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He charged through the house, going from room to room and finding nothing. But he knew what he was looking for was on the premises. If Bob had been with him, he would have tracked the corruption to its source almost immediately. But Luke did not have Bob anymore. All he had was that internal compass and it had been pointing right at this house.
The cellar.
Of course, the cellar.
By the time he opened the
basement door, he heard Stephani come in the front door. “LUKE!” she cried out. “IT’S STARTING TO GET DARK! WE HAVE TO GO! WE HAVE TO GO NOW!”
As soon as he
climbed the steps down into the basement he knew there was a Carrier hiding down there.
The odor was unmistakable: the smell of death and perhaps something beyond death. Once you smelled it, you
’d never forget it.
And smelling it,
he felt the familiar tenseness take him over, making his heart pound and his scalp feel tight on his skull. It was part anxiety, part fear, and part exhilaration…because destroying them gave him a sense of purpose and a satisfaction that was nearly indescribable.
It was a dirty, ugly job.
But it had to be done.
Flashlight in one hand and his duffel of goodies in the other, he searched the basement
first in kind of a wild angry rush, throwing doors open and kicking boxes out of his way, swearing and puffing with the exertion…then settling down, knowing that he had to keep his head. Then he took his time, looking everywhere: behind the bar, under the pool table, in the backs of closets, beneath any blankets he saw piled.
Nothing.
Nothing.
There were only four rooms down there—the rec room with the bar, the mechanical room with the furnace and water heater, a storage room, and a small cramped bedroom that had also become a storage room after Casey Pruitt went away to college three years before.
He stood there, breathing hard, angry.
He could smell them…but where were they?
And it was then, as he was poised on the brink of tearing through every room again knocking down shelves and kicking in walls, that he remembered.
The mechanical room.
The root cellar.
Anne Stericki was down there. He knew it for a fact.
He had to give her credit for that; she was much craftier than a lot of them that holed up in the first dark space they could find, completely oblivious to the fact that they might be located and destroyed. There were many of them that Luke wanted—in fact, he really wanted
all
of them—but Anne Stericki had always been high on his list. Not just because of what she’d done to her husband Alger, and others in the neighborhood, but because much like his wife and daughter, she had returned from the dead with a certain amount of cunning.
He feared the cunning ones most of all.
And Anne had become, in a way, his nemesis.
A
s smart as he thought he was, as careful and methodical was his planning, she was always one step ahead of him because she was desperate and desperation had its own intellect.
Leslie Pruitt was always canning pickles and tomatoes and banana peppers from her garden out back. She used to bring over Mason jars of pickled dilly beans and Slippery Jim pickles in the spring. Nothing quite like them with beer. He recalled Doug Pruitt complaining about the many hours his wife spent canning and storing her preserves down in the root cellar.
Luke went into the mechanical room.
There were no windows to let in the sun and the power had been out for some time by then, so he had to find his way around with
a flashlight. A tool bench. A stack of Rubbermaid containers. Boxes of Christmas ornaments. Halloween decorations. A shelf with a lot of Casey’s old toys and games on it.
Where the hell was it?
There. On the other side of the tool bench behind the boxes. He kicked them out of the way and there was the trapdoor. With barely any hesitation, he gripped the handle and pulled it up. There was an eyehook on the wall for it and he secured it.
Crouching down, he played his light around down there.
The smell hit him full force right away: pungent, almost violent.
The root cellar was maybe fifteen feet long, six wide. Shelves of pickles and wax beans along the walls and in the center of the dirt floor, next to a pile of soil, there was a trench dug down about three feet. In it was a shape beneath a sheet.
He checked his watch. It was 5:12.
Jesus.
The sun was either down or close to it.
“LUKE!” Stephani cried out. “
ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR FUCKING MIND?”
“No,” he told her, “but if I don’t get this one, I will be. Anne’s down here. She got Bob. She got everyone in the neighborhood.”
Stephani’s green eyes were narrowed and he could see she wanted to lash out at him and tell him what a fool he was, but she didn’t.
He
could feel the hairs standing up on the back of his neck as he climbed down the ladder into the pit where Anne Stericki whiled away the daylight hours in the womblike darkness. He hung his flashlight from the pull string for the light bulb that dangled above. It provided pretty good light, but also made shadows crawl like slinking black cats.
He pulled off his parka and winter gloves, s
et them aside. Beneath he wore the black rain slicker and yellow Platex gloves. He pulled a stake and hammer out of his duffel and hopped down into the trench, pulling the plastic dental face shield visor on, adjusting it so it would not slip off.
Anne had gotten pretty good at hiding. He knew for a fact that she changed her hide every few days. Most would have been satisfied with the basement, but not her. She had to have a root cellar, a dug out grave, and a sheet. She had folded it under her and then pulled the rest over
her like a sleeping bag.
