You can
’t be thinking of shit like that now. You know you can’t.
And he couldn
’t. He couldn’t possibly think of anything until Megan and Sonja were found and released from their bondage. That was his priority. He could not make them suffer any longer than necessary. There was always the possibility that they had already been hunted down and destroyed by other vampire killers, but until he knew that for certain, he kept the vigil.
He opened up the
throttle a bit and, behind him, Bob started barking his excitement. That dog had a need for speed.
The wind in his face, Luke was thinking about the Carrier in the basement of the saloon, the woman who
’d awakened enough to speak as he staked her
.
They have made shells of your wife and daughter! They sleep in the dirt!
Those were the words she had said and, as before, he was haunted by them.
They.
That troubled him because it hinted that not all was accidental, the cruel machinations of fate, but possibly directed, deliberate, by design. He did not want to be thinking that because the idea that there was some unspeakable intelligence behind this, some blatant evil, made everything that much more ominous and threatening. And maybe he could have put it out of his head if it hadn’t been for what Stephani had told him, those words spoken by Petey as he stood there, grinning and cold from the grave
:
It won’t hurt. Nothing will hurt again. You never feel anything again. There’s nothing. They make it so.
He was probably reading too much into it.
That’s what it had to be.
They
just meant the vampires in general, that’s all.
But what if it didn’t?
What if there
was
some malefic design behind it all? Then…then it all became far worse. It meant he was fighting against something with a cold, calculating intelligence, something with a diabolic craft he could not begin to guess at. Some cadaver-faced god of vaults and tombyards, a puppetmaster that would know his every move before he knew it himself. The very idea of that made him feel the cold of winter straight down into his marrow.
E
nough.
He decided he needed to relax and take things in stride. Shit was bad enough without letting his imagination run away with him. He sucked in the cold air and felt it sting his face and he rooted himself to these physical realities. He looked down at his gloved fists on the grips of the sled and thought about all the Carriers they had dispatched. At first, it had been unthinkable that he could ram a stake through the chest of a corpse. His first few attempts had been ugly and messy, but he had gotten better with each kill. And now, two months later, he was a practiced vampire killer. Knowing this, he thought,
I’ve done pretty good. I’ve learned where they hide and I know how to kill them and even the smart ones like Anne Stericki I’ll get in the end.
Don
’t get cocky. You’ve only scratched the surface of this nightmare. You know very little about that virus and what its nature is. Keep in my mind that you still haven’t found Sonja and Megan. They’re still out there and you know they’re still out there. Sonja was very smart in life and she’s quite possibly the same in death. She may be baiting you, waiting for you to fuck up so she can feed on you in a place and at a time of her choosing. The very fact that you have not found her is probably not by accident but by design. You’ll want to remember that. And even when you do get her, keep in mind that there are probably others out there far more cunning than her. One of them just might be Anne Stericki.
He
decided he didn’t want to think about any of it anymore. His head was too damn crowded with maybes as it was.
He listened to Bob barking happily
behind him and smiled. He needed to be more like good old Bob. No thinking, no introspection, no over-analyzing, just the pure clean pleasure of life, of hunting down the Carriers and destroying them, making the world a better place one staked ghoul at a time. And being happy with that. God, the things you could learn about life from a dog.
Through his goggles, Luke peered out into the white wastes.
He hadn’t been out to the dump in two weeks and was going mainly today to fill his spare gas can on the back of the sled. At least, that’s what he kept telling himself. But the truth was that he felt that he needed to go out there. There was a magnetism to the place and he could not explain it.
He knew only that it was necessary.
Hollow Creek Road twisted and turned, cutting through thickets and wooded hills and flat expanses of farmland. There was very little out there but the old dump, Birch Hill Cemetery, a few tarpaper shacks and a scattering of old rusting trailers tucked amongst the trees. Everything was buried beneath a drifted mantle of white. Even the shacks and trailers were nothing but white mounds.
He
followed the road through the trees, thick woods to either side parting. Pastureland opened to the right and the cemetery to the left, climbing up and down hillsides, marble crosses and markers rising from the unbroken field of white above.
Five minutes later
he came to the drive leading out to the old dump. The burning pits were just a bit further on as were the shelters the National Guard had set up, but he slowed the sled. He could see ruts in the snow that had not drifted over. They were the ruts of snowmobiles, which meant somebody had been going out to the dump. At Stephani’s, he had felt a perplexing need to get out to the burning pits but maybe it wasn’t the pits at all but the dump.
