He climbed into his parka and boots, dreading what he would have to do this day but knowing it very much had to be done.
Stephani returned in a parka and snowpants. She wore a facemask, leather gloves, and ski goggles. “Let’s do this,” she said.
75
By the time they reached
13
th
Street it was late afternoon. It had been a busy day. Luke decided if they were going to do this and do this right, then they needed another snowmobile. They went out to Stilson’s Marine on his Polaris and picked up another Widetrack LX for Stephani. This way, they could carry more gear and if something happened to one of the machines, they had back-up. He had always worried that his LX would die out at some desolate farm and he’d never make it home on foot before the sun went down.
With the two machines, they began randomly clearing houses, destroying twelve vampires in the course of about three hours.
But it was all just a warm-up for his own neighborhood.
When they reached
13
th
Street, what had been building inside of him broke free and he had to pull his machine to a stop so he could get his bearings again. Stephani did not ask why he stopped, she just pulled alongside, watching him as he sucked in glacial breaths of air, trying to drive the reaching shadows from his head. It was the neighborhood.
His
neighborhood. The familiarity and calm it had once inspired in him was gone, replaced by some grim monolithic foreboding that pulled the wind out of his lungs. In his mind he could see the neighborhood at high summer. He could see his neighbors, his house, and smell green grass and flowers; see his daughter riding her bike up and down the sidewalk with the streamers on the handlebars flying, ringing the bell he had put on for her…and he could see Sonja sitting on the porch in her wicker chair waiting for him as she had always waited for him.
But that was all gone. It
was history and pain.
What he
was seeing now was the neighborhood engulfed in snow, the streets unplowed, drifts cutting off driveways, trees leaning under burdens of white, houses shrouded. And the only sound was the wind moaning, iced tree limbs clattering together. It was desolate, deserted, and haunted.
“You okay?” Stephani
asked, killing her LX.
“Yeah. I’
m all right.”
But, God, what a lie that was!
He was not all right and he figured he never would be again. He was broken and ruptured, everything inside him cast about like leaves before a good autumn blow. He felt hollow inside, completely empty.
It took him a moment or two before he could pull up before his house.
Stephani, bless her, led the way up the steps and through the door. Inside, it was silent and cold. He had not been back since the day he had found Stephani and gone out to the burning pits. The woodstove had long ago gone out and it was like stepping into a meat locker.
“
Well?” she said.
“
We go through it, room by room,” he told her. “If they’re here, it ends today for them.”
They made a meticulo
us search of the house but they did not find Sonja or Megan. But they had been there. Luke knew that the moment he stepped through the door and felt an icy dread open up inside him. They had been there, waiting for him. And he found evidence of that in his bedroom upstairs. The bed was unmade as he had left it, but the blankets and sheets were stained with blood like Anne Stericki’s had been. There was an imprint where someone had laid, leaving a curious gray tinge to the sheets. They found the same thing in Megan’s bedroom. That imprint and gray tinge
.
They have made shells of your wife and daughter! They sleep in the dirt!
Yes, yes, even now he could hear those words and never had their impact been greater or their portent more disturbing.
They, they, they.
That’s what kept bothering him, gnawing away at him.
Count
RedEye was one of them, but that hardly explained anything.
“
It’s definitely not safe for me to stay here anymore,” Luke said.
“I don’t think it ever was. They
could have come for you any time they chose.”
Sighing, he knew she was right. This was
their
house, too, Megan’s and Sonja’s. They’d only come after him that once, but never again. That was strange, maybe it was even telling if you knew how to read it. But he did not. The whys and hows of them were still beyond him. According to the traditional literature, the first one they should have fed on should have been him. It was always loved ones first. That’s what the books said. But, then again, when he was out cold in that ice tunnel beneath the old coaling station the vampires had not attacked him either.
There
’s a method to this madness, my friend. You can be sure of that. There’s a scenario at work here and it is not coincidental. You are being toyed with. Maybe it’s because you’ve killed so many of them and maybe it’s something else.
But it
’s there.
And you can feel it.
And he could. Standing there, the house cold and empty and almost forlorn around him, he could feel something at work behind the scenes as he had for many weeks now. There was a puppeteer at work out there and for lack of a better name it was Count RedEye and his clan.
“
No sense hanging around here, Luke,” Stephani said, starting down the stairs to the first floor. “Let’s just pack up whatever you need here and get out.”
She was right, of course…and was it his imagination or did she seem like she couldn
’t wait to go? Like the house bothered her in some way? That was the feeling he was getting off her. Maybe he was wrong, yet it persisted.
He followed her downstairs, mentally making a list of things he would need and knowing that
even with both snowmobiles it would take more than one trip to bring it all over. The roads would be impassable for his pick-up and it had been sitting too long; the battery would be tapped out by the cold.
“
Luke,” Stephani said from the hallway that led down to the spare bedroom and bathroom. “Look at this.”
He went down there.
“What?”
“
Look…were these here before?”
There were ruts in the wall and, no, they had not been there before. There were four of them dragged down the length of the wall like maybe somebody had pulled a garden trowel along the plaster board. They were cut in deep. It would have taken great strength to do something like that.
“Like…kinda like claw marks,” she said.
