He had seen Megan out there once and he stopped doing it after that.
Night after night he would sit there with Bob whimpering at his side, drinking Jack Daniels neat in a water glass, wondering as he did every night just what in the hell he hoped to accomplish and why he was bothering in the first place. There were so many of them. Yet…he knew he was not the last man on earth. There were others in town, hiding out at night and killing the Carriers by the day. He saw them sometimes. Spoke with them. But most of them were clannish and did not trust outsiders.
But if there were survivors of the plague here in
Wakefield, Wisconsin, that meant there were survivors everywhere.
But the undead held the upper hand.
They were everywhere.
Two
days after he destroyed Pauly Crossik, he sipped his nightly whiskey, knowing that getting trashed was pointless but going at it with gusto as usual. He had too much work to do every day just to stay alive without trying to wade through it with a hangover.
He could feel
them
out there.
He could feel their minds seeking out his own like dogs casting for scent.
Block them out. Do not acknowledge them.
If they got into his head, he knew, soon enough he’d be letting them in the front door. They could be very violent when it served their ends, but they were also inhumanly patient. They did not try to break his windows or kick in the doors…that was not their way. They would knock at the door or scratch at the windows, call his name and promise him things in voices sometimes sultry and sometimes pitiful and often quite profane, but they did not try to force their way in. Just like the old stories said, they had to be invited in. And once they were, they didn’t need doors…they’d come in through any crack or crevice like ghosts.
Megan and Sonja had not come since that night. He supposed when he had told them to get out of his house he had revoked any invitation they had.
He thought about that one a lot: the invitation.
He’d come to the conclusion that he could never know the exact mechanism behind such a thing but that it must have had something to do with the very nature of evil itself. Evil was much stronger, much more complete, when you damned yourself and took an active role in your own horrid desecration.
That’s how he figured it.
Them charging into your house would be somehow anticlimactic to the evil that drove them on; it was much more satisfying if you invited them in and took part in your own violation. Then they not only got your blood, but they siphoned off your soul.
All of which brought up yet another point he spent a lot of time thinking about.
Religious objects.
Crosses and the like were supposed to drive them off. He had tested it more than once. Sometimes, it actually worked. But he was of the mind that it was probably something psychological, something very tenacious in their
human
makeup that survived death in the dark vacuums of their minds. The ones that were frightened of the cross were probably Christians in life and maybe they were frightened because something in them told them they
must
be. On the other hand, agnostics and atheists could care less what you waved in their faces, you were prey.
Maybe the ones that were religious in life actually believed themselves to be tools of Satan.
He didn’t know and would never know, he hoped.
He had never been a religious man and religion in general, like politics, was something he steered clear of. Everyone had a different opinion and they hotly contest
ed one another’s views in an effort to reinforce their own. That’s why he stepped around such matters, happily agnostic, which meant he was realistic in that he did not have all the answers and he was pretty sure he wouldn’t find them in any church.
Years before,
his old man had said to him, “See, son? The Muslims don’t like the Christians and the Christians don’t like the Jews. Always been that way. Nobody can agree on who or what God is or isn’t. Even among Christians, the Catholics and Protestants can’t get along and the Baptists can’t stand either of them and the Methodists just shake their heads and sigh and all the crazy fundamentalist Bible thumpers think they’re
all
gonna burn in hell. And if that ain’t bad enough, the Muslims think all Christians are Devil worshippers. That’s why I don’t go to church—they ever manage to agree on something, I’ll be the first in line. Until then, what I believe and what I don’t will stay right inside my own mind where it belongs.”
But after the plague sacked the world, Luke began to give it all some serious consideration.
He had to.
He honestly believed there was a universal good just as he believed there was a universal evil, but what form these might take no man could know and no man had ever known. The plague germ was evil, he believed. It was much more than a mere microbe, but something ancient and possibly sentient from some black cosmic gutter of time and space that was contaminating this world as it had probably contaminated countless others.
That was all he knew and all he could know.
But back to the Carriers themselves. He had a vague understanding—right or wrong—of the religious objects, but as to whether any of the other traditional remedies were effective, he didn
’t know. The old tales said they could not cross running water, that they could be repelled by wild roses and hawthorn, garlic and holy water. He had not tested any of these. But there was no doubting that they could not go out during the daytime and that a stake through the heart would destroy them. At night they were indestructible, capable of things that seemed supernatural; but during the day, just corpses, nothing more. Repellent, but essentially harmless.
But come sundown…
He sighed, knowing deep in his heart that he really knew absolutely nothing.
The only thing he
did
know was how to kill them.
He had gotten very good at
that.
57
Another day: house to house to house, rooting them out, dragging them from their hiding places and doing what had to be done to contain the contagion. It was gory and disgusting work on a good day and the sort of thing that would tear
a healthy mind open wide in a glistening cleft on a bad one. For Luke, there were very few good ones. Day after day was the same: cruising around the city on his LX, neighborhood to neighborhood, seeking them out and scribbling it all down in his battered green notebook—total kills, addresses, where they were found, anything unusual that might be pertinent.
It wasn
’t much of a life, but in the wake of the plague vengeance was all he had.
