Which was when he noticed the pile of bones.
They were distinctly human. He saw a skull and a femur and a foot, all of which still had bits of skin attached. Flies hovered above, digging into the remains. He hadn’t noticed the smell until now. He covered his mouth and tried not to vomit again.
It’s not Alyssa. She’s still alive. You have to believe that’s the truth.
He reached for the door, his feet inches away from the hall, when it slammed shut, locking him in the room. He tried to turn the knob but it wouldn’t budge. He kicked at the wood but it stayed in place.
He heard things moving on the other side, faint footsteps and gurgles, whispered voices that made his stomach drop again. The floor beneath his feet vibrated. It was a steady hum at first but it grew quickly into a full-on shaking.
An earthquake. It felt like an earthquake or a tsunami or a black fucking hole had ripped through the universe. He noted the way the desks and books stayed perfectly still as if glued down. He lost his balance, fell to the floor, hitting his head in the process.
Pain flared along the base of his skull and his vision turned white. Eventually, the quake, or whatever it had been, calmed and stopped altogether. He rubbed at his eyes for a long time until the stars passed. When he opened them, he thought he’d either died or was in a coma.
The walls were freshly painted and the dust had vanished. The pages of the textbooks were white and crisp, like no time at all had passed. Like the school had never closed to begin with.
Before he had time to process what had happened, he heard a creaking sound as the door opened, revealing the hall outside, looking just as new as the room.
He stood up, regained his balance, and stepped through the doorway.
For good measure, he kept the pistol raised.
●●●
“I’ve got a theory,” Justin said as they drove toward the old high school.
“Yeah, what’s that?” Alyssa sat in the passenger seat. She inspected each of her cameras, ensuring the batteries were fitted properly. On a normal day, Justin would’ve thought this to be obsessive but they needed to be prepared on a night like this.
“Maybe the cameras hurt them because it makes them popular again.” He turned on his high beams, hoping to cut through the thick mist, but if anything, the added illumination made it harder to see.
“How do you mean?”
“I mean these vamps, for the most part, were popular kids, you know? Jocks and teachers’ pets.”
“Then what does that make us? The bottom of the food chain?”
“For them, yes. We weren’t popular enough to recruit but we aren’t exactly burnouts either.” He slowed his speed. They needed to work fast but they wouldn’t be much help to Frank if they suddenly became wrapped around a telephone pole.
“Good for us, I guess.” She finished inspecting the gear and put the straps back around her shoulders. “How does making them more popular have any effect?”
He rubbed his chin and caught his reflection momentarily in the side window, his face lit up by the dashboard lights. He looked like a tired detective from some old noir movie. “Think of it this way. You have Melvin who gets picked on so much, he ends his life.”
“Blows his brains out in front of everyone in the cafeteria you mean.”
He nodded, trying not to think of what it must have felt like to witness such a thing. “Then ten years later his younger brother—who got along with everyone just fine after coming out and had plenty of friends—starts dressing like Melvin. Then we have the outbreak in Lynnwood.”
“You’re not telling me anything you haven’t already revealed tonight.”
“What I mean is that what if snapping their picture takes away some of their edge, brings back a bit of their popularity?”
“Seems unlikely.”
“It’s the only theory I’ve got and it seems to add up considering the puddle we left back at the photo shop. Think about it. A picture is worth a thousand words and all that. It immortalizes you. But these vamps don’t want to be immortalized, at least not like that. They want to live in the darkness. They want to cause havoc and make everyone else pay for what happened to Melvin.”
“But none of us had anything to do with that. It was a decade ago.”
“Maybe Melvin, setting aside the fact that he somehow avoided staying dead, doesn’t care. Maybe he wants revenge on anyone who’s within walking distance. And don’t forget, your father was one of his teachers.”
She covered her face with her hands and groaned in frustration. “Okay, fine. Suppose your theory is true. Are you ready to off a couple hundred more of those things?”
He thought about the two they’d already taken care of tonight, how the vamps had screamed in agony as the first flash went off, how they’d resembled—if only for a moment—the humans they’d once been before their last moment arrived. “What if we can get to the master first? What if killing him—again—will reverse the effect of the others?”
“If we follow your logic, I guess it could be true. But I’m more concerned with getting my dad. I don’t care how many of those bastards get in our way. I don’t care if I recognize their faces. As far as I’m concerned, they’re monsters for the time being. If we find Melvin first, assuming he’s hiding with the rest of them, then great. We’ll take a nice family photo and call it a night. But only after my dad’s with us. Got it?”
He nodded. “You’re the one calling the shots.”
“You’re not doing too bad yourself. You did save my life at the party.”
“I seem to remember you saving mine back at the shop. We’re even.”
“For now,” she said, looking outside.
They drove in silence for a while. The interior was getting cold so he turned up the heat. “You weren’t a band-aid,” he said. He hadn’t planned on bringing up the subject but a morbid part of his brain wondered if there would be another time to discuss such things.
“What?” She turned toward him, looking equally tired and beautiful.
“I’m sorry if it seemed like I was suffocating you while my dad was…” Say it. Don’t be afraid of the word. You can’t run away from it. “While my dad was dying. You just… made me feel better, that’s all. In fact, you’re just about the only thing that got me through it.”
