They have made shells of your wife and daughter! They sleep in the dirt!
When his breathing slowed and his hands stopped shaking and his mind finally cleared enough to become rational again, he sat up and tried to figure it out. Wha
t she said was true, of course, but the way she said it was like Sonja and Megan had not been simple accidental victims of Vampirus like so many others, but
targets
that had been infected on purpose.
But that was crazy.
He would not accept it.
He could not
let
himself accept it.
Yet
, he thought:
She said ‘they’ and does that mean the other vampires or was she referring to a particular grouping of them?
It all brought back the memory of speaking with Alger that day now two months past. Alger said he had talked with Hawley Shanks, the folklorist. Luke had
had very little interest in any of it at the time, but now he remembered the conversation:
I ran into Shanks last week, Luke. You know, the guy who writes those books? Anyway, he had some interesting things to say. He said this outbreak of Red Death isn’t by accident. That it was planned.
By who? Dracula?
Or maybe something like him.
It all gave him pause now, the idea that it had been planned. It was insane, yet something about it disturbed him because he felt there was an underlying ring of truth there somewhere. What scared him about it wasn’t that it might have been planned, but
who
would have planned such a thing. No, not Dracula, of course, but maybe…
maybe something like him.
Enough thinking.
Bob was sitting there, watching him, his head cocked to the side. The meditative, introspective vagaries of human beings never ceased to surprise and amuse him.
“We call it gathering wool, old pal,” Luke told him.
Bob wagged his tail as if he understood all too well.
There was
a spare five-gallon gas can on the back of the sled. Luke ordered Bob to stay and went back inside Sudz and splashed gas everywhere, pouring a great quantity of it down the cellar steps. He lit up a flyer with a stick match and tossed it in there. The saloon went up pretty quickly, the fire raging within. He watched it burn for thirty minutes or more until the windows burst out into the snow and the flames were roaring, licking out the doorway. He thought he could hear the undead screaming inside.
62
Minutes later, he pulled the Polaris across
Marble Avenue and continued cutting his path of destruction through Cherry Hill. There was smoke in the air now from the burning saloon and he wondered if it would catch the building next door on fire and then the one next to that. He figured it wasn’t going to happen with the heavy snow everywhere. The fire would probably gut the saloon—and cremate the Carriers in its cellar—then burn itself out.
The real burning would be in the spring or summer.
Because after the April melt and the spring rains stopped and there was a good long dry patch, he was going to begin selectively burning sections of the town. He could think of no better method of vampire control than to burn them while they slept.
He stopped before a two-story brick house.
This one was more intriguing than the others he’d visited that day because there was a finger of smoke coming from the chimney and a clear footpath cut through the snow leading out to the street. Generally, when he saw something like that he did not bother. If somebody was living there, then it was their job to kill any bloodsuckers on the premise. But being that it had been something like a week since he’d actually talked with another human being, he felt a need for companionship.
Best-case scenario: he
’d make a friend today.
Worst-case scenario: he
’d get shot.
And hell,
he thought,
if it’s the latter then I don’t have to worry about this shit anymore and I’ll be saved the pain of waking up into this fucked-up world tomorrow.
He climbed up the steps to knock and noticed the door was open maybe an inch. There was snow
packed around the jamb and it looked like it had been there for some time. Curious. He eased it open with his boot and found himself staring into a foyer whose carpet was filthy from melting slush. It was warm in there. He stepped in a few feet, trying to get a feel for the place. Even without the footpath or the chimney smoke he would have known it was occupied: it just had that feeling to it.
Bob agreed: he wagged his tail. He was mellow and relaxed with the idea of entering the house. There were surely no Carriers here.
“Hello?” Luke called out. “Anyone about?”
His voice echoed into the stillness.
He moved past a stairway leading to the second floor, a closed closet door, and down a short hallway. He could see a room at the end. A kitchen table. A couple chairs. He could smell cigarette smoke that was recent as well as food odors that were not so recent. But what he could not smell was that invidious odor of the undead: the stench of walking pestilence.
Half-way down the hallway, he stopped and he wasn
’t really sure why.
Bob stopped with him, growing tense.
Luke had a crawly sensation along the nape of his neck that told him that not only was he not alone but he was being watched. He could not convince himself otherwise and by that point in the game, he had learned to trust to his instincts because very often they were all that stood between him and an ugly, dirty death.
And if he didn’t always trust his own instincts, he surely trusted Bob’s.
Licking his lips, Luke said, “Is anyone there?”
Bob started barking.
Luke heard a door behind him creak open. He turned, knowing it was the closet he had just passed, and heard a sudden
fffftttt
sort of noise and something sank into the wall about three inches from his head. He had time to recognize it as a crossbow bolt before he threw himself to the floor and saw a figure jump out of the closet, bringing a crossbow to bear.
“
WAIT A MINUTE!” he cried. “I’M HUMAN! FOR GODSAKE I’M OUT IN THE DAYLIGHT!”
The figure paused, lowering the crossbow.
“Luke?” it said.
He lifted his head up.
The woman with the crossbow waited.
And Bob went after her with bared teeth.
63
“BOB!” Luke cried out.
“NO!”
He just managed to get a hand on the dog’s collar as he launched himself. As it was, he was yanked forward with him, but Luke’s additional weight threw the attack off-kilter and he got Bob under control before he did any damage.
“Easy, Bob, easy. She’s a friend.”
Bob eyed her warily, but seemed to accept Luke’s judgment. At least for the time being.