He
did not argue with her because that’s exactly what they looked like. Just looking at them made cold fear wing in his belly. He tried to come up with rational explanations, but even if some nut had snuck in here while he was gone…what point would there be in scratching the wall? None. Absolutely none. And a voice in his head was telling him it was no nut any more than it was done by accident. This was malicious and it was personal.
RedEye. This is the calling card of fucking Count RedEye.
It was the only thing that made sense. He didn’t think Sonja or Megan—their undead selves—would do something like this. He just couldn’t see the point in it. But with RedEye…sure.
I’ve been here and I’ll be back. Every night a little closer, believe that, Luke Barrows.
He tried to dismiss that as some crazy bullshit, his imagination running wild.
“
Luke?” Stephani said.
He heard her voice but he could not respond.
His attention was fixed on the wall, on those ruts.
Claws. It was done with claws. You were spared in the tunnel beneath the coaling station because RedEye wanted you to come home where your wife and daughter were waiting for you with grinning mouths and long sharp teeth. That’s why you were spared. Only you went to Stephani’s. You gummed up the works and ruined his fun. But it’s not over between the two of you and you goddamned well know it.
“Luke…are you all right?”
He nodded.
“I’m okay.”
But he wasn
’t okay because it was rising up in him again: that weird exhilaration he seemed to get right before he went on a trip. He touched his fingers to the wall. He pressed them into the ruts and the feeling was electrical. Not a jolt like sticking his fingers in a hot light socket, but more of a tingling that ran from his fingertips and over his palm and right up his arm. He felt the trip almost begin, then it faded. He saw a parade of distorted images that made him feel weak in the stomach, but that was it. Whatever Count RedEye was, he had enormous power to leave even this much of a lingering psychic signature. Luke let himself relax, then he stuck his fingers back in the ruts, feeling the connection once again. As Stephani looked on, he walked up and down the hallway, dragging the fingers of his left hand through the ruts.
It was there and he nearly felt his mind take off, but it just wouldn
’t go.
“
He has a name,” he said.
Stephani was staring at him.
“What?”
“
RedEye,” he said. “He has a name. I can’t quite see it yet, but it’s there. It’s an old name and he is a very old thing. But…but…but…”
“Are you sure you’
re all right?”
“
Yeah. I’m okay.” He shivered. “RedEye. When I put my fingers in those ruts, I can
feel
him and get a sense of what he is.”
“A vampire. A Carrier.”
He nodded. “Yes, yes…but more than that. Much more. A vector, a plague-spreader. He…he doesn’t stand alone. There’s a clan of them…a cult…a family…I don’t know, but they’re all terribly old and they stand with him to spread disease, to sow Vampirus to the four winds.”
“Just take it easy, Luke.”
“I’m all right. I’m just seeing all these things, you know? Not the whole picture. Not yet. I just get glimpses. I see around the edges, but I
am
seeing.”
Stephani chewed her lip.
“You’re really buying into this psychic stuff, aren’t you?”
He shrugged.
“I guess I am. There’s something there. Something awake inside me.”
The thing was, he knew she believed it, too. In fact, she believed it even more than he himself did. The certainty was there in her eyes along with something else that might have been apprehension.
“Can we go now?” she said.
“
We need to go out to the garage.”
That’s where he kept his stockpile of stakes. They had to get them. But he knew then that getting stakes was only of minor consideration because there was something else out there and he knew it. He practically ran towards the other side of the house, down the kitchen steps to the door that led to the attached garage.
“Luke!” Stephani said. “What the hell are you doing?”
“I don’t know.”
He gripped the brass doorknob. He got that same weird little tingling sensation off of it that he had gotten from placing his fingers in the ruts of the wall. It arced hot inside him. Breathing in slowly and then exhaling, he threw the door open and a stink of old blood wafted into his face. It was not fresh but days old, the cold air keeping it well at bay…but it was there.
And there was a good reason for it.
“Oh Christ,” Stephani said, turning away.
Bob, good old loyal Bob, had been strung up from the rafters by a length of clothesline rope that noosed his back legs.
He was impaled by about twenty stakes. He had been disemboweled, everything inside his body cavity yanked out and tossed around the garage. His blood was pooled on the floor in a frozen puddle. It was sprayed up the walls and splattered over the workbench, droplets had run like red tears down the window and iced in place.
“Help me,” Luke said, his voice breaking in his throat over the loss of one of the best friends he’d ever had.
He got the stepladder out. He climbed it and cut the rope with his K-bar while Stephani held Bob’s carcass up. He climbed down and took the animal from her. Bob’s body was stiff and cold, his fur spiky with dried and frozen blood. He had been badly used. Even before he was strung up and gutted, he had been abused horribly. One of his eyes had been torn out by the stalk, two of his legs broken in several places, his ribs staved in. Most of the fur was torn from his head as if someone had tried to scalp him.
Sobbing low in his throat, feeling not only Bob’s death
, but that of his wife and daughter, Luke cradled the dog’s body. “They were punishing me, old pal. That’s why they did this to you. But don’t you worry…those responsible will suffer for this. I’ll see each and everyone of those fucking things pay for this…”
“Luke…” Stephani said.
He took Bob out to the shed in the backyard and wrapped him in a blanket. It was the best he could do. In the spring he would bury him properly. He tried to remove the stakes but they were frozen in place. “I’m sorry, Bob. This is all my fault and, God knows, I’m so…sorry…”