Nightblood

by T. Chris Martindale

  “Cocksucker,” someone said from up close. He spun with the shotgun leveled, expecting attack, but the vampires were just coming back from the road and were wary of him now. The voice had to come again before he could trace it to its source, an older man on the ground by his feet who struggled and cussed but couldn’t lift the van’s front tire off his chest. The soldier just ignored him and went around the vehicle toward the porch.

  They were gathering again—Lord, he thought, how many of them are there!—but they didn’t charge him, now that he was armed. He’d left bodies all over the yard, and the gaping muzzle of the shotgun kept them at bay. Stiles backed up the walk, keeping all of them in sight.

  Thud.

  The weighty blow came out of nowhere and caught him in the middle of the back. It knocked the air from Stiles’s lungs and drove him to his knees, and a second blow sent him farther down, onto his side and grimacing from the pain. The dark world spun madly and he could barely focus on the swaying figures looming above him, one face so scarred and bullet-ridden he could barely recognize it as Dutch Larson. Both he and his mousy wife were there, Dutch as animate as ever since Ladonna had climbed from her hiding place and pulled the silver cake knife from her husband’s chest.

  Dutch was leering down at him, saying, “Remember me, boy?” and then, just as suddenly, he was gone from Stiles’s view. The soldier’s ears were still ringing from Larson’s blows, so he didn’t hear the shotgun blast that dispatched him, nor the second that snatched poor Ladonna from her feet and pitched her atop her thrice-dead husband. Stiles didn’t see anything but night sky until an even darker face leaned over him. “C’mon, Mr. Stiles,” Hubert Ranall said as he pulled him to his feet. “I don’t know how long we can keep them back.”

  “You just get moving,” Jessie said, brandishing the deputy’s smoking Mossberg. She picked up the weapons Stiles had dropped and followed them up the steps, keeping a wary eye on her neighbors until they were inside and the door shouldered back into place behind them.

  Stiles all but collapsed onto the couch that Bean had vacated for him. It was as if that last beating had finally convinced his stubborn mind how injured he really was. His head pounded and his groin as well, and his arms and legs were leaden. Jessie immediately began dressing his newest wounds.

  “Mr. Stiles?” Hubert was looking over the back of the couch at him, cradling one of the Remingtons against his chest. “What do we do now, Mr.—”

  “Stiles!”

  The soldier started. It was a young, forceful voice, and it made Stiles’s spine shrivel. He did not need anyone to tell him where it came from or who it was. He already knew.

  He waved Mrs. Shively away and motioned for Hubert to help him to the window.

  There were more of them than ever, even after Stiles’s assault. And Nathan Danner was standing out in the lead, now dressed in a bright red Adidas sweatsuit and coming up the walk. Stiles blinked twice in disbelief. This was not the same man he’d been chasing all night. . . it couldn’t be! This one did have Danner’s mocking face, but it was even younger and stronger than before and completely unmarked. He stood tall and straight on uncrippled legs, and he was no longer missing an arm. And his cheeks were flushed with color, with blood.

  Stiles was dumbstruck. It was Danner—completely regenerated in less than a single night!

  “Son of a bitch,” the soldier whispered. He was too far for the scatterguns to be effective, so he motioned for the H & K and flicked its setting to autofire and activated the laser sight. When he aimed, the dot danced along Danner’s cheek, just as it had several nights past. But the vampire had obviously learned nothing from the experience. He just smiled. Even as the rifle burped to life. Even as the rounds ate up the side of his face.

  He still smiled. Even as he healed himself.

  No sooner had the excised tissue been blown away than new flesh began to form. It flowed into the wound channels like pale water until they were completely filled, until the face was as unblemished as before. “Do you see, Stiles?” he laughed. “You’ve waited too long. I’m too powerful now. For you. For anyone.”

