Authors: Tim Curran
She hit it.
She hit it with a balled-up fist right where its face might have been and it…
exploded.
Like a stepped-upon fruiting body of fungus, it came apart like a juicy, black tomato, spilling foul yellow ooze that leaked in rivers.
Then she was through the door.
She was out of the house.
She was in the storm. It took hold of her in frozen hands, gripping her, squeezing her, throwing snow in her face and shoving icy air down her spine. Crying out for Wenda and Rule, she plunged headlong into the
night, frantic and half-mad. When hands reached out and took hold of her, she screamed.
15
As soon as they stepped outside, the wind found them
.
Holding Rule’s hand, Wenda and he walked side-by-side int
o the blizzard. If something were waiting for them out there—and, no doubt,
something
was—then they would face it together. Head-on. She was aware of the forms standing out just beyond the periphery of the storm. They got no closer. Not just then. She could feel the cool emptiness of them. Not human beings. Not things with souls. Just animate hunger. They were breathing hides and no more.
It wasn’t far to the Georgian house where Doc and the others had run after the incident with the bus. That all seemed ages ago now. No more than forty feet, but never had that distance seemed so long as it did at that moment. Antique houses rose up around them in the blizzard like ghost ships coming out of sea fog, phantasmal and weird.
“We’re in incredible danger,” Rule said.
And, yes, Wenda figured they were at that. But what choice had there been? With dawn getting closer and more subtle modes of persuasion failing, the vampires had dropped all pretenses and simply forced themselves into the room. Something which was either an act of desperation or a herding maneuver to force them out into the storm. Either way, it worked.
They pushed on through the tomb of the blizzard, clutching hands tightly, waiting for it, tensing, expecting to be attacked at any moment. But they weren’t. In fact, nothing happened until Megga burst out of the storm, screaming their names. They took hold of her and they were three. It wasn’t much with what they were facing, but it was something. Megga, of course, was nearly out of her mind, gibbering and stuttering over what she had seen and what had touched her. She wanted them to know, to understand, to feel the depths of her horror…but in the end she just fell silent. Words could not convey what was in her head.
They found the Georgian within minutes.
It was tall and somber, its multi-paned windows filled with darkness. But the worse part was that the front door was wide open. That did not bode well. Wenda smelled an almost sweet, unnatural sort of odor coming out at her. She knew what they would see and what they would find would not be good.
They all knew it.
Regardless, no one suggested that they turn back.
Wenda led them in. She carried her sliver-bladed knife in one hand and a kerosene lantern in the other, lighting the way. Megga was behind her with empty hands and a hollow heart. Rule came last. He carried his flashlight, but he didn’t waste any batteries shining it around. The lantern would do.
Wenda led them towards a doorway that was open. They could see the low flickering of a fire beyond it.
Rule felt something pull up inside him as they reached the doorway.
He knew whatever was in there would be horrible and it was what the undead wanted them to see. He followed Wenda in there, practically dragging Megga behind him. He thought she might be in shock. When she’d first found them in the storm, she wouldn’t stop blabbering out her torment. Now, she wouldn’t say a word. But as he pulled her into the room with him, he could feel how she drew back. She knew there was something in there that she didn’t want to see.
It was a parlor
.
The fire in the hearth had nearly died out. Wenda raised her lantern, casting light around and he turned on his flashlight, panning the room and soon wishing that he hadn’t. There was a body tacked to the wall, crucified with nails, and it was an absolute obscenity. Not only was it swollen and puffed purple-blue like every bone within had been broken,
but it looked like it had nearly been turned inside out, bowel and organ and gut pushed out of the rent body cavity, dripping and seamed with yellow fat. But despite the carnage, there was barely a drop of blood to be had. Rule could imagine why. In his mind, he could see the vampires crowded up to the dying man, suckling him like piglets at the milk-swollen teats of their mother.
Megga made a slight squealing sound in her throat
, but she continued to stare. Sickened, Rule clicked off his flashlight and turned her away from the atrocity.
“Its Doc,” Wenda said, her voice edged with defeat. “It’s Doc.”
Rule sighed. “If he’s…like this, then I doubt the others survived.”
“Burt, Reg, Bailey…oh Christ.”
Megga pulled her hand away from his own and dropped her weight into a chair. Rule knew she had given up. If Wenda gave up too, they were done. He could fight to the death and it would do no good. His death would be an amusement for Griska and his legions. Nothing more than amusement.
“We have to get down to that tunnel,” he said. “There’s no time to waste. Dawn is getting close and they’re going to get very desperate.”
Wenda was staring at Megga. She looked forlorn. Empty.
“Wenda…we don’t have time,” he emphasized.
She nodded. There were a couple stakes on the floor. No doubt they had been manufactured by Doc and the others. She took them, slid them through her belt with the others.
And Megga screamed.
They looked over at her. Both were still having trouble getting the image of Doc out of their heads. Wenda opened her mouth to ask Megga what in God’s name she was screaming about, but the words never came out.
Rule saw what she was staring at.
It was something that did not look especially threatening…
cobwebs.
At least, what he assumed were cobwebs. White crepe-like tendrils dangling in the air, several of which seemed to be dropping over Megga. They looked, absurdly enough, almost like Silly String. Megga brushed them away from her face. In a frantic rush to get away, she hit the floor on her knees and Wenda pulled her away.
Cobwebs?
