“Don’t worry,” the vampire said. “I have left your guns in a safe place, where you are sure to find them...” After a dramatic pause, he erupted into a demented laugh. “In the next century!”
He laughed for about eleven seconds, no doubt enjoying his little eternal-life humor.
I looked at Grandmaster. When I finally caught his distracted gaze, I motioned with my eyes in a sort of: Aren’t you missing something?
He touched his chest with his fingertips and looked around, then mouthed: Me?
I mouthed back: Yeah, you, you vampire-hating bastard, you’re forgetting something.
He eased back on his heels and a few silent moments passed while he thought about what he was so obviously missing. The vampire regained his composure and the VVV had drawn back a few more uneasy steps.
And then Grandmaster snapped his fingers. “My silver cross.”
Now pointing, he shouted vehemently, “You’ll never escape me. I’ll hunt you down to the ends of the earth. Even if I have no legs I’ll crawl after you, my intestines trailing behind like a hideous tail after your immortal ass. Even if I don’t have any eyes, no thumbs, and one ear I will never let you rest—”
And as Grandmaster proceeded to eliminate all possible body parts, the three of us made our way out of the cellar. No one attempted to stop us, not wanting to know what the vampire could do to them during that millisecond-but-actually-an-hour-to-the-vampire.
And according to Grandmaster, even if he had no penis, one arm, no legs, faltering heart, an inflamed kidney, dandruff, hemorrhoids, and even Alzheimer’s, he’d never forget this day and never give up the chase.
And somewhere, deep down, probably in the cesspools of my bowels, I respected the man’s persistence.
The asshole.
Chapter Forty-two
We stood in the doorway of the mansion, having retrieved the professor from one of the guards outside the cellar door. The professor had done the obligatory oohing and ahhing at the revelation of all his intellectual fantasies, and I could tell he wanted to interrogate the vampire as much as I did. But we needed to keep moving.
“What now?” I asked.
The vampire stood with great dignity at my side. He did not appear to hear me, and I figured he was probably soaking in the night, since he hadn’t seen it in over seventy-two thousand days, give or take a few.
The professor, however, said quite simply, “We get as far away from here as possible.”
“Should we borrow one of these?” I said, pointing to the array of Broncos.
“Unless you prefer to walk.”
“What about Laumer? He can do that millisecond thing and go anywhere. And maybe vampires can fly. After all, we’re still sorting out fact from fiction.”
All was quiet, very quiet, as quiet as a tomb at four a.m. How many hunters did we leave behind in the cellar? I think I counted eight. Counting Dial, there had been eleven all together, so that left two still lurking in the shadows where the bastards belonged. Where were they now?
“Do you think it’s safe?” I asked.
“I don’t see any other possibility.” The professor was still crushing on the vampire, and he seemed a little annoyed at my pointing out the fact we were likely doomed. “Laumer doesn’t need us anymore and can obviously leave anytime now, but apparently he hasn’t chosen to.”
With that, I looked at the vampire, who did seem to be rather too quiet. He was holding his side, like a long-distance runner getting a stitch, but in this case, it was like a thousand stitches.
Vermilion liquid coated his hands. Not only that, I saw it pumping through his fingers.
He smiled weakly at me. “I suppose I’ve been shot.”
“Stealth bullets!” said Dial.
Laumer swayed slightly and I put my arm around his aristocratic shoulders. “Silver stealth bullets?”
The professor said. “Of course! Why shouldn’t these foul creatures employ advanced technology?”
“Are you okay?” I asked the Vampire Laumer, realizing I was holding onto him like a parent, like a child, like a lover, like a pal. Like a prized possession I never wanted to lose.
He grimaced and his lips stretched back, revealing his beautiful teeth. “Not so bad for a dead guy.”
“They’re coming,” said Dial.
The vampire slumped and, despite his frailness, grew too heavy for me to hold. He slipped from my grasp and fell to his knees.
Dial scooped him up. “Follow me.”
And we followed him to the nearest Bronco. Dial pulled open the passenger door and crammed the vampire in the front seat. Laumer was again flopping like a rag doll.
I opened the back door of the SUV, careful not to dent the vehicle next to me, argued with decency and formality with the professor as to who should go in first, fastened my seatbelt like one always should, and watched as vampire hunters poured out of the woods.
One of them leveled a rifle at the Bronco. I ducked instinctively, thanking my instincts for not wanting to get my head blown off. The bullet thumped somewhere on the SUV, but thankfully not on me.
In my lying position, I saw Dial twisting wires together beneath the dash. “Isn’t that illegal?” I asked the professor, who was hunched next to me.
Before the old man could answer, Dial shouted, “Got it!” and the Bronco roared to life.
Dial threw the gear into reverse and smashed down on the gas. The SUV, predictably, went backwards with a leap. I heard three succinct thuds and wondered what we hit, until I looked back and saw three VVV faces smashed against the back window, distorted in what I assumed to be extreme agony.
