by P. T. Phronk
Her nose cracked, increasing the river of blood pouring from her nose. Stan rushed to put the blanket around her shoulders. Back home, they usually did this in one of the bathrooms of the vampire’s mansion, where plastic wrap covered the floor. That, and being able to dump the solid waste into the basement for the creatures down there to snack on, made for easier cleanup. But it felt much better to be transforming out in the woods, where she didn’t have to worry about splashing the mirror.
Her lower jaw retracted into her face, giving her what must have looked like a pretty dorky overbite. Paul instinctively moved forward to help her, but Stan put a hand on his chest.
“Not just mooses,” she continued, even though it hurt to talk. “There is something else out there. Something similar to a vampire. Maybe more than one.”
Paul’s eyes were so squinted they looked closed. “Okay, so vampires are real, is what you’re telling me.”
“You don’t seem surprised,” Stan said.
“Lot of crazy shit in this world,” Paul said, shrugging, but he looked pale. “So what the heck are you?”
Annie’s forehead caved in. She closed her eyelids before Stan could see her eyes being absorbed into the wriggling storm of flesh occurring inside of her. That always grossed him out. “Don’t matter! Listen. These things are in the woods, kinda like vampires, but not really. Other monsters. There’s also another monster out here. One we know, Stan.”
“Jeffery Humber-Wilcox,” Stan said, spitting out the name of the man who tried to kill them like it was a curse word.
“Yes!” Annie said. She hunched over as her ribcage imploded. One of her legs snapped and she fell to the ground. Stan draped the blanket over her as she tore her shirt off and tossed it aside.
“So where is he? Let’s go get my mother back from the asshole.”
Annie inhaled. There was that odd sensation. She could smell Wilcox; faint traces of him came from the house and the woods around them, but the smell was scrambled. Paying attention to it was like trying to look at one of those magic eye paintings, with the mess of dots hiding a 3D picture. She could almost see something, but as soon as it started to come in focus, it was gone again.
“I can smell him now. I know he’s near. But I don’t know where.”
“Fuck,” Stan said.
Paul looked like he was about to talk, but instead put his hands on his knees and vomited onto a bed of leaves.
“I’ll, um—one sec.” Annie screamed in pleasure and pain at the same time. Every organ in her body twisted in agony, but it felt more like untwisting, finally getting her body into the proper configuration again. “I’ll know more when I’m done. Let’s go into the woods. Follow me. If I can find his trail, we’ll surprise him. Together by night.”
Annie shrank under the blanket as every remaining bone in her body broke, every organ contracted, most of her skin sloughed off. She couldn’t talk anymore.
“Together by night. Okay, girl,” Stan said.
“Do I want to be part of this togetherness?” Paul asked, his voice shaking.
“Probably not.”
“But I will be.”
“I sure hope so.”
Annie went blank for a few minutes as her brain shut itself down, got rid of all the unnecessary human gray matter, then returned as a smaller, simpler, better brain. As floppy ears started growing from her head, Bloody heard Stan explaining to Paul:
“Yes, the same guy you helped us find a few months ago. And yes, he’s dangerous. It looks like our past has come back to haunt us. When it’s dark, let’s hunt down our past and kill it.”
In the first sniff with her fully formed doggy nose, Bloody was hit with a faint whiff—there, then gone again when the wind shifted—of something else from their past. Something impossible. Moving fast from the west, where Stan had driven a stake through the vampire’s heart, she smelled Dalla.
(ONE)
FOUR MONTHS AGO
BRITISH COLUMBIA
He killed a pair of police officers before his feet even touched the ground. The knife that he kept in his boot punctured their hearts so quickly and deeply that they probably felt nothing. He landed, then eased their bodies to the ground and stabbed them a few more times, to make the murders seem like something a human would do.
That dirty little deed would buy him time before the next wave of cops arrived. He stepped into the building the police were investigating. The doors no longer had glass due to the SUV driven halfway into the store.
