by Darst, Matt
She orders Van to kick dust over the prints. “There’s no need for anyone to worry about this now. Let’s move.”
Just footprints, Wright thinks, probably a week old, heading on a diverging angle. Everything is fine.
No. Certainty is a death sentence.
Wright decides to march them another dozen miles. She doesn’t want to face Heston or the questions he will ask. So, she pairs with Burt. The Hestons can accompany each other, at least until Wright needs more answers.
Thirty minutes pass, Burt and Wright nary sharing a word. But Burt has theories of his own, and he can’t help but cut the silence to disclose them.
“Have you ever seen a vampire movie?” Burt asks sheepishly, almost as if he’s walking by himself.
Wright cleans the barrel of her pistol. She does this effortlessly while walking, while still scanning the tree line. She’s done it a dozen times since the crash. You can never be prepared enough.
She reminisces about watching the Son of Svengoolie with her father Saturday afternoons. One scene sticks in her head: some actor fending off a vampire, maybe Christopher Lee, with a couple of candlesticks held to form a rudimentary cross.
“Sure,” she says.
Burt steels himself for his next query. “Did you ever wonder,” he gulps, “if there’s any truth to the vampire mythos?”
The vampire mythos? Wright guffaws. “Like Dracula?”
“No,” Burt replies, gruffly. Dracula, or Vlad Drakul, was as much a vampire as Princess Diana. Bram Stoker ruined a man and his Romanian heritage like some paparazzo. Imagine how all of England would have reacted if Stephen King had accused the Princess of lycanthropy.
“Like George Hamilton, then?” Wright jokes, eyes still on the landscape.
Burt thinks her question is a serious one. “True,” he says, “George Hamilton played Dracula. But Dracula, again, was not a vampire. And vampires definitely aren’t tan. There is something, though, in his portrayal, like Bela Lugosi’s, like Gary Oldham’s, even like the guy who played Blackula, loosely based on folklore.”
Wright holds the barrel of her pistol to her eye, inspects it against the dying light. She is losing patience. “Your point?”
She’s subtle, Burt muses wryly, like the Incredible Hulk at a tea party. Myths generally arise from a need, a need to explain something that can’t be clarified, either through experience or science. “Maybe the vampire myth just served to explain something that people were witnessing.”
Wright is clearly annoyed. “Do you think people witnessed some guy turn into a bat?”
“No, I’m not talking about bats. Vampire bats don’t even come from Europe. That’s just another myth created by—” But Burt digresses. “What I’m really talking about is the formation of a core belief of corpses returning to prey on the living…and consume them.”
“Mythology, Burt,” Wright shakes her head. “You just said it yourself: vampires are a myth. All myths can be explained away by good science. Example: the Cyclops, not a giant with a single eye, but an elephant skull discovered by the early Greeks mistaking the enlarged sinus cavity for an eye socket. Witness the creation of a fiction.”
“Granted, but I’m talking about vampires.”
He’s right. Best to stick to one supernatural beast at a time. “Have you ever heard of rabies?” Wright asks.
“It’s like distemper, right?”
“Kind of,” Wright says, remembering her conversation with Dr. Heston. “But it presents…uniquely.” Does Burt recognize the symptoms of those infected? The face and body contorting, animal-like; the violent behavior, especially the biting; the pain caused by intense sensations, like direct sunlight; the nausea induced by strong odors, like garlic. “Sound familiar?”
So she does know vampire mythology. “Yes,” Burt allows. But can she explain away other bits, like escaping their graves to feed on their victims’ blood?
“Poe,” Wright says. Edgar Allan Poe, author of “The Raven,” “The Telltale Heart,” and “The Premature Burial.” It is this last story that offers clues.
In it, a man suffers from catalepsy, a disorder that suspends animation, often mistaken for death. In the 19th century, embalming had yet to come into existence. So they would hold wakes, staying up, hoping death was temporary. Still, an occasional coma victim would wake, finding himself buried alive, tearing himself apart to escape the grave.