The crazy woman with the wild raven hair and the glassy green eyes and attendant crossbow was Stephani Kutak.
“
Luke, what are you doing here?” she asked. It was not a question really as if somewhere along the line she’d forgotten how to phrase a question properly. Conversation, like anything else, took practice.
Luke pulled himself up.
“I’m going house to house. I’m killing them.”
Then he wondered if he should have said that because Steph didn
’t look so good and that could have been stress and terror and it could have meant she was infected and the infected sometimes took an instant hatred to vampire hunters as if they knew who their enemies would soon be.
And, realizing this, a voice that was faint yet loud said:
Wouldn’t that be the kicker, you asshole? You survive the plague and you play hippety-hop day-by-fucking-day killing vampires and in the end you get killed by this green-eyed woman that gave you wet dreams when you were sixteen? Wouldn’t that be some kind of poetic justice? Instead of you penetrating her like you always wanted, she does the penetrating with a crossbow bolt and, everywhere, in tombs and cellars and black-shadowed closets, the vampires grin in their dormancy because you, the staker, has been most thoroughly staked!
Steph lowered the crossbow
and pushed greasy strands of black hair from her face. She was pale, yes, but who in Wisconsin wasn’t in the depths of winter? There was winter pale and then there was another kind of pale. Luke felt he could tell the difference and hers was the former.
“Is your vicious animal friendly?” she said.
He smiled and petted Bob. “He’s a baby. Just give him the chance.”
Steph knelt down and called Bob to her. Bob looked to Luke and then went over to her, tail wagging and head held low. Steph petted him and, true to form, Bob pressed himself against her, laying his head across her knees. The love between them was instant and mutual. Steph ran her hands across Bob’s soft pelt. “You are one handsome fellah,” she told him, continuing to stroke him. Bob beamed at her, as if it say,
don’t I know it.
She led Luke
into the kitchen and sat him down at the table. She had a little Coleman camping stove and she pumped up the gas and lit the burner. She put water on to heat.
“
We’ll have some coffee,” she said and from the tone of her voice it was something he was not allowed to refuse.
She sat down and Bob glued
himself to her.
Luke checked his watch. I
t was 2:40, which gave him plenty of time to have coffee and maybe a chat before he checked out a few more houses. It wouldn’t be fully dark until around six so he had plenty of time. He kept looking out the window at the backyard with its blanket of unbroken snow leading out to the garage. He wondered if any of them were in there. In his mind, he saw the shadows thicken like gel and night come flooding out. He saw them standing out there. Sonja and Megan were among them.
He shook that from his head.
Nothing out there but snow and February icicles hanging from the eaves of the garage. That’s all. But out there somewhere, he knew, were his wife and daughter and he would stake every one of them if he had to in order to get them. Because he had to get them. They had not come after him in awhile, but he had a dark, almost prescient intuition that they would begin again soon and he didn’t think he could go through that so he had to get them as they slept.
Shadows.
They were all shadows at night.
You could shoot holes through them but it did not harm them. They seemed to have no more true physical reality than sheets blowing on a clothesline in an October gale…it was only during the day when they were at your mercy.
He looked up and realized that Stephani had been talking and he had been nodding, agreeing with her, and for a moment he wasn’t sure what any of it was about. But it was her husband…Bert or Bill or something. She was telling him how he had gotten the Vampirus germ and how he had laid like a corpse in bed for days, growing pale and weak and wild-eyed. And how, right before the end, he had gone crazy like some of them did, crawling out the window and dancing around out in the snow like a maniac.
The Dance of the Red Death.
That’s what people called it. A skeleton-frolic like something from an old Ub Iwerks’ cartoon or maybe even something more high-brow ivy league allegorical like Wolgemut’s
Dance of Death
where the cadavers dance happily into the grave.
Then he had died.
She found him on the floor, mouth hooked in an insane grimace, eyes wide open and staring at the ceiling like maybe he had seen beyond the pale and into the grave and this is what had killed him. He went to the pits then. Steph did not wait for the corpse trucks, she called and they came and off went her husband into the flames. Then it was just Steph and her son Peter and it had not been easy. No, not easy at all. Two weeks ago Peter had gotten it, too, and she had watched him go from a bright, red-cheeked boy with a wonderful stoic sense of humor and a natural talent for music to something thin and white with huge shining eyes. It was the germ, surely it was the germ. It could not be the others infecting him because she kept the windows and doors locked. None of the Carriers could have gotten in. But there she erred…for although there were no marks on his throat, there were on the underside of his wrist.
“
Maybe I wasn’t in my right frame of mind,” she said then, pouring hot water into cups with instant coffee in them and spilling so much that Luke did it for her.
She sat across from him, shaking, eyes darting madly in their sockets, smoking one cigarette after the other….or maybe smoking one cigarette on
top
of another because this wasn’t chain-smoking exactly. She’d light one, take two drags, start rambling again in some breathless froth of words, light another and repeat the process. Neurotic? Yes, very. She was dancing on the tip of a pin and trying not to fall. She was living right next door to a complete mental collapse and who in the hell could really blame her?
Luke drank the coffee and
butted her cigarettes and heard her out, and even stressed, near-hysterical, and shaking he thought she was still an amazingly handsome woman and hated himself for even thinking that. Because her words came out in a torrent of cutting metal like razor blades and shards of iron that opened her up and made her bleed and as she spoke he understood, truly understood, because what she did was what he had done: she couldn’t bear the idea of her son going into the burning pits so she had hidden him away.