Blood covered every surface in smears, splats, and spots. Bodies lay beside toppled boxes like they were just more products for sale. Tears streamed from his eyes. Much of the blood, watered down though it was, belonged to him.
He lifted his mask for a moment to wipe the tears away. He wore glasses when in the public eye, but those were just another type of disguise. The red mask was a product that he’d heavily modified, so that it would be vaguely familiar, but hard to trace back to a specific memory. His face and name would be about the same— vaguely familiar to the public—but the mask ensured another layer of anonymity that kept even his mild fame from interfering with his personal business.
It was almost pleasant to feel the tears. At least they meant that, after all these years, he could still feel something.
Floating above the ground, he surveyed the brightly-lit store. Debris littered the place, as if a bomb had gone off. The checkout counters near the front were red with his blood, still wet in the middle of larger puddles. Men and monsters alike lay dead, atop and between toppled shelves.
He passed the Electronics section, where one body, which smelled and felt different than the others, was missing an arm and had no head aside from a widely distributed collection of brain matter, skull fragments, and teeth. He smelled a bit familiar. A celebrity. Maybe they’d worked together before.
Another body near the front of the store—one of the monsters—was also familiar. His head was missing too, but intact and nearby. It belonged to one of those talk show hosts. Kimmel? Leno? Letterman?
Had he met these people before? The last decade blurred together. All these famed icons that the people worshipped, fawning over what he’d accomplished, never realizing just how easy this all was for him.
“I told her,” he growled, holding back more tears. He floated over the shelves and bodies, toward the back of the Walmart. Toward her.
She lay in a storage room. If he couldn’t sense his own blood, now stagnant and putrefying around her, she would have been unrecognizable. Her skin was black. Her body was small, drained. A stake protruded from her heart.
He picked her up, folding her tiny, delicate limbs together in his arms. He could smell her skin. A tiny bit of that perfume she always used overcame the char. She’d had that scent since before she was even a vampire.
Hoisting her over his shoulder, he carried her back out into the wasteland that was Walmart. “Oh, Dalla,” he said, patting her charred hair. “What happened here? My poor baby, what did you get yourself into?”
He laid her body outside, beside a shopping cart receptacle. Sirens wailed from distant roads. The colleagues of those poor policemen would arrive soon. He needed to hurry.
After rocketing back inside, past the wasteland, past the room where Dalla had died, he found the facility controls, where he disabled the sprinkler system. He’d done this before. As the years went on, he found he’d done most of everything before.
Gasoline cans sat beside the backup generator. It only took him a minute to empty them in strategic locations.
He passed the beheaded man near the front again, and considered bringing him outside. Maybe giving him a proper burial. After all, he was family too: Dalla’s offspring, transformed long enough ago that his features had come to resemble hers. The old talk show host was his grandson! What a gas. But he felt no affection for the man, who he could picture engaging in inane banter with every celebrity who had a movie to promote. He poured fuel onto Letterman’s curly hair.
He flicked matches into a few key locations and made sure the place was burning correctly; he was particularly concerned with the bodies that felt like his blood—new grandsons and granddaughters who barely had a chance to live—because anything from this war zone leading back to him could be disastrous for his current career path. As planned, the most flammable materials exploded or quickly erupted in flame. Soon, the whole building was filled with smoke and glowing with fire.
He let out a shaky sigh, muffled by his mask, as he watched it burn. The stake jutting from Dalla’s body caught the firelight in an odd way. It was shiny with oil. He wrenched it out from between her ribs, then dropped it in a pocket of his trenchcoat.
The sirens drew closer. He put his daughter’s body over his shoulder and headed for the clouds. Below, police cars sped across the expansive parking lot.
Several thoughts went through his head as he headed back to the United States. There was the notion of revenge, of course; whoever murdered his daughter would pay. It wasn’t something he looked forward to, but it was necessary, for his emotional well-being, as well as for practical reasons. The stake through his daughter’s heart meant that whoever killed her knew what she was, and people in the know were dangerous. More and more, there were groups of people that knew the reality of his kind, and if they ever gained any significant power, it would be a real bother.