  He looked down at the bodies in front of him and with one hand lifted Dutch Larson’s corpse by the back of the neck until the heavy set marshal’s feet dangled above the walk. He stripped away Larson’s shredded T-shirt and exposed the mangled flesh beneath. And with his free hand Danner began to dig into that fleshy chest, burrowing with his fingers until he found something, and then withdrawing it. His fingertips smoked as he held up the knot of silver for their inspection, and he refused to show any pain it caused him. His jaws were clenched as he methodically dug each piece from the marshal’s chest, and in all that time the damning smile never left his face. When the last piece came out, Larson’s eyes blinked open and he began to fidget in his master’s grasp. Danner dropped him and turned to the parlor window as if to bow for his performance. “Come out, Stiles,” he said. “We have unfinished business.”

  The four of them backed away from the window. All looked to Stiles for support, but they did not get it. It was the first time they had seen him visibly shaken. “What do we do now?” Hubert asked again.

  Ida answered softly from her recliner, where she fingered the arms of her small cross. “We wait,” she said. “And pray.”

  The voices were getting worse. Bart had turned up the radio three times already, but it still wouldn’t drown them out. Mad, cackling laughter segued into pitiful moans and outright pleading. First a child’s frightened voice, plaintive, cutting to the heart of all who listened. “Please, let me in,” the girl said, “I can’t find my mommy and there are bad men out here, please, let me in!” The occupants of the basement had looked from one to another, wondering how long they could hold out against such a pitiful plea. But then the child’s wailing became a tantrum, the voice deepened, and whatever it was out there began spewing obscenities and hammering at the steel-reinforced door. “Let me in, you fucking maggots, you pukes, let me in, you’re dead anyway, all dead!” But after a few minutes their assailant gave up, and the tirade stopped. Temporarily.

  Billie was pouring a capful of coffee from her thermos to soothe her jangled nerves when the next voice came. Unlike the others, it was barely a whisper, and hardly anyone heard it at first. Ted had to bring it to Billie’s attention. “Mrs. Miller?” he motioned to her from his crate-seat by the door. “I hear another one out there.”

  She was irritable as were they all. “So what?” she snapped.

  “This one’s calling for you.”

  She started, spilling her coffee. The thought of it, the personalizing of it, sent shivers up her spine. But it also raised a macabre sort of curiosity in her. She picked up her shotgun and started for the door.

  Del caught her pantleg. “Don’t open it, Mom.”

  “I won’t, honey. I’ll be right back.”

  She went over, knelt by Ted Cooper, and listened. It was very slight, a hushed, urgent voice she could barely make out. But she did hear her name. “Billie,” it said. “Billie Miller, you in there?”

  “Bart, turn the radio down,” she called, and the older boy complied. In the resulting silence, even through the door, the whisper was magnified. It was female, as far as Billie could determine. Oddly familiar.

  “Billie? It’s me, Carol Gastineau. I can’t talk too loud, they’ll find me. . . .”

  “What do you want?” Billie said flatly. It felt wrong speaking back but it mattered little, since they obviously knew they were there.

  “I’ve just come to tell you, Sharon Lou is in a lot of trouble. She needs your help.”

  “What’s wrong with Sharon?”

  The whisper grew perturbed. “Don’t dillydally, girl, she really needs you.”

  “Where is she?”

  “The drugstore. She’s at the store, and she’s trapped.”

  Billie looked at Ted. The store? “
‘How long as she been there?”

  A pause. “All night.”

  “Liar!” Billie screamed through the door. “I left her at her house just before dark. You haven’t seen her at all, have you? Have you!”

  There was no answer this time.

  Ted snorted. “Way to go, Billie,” he said with a frown. “You just told her where to find Mrs. Moore.”

  Billie’s heart shriveled at his words. “Oh, Lord,” she said, reaching for the door bolt but Ted got to it before her and held it firm. She hammered helplessly against the steel and yelled, “Carol! Don’t you touch her! Don’t you dare touch her!” Ted finally had to wrestle her away from the door and take her back across the basement. Del and Bart helped her to sit down. “What have I done?” was all she could sob. “What have I done?” Thunder cracked suddenly, close by, just beyond the basement wall. It came again, three times. Gunfire. Then someone banged on the door from outside. “It’s me!” Stiles yelled, out of breath. “Hurry up, get these doors open!” More shots fired. “We can’t hold them off for long!”

