But the dog continued to growl.
That’s when Luke heard something outside the window. He had the shade pulled down because sometimes they floated out there at night and called his name. He had seen Anne out there one night like some monstrous death’s-head moth, white and filmy.
One of them was tapping on the pane. When he didn’t respond to that, they scraped their fingernails over it with a sound like forks scraped over a blackboard.
Bob hopped up in bed. He was trembling.
Luke pulled him close. “We’re going to be okay,” he said, though he secretly did not believe that at all. “Just me and you, we’ll get through this because we have to get through this, old pal…”
He kept talking and talking, ignoring the silver voice outside the window that called to him and tried to edge into his thoughts. He knew the voice very well. It was his wife telling him how she wanted to kiss him.
It was only after she left that Bob relaxed and he himself dared to breathe.
52
What Luke found most amazing about vampires is how they had been romanticized: a thoroughly unpleasant legend was unearthed, given a bright and shiny candy coating, and fed to the masses who gobbled it up in great amounts never once imagining the dark truth behind the myth of their erotic, romantic heroes. Vampires, through fiction and films, had become effeminate suffering Byronic characters, slick fashion plates
with coiffed locks who wore Armani suits and the requisite leather trench coats. They drove Jaguars and hung around in trendy bars, espousing angst. Sometimes they were rock stars, opera singers, or teenage pinups. They were cool, edgy, sexy, and about as threatening as mango smoothies.
It was a fascinating comment on modern society,
he thought, how something so inherently repellent had been carefully sanitized and made palatable.
But romantic Goth fantasy aside, the truth was vampires—or
Carriers,
as he preferred to call them—were about as alluring as engorged leeches because that’s really all they were. Just parasites that existed by draining healthy bodies.
He had approached them now from every angle—folkloric, fictional, and religious. He had poured through
The Vampire: His Kith and Kin
and
The Vampire in Europe
,
The Natural History of the Vampire
and
The Vampire Encyclopedia.
He had studied the histories of Vlad Dracul, Peter Kurten, and Elizabeth Bathory. He had read
Dracula
and
Varney the Vampyre,
stories about vampire villages and bloodsucking governesses, novels about vampires in subways and sewers, professional vampire hunters and vampire plagues, ancient European bloodsuckers turning little American towns into graveyards and vampires transforming L.A. into a shrine of the living dead (the social metaphor there was particularly scathing).
Some of it was relevant, some of it was not. About half of the folklore was bullshit, but the rest of it rang pretty close to the truth (something Luke could certainly attest to). He only knew that the undead, the Carriers, were leeches. They were predators that would do anything to get at your blood and that, in the end, was the only thing that really mattered. They were viruses stalking the human race.
M
any, many people had gone to their graves denying the reality of the undead.
Much
as he himself, they could not bring themselves to accept it, to admit openly that,
yes,
the dead were coming out of their graves and,
yes
, they did want blood. The thinking brain railed against it with everything it had: medieval superstitions of old wives as told by candlelight, something that had no place in the modern world of light, science, Lindsay Lohan, and global terrorism.
They denied it,
he knew, because they
had
to deny it.
The same way adults laughed at ghost stories and made light of tales of hungry boogeymen lurking in the night. If something scared you, you had to emasculate it, take its power away so
you could sleep at night. If you didn’t, you would be haunted by childhood terrors and you would never, ever leave your house. So, they had denied right to the end the reality of the undead while secretly praying, counting rosary beads and clutching St. Christopher Medals when the sun went down and there were knocks on the door.
They had gone to their graves in open denial.
But sometimes, he knew, it was easier to surrender yourself to the darkness than to admit what crawls in it.
53
He came across many houses that were simply empty. Even the attics
and cellars were unoccupied (unless you wanted to count the eerie silence that seemed to occupy them like some malevolent spirit). He had a most disturbing feeling that many of them were congregating somewhere. And perhaps, if he found out where that was he might just find Sonja and Megan. Sometimes he very much wanted that; other times, he was glad their location was unknown. Many of them, he knew from Bob’s super sniffer, slept in the snow, but trying to route them all out was a near impossible task unless he planned on covering every square inch of town, poking in every snow drift with a pole.
Still, he did find them…at least,
Bob
found them.
In closets and under beds, in shed and garages
, in schools and businesses and just about everywhere else. Bob became a first-class vampire-finder, 100% AKC Dracula Hound. If they were there, he always found them and the more he found, the more terrible Luke’s job became. He had made many promises now. One was to his wife that he would not stop fighting, another was to himself that he would get the Carriers before they got him, and the latest was that he would kill
any
of them he found regardless of the pain it might cause him. So he went at it with a mania: staking them and dragging them into the light and chopping their heads off. When he found dozens in a single house or building, he torched it, burning it right down to ashes and blackened timbers. And when that wasn’t feasible, he piled the undead atop pyres of wood, dousing them with gasoline and lighting them up. The stink was horrendous, but he did not shrink from it; he made sure there was nothing but bones remaining.
54
Another blizzard hit
towards the end of January and the snow came down in curtains. By then, the power was out and the other utilities went around the same time. No lights, no natural gas, and no water. He was forced into a 19
th
century sort of existence. The good thing was he had been steadily stockpiling and he had more than enough wood to see him through until spring. In his searches of neighborhoods he came upon great stockpiles of food, water, and weapons that people had put up and then died before they could ever use. He had more than enough of everything and he kept a list of houses where there was more to be had. He kept it in the green notebook along with his list of houses that he had cleared and his occasional comments concerning the state of things.