Burt offers another argument, “What about the bodies being disinterred? What about what they found?”
Wright doesn’t question there’s evidence, archaeological and historical, that people dug up suspected vampires. But their descriptions, horrifying enough to spark an epidemic, also accurately depict the natural process of decay.
Villagers exhumed a body, found fresh blood dribbling from the mouth and assumed the cadaver had recently feasted. But corpses liquefy, swelling as they decompose. Blood naturally bubbles, escaping from the mouth. The abdomen bloats, too, leading one to suspect the belly is full of flesh and blood. Couple all this with the homeless who took shelter in tombs, coming and going by night, Wrights says, “…and you have a legend.”
Burt shrugs. “Still…”
“Still what?” Wright demands.
“Still,” Burt continues, “it seems these monsters”—he fans an arm around his head, indicating the space surrounding them—“ easily could have been mistaken for vampires by peasants in the 17th and 18th centuries.”
Wright raises a brow. “Just what are you getting at?”
“What if this has happened before?” Burt posits. “You know, but on a limited scale?”
Wright scoffs. Is Burt actually suggesting a historical precedent for this plague? Ridiculous.
“Why?” Burt poses. He challenges Wright: Compare the similarities between these creatures and the vampires of folklore. Not the Hollywood Dracula crap, but the certified dead rising and killing, communicability through a bite, and their manner of destruction: fire and decapitation.
“But vampires are killed by wooden stakes,” Wright states. “These are not.”
Burt shakes his head. Vampires are only killed by stakes in “Buffy, the Vampire Slayer” and in other fictions. They were not killed that way in folklore. In European tradition, vampires were pierced, held fast to the ground by a wooden stake, sometimes of ash, pounded through their chests. The stake only prevented them from moving. They still had to be decapitated or burned. Either method sufficiently destroys, or at least inhibits communication, with the brain. “Maybe,” Burt continues, nodding at Wright’s handgun, “even better than that thing.”
Wright can’t believe they’re having this discussion. The whole concept is insane. She says so. Then she tells Burt to shut up.
They walk the remaining miles in silence.
Then they set up camp.
*
City Hall. The building houses both the city and county governments, although some dispute whether the latter qualifies. Usually the Hall is noisy with activity, the voices of aldermen, lobbyists, and protesters, stirring together into a blur. Nothing here is pure. Laws and policy are watered down, adulterated by anyone whose voice rises above the clamor.
But as Peter surfaces on the escalator, the Hall is quiet. I need to get to the street, he thinks.
As he exits a revolving glass door, the noise returns in a rush. Sirens, klaxons, alarms, all signaling emergencies, all competing for attention. But which is more important? The ambulance taking the secretary dying from a torn jugular—torn by the teeth of a bike messenger she greets every morning—to Rush’s emergency ward? The black and white cruiser crawling through stacked traffic, unclear as to where to start to address the spreading chaos? The firefighters elbowing their way through the crowd, moving like salmon upstream, going who knows where?
This is not how emergency response is meant to work. This is not how Homeland Security, nor FEMA, nor the CDC intended it.
Peter has taken the courses, trained at the Center for Domestic Prepa
redness, readied to assume a supervisory role in an event or incident. But it doesn’t take a mathematician to see things are out of hand and growing exponentially. There’s no established incident command, no objectives, no plan.
Peter has a choice.
He chooses to go home to his family.
There is no shame in that. This is a free-for-all.
He grabs a bicycle, the one abandoned by the messenger, and makes his way north.
Chapter Fourteen: Run for Your Life
Four hours into their morning push, and Van is not happy.
He does not like being alone, being on point. He’d rather be talking to Anne. Instead, she is talking to Ian twenty paces back.
Van hears her laugh lightly. Then he hears her ask Ian, “What’s your sign?”