He brought the sled to a stop and just sat there, looking at th
e ruts like they might tell him something. He got that dry, sour taste in his mouth he got at moments like this when his reason was replaced by intuition and instinct. His stomach felt light and fluttery.
No, not the pits at all,
he thought,
but here.
This is where I needed to go.
Bob yelped as if he agreed.
Luke
turned the Polaris onto the dump road and followed the snowmobile ruts through the drift. The trees parted and he could see several prefab structures slouching beneath heavy blankets of snow. Beyond them was another old railroad building that had fallen into itself decades ago. The dump itself had been abandoned ten years before in favor of a newer, greener, high-tech county facility some miles away but apparently somebody was using it.
And Luke had the feeling that it was important he find out
who.
He pulled
the sled to a stop before one of the buildings and climbed off. He didn’t bother taking his duffel with him. He dug out a flashlight and the Smith .45. He didn’t figure he’d need much else. The snow was up past his knees as he made his way around the side. A garage door was open—or fallen in—and drift had blown in over the cement floor. He saw three Arctic Cat sleds right away. He had a funny feeling that he was about to come face-to-face with some of his compatriots in the vampire hunting game and could not decide for the life of him whether that was a good thing or a bad thing.
He looked around in the garage, but saw nothing of interest save that the far wall was buckling under the weight of the snow. There were some offices to the other side but they were empty, stripped of everything but an old calendar on the wall.
He stepped back, feeling something, but not sure what.
Bob seemed to be feeling it, too, because he had gotten very quiet, morphing into stalking mode now.
The only sound was the wind out in the trees by the road. It made the ice-sheathed branches click together like castanets. But that was all. Inside the garage there was nothing. It was a big place, the size of a trucking garage but the only thing in there other than a pile of old lumber and the sleds was a huge mountain of road salt. He figured it must have belonged to the County Road Commission.
At the far wall, there was a door.
He went through it and it was just a walkway leading to the other building. A dusty, plank-floored tunnel was really all it was. He came out the other door and into the other prefab structure and was instantly disappointed because there wasn’t a goddamn thing to see. He looked everywhere, but there was absolutely nothing. Just a big empty space with the remains of birds’ nests up in the rafters.
Still, however, that feeling persisted.
There was something here and he knew it. He could almost feel it gripping him, laying hands on him and holding him there until he divined its mystery. He breathed in and out, unbunched his shoulders. He needed to relax. He checked his watch. 3:43. Plenty of time until sunset, but he needed to be out of here by 5:00 at the very latest. Sometimes, it was easy to get distracted and forget the time and it had nearly happened to him three or four other times. A lifetime spent not fearing sundown created dangerous habits.
He
stepped out of the building into the snow and felt the wind on him again. A few snowflakes were falling. It was a cold, desolate world out there. A great frozen graveyard. The perfect place for vampires. The plague and the blizzards had sealed off every town in the Midwest and Northeast, making it that much easier for the germ to jump from body to body and that much easier for the Carriers to the spread their contagion.
They were here and he knew it. Whoever had driven those snowmobiles into the garage had to be hiding here somewhere. They would not have abandoned them. And that meant either they were out here somewhere or the undead had gotten them and they were sleeping beneath a drift.
The fact that Bob had not barked or growled made him think it was the latter.
Luke looked over at the wreckage of the old railroad building.
That feeling grew stronger.
Bob growled.
He moved over towards it, the snow coming up past his knees now. Bob hopped along, using the trail Luke had cut. The building was a snow-capped derelict of jutting timbers, rubble, and ruin with the remains of a mangled iron framework above. It had been an old coaling station for the Wisconsin Central Railroad when there had been tracks out here, but they had been gone fifty years or more. He looked around in the snow for any tell tale depressions that might indicate a footpath that had drifted over. But the snowfall had been heavy in the past few days and the wind had done the rest, piling it up into rising drifts like the crests of waves and leaving a smooth unbroken sheet between them.
There was no way the hunters
could have gotten into the old tower; it was completely collapsed. Unless that’s what had happened. Maybe a couple Carriers had crawled in there to hide from the sun and the hunters went after them and something fell in on them, trapping them. It wasn’t an impossible scenario. The cold would have done the rest…or the Carriers when they woke up.