Her eyes glazed over and for a moment he thought she would cry but instead she turned off the heater and rolled her window down, stuck her head out into the night.
“What’s wrong?” he said.
“Do you hear that?”
He rolled his own window down and concentrated. He did hear something, music of some sort. Halloween music, the kind you heard at the beginning of seasonal cartoons. Except now, no matter how cheesy it may have been, his skin grew thick with gooseflesh.
Up ahead, the mist parted for a moment. They rolled up the hill and into the parking lot. The music grew louder. He saw the decorations covering the school. It resembled an amateur haunted house, only it was more like the real thing. The props weren’t what bothered him, though.
What bothered him were the countless silhouettes outside the front entrance, blocking the way, standing guard. Waiting, perhaps, for Justin and Alyssa to come strolling up the hill just in time for class to begin.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
If Frank didn’t know better, he would’ve thought it was ten years prior and his stomach wasn’t stretching out his jeans and his hair wasn’t thinning and his beard wasn’t graying and he wasn’t in the condemned building that had become vamp headquarters. If he didn’t know better, he would’ve thought the last decade had been a bad dream.
The problem was that he did know better. He knew in his gut that Jeremy was still gone and that those bastards were running around town like a mob. He also knew that Alyssa was somewhere inside these walls, no matter how fresh they may have looked.
It’s a mirage, something to keep your mind occupied and your defenses lowered. Don’t buy into it. Rub your
eyes and wake up.
Kids rushed by him, not vamps but students that he knew for certain were adults now. He recognized several of them, could recall the good ones from the bad. A few broke off from their groups, laughing and shouting, and turned into a classroom that Frank knew well.
It had been his for nearly five years after all. He walked toward the room, touching the walls and lockers as he went. His fingers grazed chipped paint and dented lockers, the sensations not matching up with what he saw.
He stopped at the doorway to his classroom, every hair on his body standing up.
Don’t do it. Do go in there. That’s what they want.
But Alyssa could be in there. They were using her as bait. They wouldn’t lead him to a dead end. If anything, they’d want him to see her fear for her life.
He raised the pistol and stepped into the class. Twenty students stopped speaking to each other and goofing off, all of them looking at Mr. Tanner. He expected them to scream in shock at the sight of their teacher pointing a gun but they didn’t seem all that worried.
He sensed a presence in the doorway behind him. He was certain it was one of the vamps or worse. He spun in that direction, prepared to pull the trigger, but his shoulders slumped when he saw the figure standing there.
It was not Melvin or Busty or any of them for that matter.
It was a younger version of Frank Tanner.
“Okay, class,” younger Frank said. “Let’s get started. Hope everyone had a good weekend.”
Frank had once heard that if you ever saw a perfect copy of yourself—an actual doppelganger—you would lose your mind. The brain wasn’t equipped to process such a thing. Right about now, he thought that theory held weight. He felt ready to collapse. His sanity threatened to fly away in the breeze, the closest thing to an out of body experience he’d ever known.
The students opened their books and younger Frank asked them to pass down their homework assignments, four simple questions that could’ve been answered by skimming the first three pages of the chapter they were covering. How times had changed. Because of the administration, his homework had grown exponentially harder both on him and his classes.
Something caught Frank’s eye in the back of the class. He expected to see another version of himself, a clone that was perhaps even younger this time, but instead he saw Melvin Brown.
The boy’s black hair was greasy and covered most of his face. The girls sitting to his left looked worried while the jocks sitting behind him mocked Melvin. On the desk before him was a black notebook. Even from Frank’s spot at the head of the class he could see the scribblings of appendages and teeth. It dawned on him then why he’d been forced to remember this day in particular.
The bell rang.
It seemed abrupt. Hadn’t class just started? Perhaps time moved in odd patterns in this dream or hallucination. The students jumped up from their seats and ran for the door in a stampede of excitement.
It was lunchtime.
The jocks pushed past Melvin, one of them knocking him to the floor. His notebook fell from his hands, opening at random to one of his hideous works of art.
The jocks laughed, pointed at the drawings.
“Psycho,” one of them said.
“Have fun dying a virgin,” said another.
Melvin remained quiet. He picked up his notebook, stood back up, and stared at Frank. He felt the boy’s eyes boring into him, certain Melvin’s voice would invade his mind at any moment. Frank realized Melvin was looking at younger Frank, who was too busy erasing the board and pretending not to see the bullying in his own classroom.
That Frank had been too focused on his new career and couldn’t have been bothered with such trivial matters. He’d turned his head on a troubled boy who was about to go to the cafeteria and—
Time sped up again. The students and the younger clone of Frank acted as though they were on fast forward, filing into the cafeteria. Older Frank followed. Younger Frank was at the front of the dining hall, talking with fellow employees, trying to make a good impression.
From the entrance to the cafeteria, he watched the jock, whose name now escaped him, if he’d ever known it to begin with, push Melvin to ground. He watched Melvin pull a gun out of his backpack but by then it had been too late to act. Younger Frank saw the argument, but not the gun—not at first. He turned away and cracked some joke to a fellow teacher.