Dalla was partly to blame for her own fate, of course. He’d tried to talk her out of this life of fame a few weeks ago, when out of nowhere she got the idea to meet some movie star crush of hers, but the discussion had upset her. He could only imagine what sequence of events had led from that argument to her death among an army of her own offspring and a couple of world-famous celebrities. The apple didn’t fall far from the tree, he supposed.
Later, the lights of Los Angeles reflected off the clouds. He pulled the stake from his pocket. There was an inscription on it, carved near the base—a signature. Whoever owned the stake had probably killed his daughter. Another doomed vampire hunter, perhaps. With Dalla’s soft hair brushing against his neck, and another tear forming in his eye, he vowed to track, and bring Hell down upon, whoever was responsible for ripping his family apart.
4. Zen And The Art
STAN RAN HIS THUMB ALONG the edge of a picture of his mom on the fireplace mantle.
“I thought Wilcox's thing was killing vampires. Why would he go after my mom?” he asked Bloody, who rested on the couch, her paws splayed off to one side. Her grayish fur and perpetual underbite made her look old and grumpy. She raised one eyebrow and squinted her eyes at Stan like he was an idiot.
“Okay, yeah, I stabbed him. And you ripped his throat out. I guess he has reason to hate us. But going after Mom is so … indirect.”
He couldn’t let himself imagine the possible places and states that his mom could be in. He took a gulp from the bottle of beer he’d found in her fridge. It tasted like a skunk’s ass. That bottle had probably sat there since last time Stan visited, which was … too long ago.
Bloody made an exaggerated effort to sniff the air, then point toward the window.
“You’re right. If you still smell him, and Mom, then they must be close. She must be alive.”
The dog nodded quickly, her floppy ears bouncing and her lips pressed tightly together. But she looked sad, like she wasn’t quite sure if it was true.
The front door opened, letting cold air into the small house. Paul walked in wearing civilian clothes, but his sheriff’s duty belt sagged around his waist, and he carried a pair of flashlights and a shotgun from his truck.
“Let’s go find this fella,” he said.
The fog persisted even at night. As the sun set, the flashlights barely illuminated a tree or two ahead as the two men and a dog followed Linda’s last known path into the woods. Paul said that Newbury had been swimming in the fog for a few days, which made driving treacherous.
“I noticed,” Stan said.
“You said someone jumped in front of the car.”
Stan and Bloody both nodded. “Some guy. No shirt, pale, long-ish hair,” Stan said.
“Ah, probably the Blackwood kid. Horse Boy, the guys down at Ducks call him not-so-affectionately. He’s been like that for years, not paying attention to much of anything people do, wandering like a lost animal ever since he went through some things. Things that almost made me quit police work. That was years ago. He’s one of the long-standing town oddities, unlike the recent oddities.”
“There are more? Other than what we’re doing? Like what?”
Paul squinted. “Come on, Stan, have you already forgotten what it’s like here?”
“I know the ‘moose capital’ thing hides the ‘unsolved murders per capita’ thing. I know I got a lot of days off school, or trapped in lockdown inside the school, without really knowing why.”
Paul hunched down to shine his flashlight on the ground, following a path that only he could see in the muddy, slushy earth. “It isn’t the first time this month I’ve been trudging through the edges of town at night. Two people missing before Linda. Older folks. The theory that they got confused and wandered off into the wilderness only works for so long.”
A chill ran through Stan’s spine. The woods were familiar to him, but less so at night, especially once they crossed the railroad tracks. Stan had been forbidden from crossing them when playing in the woods, or else he would meet Linda’s dark side: a quiet disapproval that was worse than any outward anger.
They followed a stream, more or less. Occasionally, Bloody would smell something and bound ahead of Paul, disappearing into the fog before returning a moment later looking disappointed.
