Authors: Christine Dougherty
Luckily for Chance, the restless streak in Destiny never turned her attention too far away from him. Even when she was sixteen–1983, the year the world trembled on the edge of the plague but did not yet know it–she’d taken seven-year-old Chance with her almost everywhere she went.
She taught him to catch at the Town Center park and supervised as he fed the ducks in the pond. She helped him with his schoolwork and counseled him on his social interactions. She watched over him when they rode bikes down Route 562, and led him through the woods behind their neighborhood, pointing out interesting things like caterpillars, small lizards, frogs, and spider’s webs woven between branches–everything she knew instinctively he would like.
Destiny and Chance would sit for hours on end at the edge of the lake when they went there as a family on summer weekends. The sun would be hot on their backs, and a steady breeze came off of Lake Ontario, and seagulls called in the sky, hanging suspended like cottage decorations. Other children ran past, screeching, made frantic from the three-foot Pixie Stix bought at the concession stand, but Destiny sat patiently, listening to her baby brother tell her stories of the Smurfs–his latest obsession. Sometimes her thoughts would drift, but she mentally checked in now and again to make sure she didn’t miss any of Gargamel’s evil plans for the obviously delicious little blue people. She did wonder idly if they would ever have an episode where a Smurf was actually eaten.
In the late spring, early summer of 1983, whispers of atrocities outside the scope of believability had finally filtered to Wereburg. By the end of 1983, the news was all bad. Wereburg huddled into itself and planned to wait out the storm the same way they’d gotten through Vietnam: by (hopefully mutual) disregard.
By early 1984 everyone knew, even in Wereburg, that the end–a bitter and bloody end–was a very real possibility. New York City and its outlying areas had fallen first, and outbreaks had been reported in Trenton, Bethlehem, Philadelphia, Reading, Wilmington, Baltimore…the disease was spreading steadily and unchecked.
By then a junior in high school, Destiny listened to the news and the rumors with the same outward signs of fear as her family and friends. But inside, deep enough where she almost didn’t even have to admit it to herself…there came a small shift of excitement.
Something was
finally
happening.
It was this tiny, blameless, inner thrill that would come back to haunt her with black guilt after the death of her parents.
She rode into town with barely an hour to spare before sunset and made her way to the outpost. As usual, entering the high school was like submerging herself in a cold, dirty pond of memories. She jerked Ash’s rein as they passed the gym, and though she spotted Lea and Mark talking to Mr. West in the wide-open expanse, she hurried past it and to the former classroom that had become her home. She avoided the gym whenever possible.
The classroom was cleared of desks, but the blackboard remained, and a few tattered posters lined the walls. Two cots were currently in use–hers and Lea’s–and a nest of blankets in the far corner along with heavy buckets made it obvious where Ash was kept. Her eyes went to the windows…reinforced and covered over along the bottoms with a slit of glass above showing the bruised Western sky. Night was here and, with it, the vampires.
It still felt weird on her lips and in her ears.
Vampires
. The word was squirmy and old-fashioned and almost…embarrassing. Vampires conjured visions of white-faced, urbane men with tall collars and blackest capes, swooping in with their twirling eyes to abuse fair maidens. In this era of slash and bash Freddy and Jason movies, vampires were antiquated and uncool, something your grandparents shivered over in the movies in bygone days.
These vampires, though, were anything but Hollywood urbane, despite having come from Manhattan. Crosses, coffins, garlic…a lot of the old folklore turned out to be untrue. These vampires were vacant, bloodthirsty, inhuman and inhumane and subject to bouts of unparalleled horridness. They acted rabid, and they were voraciously hungry for blood. That was one of the things from the folklore that had turned out to be true. The bloodsucking part.
Not everyone turned into a vampire after they’d been bit, either. Mr. West–her high school earth science teacher and one of the smartest people left in the Burg–had explained that he thought it had something to do with communicability and immunity. If you caught the disease through a bite and were susceptible to it, you became a bloodsucking human leech. If you were immune to the disease, you died from blood loss if the bite was bad enough. According to rumor, some people had been bit and lived through it; mythical half-and-halfs that lived with the disease dormant in their blood. But that rumor seemed to be based more in wishful thinking than actual fact. In Wereburg, they’d never seen anyone who’d survived a bite. Chances were if you were in a situation where a vampire got to you, you were a goner because they were as strong as they were stupid.