Luke edged in carefully to it.
It rose up above him higher than a two-story building, timbers and twisted shanks of metal jutting from the snow. If they were trapped in there, then they were already dead. Was this the revelation his intuition had brought him here for? If that were the case then all of this was a colossal waste of time. He moved in a little closer until he was maybe fifteen feet from the wreckage, some iron girders above creaking in the wind.
There was nothing to see really, yet the feeling
still persisted.
Bob felt it, too.
Probably even more so with his near preternatural canine sense of hearing and smell. He was whimpering deep in his throat like an injured puppy, his eyes huge and almost glazed. His hackles were raised, his nose sniffing out the danger that seemed to be coming from every quarter. Every few feet, he paused, froze up, one paw held stiffly in the air like that of a pointer.
But like Luke himself, he just didn’t know where to point.
“This is a waste of time,” Luke said under his breath.
Bob started barking, sniffing out something.
Luke looked around but saw nothing.
He took three more steps forward
and the ground fell away from beneath him and he was pulled below.
65
He didn
’t fall very far.
That was the good thing.
He dropped a good seven, eight feet and landed on ice and then he was tumbling, skidding on his back down a snow tunnel whose floor was glare ice. He slid that way maybe ten feet before the tunnel leveled out and he came to a stop. It was dim down there, the only light coming from the hole he’d made above. As he groped for the flashlight in the pocket of his parka, he began to wonder if what had just happened to him had happened to the riders of the sleds in the garage. But he didn’t think so because he was certain he could probably climb back out with some effort.
Bob was barking madly above.
“I’m okay!” Luke called up to him. “Just wait for me!
Stay!”
Bob settled down, but he was still alternately growling and
whimpering.
Luke
played the light around.
A
snow tunnel. It could have been natural. The wind and drifting could have created it…yet he couldn’t help think that it looked like somebody had dug it out like an ant.
He checked his watch. 4:12
. Still time.
He decided to investigate further. The tunnel was only big enough for him to crawl on his hands and knees so he inched his way forward, guiding himself with his light. It threw distorted shadows around him the further he went. Before long,
he began to see the wreckage of the coaling station: heaped brick frosted with ice, huge jumbled timbers split by dryness, a cracked stone pillar, rubble and old coal standing out starkly against the snow.
I must be just about under the station,
he thought.
4:1
8.
He had to make decision here: did he keep going on what was probably a pointless missio
n or did he get his ass out of here right now? After all, what did he really hope to find? He didn’t know. He only knew that the feeling of necessity in him that had drawn him to this place originally was growing stronger by the second. It was not just a feeling, a hunch, a tickle at the back of his brain now, it was real, palpable. His skin was crawling and his belly felt like it had wings. There was a weird and nameless exhilaration building in him. His fingertips were tingling. His face felt hot. He was seeing everything around him vividly—crystals of ice sparkling in the flashlight beam, the snow not just a blanket of white but made of a million-billion tiny snowflakes meshed together like gears.
You can
’t stop now and you know it.
The tunnel was gradually widening. He crawled farther, pawing through rubble, knocking his knees on ancient chunks of coal, sliding over ice-licked beams, and around an immense metal drum rusted orange…and yes, here it was.
A body.
The body of a man sprawled amongst a tentacular webbing of old steam piping that came out of the wall of the tunnel. He had died violently, one leg broken at the knee, his left arm twisted nearly out of the socket. There was frozen blood in the snow all around him, sprayed up onto the tunnel walls, covering his parka in a sheath of red ice. From chest to crotch
his parka had ripped open by four lateral ruts like a tiger had clawed him. His face was blue, eyes wide, mouth opened in a contorted scream. The back of his skull was missing and his throat was torn out. His head was only connected to his body by a few red threads of meat. The blood was everywhere so Luke figured he had not been attacked as food, but out of rage: violent, demented rage.
He was trying to escape
. He was trying to get away from…from something absolutely horrible, a hideous nightshade with claws and teeth and an unspeakable elemental wrath. If you flip him over you’ll see that he was taken from behind, that his back was sheared open right down to the spinal vertebrae.
Yes, it was true and Luke knew it: his blood was of only secondary importance. An example had been made of him. His corpse was left here as a warning to the curious.
Question was: did Luke heed that warning or did he just keep pushing on where things would get far worse? Where he would perhaps come upon the creature that had killed this man?