“How long will she stay like this?” Paul asked, shining the flashlight on Bloody.
She frowned at Paul and narrowed her eyes.
“She doesn’t like it when you talk about her like she’s not here,” Stan said.
Paul rubbed one of his temples. “I … but … you just did.”
“Hear that, girl? He thinks I don’t know how to talk to you.”
Bloody snorted.
Paul bent low and faced Bloody. “Okay, Annie, how long you gonna be a dog for?”
Bloody tilted her head at him.
“She can’t talk, Paul,” Stan said.
“I give up!” Paul raised his hands and fell behind. “I give up.”
Stan clapped Paul on the shoulder and pushed him onward, smiling. “Come on. We’re just fucking with you. She can change back whenever she wants to, more or less. She was stuck for a long time—as a dog, I mean—but a mutual friend of ours fixed that. Part of the reason we’re in this whole mess is because of Morgan, but at least he fixed that little issue.”
Bloody sighed sadly. They hadn’t seen Morgan—who Stan had known as Bob—since shortly after the nasty business at the Walmart in British Columbia. He’d gotten an email signed by Morgan with little more than a phone number, a few sentences saying that he’d found his way to L.A. again, and that he was doing well. Stan had met the man in the streets of New York when neither of them could even afford a bar of soap, and here he was with a phone number and email. Stan was so weirded out by the change of circumstances that he never got around to responding.
Paul exhaled through tightly pursed lips. “We’re getting close to Twin Lakes.”
The wind picked up, causing the fog to curl and shift, making it difficult to judge how far away even the nearest tree was. Paul twitched.
“You okay?” Stan asked.
“It’s just … I’ve seen some fucked up things in this job, Stan, but never anything quite like this. I can’t believe you dragged me into it.”
“You said, I quote, ‘I doubt you’ll surprise me.’ You can’t taunt us like that then expect to not get dragged into it.”
“Okay Stan, you win, I’m surprised,” he said, his voice nearly cracking. Stan was joking, but Paul didn’t sound like he was.
Bloody barked. Paul jumped. Stan raised his flashlight and jogged ahead to ke
ep up with his dog.
“Quiet, girl,” he said, shuffling along the mossy bank of the stream behind her. “We don’t know who’s out here.”
She responded by picking up her pace further. A gust of wind shifted the fog ahead of them. A ten-foot tall figure appeared in Bloody’s path: a silhouette of a woman with a floppy hat and a long coat. It was the vampire, Dalla.
Stan’s heart felt like it twisted in a knot. The wind shifted again. The vampire disappeared. She had never been there; it was only a tree, its outline twisted by the fog and Stan’s own shadow projected onto it. He shook his head. She was dead. His mind had to stop seeing her everywhere.
He had to stop being disappointed when it wasn’t her.
The stream beside them widened. He couldn’t see it through the darkness and opaque air, but Stan could feel the lake coming up ahead. The very air seemed heavier, the sound of their footsteps free to travel further.
Bloody paused, sniffed the air, looked confused for a moment as the wind shifted again, then continued on. A moment later, she yelped.
Stan sprinted ahead. He crouched beside Bloody, who was hunched over, the scraggly hairs on her back puffed up, pointing her nose at the stream. He raised his flashlight, then nearly dropped it. A whimper escaped from his lips.
Paul appeared over Stan’s shoulder, shotgun aimed at the horror lying by the water.
Stan fell to his knees on the soft, pine-covered ground. “Is it her?” He lowered his flashlight. “I can’t look. Oh God, oh God. Just tell me if it’s her.”
Paul continued forward, flashlight aimed in the same direction as his shotgun. It illuminated a flesh-colored mass, writhing in the current of the stream. Stan squeezed his eyes shut.
“It’s … I don’t know what this is,” Paul said.
Stan heard Bloody snort.
“Annie is shaking her head. It’s … probably not Linda? Is that what you’re saying, girl?”