  “It’s them!” Mrs. Helton exclaimed, jumping to her feet. “We’ve got to help them!” By the time Ted and Billie turned to look she was already at the door. Her hands were on the crossbolt.

  “No!” Ted lunged across the room without a hope in hell of getting to her in time.

  The bolt slid back. “You get in here, and hurry!” she said, swinging the door open. “They’re all over the place!”

  The doorway was dark, but not from the night. From the bodies. They were standing three deep there, clogging the solitary entrance, dark shadows with white clown faces and sardonic smiles. And at the lead was Rusty Sanders, now wearing his blood-streaked deputy’s uniform and tarnished badge, his revolver in hand and the barrel still smoking. “You get in here and hurry!” he repeated, mocking a petrified Mrs. Helton with perfect mimicry of her own voice. Then he took her by the shoulders and put his leering death’s face right down in hers and he laughed, “Was that an invitation?”

  Something rigid bumped his sternum—the barrel of a shotgun sticking out from under the woman’s arm. Ted looked over her shoulder at him and grinned. “Hey, Rusty. Whaddayasay?”

  Boom.

  The close proximity of the blast threw Sanders completely back through the doorway, his face frozen in a look of utter shock as he died. Again. The other creatures knocked him aside and started through the door themselves, but by then Bart and Billie had joined Ted to form a skirmish line and they began firing into the doorway, firing at anything that moved, pumping two and three rounds into the same bodies until the damn things were completely and unquestionably dead.

  “I’m out,” Ted called when his trigger clicked on an empty chamber. “Cover me!” He went forward while skirting their direct line of fire and came up behind the door and tried to push it shut. But it would only swing halfway. There were too many corpses blocking the threshold.

  A wave of bodies surged against the half-closed door and knocked Ted Cooper to the ground. His shotgun went sliding away as a heavy weight landed astride his back and drove him to the floor. Hands snarled in his hair and pounded his head into the concrete once, twice, three times, till his skull made a soft sound and the teen stopped struggling altogether. Only then did Doreen Moody turn him onto his back and begin to feed.

  Nightmares streamed into the basement like a dread and dark­ling tide, washing over the only line of defense, engulfing them all. Bart’s shotgun went empty, but Billie’s still roared defiantly. Its report mingled with the screaming, both men and women, rising in pitch until gender was no longer an issue. It was one long ululation, starting on one side of the room and then jumping to the other and back again. “You bastards!” Billie cursed and fired her last shots into the grinning horde and then drew the extra Magnum Charlie had given her and used that.

  “Del, Bart, get behind me! Did you hear?” She turned to look for them in the dim light and confusion, and that was when someone grabbed her wrist and knocked the revolver from her grasp. They swept over her like a cold wind, arms enfolding her, dead mouths on her cheeks and chest and sliding over her until they could find her throat. The bare bulb hanging overhead swayed from the melee, splashing everything with a strobic split second of light but illuminating nothing. She couldn’t even see who was going to kill her.

  Teeth broke the skin of her neck. Her own screams joined the communal wailing.

  A voice in the darkness, familiar to her. Frank Sipes. “Hold it.”

  The teeth sank no further. The mouths pulled away.

  “Not her. She’s Stiles’s woman. The Master says he can use her. Take her to him.”

  She tried to twist away from them, pummeling at where she thought faces should be, kicking at them, struggling to get away, to get to her boys. “Delbert! Bart!” she called out in vain against the other screams of the basement-cum-dining room. But a fist split her lip and filled her mouth with blood, and a second blow stunned her, and a third left her limp as a rag doll. She felt herself thrown over a shoulder and jostled about, and then there was the sensation of motion and a chill to her skin and the screams began to fade. She realized she was outside in the cold night air, being carried away. And she couldn’t even cry out. Not for her children. Not for herself.