The Bronco switched to its forward mode via Dial brain impulses sent to his hand, and our three stowaways slid off. The Vampire Laumer was slouched in the front seat, tossed around but apparently feeling no ill effects. If you didn’t count suspended animation, coma, and eternal unholy thirst as “effects.”
The professor was leaning between the front seats, doing an examination of our special guest. I thought he took a little too much time with his fondling, and it was starting to get a little creepy, but given the recent Juan-Dial revelation, I figured everything was fair game at that point, as long as I got Janice in the end.
I risked a glance up and saw that we were headed rapidly in the opposite direction of the mansion. I approved.
What I didn’t approve of, however, was the fact that a dozen or so identical Broncos thought it necessary to follow us.
Chapter Forty-three
And to top it all off, they started shooting at us.
And since I heard each distinct crack, I assumed they weren’t using stealth guns. I was starting to take this personally.
“How’s he doing, professor?” I asked, taking note of the fact that my side mirror had just been obliterated by a bullet.
“He’s been shot three times, not two. One bullet’s wedged in his hip, another in his kidney. I’ve already extracted the one in his lung.”
“Jesus Christ!” shouted Dial.
“Where?”
“They blew out a tire.”
“Funny,” I said, “the ride doesn’t feel any different.”
“Well, they did.”
“But we seem to be moving okay, so it must not be too bad.”
“You’re correct, but we’re obligated to crash into a tree.”
“Say again.”
“We blew a tire in the dark of night on a deserted road during an intense chase scene, so therefore we must fulfill the scheme of things and crash into a tree.”
My mouth opened, desperately wanting to respond to his twisted logic but it was too late: he turned the wheel roughly and crashed into the first tree that caught his divided attention. The tree fell, the Bronco slowed.
“Hmm, better find a bigger one. There!”
BAM! We crashed.
“Everyone out,” said Dial.
Everyone outed, Dial dragging Laumer over his shoulder.
“Now what?” I asked, s
tanding in the middle of the woods. The professor struggled with the vampire and I could hardly believe I had momentarily forgotten him in my will to survive. I went to the professor’s aid and helped him and Dial stand the immortal upright.
A hundred feet away, the fleet of Broncos banged off the road and followed our smashed path.
“Now we run like hell,” said Dial, moving to the vampire. “I’ll carry him.”
“Just be careful,” I said, “Though, of course, he’s the one person that all your training wouldn’t kill.”
“Gimme.”
I reluctantly released the bleeding vampire. Dial flipped him up and over his shoulder. The vampire’s eyes were closed but his thin lips parted and a moan escaped from his lips—lips, I might add, that had touched the flesh of many a neck and sucked of the sweet life-substance of others. His long arms slapped against Dial’s buttocks as if he were playing the mambo drums as Dial ran deeper into the woods.
“Guess we should follow,” guessed the professor.
“Think the vampire will be okay?” I asked, following the trail of vampire blood sparkling in the moonlight, blood that we had so recently hosed into our living relic.
“Assuredly. The important thing right now is to get him—and us for that matter—to safety. The vampire will always be okay and we can always make him okay later, but he won’t be okay in the hands of the VVV.”
“Well, neither will we, and we still have to rescue the rest of the Vampire Club.”
“Don’t add complications, Andy.”
“Sorry. But we took a blood oath.” Actually, it was mainly Janice I was worried about, but mostly I just wanted them to see Vampire Laumer so I could stick out my tongue and say, “See? I told you so.”
I could be a little immature at times, in case you hadn’t noticed.
Chapter Forty-four
“Guess what?” said the professor.
“What?” I was busy wiping at scratch marks and mosquito bites.
“It’s dawn.”
I looked up above the twisted, towering trees and could make out the dim glow penetrating the woods. A few birds had started singing, too, first one, then a couple, in that slow way that builds to a symphony before you really noticed it.
“Do you have any idea where we’re headed?” asked I.
The professor squinted at the light-stepping Dial carrying the limp vampire. “He moves like a cat.”
“Big cat.”
“African lion, but no, I have no idea where he’s taking us.”
Dial stopped, and in a few minutes—the time it took me to catch up to him—I asked, “What’s the matter?”
“They’ve surrounded us.”
“How can you tell?”
“My senses are as attuned as the deer.”
“Good enough for me. How about you, Prof?”
“Deer are renowned for their detection of humans through smell and hearing and sight and—”
“Good enough for me,” I said, shutting him up before he opened his mental encyclopedia and then delivered a thesis on the themes of belonging as explored in the Disney film Bambi. “How did they manage to do it so quickly?” I asked.
“They called in their waiting back-ups immediately, no doubt, when things began going to hell. Did you notice a plethora of hunters who poured out of the woods even though we left the majority in the basement?”
“Yes. That part where they were shooting at me was a little hard to ignore.”
“Well, they are considered back-ups. We actually never had a chance against them, for all roads within a twenty-mile radius are being watched. Let me rephrase that: I had a chance, but I wasn’t going to abandon you and my one chance of true love. You two are what we in the VVV call ‘turtles.’”
“Imaginative,” I said. “What now?”