Now, Frank covered his eyes. He didn’t want to watch that poor kid end his life all over again. Something latched onto his wrists and pulled them away from his eyes so that he had no choice but to lay witness.
“No,” a voice said, its tone harsh and raspy, what Frank had imagined the bogeyman sounded like as a child. “You don’t get to turn away this time.”
Melvin raised the gun at one of the jocks and then turned it slowly on himself.
Frank closed his eyes but felt something thick and slimy drop from the ceiling. It latched onto his lids and pulled them open.
Younger Frank’s eyes widened. He opened his mouth to scream.
Melvin pulled the trigger.
The shot was deafening, much worse than it had been in reality. Frank’s ears rang but he was more concerned with the geyser of blood spilling onto the floor. It looked as though a water main had burst. Red liquid flooded the cafeteria. The students screamed, tried to swim, but the blood was too thick. They slowly drowned, screaming for Frank to save them.
“Fat chance of that,” the voice said. “You’re not good at saving anyone.”
Frank looked at the things holding onto his hands. They were tentacles, ripped straight from Melvin’s drawings, the skin slightly translucent, thick veins bulging underneath.
“Aren’t they beautiful?” the voice—Melvin—said. “They were my only friends, Frank. They used to come to me in my dreams. I guess you could call them nightmares but to me they were fairy tales. My monsters didn’t tease or call me names. My monsters didn’t tell me I was just filled with hormones and that medicine wouldn’t help me. My monsters didn’t tell me anything. They just accepted me.”
The blood reached Frank’s feet. It climbed quickly, filling up the room like a monsoon. Bodies floated through the mess. He felt them graze his skin as they moved toward the entrance, like they were being herded by unseen things.
The blood reached his knees.
“She’s dead,” Melvin said. “Your pretty little daughter is dead.”
“No,” Frank said. “I don’t believe you.” Where was the gun? He’d let go when the tendrils grabbed onto him. He tried to search through the crimson water but he was frozen.
“You can die knowing you failed all of them. We’ll go back for Mona too. We’ll tie her up and eat her slowly. She’ll see her death coming from a mile away and she’ll only have one person to blame.”
Frank tried to speak but the blood reached his neck, his chin, his mouth, until the coppery liquid invaded his throat and nostrils and eyes. Everything hurt, the world was on fire, and he felt infinite blackness approaching.
●●●
“Faster!” Alyssa said, rolling up her window and locking the door.
“I’m trying.” Sweat poured down Justin’s face as he put the car in reverse and barreled backward down the hill. The hat irritated his head beyond belief. He tossed it onto the backseat without taking his eyes off the road and the rearview mirror. The hill leading up to the old high school was tall and winding and he wondered who the hell had made the decision to build atop its peak. He turned the wheel left and right, feeling the road out by memory. The mist was still too thick. He couldn’t make out anything behind him as he backed up. Or in front of him for that matter.
Had they been spotted when they rolled up to the parking lot?
Of course we were. Those bastards were waiting for you. After what you did to Sylvie and Sunglasses, did you think they’d just let you walk in through the front door?
“Almost there,” he said, sensing the road as it straightened out. If his calcula
tions were correct, they’d be on the main street in ten seconds. Then what? Would they drive around the block and enter the back door? Who was to say the vamps weren’t patrolling every point of entry?
Too many questions. Too much fog. Too much blood rushing to his head. Too much sweat dripping into his eyes. Too much piss threatening to burst his bladder.
The hill evened out just as he’d suspected. He took a miniscule breath of relief that didn’t seem to help that much. “See? I told you.”
“Something’s not right,” Alyssa said, peering through the windows, her eyes darting every which way.
“What do you mean?”
She didn’t have time to answer. Something landed on the rear of the car, rocking the suspension so that metal grinded against metal. From behind, through the mist, Justin saw several shapes emerge, their pale skin blinding.
A boy he recognized from school, one of the lacrosse team’s shining stars, peered through the rear window and knocked on the glass. “You mind letting us in? I know of a great Halloween party just up the road.” He cackled and smashed his hands against the window. Cracks appeared and fissured outward. Another blow like that and the glass would shatter.
“Hold on,” Justin said as he put the car back into drive.
“What’re you doing?”
He floored the pedal. The tires spun out for an eternal few seconds. In those moments, he saw them both being eaten alive, saw the girl of his dreams screaming his name as her tongue was ripped from her mouth and swallowed whole by one of the vamps as if it were a delicacy.
The tires straightened, gained traction, and he thanked every known deity as he sped back up the hill, no longer in reverse, the car swerving along each and every bend.
At the top, he saw the crowd again. They’d gained numbers. There were perhaps fifty additions and they blocked the way.
“You’re going to hit them,” Alyssa said.
“I’m betting on it.”
The first to get smashed was a girl with a shaved head and a pierced nose, a chain running from the ring, dangling across her face and winding back up into her lip. She didn’t seem the least bit scared as the hood collided with her mid-section, ripping her torso free from its legs and launching it across the way. Her upper half landed onto several other vamps, knocking them over like bowling pins.
We Came Back Page 23