4:28
now.
The wise thing to do, he knew, was to get out and leave the investigating for another day. Tomorrow, or instance, after the sun came up and he would have an entire day of sunlight to fig
ure out how to deal with this. But, no, he had to know. He had to see. He crawled further, over more wreckage and around another heap of coal. He was in the cellar of the station now. There could be no doubt of it. He could nearly feel its weight poised above him, ready to fall. There was still snow everywhere but he could see the shattered timbers overhead, the ceiling having caved-in in places, piping and ductwork tangled in and out of the snow and rubble.
Two more bodies.
Yes, the other two riders.
They were hanging from a beam by the feet. Old square-headed nails were driven through their boots to secure them. They had no heads. They were opened from throat to belly, eviscerated, what had been inside their body cavities yanked out and thrown in the snow.
It was grisly and horrifying to see them hanging there in the flashlight beam, but what was worse were the undead sleeping in the snow around them. A naked woman with glazed staring eyes, the corpse of a child at her side. A pair of teenage boys covered in a light down of snow. A man whose feet stuck out of a drift. An elderly man who had tunneled into a coal pile, his head visible, blood at his mouth. They were everywhere. Luke figured there were a dozen or more of them. Atop a pile of rubble was what looked at first like a coffin but was more along the line of an ancient, water-stained packing crate. Like something that might have been used to deliver a refrigerator. There was a bloody drag mark cut through the snow leading to it as if something heavy had been pulled through there…or
crawled
through there.
This is what he had been looking for.
He climbed up the rubble and put his hands on it…immediately withdrawing them. It was like a shock had gone right up to his elbows. He could still feel it. But what he felt more than that was what oozed from the crate itself…a noxious psychic odor of decay and infection, a seeping eldritch evil that was equal parts misery, defilement, and malignance. It seemed to get inside him like a cool, slow-running poison, spreading out through his veins in toxic rivers.
He was sweating.
He was shaking.
Steeling himself, he wedged the flashlight between two broken planks so he could see what he was doing. Then he gripped the lid but he couldn
’t get any purchase in his clumsy gloves. He stuffed them in his pockets and ran his fingers beneath the lip and pulled. It would barely come open. It was warped from years of weathering, swollen by decades of thaw and freeze and dripping water. He gave it everything he had and yanked it off. It clattered away in the wreckage.
A flood of something black like clotted sand poured over his knees.
No, not sand…
flies.
Literally thousands and thousands of fat meatflies that were
frozen solid. The crate was filled with them. But there was something more and he knew it. He thrust his hands inside regardless of how repulsive it was. He dug through the flies and his fingertips touched something that felt almost greasy and fleshy like tissue. He dug around it and saw some sort of black cloth that looked almost membranous like the skin of a bat’s wing. Whatever was under the flies was wrapped in it like a cloak. He pawed away flies from the top of the crate and saw part of a face that was gray and corrugated by lines and intersecting ruts like the bark of an old pine stump.
Then he saw a mouth.
It was open and filled with frozen flies. The central incisors were long and needle-like, curving backward like the fangs of a cobra. The lateral incisors and canines to either side were nearly as long, though not sharp. All of them were stained and discolored by midnight feedings, the gums shriveled back, ebon and puckered. Luke had no doubt that these were the teeth that had torn out the hunter’s throat. There could be no doubt of it. Some of the undead had teeth like that, but not to this degree.
More flies fell away
and he saw gray misshapen fingers, splintered yellow claws at the end of them. He pawed more flies from the face and revealed a single eye that was like some huge succulent blood-cherry set with tiny black veins. It looked right into him with a rabid, pestiferous hatred that made his thoughts melt into one another and it was hard to say what might have happened if he hadn’t have lost his footing and fell backwards.
He pulled himself up and a voice said,
“So it’s you, is it?”
Luke came around with the light, his other hand fishing out the Smith .45.
He thought for one frightening moment that the thing in the box had spoken. But no. It was not that creature nor was it its worshippers lying inert in the snow. The voice belonged to a woman in a heavy coat. She was bundled up tight and he could just see part of her face, which was dangerously pale, one eye that was bloodshot and going yellow as if with jaundice. A ribbon of saffron hair fell over her face. She was not one of them yet, but tonight she would offer herself and be drained and then tomorrow night—