The Mammoth Book of Dracula (93 page)

Above the rail, a myriad wires and tubes extending from it and feeding into it, a huge pulsating thing rested in a large cage. It looked like an over-ripe pumpkin, the biggest Blaumlein had ever seen. Its movements quivered and shook, each expansion and retraction sending fresh rivulets of thick fluid down its sides to gather into a tray which fed down into a trough leading to three bottles. In turn, the liquid in the bottles fed into more tubes which spun off, dividing into still more leading to a bank of large wooden canisters, each with a tap and tray attached to its side.

Around the perimeter of the barn, where the light was at its dimmest, many more bodies, all naked, hung by their feet. The bodies were male and female, some were old, some not so old and some were very young. Very young indeed. Blaumlein counted three babies ... there could have been more that he could not see, for the bodies were several deep, hanging like pieces of meat in one of the old butcher’s stores.

Then one of the bodies opened its eyes and looked down at him. It was a young man, maybe mid-twenties. The eyes focused dimly, seemed to widen for a second, and then the lids dropped shut again.

“He’s alive!”

“They’re all alive,” Tom Duffy said. “They’re provisions.”

Now that Blaumlein concentrated, he could see chests moving up and down. They were moving slowly, but they were moving. There were no other signs of life. The faces were empty, waxen caricatures of lives that once were but were not any more. Their legs, arms and necks were manacled to individual backboards, and tubes and pipes had been inserted into arteries and veins—and, in some cases, into rough tears in chest or stomach, each one clumsily sutured—leading off to the single body.

Someone shouted behind him. Blaumlein recognized the voice and spun around in time to see Pat backing into the barn from a figure that stepped menacingly towards him. It was the man Blaumlein had shot, looking as large as life, grinning and holding his shirt wide open to display the blackened wound in his stomach. Holding the edge of his shirt with one hand, the man—Solly something?—inserted the index finger of the other deep into the hole.

Deedee screamed and fell to the floor.

Someone else laughed and the sound was joined by muted sniggers, as the man jammed a second finger into the hole and, moments later, produced a small piece of metal. A bullet, delicately held between two fingers mottled with tissue. There was no blood. As soon as the fingers were clear, the wound gathered a film across itself and was gone from sight.

Pat raised his gun and pointed it at the man. The man’s eyes widened and Pat seemed to freeze on the spot. Then the man reached out, removed the gun from the old man’s hand and pointed it against his own temple. The sound was deafening and the man seemed to stagger briefly and then stood straight again. The side of his head had been blown away, one eye completely gone while the other hung down on the man’s cheek. The man began to laugh, smoking tufts of hair attached to the side of the carnage juddering, and handed the gun back to Pat. As Pat accepted the weapon, the man’s eye rolled back on itself into the socket. Then the skin around the other ruined socket blistered and filled out and new shoots of thick, dark hair sprouted above the hairline.

Eddie was the first one the townsfolk took.

The boy’s axe split a couple of arms in the process, but nothing that seemed to bother the people of Pump Handle one iota.

Blaumlein watched as they dragged the boy screaming and kicking towards a makeshift table behind the barn doors. They lifted him onto the table, many hands working in unison, some deftly removing clothes while others held the squirming limbs in place. Then, holding what looked like a monstrous hypodermic, Eleanor Revine bent over the body. The quivering stopped almost immediately.

Blaumlein noticed two things, then.

The first was that the plastic sheeting was moving back into place and the barn doors were closing; the second was that a tight grip had attached itself to his arm.

“You’re going to join them, Mister Blaumlein,” Tom Duffy’s scrawky voice announced merrily.

Blaumlein spun around but was unable to loosen the old man’s grip. He lifted his gun and fired, point blank, four rounds, each one finding its target—chest, two in the stomach, one opening the man’s neck—but each to no avail.

Duffy opened and closed his mouth like a fish and laughed silently, lifting a hand to assess the damage to his throat. He shrugged and looked across at the hanging man. As he looked, the neck filled out with new tissue, glistening in the glare of the fluorescent lights.