Ian doesn’t know.
“When were you born?”
Ian answers.
“Oh, you’re a Leo!” she says enthusiastically. “You’re a natural born leader.”
Van watches and listens, feeling the jealously building.
Twenty minutes later, it has all gone to shit.
They are fleeing, running for their lives.
“There’s a house,” Ian screams, and what’s left of the group sprints hard.
Ian is first up the steps to the door. It’s cracked open, and pops wide as Ian strikes it with his shoulder. He goes down, sliding across the floor, into the staircase opposite the entrance. He’s up quickly, calling to others to move fast. “Don’t look back!”
Anne follows, screaming.
Then Burt.
Jessica.
Van.
Last is Wright. She has to make up distance fast. She’s in, and she shouts at Ian to shut the door. He slams it hard, lopping off the fingers of a trailing monster. They fly in all directions, and Anne cries out again.
Ian leans against the door, low and panting hard. Burt straddles him, his weight distributed high. A fingerless fist demands entry, pounding against the rotting wood.
“Where the hell did it come from?” Ian demands of a frozen Van, his eyes daggers.
Anne whimpers uncontrollably into Jessica’s bosom.
Wright steps forward, allowing a slinking Van to find cover behind her. “Ian, we’ll get to that later.” What matters now is that he holds the door. She orders Van to assist.
Van hesitates. She grabs him by the shoulder and pushes him to Burt’s side.
Wright mutters something about securing the place, then dashes deeper into the home.
The hammering continues, Van wincing with each thud against his shoulder. Ian leers at him, his eyes barely slits. Van sees the anger and responds, “I just…just didn’t see them.”
That’s no excuse, Ian retorts. “Save it for the Hestons. They should be along shortly.”
“My Lord,” Burt exclaims, considering that the remains of the Hestons could already be slithering their way to the doorstep. The door bucks, and he leans harder into it. “Hold tight!”
“Man, fuck this!” Van exclaims. He starts to sob.
“Fuck you!” Ian lashes out. “Here’s a suggestion—” Sometimes the difference between a suggestion and criticism is subtle. Sometimes it is not. “—Next time you’re on point, try not to let any of us get eaten.”
Van responds in kind to the criticism. “Fuck you, Ian.”
Fuck me? Ian’s engulfed in rage. He turns to Anne, back still pressed against the door. “You know,” he says to the terrified girl, “I used to think Van could only muster ‘fuck this’ or ‘fuck that’ because he had too many thoughts to manage in his head. ‘Fuck it’ was just easier. But I was wrong, because the truth is that Van doesn’t care about anything. He doesn’t care about you, Anne. He doesn’t care about you, me...” Ian laughs shrilly, a man losing control, “…God, he doesn’t even care about himself.”
Ian strikes a nerve. Van twitches, almost imperceptibly, but enough for Ian to take satisfaction.
Wright’s return interrupts the bickering. Her return surprises the girls, and they squeal. “It’s all right, girls,” Wright soothes, petting their heads. “It’s going to be fine.” “That’s how they initially got in,” she says, pointing to the door. She eyes the men. The rest of this floor looks secure. She’s going to look around for something to use to seal the door.
“Why don’t you just shoot them!” Van cries, plaintively.
“Because she can’t,” Ian answers. “The gunshots will attract more of those things.”
True, Wright thinks. Plus, she needs to conserve the ammunition.
“Girls, would you mind checking the drawers in the kitchen for knives, weapons…anything you think is valuable?” Jessica starts to protest, but Wright explains the kitchen is safe. “And, it is quieter.” That convinces them. They move down the dark hallway before Wright mounts the staircase.
“Kari?” Ian starts.
She halts. “Yes?”
Ian’s painfully aware of the eyes upon him. He stammers, “Be careful.”
She permits a rare smile. “Don’t worry. I will.”