Promise pulled the scrunchie from her ponytail, letting her hair cascade like a black waterfall around her shoulders. She considered the scrunchie in her hand and then used it to blot the fresh tears from her eyes. She dropped her head as a heavy black wave of loneliness rolled over her. Distantly, people called to each other in the hallway, but it sounded too far away, unrelated to her.
She missed her family.
Jim and Linda Riser died as they had lived, in lockstep with everyone around them and firmly in the middle of the pack.
Within one week, there had been two killings and nine disappearances in Wereburg, and people were beginning to avoid the night, as it seemed the mayhem had finally hit their town. A meeting was held (during the day) in the high school, and the Wereburg mayor had shakily read the instructions from the mimeograph the National Guard had distributed to each town. The essence of which boiled down to: don’t go out at night, don’t go near someone who’d been bit, don’t believe in crosses, garlic, or calls to a personal savior as protection–the only protection was the sun or any implement that pierced the heart of the afflicted. Guns were not to be used, as the sound had been shown to attract more vampires.
The mayor had then set a curfew that coincided with sundown, in accordance with the National Guard instructions.
Even then, it still seemed mostly unreal to the people of Wereburg.
Destiny’s dad, Jim, had been caught out at night.
The Riser house on Oak Street had been one of the last houses built in the neighborhood. Oak Street’s north side, where the Risers lived, was considered highly desirable because the houses backed to open meadow and, beyond that, the woods. You could barbecue and sunbathe to your heart’s content secure in the knowledge that only the neighbors to either side could spy on you.
Jim had been certain that he could make it to their small shed and back, after all, it was the suburbs! Nothing
bad
happened in the suburbs, not when you lived virtually cheek to jowl with three hundred or more other people. Not when you had a four-foot chain-link fence to protect your property. Not when you had a brand new motion-sensing floodlight that gazed watchfully over your backyard like a one-eyed god. How could Jim know the innocently unlocked shed had been colonized?
He wanted to get the dowel rods he’d stored out there. The mayor’s speech and the National Guard mimeo had inspired him into remembering the two-inch diameter, hardened and treated pine rods that he’d bought originally to fashion into tomato stands for Linda’s garden. In the confusion of the past few months, he hadn’t gotten around to the tomato stands. Of course, fashioning the rods into vampire-killing stakes was more an exercise in handiwork for Jim; he didn’t imagine he’d actually have to pound something into a vampire’s heart.
Secretly, he believed the whole thing was some sort of mass hysteria, and his largest concern was closing the store so early every day. There would be little to no profit, and he felt slightly angry that everyone (including the mayor) seemed so ready to go along with something so crazy. And as yet unproved.
There were no such things as vampires.
“I’m just going to grab them and run right back in. You can even keep an eye on me from the slider, okay? No big deal, honey.” Jim laughed at the set and stubborn expression on Linda’s face. “It’s only thirty feet! Sixty if you count the round trip.”
Destiny looked up from the kitchen table where she was trying to keep her mind on her research paper. She was writing about President Reagan’s years as an actor and trying to draw a correlation on how it would help him as a politician, but she couldn’t keep her mind on it. School was still in session as Wereburg tried to hold onto a sense of itself, but Destiny had a feeling that school, sports, the lake, everything…everything they knew and everything that seemed important…was beginning to crumble down around them.
She glanced at Chance in the family room as he sat watching a
Magnum P.I.
rerun and shooting worried glances at his parents fighting quietly at the back door five feet from him.
“Hey, Chance,” Destiny called, and he turned with a smile. “Come help me with something, okay?”
Chance padded to her, his pj’s and slippers already on, since he went to bed at nine and it was a quarter to. He leaned against Destiny’s chair, and the warm, yellowish smell of Johnson’s No More Tears from his damp head filled her with a nostalgia shocking in the depths of its sadness.