Every week he spent two days doing
no hunting. There were other things that required his attention—sharpening stakes on the lathe, cutting kindling in the garage for the woodstove, maintenance on the truck and snowmobile, inventory of supplies. To continue the hunt he had to survive and all the things he’d once taken for granted—and had been supplied by society for a price—he now had to get on his own.
He figured it would all be easier once spring came
and the snows melted. The Carriers were taking full advantage of the heavy snow and burrowing down into it during the day and there was no way in hell he could go around poking every drift and snowbank.
Come spring, their hiding places would be limited.
And Luke was already considering a program of selective house burning to drive them out of their holes when the time came.
By
ten a.m. that day he’d staked two and tossed another out into the snow and it had been pretty easy for the most part. Then, touring through the Grove on Wakefield’s west side, he came to a little brick ranch and pulled into the yard. He killed the engine on the sled and grabbed his duffel of equipment. Bob was barking his head off. Not so much as a path was shoveled to the door so that was a good indication that nothing
human
lived there. The Carriers were like ghosts…they did not leave footprints.
Just to be sure, Luke
pounded on the door before popping it open with his crowbar. Inside, another house sitting silent waiting for a family that would never return. Other than that, just the dirty low stink of the undead which he had come to know instinctively: damp decay and sweet fermentation like ancient wine gone bad.
They were here.
Bob growled in his throat in confirmation.
It was never easy going through houses knowing they had been fine homes once. Room to room, seeing kids
’ toys, wall hangings, comfortably worn furniture, kitchens with GOD BLESS OUR HOME plaques on the refrigerators. By that point Luke was pretty tough, or told himself he was, but it never got any easier because it not only reminded him of his own family and what they had become but of how empty and wanting his life was, how the world was now a cesspool and he was just a crawling, wriggling thing surviving in its wastes.
He stood there in the dini
ng room, staring numbly at the China hutch, the framed photographs of Thanksgiving dinners on the walls…all those happy, smiling people who had either went into the burning pits or were, even now, slumbering away the daylight hours so they could rise and feed.
He
swallowed, made himself move.
He checked the rooms. He looked under beds and pawed through closets, investigated any heaped blankets on the floors. He found nothing, but he knew they were here somewhere. There was no denying the stink of the vampire.
In a windowless room at the back of the house Bob found them. He growled and took up his station outside the door. As always, he refused to cross the threshold. As far as Luke was concerned, that just showed how damn smart that dog was.
Patting him on the head,
he entered the room.
Oh, God, not again,
he thought as he pulled back the coverlet on the mattress and found them laying there, mother and child.
The children were always the worse and there was never any lack of them.
This time it was a mother holding an infant in her arms as she had in life, except both were now undead and dreaming ensanguined dreams of bathing in rivers of blood.
The woman was young, early twenties, probably a new mother. Her hair was dark, her face pretty even in death. She was naked, long-limbed, and full breasted. As sick as it made him feel,
he found himself studying every inch of her and feeling the old desires rising up again.
But she was a dead thing, a leech.
The stink of warm putrefaction coming from her was enough to ream out his nose and quash any desires of the flesh.
Her
skin was shockingly white as was that of the child, though the baby—a boy—was mottled with ancient dark contusions in places. There was a rosy blush to their cheeks. Luke could plainly see a livid vein tracery just beneath the skin on both of them, which was especially pronounced on the woman’s breasts and just beneath the tawny blonde hair of the child’s head. Grotesquely swollen from their feedings, there were dark stains at their mouths and chins. There was a dried bloody thumbprint at the child’s cheek as if the mother had poked it there,
my, what a fine fat baby mama has.
Their eyes were wide open, the lids a bright startling scarlet, the whites gone to a dun yellow and threaded with
blood-filled veins. The pupils were horribly dilated so that the iris was nonexistent, swallowed in fathomless blackness.
The most obscene thing was the baby. The full,
juicy pink blossoms of its lips were pulled away from two sliver-like fangs, the tip of a fat graying tongue shoved between them.
“
What is it like for you two?” Luke wondered aloud. “Is there love between you or is it just some fucked-up symbiosis, a mutual need?”
He
sat in a chair in the corner and just looked at them.
Th
ere was so much he did not know about the undead. He had staked them and dragged them out into the sunlight, burned them and decapitated them. But essentially, he was just mutilating corpses. They came to grisly, savage life when you staked them, but it wasn’t
real
life, it wasn’t the way a human would react if you plunged a stake through their chest. No, they reacted instinctually like animals—violent, screaming, howling, scratching, snapping their jaws, spitting and bleeding…but not with any true anguish or feeling. He often wondered if it was pain they felt or if the evil in them reacted with such hysterical frenzy because its days of destroying the living were at an end.
These things, like so many others, were mysteries.
Staring at the woman and child, he wondered again—silently this time—what it was like for them. Did they each wake exactly at sunset? Was it a few minutes before or a few minutes after like Cliff Corbett? Did they speak to one another or were they telepathic like in the old stories? Did they wake slowly like mother and child, cuddling, touching one another? Was the mother moved by maternal instinct to find food for her baby? Or was there no thought whatsoever, simply diabolic instinct? And how did they find their prey? Did they have some kind of infrared vision that allowed them to find warm blood in veins?