The thing punches the door almost rhythmically, the metronome beats counting the seconds until Wright will return. It’s just inches away, Ian thinks, just a rotten piece of wood between us. It is so close he almost confuses the beast’s battering for the thumping of his own heart.
Minutes pass, each one moving with the speed of an epoch. Although Anne and Jessica have quieted, the monster persists, unabated. The door, fortunately, holds firm, but Ian cannot say the same for his resolve. He finds his courage quaking, the initial adrenaline rush receding.
He turns his thoughts to something else. His family. Song lyrics. Sex, or what he thinks sex might entail. But the noise outside forces such thoughts aside. It will be worse soon, worse when the Hestons join the visitor demanding entry. There will be more of them to come.
Only then does he realize the folly of Kari’s search of the home. She should not be alone. His blood goes cold. More of them to come? What if they were already upstairs?
“Burt?” Ian calls between fist falls. “Can you manage without me for a moment?”
Burt stares at Ian, his eyes wide and questioning.
Ian nods his head in the direction of the stairs.
“Good idea,” Burt agrees. He thinks the door has swollen in its frame some. That should help him and Van to hold it.
With that, Ian bounds up the stairs, three at a time. Toward the top, he stops. He lived most of his life in an old house, and he knows how to walk to minimize the creaking. Still, as he steps heel to toe, the last few steps groan under his weight.
He takes note of the blistering wallpaper. Sun-bleached, he can barely perceive the detail of birds flitting to and from bouquets of bluebonnets. “Kari,” he squawks meekly, still hidden in the shadows of the staircase.
He peers left. A brightly lit room bathed in hues of baby blue greets him from the hallway’s end. He opts, though, for the right, toward a darker burgundy room five paces past a full bathroom. A carpeted runner silences his tentative steps.
From the left, behind him now, something lurches forward from the blue room, a child’s bedroom. It shuffles silently, shoulder to the wall. Its dead hands slide eagerly over the aging paper, convulsing like ancient spiders about to pounce.
Ian moves more quickly, unaware of the danger at his back. Once he passes the bathroom, he takes longer strides towards the end of the corridor. He whispers Kari’s name again, hoping his appeal for an answer will elicit a response, before taking the final plunge through the dark threshold.
Hand to the frame, he swallows and steps through the entry.
The room is dark, save for two thin shafts of light cutting through the dust from a pair of southern windows. The beams barely escape the darkness of heavy drapes that imprison the room in blackness.
Ian’s eyes slowly adjust to the gloom. He detects a great four-post bed standing solemnly before him. It anchors the far wall, dividing the room into two, presumably
“his” and “hers,” sides. Ian is stricken by the fastidiousness of the room, the made bed. Even in this family’s final days, they bucked against the chaos, seeking refuge in order, things as simple as tucking in sheets and arranging pillows. For Ian, making the bed was always a chore. To these people, though, it must have brought them solace as their world caved in around them.
Wright steps away from a chest of drawers, into the struggling sunbeams. Dust dances about her illuminated face, glowing. Like fairy dust, he considers. Ian spies the hint of another smile.
He starts to grin in response, but checks himself. There’s a sudden change in her expression.
Wright’s face goes dim. Her full lips spasm.
She draws her pistol…and levels it…at Ian.
It doesn’t happen in slow motion like in the pictures.
The gun is up and out in the beat of Ian’s heart. The hammer connects with the percussion charge instantaneously. The muzzle flashes, and the bullet’s away, long before the thundering report ever reaches Ian’s ears.
It’s faster than a synapse snap, too fast to elicit a reaction.
Too fast for Ian to voice, or even begin to formulate the question, “Why?”
The slug strikes with a sickening thud. Flesh and bone hit the wall behind where a falling Ian once stood.
Wright moves with surprising purpose and efficiency, a trained assassin unleashed. Before the body can even complete its descent to the floor, she’s there. As the lifeless remains hit the carpet, she delivers the coup de gras: two additional bullets to the head.