“Just wait until tomorrow morning. What’s the big deal?” Linda said, her frustration growing in tandem with her fear.
She
believed the news…she saw more of it than Jim did. In fact, he
never
watched the news or even read a paper. Linda’s hippy dippy tie-dye days were long behind her, and she’d become more clear-headed and practical as the years had gone on.
“I was going to take them downstairs and mess around a little bit; see what I could make of them,” Jim said. Although Jim thought it was all very reactionary–
over
reactionary, even, he was a go-along kind of guy and anyway, he did like puttering with projects in his small workshop in the basement. The dowel stakes gave him something comforting to pin his mind to. He put a hand on Linda’s shoulder and squeezed. He smiled. “The shed isn’t even locked! I’ll be back in five seconds, and you can watch the whole time. Relax, Linda, okay? Just relax.”
He pushed the heavy sliding door open by a foot and a half and exited. He walked across the concrete patio in the still darkness. When he got to the grass, the floodlight flashed on, making a black shadow leap out from under his feet and stretch toward the shed. He kept on, skirting the low, iron fire pit, and when he was halfway across the yard, he turned to wave at Linda, shielding his eyes against the floodlight and smiling.
Linda waved and smiled back, feeling silly and a little bit embarrassed. Then her eye was caught by movement just over her husband’s shoulder–the shed door was creaking open.
Linda gasped, her eyes going wide and her hands coming up to smack once on the glass, flat palmed. “Jim! Behind you!”
Jim’s expression squinched into one of confusion, and he shook his head at her, still shielding his eyes against the floodlight.
“Behind you! The shed!” Linda said and smacked the glass again. It shivered in its frame.
Jim turned and peered into the dark, obviously blinded from squinting into the floodlight, trying to get his eyes to adjust. He took one confused step toward the shed, and behind him, Linda yelled his name, her voice threaded with tight alarm. Now he could see the shed door swinging open, and the pit of his stomach filled with an instant and all-encompassing dread. He turned to run, but his second step landed on the fire pit, and it tilted up, catching him in the stomach as he tumbled over it, whoofing as if punched.
Linda screamed again and, without thought, yanked the slider open all the way and ran out. Destiny and Chance stared in shock at the place their mother had just been. Then Chance broke for the back door.
In the yard, Jim was coughing on his hands and knees, struggling up from his fall. Linda was on him in a second, still screaming, pawing at his arms, pulling him backward toward the house, making him tumble over again. Jim looked at her in shock, forgetting the shed in his pained confusion. Linda’s eyes were wide, the whites showing all around her blue irises. She was looking past him, into the yard.
He remembered the shed door opening.
He struggled up, almost in spite of Linda’s help, and turned just in time to see a figure was almost upon them. He pushed Linda protectively behind him, causing her to stumble over the fire pit.
“Stay back!” Jim yelled, the fear and adrenaline charging his voice to a level he’d never achieved in his formerly temperate life. Then he recognized his assailant. It was Bill Miller from three houses down. Bill and Jim had split the cost of a snowblower with four other neighbors last year. Their families had barbecued together. Bill and Jim had gotten drunk together.
Relief crashed into Jim. “Jesus, Bill, you scared the shit out of me.” He turned to Linda, bending to help her disentangle herself from the fire pit. “Honey, are you okay? There’s nothing to be afraid of, it’s just–”
Bill fell on him, tumbling him over onto Linda, and the three of them struggled and rolled like some nightmare ménage à trois. Bill wrapped his arms around Jim, keeping Jim’s back to his chest and leaned his head to Jim’s neck, his lips seeking the carotid, seeking that heat and pulse of life.
Bill bit.
His teeth, grown long and sharp, sliced easily into Jim’s skin, and Jim’s dark red heart’s blood shot into Bill’s sucking mouth. It also rained down on Linda. She struggled under the men, screaming. She flailed and got an arm free and pushed at Bill’s nightmare face, trying to make him release her husband. In her heart, though, she knew there was too much blood. She could feel Jim dying, feel the rhythmic tremors tightening his body on hers. Then even worse, she felt it as his body began to relax…his life fading with each stinging gout of blood.