He knew then if he hadn
’t before: Anne was his enemy.
She was his nemesis.
Van Helsing had Dracula and he had Anne Stericki.
40
The knocking st
arted just before eleven that night.
I
t was of a different caliber than the night before when it sounded like a flurry of fists pummeling the door. Tonight, it was a single fist rapping with a constant, almost mechanical rhythm. Whoever it was, they were in no hurry.
Thump, thump, thump.
It was a flat, passionless sort of sound as though it were a machine standing out there banging on the door.
Luke
’s first instinct was the right one: ignore it. Just pretend he didn’t hear it and maybe, just maybe, whoever was out there would go away. Then he started thinking about Stephani. What if she was out there with her son? Out on the porch in the cold night with Carriers stalking them? If that were the case, there was no time to waste.
His
worst fear, of course, was that it was Sonja or Megan out there. But they would have just come right in. If it were one of the Carriers out there and folklore held true, they would need to be invited in.
Which made him think of Anne Stericki.
If it’s her, you have to be ready, because sooner or later she will come for you. And she’s been invited in numerous times.
T
he knocking went on and on, so he grabbed his Marlin 12-gauge, the stake, and went downstairs to answer the door. It was getting so fear and apprehension were natural rhythms inside him. It wasn’t good. Because, really, how long could a person go on with their guts crawling up the backs of their throats on a daily basis?
He
went down the stairs, turning on lights to chase the shadows away. He stood before the door listening to the repetitive knocking. If it had been a normal human being out there they would have either given up long ago or been pounding angrily by that point…but it went on and on, slow, measured, and almost indifferent.
Sweating despite the chill, his
hands shaking, his belly tensing, he reached out and undid the locks: the deadbolt then the door lock itself. This was a moment of truth and he was not facing it boldly. The skin along his spine was crawling, his mouth dry as fireplace soot.
The knob began
to jiggle back and forth as if whoever was out there had forgotten how to open a door. Luke slid the stake through a loop in his carpenter jeans, cradled the Marlin in his left arm, finger teasing the trigger, and threw the door open, jumping back as he did so.
Nothing rushed in save the frigid wind and a few flakes of snow.
For one uneasy moment, he didn’t think there was anyone out there at all…then…
then
it seemed like the shadows out there that lay over the snow and gathered around the hedges began to move and flow together and he saw a shape standing on the porch. It was crooked and narrow, leaning off to one side.
A shape bundled in a heavy parka
: Alger Stericki.
Luke tried to swallow down his fear as a cold horror swept through him. He shook his
head from side to side, blinking rapidly as if he could force the image away like it was a delusion, a hallucination. But it was still there. It stood still as post, flakes of snow gathering on the blue watch cap it had pulled down low over its brow and the heavy, striped scarf wrapped around its throat and pulled up over its mouth. Its eyes were closed.
Luke
brought up the Marlin in both hands.
Alger still had not moved.
He was like something carved from deadwood, an ice sculpture, a mockery of a human being. A dark and musty odor came off of him. It was reminiscent of clothes that had been stored in an attic trunk for decades. What Luke could see of his face was white as the falling snow, a perfect unblemished white.
Then
there was an exhaled sibilant breath. The eyes opened and they were huge and bright in red-rimmed sockets, a silvery metallic sheen to them. They did not blink. They seemed almost lidless like the eyes of a viper.
Luke felt like he
was in a dream or a drug-induced stupor: everything seemed slow and clumsy. His mouth would barely open and his voice would barely come. “Get away from my door, Alger,” he finally said. “You’re not welcome here anymore.”
T
here was a low moan that seemed to echo inside of Alger as if he were as empty inside as a barrel.
“I’m cold, Luke, I’m so cold. Let me come in. I need to come in.”
“
No, Alger. Go away.”
Alger
’s eyes locked with his own. They seemed to push from their sockets, growing larger and larger until the world was gone and there was nothing but those huge, glowering eyes like twin moons looking out over the craggy surface of a dead planet. Though he was six or seven feet distant, it was like his hungry eyes were but inches away. Luke’s blood seemed to barely circulate, his lungs deflating in his chest. He could barely hold onto the shotgun. He felt insubstantial, weak, gutless, emptied, hollowed right out, a speck of dust being drawn into some immense sucking black vacuum of nonexistence.
He couldn
’t be sure what happened next.
But something in him
did not submit completely. It screamed inside for him to wake up before it was too damn late and when he did not and could not listen, it tightened his finger on the Marlin’s trigger.
The chamber explosion snapped him
out of it.
It was loud and booming like an artillery strike. At such close range, the Marlin shou
ld have blown a hole through Alger big enough to toss a softball into. But the buckshot only tore his parka to confetti, scattershot punching tiny black holes into the even whiteness of his face. But that was the only damage it did. It was like shooting a patch of mist.
His face seemed to draw
itself into a vulpine mask, narrowing, cadaverous, the eyes unblinking and filled with an almost diabolic wrath.
“
You’ll invite me in, Luke. Tonight, or tomorrow, or next week. When you’re all alone, you’ll beg for it.”
Luke
pulled the trigger again, more out of sheer terror than anything else. The muzzle blast was blinding in the darkness. Alger seemed to pull apart into the shadows he was made of. There was something like a coiling, spreading mass of them playing over the gleaming crust of snow and then nothing.
Luke
slammed the door shut and locked it.