Blaumlein watched as the townsfolk worked over the body of young Eddie. He watched as they swabbed pieces of skin and jammed different tubes into arms and legs. He followed the tubes and pipes with his eyes, trailed them through yards and yards of curled and furled tubing, all the way to the pulsating object in the cage ... then down into the naked man.

As Duffy started to speak to him, Blaumlein was vaguely aware of two of the townsfolk lifting the inert body of his wife onto another table. The scream was short-lived, to be followed by squelching noises and grunts of exertion, and then the distant dripping of liquid into a jar.

“He came to our town after the bombs had hit. Tried to pick someone off out on the road, but I guess his powers were shot. He didn’t make too good a job of it.”

“Who is he?” Blaumlein asked.

“He’s our mayor. Mayor Ladd.”

“But who
is
he?”

“He
said he
was Dracula. That’s why we called him Ladd—kind of like Vlad. But Dracula ... I mean, can you
believe
that? He could’ve said Nosferatu, Count Yorga or Barnabas Collins...” Duffy shrugged. “All of these and none of these. Maybe he
was
Dracula ... who the hell cares. Whatever the name, he may be the very last of his breed.”

“Breed?”

“A vampire, mister Blaumlein.”

“A ... a vampire? A
real
vampire?”

Tom Duffy took hold of Blaumlein’s arms and started to lead him to the table. When he struggled, he caught sight of Pat’s body, wires and tubes and pipes protruding from veins and tears in the arms and upper thighs, being hoisted along a pulley to take up a position at the front of the lines of upside-down cadavers. Deedee and young Eddie were already in place, waiting for him. Waiting for Joe Blaumlein, too.

“You see, when we hit on who he was we figured he might be able to help us,” Duffy said in a quiet sing-song voice that calmed and soothed. Blaumlein didn’t feel afraid at all. Only curious.

“I was a surgeon before . . . before the bombs. Over in Atlanta. I was visiting friends nearby when all hell broke loose. There was no way to get back and no place to get back to. The towns—the big towns; even the small towns—went to hell quickly. Looting, fighting ... no place to be. So my wife and I walked until we hit Pump Handle. Had a boy with us. Martin, seventeen years old. Had him late, Mildred and me.” Duffy paused. “He didn’t make it.”

“What happened to him?”

“My, but you do have a lot of questions. He died. Wasn’t nothing I could do for him.”

Blaumlein glanced across at the table. The townsfolk were doing something to the bodies, injecting them with something. He turned away.

“Squeamish? Don’t worry. It’ll pass.

“Anyways, we got here and settled in. Wasn’t anything else to do. Wasn’t any point in carrying on. We knew that. This—Pump Handle—was as good as it was going to get. And even that wasn’t great.”

“Not great?” Blaumlein was trying to play for time. He could not loosen the old man’s grip. He had to wait for the right moment.

“Scurvy, pestilence, a few skin cancers ... no food, no real sunlight only those damned coloured clouds. It was a waiting game, and we knew it. But, as places to die go, it wasn’t a bad choice. And then he came along.”

Blaumlein followed the old man’s stare and his eyes fell on the naked man hanging in the centre of the room.

“Like I say, we tackled him and ... well, we found out who he was.”

“A vampire.”

“Yes, it sounds a little silly, doesn’t it. But that’s what he is ... or, rather, was. He’s just a litmus flask now.”

“A litmus flask?”

“When I said he was dead, I might have been wrong. I mean, vampires are dead to start off with, aren’t they?”

Blaumlein shrugged.

“He didn’t have any pulse. That was the first thing we noticed. Then I sounded him out and he didn’t have any heart. I know, I know,” Duffy said when his captive smirked disbelievingly. “But he didn’t. I opened him up and there wasn’t one. Simple as that.”

“So how did he live?”

“Well, the short answer is he didn’t. Turns out that vampires are simple walking chemical reactions. It’s some kind of virus that reacts with the blood and freezes the ageing process. But it kills the body at the same time.”