Dial shrugged, the vampire rising with Dial’s meaty chunks of arm-holders. “We’re as caught as it gets. We cannot run, for how do you run from humans who are as close to the gods of war as it gets, who have trained relentlessly for years to not only slaughter humans, but the undead as well, who can kill with a playing card and a toothpick, who can floss your corpse before it even hits the ground, all while reciting ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’?”
A good point.
I heard distant shouts and rumbles of engines.
“They know exactly where we are,” said Dial, looking absently into the lavender morning. “Because I know exactly where they are.”
If only the vampire hadn’t been shot. Then we’d have the most powerful military weapon on earth.
Dial mumbled in his man-child voice.
I looked at him and so did the professor.
Dial said, “Wasn’t me. It was him, the vampire.”
“What’s he saying?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Dunno.”
“Think it’s important?” I asked the professor.
“It certainly warrants investigation.”
I ambled over to Dial and the hanging vampire. “What was that again, Laumer?”
The vampire’s pale lips, lips I remembered that had once been juicy red, parted: “I cannot be caught again. Ever.”
Reasonable enough request, but unavoidable. Except I really didn’t want to be the one to tell him that. I mean, “Sucks to be you” is not what a vampire wants to hear.
The vampire spoke again, “The sun—”
“My god,” said the professor, and I briefly wondered which of his gods he was referring to, or if he would start down his list of several thousand Hindu names. “We have to get you out of the sun.”
A true dilemma indeed. But I think the vampire had truly worse fears to grapple with at the moment.
The vampire shook his groggy, pale head.
“The sun...is the key,” he said. “There is a way out.”
Chapter Forty-five
The sun had not yet made its full entrance, and the dawn was still chilly, which made the vampire’s words all the more inscrutable.
I leaned close to the draining vampire. He seemed distracted, distant, fragile. I figured it was because of his multiple, near-fatal-but-not-quite-because-he’s-a-vampire silver bullet wounds.
“You were saying something about possible escape and perhaps our delaying imminent death....” I goaded the fading immortal.
“Yes, yes, it’s just my damned soul trying to find itself—causes me to fade in and out.”
I nodded sympathetically. Vampire souls were one of the great philosophical debates of the Vampire Club.
“I’ve got only a few minutes before I achieve total coma—”
“Funny,” I interrupted. “We’ve got only a few minutes before death.”
“I do not want to wake up another two hundred years from now. Those small-minded freaks have no right to control the natural order of any mortal or immortal being. They must be stopped, and that time is now. Are you with me, human-called-Andy?”
“The nobility of your kind must be preserved at all costs,” I said bravely and absolutely meaning it. “I’d give you my soul.”
“Good. Because that’s what I’m asking for.”
The soul is one of those things we all like to joke about, and the topic usually only gets serious in the temple of your choice. Most of us like to believe our soul will know what to do when the time is right. But we also understand our souls are not likely to enjoy the crunch of Cheetos or the sweetness of chocolate or the complex joy of watching Dark Shadows remakes. In short, the soul only matters when you’re dead. The rest of the time, it’s your mind, ego, and sensory pleasures that are most important.
So of course I thought the vampire was joking, that cryptkeeper humor we all know and love.
The vampire didn’t look me in the eye. I take it he was too weak to even raise his head. “There’s only one way out of here and it’s through you, Andy.”
I was silent. Something deep down in me began to shake. Maybe that something deep within me knew what was going on but I sure didn’t
.
“Me?” I finally said. “Why me?”
The vampire raised a hand. “Unless someone else wants to volunteer.”
“Volunteer?” The three of us said in melodic unison.
“Yes, but I’d prefer you, Andy. I sense you are willing, and you must be willing.”
“Oh, like the rule where you have to invite the vampire in?”
“You must invite me.”
“I’m still not following,” I said.
“Only a vampire can get us out of here. I want you, Andy, to be that vampire.”
Chapter Forty-six
On a slight rise in the not-too-far distance, a war jeep with a mounted machine gun crashed through trees and rocks. And I was faced with the decision of my life: whether to die, or whether to be undead.
“I can make you a vampire, Andy. You are our only hope—your friends’ only hope for life, my only hope for peace in my troubled soul.”
“If we get out of this,” I said, “I would really like to know more about this troubled-soul aspect of being a vampire.”
“You’ll learn soon enough. Now, Andy, you have a choice to make. I don’t think I need to tell you what you will be getting yourself into if you choose to follow the way of the immortals. You will not be walking blindly into this, and for that reason I will feel little or no guilt for taking away your humanity.”
“So my choice now is either eternal death or eternal life?”
“Eternal life is a simple term for a complex situation, situations I can only discuss with you later if we’re both still around. But yes, you will never, ever die, Andy Barthamoo. You will be a vampire until the end of time—and beyond.”
All my life, in all my dreams, I had longed for this moment. The only thing I could compare it to was when I was deflowered by my friend’s older sister. I had so looked forward to that moment and when it finally happened it was somewhat of a letdown—the strangest sixteen seconds of my life.
The Vampire Club Page 13