  She was gone almost ten minutes before the screaming in the basement finally stopped. But the other sounds didn’t. The moans. The smack of lips.

  The feeding.

  Chapter Twenty

  Del couldn’t stop crying. He knew it wasn’t doing him any good, and it sure as hell wasn’t helping Bart or Mom. But he just couldn’t stop. C’mon. Tough it out. How long has it been since they dragged them out of here—fifteen minutes? Half an hour? What could have happened since then? Are they alive, or . . .

  They’re alive! They’ve got to be alive!

  Then you can still help them. You’ve got to try. But you can’t do anything till you stop crying.

  I will. I will.

  He wiped his eyes, then removed his hand from his mouth, but only when he was sure he wouldn’t sob or gag again. He’d almost given himself away last time, and he couldn’t afford the mistake twice. He massaged his tingling thighs; the alcove behind the furnace and water heater was small and he’d had to scrunch himself into an uncomfortable fetal position to remain unseen. And every minute he stayed there, his muscles cramped a little worse. It took him forever just to inch himself around to where he could peek out through the crack between the heater tank and the wall. He couldn’t make out much. The shadeless bulbs hung widely apart, and they were of low wattage. Their light barely reached to the floor, and that’s where all the bodies were. From his low angle they were indistinct mounds of shadow, entwined in twos and threes to where he couldn’t tell one body from another, the living from the dead from the undead. And with all the oohing and ahhing that reached his ears, the groaning and lip-smacking . . .

  What if the plan doesn’t work? What then?

  Then everyone you love dies.

  The answer was that obvious, and that sobering. He set his jaw and started to prepare himself.

  He unrolled the top of the sack very slowly and slid the contents out onto his lap. Amidst the Zagnut bars and the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups and the Teen Titans annual were the things he’d picked up as he stood in the aisle of the drugstore and surveyed the Halloween supplies and wondered, What if? They were the tools of his desperate doomsday plan: two sticks of clown-white facial paint, a pair of Vampire Teeth, and a thick tube of stage blood appropriately titled in dripping letters Tube O’ Gore. He laid them out on his leg like surgical instruments. First the face paint. There wasn’t enough light to read the instructions, but he remembered glancing at them in the store—the sticks needed to be moistened for application. He tried to spit into his hand but nothing would come out. His throat was too dry. He had to work at it, dredging it up
with his tongue just like when he used to hocker out the window of the school bus onto passing cars. He finally got a drop or two into his palm, just enough to wet the stick. Then he ran it across the back of his hand. The grease came off thick and lumpy but was the right shade of death, and the lumps looked like the flesh was beginning to decompose. Neat. He covered his hands and then his face, all over, even up into his hairline and down his neck. Then he put the teeth in. If only he had a mirror . . . As a finishing touch, he used the Tube O’ Gore to smear his lips red and dribbled the fake blood from the corners of his mouth, just like they always did in the Hammer films. The stuff had a pungent, plastic taste when he inadvertently licked his lips. He was careful not to do it again.

  He was hyperventilating by the time he finished. It has to work, he repeated. It has to, it has to. He took a deep breath and stood up.

  No one turned to look at him. The vampires, which he could see more clearly now, were hunched over their prey and much too engrossed to notice him. So far, so good. But how will you ever get past them? It was like an obstacle course and an Indian gauntlet all rolled into one.

  He stepped slowly, hesitantly around the furnace. Out into the open.

  There was immediate movement to his right. He froze. His neck refused to turn; only his eyes would obey, sneaking to the corners to see.

  One of those . . . things had been sitting on the other side of the furnace all the time, feeding contentedly only a few feet away. It was a large woman he had seen many times behind the cash register at the IGA, with her thick glasses and her hair in an ever-present bun. She still wore her smock and her “My Name Is Evie” badge, though both were speckled with red. Her mouth was wet and gleaming; Del knew it was not lipstick. She was sitting cross-legged and there was the limp form of a man draped across her lap but she was no longer looking at him. She was looking at Del.