The
blizzard went on for four days straight and when it finally retreated, there was over five feet of snow on the ground laying atop the nearly four feet they already had. The roads were absolutely impassable. There was no way Luke could hope to open them up again. Even the National Guard wasn’t bothering by that point.
When
he and Bob dug themselves out, the world was an arctic wasteland. Cars in driveways and at curbs were white hillocks, houses drifted right up to their roofs, trees slouching beneath canopies of ice and snow. Up and down the block, house after house after house looked like ski chalets from postcards or igloos, for that matter.
In the notebook, he wrote:
We’re fucking buried alive. I haven’t been out of the house for days except to get Bob out to piss. I keep having these visions of a blizzard that never stops and a snow that refuses to stop falling. Is that how the Ice Ages started? With a winter that would not end but just kept getting worse and worse all the time? I haven’t been able to get out and waste any Carriers. I’m so used to doing it now it’s become like a natural rhythm to me like taking a shit or brushing my teeth. Not doing it makes me feel antsy and anxious and weirdly frustrated. I have to get them. I have to get all of them. Then what? you might ask. Then what, you half-assed Van Helsing? Good question and one I ask myself every night when the goddamn sun goes down. I can’t picture a day when there will be no Carriers in Wakefield. Even if I destroy every one of them, what’s going to stop more flooding in from Pigeon River or Wammapick Falls? Or across the state line from Michigan? In my mind, I can see armies of them hiding out by day and raiding by night as they push down from Mineral Hills and Marinesco.
Some of those places—I heard before t
he Internet shit its own pants—are worse graveyards than Wakefield.
I can’t relax. I feel like a general encamped with his feet up while enemy armies mass on every side.
I can feel them out there. Maybe that makes no sense, but I can. I can see them sleeping away the daylight in snow-heaped houses like mummies in tombs drifted over by desert sands. Every one of them will kill me if they get the chance, every fucking one of them.
I feel like a rat cowering in a crypt.
55
Leaving Bob in the garage, Luke huffed it over to the VanDanning’s house and broke into the garage. Like most of the other houses in the neighborhood, he had not explored it for Carriers. In the garage he found Warren VanDanning’s Arctic Cat snowmobile that he used to get back and forth from his ice shanty up on Six Moose Lake. The battery still had a charge, which meant Warren had been getting it ready before…before whatever happened to him. Luke drove it out to Stilson’s Marine on the highway and grabbed a heavy duty working sled, a Polaris Widetrack LX. It was a lot of machine with an 80 HP four-stroke twin engine, 488ccs, twin-seats, thumb and hand warmers, the works. It had plenty of torque and no snowdrift would stop it.
Bob didn’t like it, of course.
Not at first. He refused to get on it at all. But when he did and Luke took him out for a spin, he had a good old time barking into the wind. The LX was ideal. It could go anywhere. With it, they started hitting neighborhoods over near Salem Cross where he knew the hunting would be good. And it was. He took out thirty in three days of grueling work, burning most but doing a fair share of staking and dragging lone ones out into the sun. That was a real bitch because most of them tunneled down into the snow and he had to yank them back out again.
In one of the houses he found Pauly Crossik.
The kids were always the very fucking worst, but he stood by his oath: he would leave none of them and particularly not out of maudlin, sentimental reasons. The snow was impossibly deep outside the house and even Bob gave up trying to get to it, preferring to wait on the LX, barking out his warnings.
Luke knew he’d have to stake Pauly and it made him feel just black inside.
But there was no choice. If he dragged him outside, Pauly would tunnel down into the snow soon as the sun hit him and it was just too damn deep to have to drag him back out again.
So, stake it was.
He dragged Pauly out of the closet where he hid and stretched him out on the living room floor. Pauly was filthy with dried, crusty blood, his face clown-white, his eyes sunken like the hollows of graves. His fangs were fine and needlelike jutting from puckered gums.
“I’m sorry,” Luke told him and brought the stake down with absolute rage at what he was being forced to do.
Pauly, who’d looked like a lifeless corpse not seconds before, came out of his sleep screaming. His hands were flailing, head whipping from side to side, legs kicking, lips peeled back from gnashing teeth. He screamed with such force that his mouth actually split open in the corners. Then the drainage came spurting out of him like pus from a boil. Some of it was blood and some of it was that inky discharge that leaked from the undead. One good swing from the hammer and the stake was driven all the way through. A jet of black vomit came from Pauly’s mouth and with such force it hit the face of the TV ten feet away where it ran down the screen like dirty transmission fluid.
Luke staggered outside and collapsed in the snow, trying to keep what was in his stomach down
because he was getting thinner all the time.
He
laid there, smoking and sobbing deep in his throat while a voice chided him,
this is nothing, this is absolutely nothing! You wait until it’s Megan! You wait until she screams like that and your heart melts in your chest like a wax wafer! When you hear that, you’ll scream, too, and you might never stop…
When he
finally made it over to the LX, Bob was frantic with worry and anxiety. It took some time to calm him back down. Luke held onto him, petting his soft fur as snowflakes dropped onto it.
The country
they lived in was called Hell and its boundaries were limitless.
56
Every night, just after sundown
, they crawled out of their holes and stood around out in the snow. He could see them through the peephole in the front door if he wanted to, but he’d given up watching them long ago. There was nothing to see. And it wasn’t a good idea to let them look at you. Once they caught your eyes, they would not let you look away.