for quite a long time, privately. After what seemed an eternity, he finished and, folding his hands on top of his desk, said, “Mr. Cooper, you’ve got to calm down.”

  But Cooper couldn’t “calm down.” He was practically hysterical. He’d worked himself into a lather, roaming the office, back and forth from the desk to a full-length mirror on the back of a closet door, wringing his hands and trembling until he finally planted his feet and shouted, “See this!” with both his index fingers pointing to his stomach. The wound was a bitter oval of purplish bruises that culminated in a row or real punctures on either end. The entire area had gone a sickly yellowish color and had puffed up a little, forcing a couple of the punctures to leak when he breathed. “I’m hurt. I need a doctor…a hospital!”

  Conway shook his head.

  “No doctor in the county’ll touch you.”

  “Then I need one from out of the county.”

  “Be a waste of time. That’s no natural wound, so no ordinary medicine will heal it.”

  “Oh-God-oh-Christ-oh-God!” Cooper cursed, running both his hands over his face. “At least let me have my car keys.”

  “Nope,” Conway said with a sad shake of his head. “I can’t have you runnin’ around loose. You’ll stay right here…”

  “And die of infection!” Cooper screaming, slamming his hands down on the desk.

  Conway was unfazed. Without so much as a blink, he said, “We can only hope you’ll be that lucky.”

  It was useless and Cooper knew it. He couldn’t get through to the sheriff, and he couldn’t leave. He felt like a bug in a bottle, and his rage was so complete that
everything he saw seemed to be tinted pink—as if his eyes were coloring his world bloody out of spite. He ended up sitting on a bench, covered with a blanket from one of the cots in a cell, drinking from a bottle of gin and mumbling about “hicks” and “fucking, redneck ignorant bastards,” while Conway made coffee and rifled through the briefcase that Cooper had brought with him from Cleveland. When the door opened and a man walked in, the detective ignored him by hunching himself up and staring at the floor, while Conway silently indicated a chair for the man to take.

  In half an hour, there were twenty others in the room, and finally the sheriff asked, “Did you bring it, Billy?”

  To which a weird little guy in bib overalls and a canvas coat responded by nodding and handing over a mayonnaise jar that Conway opened and sniffed.

  “Okay,” he answered loudly.

  And the tone in his voice made Cooper look up.

  Despite his anger, he was a little surprised by what he saw. He’d been fuming in his place, and consciously blotting out sound and motion from his attention for fear that it would spark an explosion that would send him screaming for somebody’s throat. So when he saw so many men, sitting on folding chairs, on benches, and cross-legged on the floor in a group before him and the sheriff, he wondered where the hell they had all come from. They looked like every stereotype of every hillbilly ever created, all rolled into a single, motley bunch.

  Dim the lights and you’d have a Klan meeting, he thought. Turn them off and you’d have a lynching.

  When the sheriff turned, the Klan looked his way and Cooper rose, the blanket sliding off his shoulders and the gin bottle suddenly heavy in his hand.

  They were about three feet apart, the sheriff and the detective. All eyes were on Cooper’s stomach, and self-consciously he kind of danced his fingers over the area, halfheartedly trying to hide the wound but knowing it was impossible. The expression on the sheriff’s face was a mixture of regret, pity, and revulsion, and with a tone of resigned authority in his voice, he said, “Just so you’ll all know,” as he flipped the mayonnaise jar Cooper’s way, sending its contents out at him in a quick, brown arch.