“And the mind?”

“Nope, doesn’t kill the mind. Not as far as we can tell, anyways. And we should know.” He laughed. “You about ready for another one?” he called out.

Eleanor Revine turned around and nodded. “Five minutes.” She was stitching something that Blaumlein couldn’t see. But he could see the needle. He was glad he couldn’t see anything else.

“So what’s he doing now? Is he alive or is he dead?”

“He hasn’t moved or spoken since we brought him in here, and that was ...” His brow furrowed as he calculated. “Must be eight, maybe nine months now.”

“And he just stays that way? I mean, he doesn’t, you know ... decompose?”

Duffy shook his head. “Nope. Strange, isn’t it. ‘Vampirism’ is a very emotive term and not a very accurate one. It conjures up fangs and cloaks and mumbling east European accents. Some might say he was cursed,” he added, nodding towards the body. “I prefer to say he was blessed. I studied the body for some time and was unable to figure out what the root of the problem—or rather, benefit—was.”

“How did you kill him?”

Duffy shook his head. “We didn’t. At first, we thought he was just some crazy man—we get them from time to time: radiation fever and the like—trying to eat one of the townsfolk.”

“Eat?”

“That’s the way it looked, at least at first. Then he started mumbling about how he needed blood and about how he’d been around for centuries and he’d seen so many things happen ... and that’s when we noticed he didn’t have a pulse.

“His condition deteriorated and, eventually, he just stopped talking. There was no breath, no vital signs, no nothing. He didn’t take any food—not that we had much to offer: we still don’t... not regular food, anyways—and he didn’t decompose. He just lay there.”

Duffy nodded to Eleanor Revine. “They’re ready for you, I’m afraid.”

Blaumlein felt a flutter of panic. “Wait... wait just a minute.”

“Why?”

“Well... what is it that you’re going to do with me? And what do you do with all the cabbages?”

“Okay,” Duffy said with a sigh. “Must be quick, though. When we realized what we had—or what we might have: we were still sceptical for a time—we, or I, wondered if his blood might have recuperative powers. After all, that’s what vampires were all about ... giving eternal life. So we took a sample and I tested it as well as I could, and we realized that this was indeed a life-giving and life-prolonging elixir. We fed it to some of our people who were sick and the results were both amazing and immediate. Increased, almost superhuman strength, little or no need for sleep or any kind of rest, and curative powers for burns and fevers that were quite unbelievable. In fact, if I hadn’t conducted the tests, I wouldn’t have believed it myself.

“But there was one problem.” Duffy smacked his lips contemplatively. “The supply was finite. Not having any heart or system, he doesn’t regenerate his blood. What there was was all there was. Simple as that. And then I had an idea: what if we could continue to supply his body with the blood he would originally have taken for himself. As I said before, he was, to all intents and purposes, dead ... but he didn’t go through the usual mortification process.

“Basically, the thing above him that appears for all the world as some huge turnip is, indeed, a heart. I made it, fashioned it out of tissue and veins removed from what livestock we had available. All that’s gone now.

“It quickly became obvious that I must do something to extend his abilities and make the most of dwindling supplies. Attached to the heart are a series of left- and right-ventricular assist devices to ensure maximum through-motion. I fitted three sections of steel—titanium being in somewhat sort supply—to the abdomen, each one weighing in at 800 grams, plus 600 yards of tubing in the aorta and sixteen external vents to reduce clotting. We rigged up a generator and ... well, I won’t bore you with the rest.”

Keeping a rock-steady grip on his captive, Tom Duffy waved his free arm majesterially at the dangling bodies. “They’re all alive -saline drips and a constant diet of cabbage ... very good for the blood and the heart—and we have them on a constant, very slow blood transfusion to the main body. That, in turn .. .well, who the hell knows what it does: let’s say it turns the water into wine. We drink the wine. Simple as that.”

“You injected them ... I saw her—” Blaumlein pointed at the waiting Eleanor Revine. “—I saw her injecting something into my wife.”