Then he
sank to his knees, breathless, his back up against the door, just waiting for what would come next, but nothing did. Nothing at all. He sat that way for hours, too scared to move.
41
In his little green notebook he wrote:
I can’t live in fear.
And I won
’t live in fear.
Oh, how fucking easy it would be to pull into myself and fold-up, crawl into a corner and shiver and shake, suck m
y thumb and pretend the night isn’t swarming with ghouls thirsty for my blood. But I can’t do that. I made a promise to Sonja and, equally as important, I’ve now made a promise to myself: get them before they get me. I can’t argue the logic of that.
42
Two days after Alger showed, Luke went down to Public Works
. He wasn’t really sure what brought him there other than the need to go to a place where his memories were not stained and strained by tragedy and death. He’d had some good times there and worked with a pretty good group of people. He missed the normality of it, the camaraderie, the joking and laughing, the hard mindless work where his mind was free to travel wherever it chose, and, yes, even the bullshit that was part and parcel of the working man’s life.
He got a bad feeling in his gut soon as he
pulled into the little lot out in front of the brick-walled Quonset that passed for the Public Works Department in Wakefield. He slipped in through the side door and was struck immediately by how damn quiet it was in there. Usually, there was a radio or two playing, a few guys standing around bullshitting, the steady thumpings and grindings as the mechanics worked on the trucks. But all that was gone. It was silent as a funeral home. The smell of gas, oil, and hydraulic fluid was still in the air, but it smelled old, a ghost of it former self.
He
went up front and Stubby was in his office, staring into a cup of coffee.
“
Luke…hell, where’d you come from?”
“
Came in the side. You’re the only one left?”
Stubby
nodded. “They’re all sick. All I had was Johnny K. and Milt. Milt got sick last week and Johnny…hell, he just stopped showing up. You’re not here for work, are you?”
Luke shrugged.
“If you need a hand, I’m it. Not like I have anything better to do.”
“
Great, great. I’ve been trying to man the office and get out six, seven hours in the plow truck to keep the roads open. But I’m too old for that shit.” He paused and looked at Luke intently. “You been…feeling all right?”
“
Yeah. The bug doesn’t seem to have any interest in me.”
Stubby said he
was glad to hear that. He’d been free of it so far and there were quite a few in town that were too. Most were sick, dying, or dead, and that was the plain sad truth of the matter. Wakefield was definitely on its last legs. There was no one working the Electric Department now, only one guy out at the Water Department, and another at the power plant.
“
Power will be out entirely by the end of the week,” Stubby said. “If I were you, I’d get my woodstove or pellet furnace rolling. Gonna be a long winter. I got an oil burner and enough oil to last me clear through to spring. I can’t even imagine what this town is going to look like by then.”
He said a group of survivors were holing up out at the
Boy Scout lodge on Pagawanic Pond. Sort of a commune. Plenty of wood and fresh water out there, lots of game. They had stockpiled food and essentials.
“
If worse comes to worse, I figure I can always go out there. You can, too, Luke. Hell, you want to, you can bunk in at my house.”
“
Thanks, Stub, but I’m doing okay so far.”
“National Guard has set up a few shelters out on Hollow Creek Road if you ever really get desperate―” he smiled “―and you don’t mind being downwind from the stench of the pits out there.”
Luke
had gone there trying—foolishly, of course—to escape the bleakness of his own world and only finding more of the same. But plowing, as monotonous as it was, would make for a good diversion and, like Stubby said, the roads had to be kept open. Besides, Luke figured it would give him a chance to get a good look at the town from one end to the other. And if he were going to start cleaning out the Carriers, he would need an overview…and plowed roads.
43
He went at it
for three hours, opening up the arteries of Main Street, Cherry Hill Road, and The Grove. He never made it down to Sewer Street, but he cleaned up Castle Avenue all the way down to Hollow Creek Road and even took a run out into the sticks on Willow as far as Wolf River and Cut Bank Bridge. He saw no activity out there. A few people were wandering around the trailer court on Castle and a few more were on snowmobiles cutting across the fields beyond, making for the big pines of Cut Bank, but not much else. Even in the town proper, activity was spotty at best.
He
brought the truck back to the garage around 11:30 and Stubby was gone. He’d left a scrawled note on the chalkboard that he had to go out to the power plant.
Poor guy.
A one-man public works. How long can that possibly last?
Luke
gassed up the truck, got a candy bar out of the machine, and sat in the lunchroom gnawing on it. It practically broke his heart to be in there. A year before, hell,
four
months before, the lunchroom would have been thrumming. Guys playing cribbage and eating sandwiches, bitching about the Packers and the Brewers. Ronny Hazek would have been cracking jokes and Tiny Christiansen would have been bitching about his wife.
Now, it was quite
literally
dead.
Completely on
a whim, he stepped back out into the cold and crossed the road to the old Ford Refitters building which the city used to store salt for the roads and just about everything else. It was a huge, cavernous place where diesel engines were once rebuilt. It closed back in the 1970’s and had been taken over by Public Works.
The door was open and he let himself in, clicking on the lights.
There wasn’t much to see. At the far end there were immense piles of road salt nearly as tall as a two-story house, lumber and old street signs piled against one wall. There was a front-end loader parked near the salt mountain.
His
footsteps echoed and echoed. He felt a vague sense of alarm that stopped him fifteen feet into the building. He could not put a finger on what it was exactly, just a gnawing sense of danger. The atmosphere was that of a pest house.