No, they weren’t cobwebs and he knew it. He expected only the worst and he was not disappointed. In the time it took him to realize there was something seriously fucked up and Wenda pulled Megga to her feet, the extraordinary was occurring: much like Silly String, the cobwebs were filling the air. A network of them was coming from the direction of the ceiling, it seemed, attached to the chair Megga had been sitting on by several thick white cords like the anchor strands that held a spider’s web in place. It happened very quickly.
Rule backed away with the others. In his mind, the stuff looked like ectoplasm.
“We better get out of here,” Wenda said, her voice sounding dry like it was blown with sand.
The cords came together with a sliding and whipping sound, breaking apart into threads and filaments, interweaving and crisscrossing until it looked like there was a great living net in the room. But that quickly thickened as the ghostly white threads knotted together, taking on a ropy near-human form as the rootlike growths had in the
other house. They fleshed out in seconds and there was a featureless female shape drifting above them, still connected by myriad white fibers. The woman looked like she was made of pale phlegm, roiling yellow gas, and tresses of coiling bloody tissue. A grinning face emerged. A set of swollen breasts. A mounded pregnant belly as if she had died in childbirth. Rule could see the faces of unborn children trying to push through her skin which was like gray lace.
“WE HAVE TO G
ET OUT OF HERE!” Wenda shouted.
“NOW!”
Rule realized then that he had been seduced by the impossibility of what he was seeing: a living cobweb woman. He hadn’t been able to look away from it. He would have waited there, he knew, until she came for him, until she buried him alive in her webby, seeking mass and drained him dry drop by drop. Even then, threads of web were snaking through the air in his direction.
“Come on!” Wenda shouted.
Rule led the way out. He slammed the door shut
, leaning on it, breathing heavily, realizing how close he’d been to sacrificing them all. But it wouldn’t happen again. He would not allow it.
At least, that’s what he kept telling himself.
16
It was cold and dark in the house. Now that she had been away from the fire for a time, Wenda felt numb inside. She wondered if she’d ever feel warm again.
Rule led them on down corridors that probably made perfect sense by day, but at night were a complete maze. But he knew the way. Despite the horror that was
behind them in the parlor, he moved them slowly and efficiently, scanning the way ahead carefully with his flashlight.
“It’s a game,” Megga said.
She hadn’t spoken in some time, so both Wenda and Rule stopped and looked at her. Her eyes blinked rapidly in the darkness. “It’s a game,” she said again. “That’s what it is. We don’t stand a fucking chance. They’re toying with us, letting us think there’s hope. At the last moment, they’ll snatch it away from us when they’re done letting us run the maze like rats.”
“There’s always a chance,” Rule said.
Megga laughed at him. “They’re destroying us even now, planting seeds of fear and indecision in us. They’re ancient and cunning. We’re hopeless and week. They are the children of the night, the—”
“Just shut up,” Wenda told her. “We don’t have time for your uber-Goth drama.”
Megga just shook her head. “You don’t understand. They already own us. They can claim us anytime they want.”
“They own
you.
That’s all they’ve ever owned. And they’ve used you to cause trouble again and again. Quit being so fucking weak. We don’t have the time for it.”
Rule led them on again and Wenda found herself wishing that Megga had not found them, that she’d stayed back in the other house with her own kind. She would have been a happy, morose little vampire by now. Wenda didn’t like thinking things like that. It wasn’t in her nature…or it hadn’t been before tonight. The last thing she wanted to do was to sacrifice one of them to the walking dead, but her patience with Megga was simply bone-dry.
“Okay,” Rule said. “The door is just around the bend.”
When they got there,
he did not open it. He considered it carefully. He looked over at Wenda as if to say,
ready?
She nodded. He grasped the knob and threw the door open. He explored the darkness beyond with his light. He saw nothing move on the stairwell.
Wenda felt the tension drain from her. Nothing had leaped out at them. That was a plus. Even so, the adrenaline surging through her system would not completely release its grip on her.
“Let’s go,” she said, feeling the press of shadows behind them. “I think they’re coming.”
Rule swallowed and led them down the stairs, his breath puffing out in the flashlight beam in white clouds. There was death below and he could feel it.
17
By the time they reached the cellar floor, the vampires were coming down the stairs.
Rule picked them out in the beam of his flashlight: seven or eight ragged figures that seemed to be as much mist and smoke as they were flesh and blood. One moment, they seemed perfectly corporeal. The next, they lost solidity and the light seemed to shine right through them, illuminating the stairwell and little else.
He needed little more inspiration.
Moving sure
and quick, he grasped Megga’s hand and towed her away deeper into the cellar, Wenda at their side. Despite the winter chill, the darkness felt damp. It seemed to crawl around them. Sounds bounced and echoed and it was hard to know if they had made them or if it was the vampires.
Rule did not believe it was the undead: they were unbearably silent. They made no more sound than patches of moonlight traveling across a midnight lawn.
The cellar was used for storage and it was crowded with dark shapes and menacing shadows. Boxes and crates, stacked lumber, old apple baskets and stone jars, nail kegs and aluminum milk jugs.
He found two more kerosene lanterns that he had filled not
a week before. He gave one to each of the girls and Wenda abandoned her nearly empty one.
He
knew his way through the maze because he’d been down in the cellar dozens of times in his job as caretaker. Much of the assorted junk down there, he had brought down himself. As he led them through it all, quickly as he could, he thought:
You won’t get these girls because I will not allow it. Maybe I’m old and I’m weak and I’m approaching the end of my years, but, by God, I’ll fight. You know I’ll fight. We all will. Dawn’s coming now and if you don’t get us all, if you fail and leave just one of us alive, that one will hunt you all down and stake every goddamn one of you. You know it’s true.