But it was no sleeping bag.
It was a shroud.
Very good, Anne. Very clever.
Luke grabbed the edge of it and pulled it back, exposing her. Flies and dank, sickly-sweet smelling heat rolled off her and he had to turn away from the stench. He never understood the heat because they were always as cold as thawing meat.
She had brought a reign of terror down on the neighborhood, she had become the local boogeyman…or
boogeywoman.
And to Luke, she was what Dracula was to Van Helsing. But she had been cunning and sly. A walking pestilence that returned from death with many of her reasoning faculties intact…which was something that could not be said for many of the others who did not even seem to understand what they were, only that they needed blood and would have it at any cost and seemed almost confused when you didn’t want to give it to them.
Finding Anne was a great satisfaction.
But also a great horror that brought with it a sense of loss that was incalculable. Because Anne had been his friend and poised there, with the stake held high, he wanted to shake her awake and say,
it’s all bullshit…right, Anne? None of this is true and you’re not really one of them. Please, please, please, Anne, tell me it’s not true.
But it was true.
And, dear God, did it ever hurt.
He could not weaken. She had been a fine woman in life that made one especially nasty parasite in death.
She was still wearing the same blue nightgown she’d been wearing when they put her in the mortuary out at Salem Cross Cemetery. Only now it was dark with crusty brown stains, torn and filthy with soaked-in blood as was the rest of her. She had fed well last night and was bloated up like a barrel, blood on her curled fingers, in her greasy hair, splashed over her mouth and staining her chin. It was even on her cheeks and forehead like ghastly warpaint against the graveyard pallor of her skin, which was an almost phosphorescent white.
She must have bathed in it.
An absolute blood feast.
So much that it had leaked from her mouth and nostrils and even her ass and privates if the red-soaked sheet beneath her was any indication.
Fucking leech, you goddamn fucking leech.
He swatted flies out of his way, feeling them crawling over his neck and through his hair, buzzing at his ears.
He could have used Stephani’s crossbow. It would have been a neater job.
But t
his was personal.
He wanted to
feel
the bitch die.
He wanted to know her agony, experience her suffering.
He looked down at the corpse in the trench. She stared up at him with huge red-veined eyes that were blank as glass. Holding down the bile in his stomach, he raised the sharpened stake above his head with both hands.
“
Long time no see, Anne,” he said, and brought it down with a twisted cry of vengeance, a weird combination of pleasure and hate and necessity, his mind filled with the faces of her victims.
His aim was perfect.
The stake pierced just left of the sternum, pushing aside rib slats and piercing her heart just as she began to move. The effect was instantaneous. She came awake howling with a wild screeching roar, white filth-stained fingers clawing at the visor that covered his face…but even with it on, he could smell her breath, which was hot and thick with stolen blood. She writhed and contorted with slick, greasy reptilian gyrations, head thrashing from side to side.
And blood.
It did not just ooze from the wound, but fountained and sprayed, splashing his slicker and gushing against his face visor like hot seething lava from the cone of a volcano. She was so swollen with stolen life that she seemed to literally explode, hemoglobin gushing from not only the stake entrance wound but from her mouth and nostrils and even her eyes which filled with blood, bulging from their sockets and bursting. Blood flowed in rivers from every available orifice in waves of stinking red until it seemed the trench was awash with it.
And by then, manically wiping
the mess from his visor with his sleeve, he had the hammer in his hand. Gripping the stake, which was dyed red and oily with blood, he brought the hammer down once, twice, three times. Her upper body arched up one last time, her mouth opening and her lips peeling back to reveal gnashing gray fangs and an explosion of foul black slime gurgled forth from her throat…and then she fell back into the thrashing pool of blood, emitting a loud shotgun-like burping blast of putrescent air and began to decay.
By that point she had been dead
over two months and the decomposition came and went fast. She bloated up like a fleshy balloon, her skin striating with bands of purple and blue, a grayish-green fungus spreading over her throat and face and the back of her hands. She shook a final time and the gases of putrefaction were released in one whistling foul expulsion of hot, sickening air that turned to a boiling steam in the cold air.
Luke pulled himself from the trench, gasping and gagging, finally peeling off his visor and vomiting until his abdomen jerked with dry heaves. The blood, the decay, the warm stench of death like spoiled pork…he could barely breathe.
With a minute or two, it had pretty much dissipated.
When he was able, he looked down into the trench. What he saw was ghastly. In the old vampire movies—and books, for that matter—the staked monster always looked to be at peace, rosy-cheeked and serene now that the corruption of evil had been expunged.
Bullshit.
What they looked like in reality was an especially unpleasant staked corpse that had died in horror and violence. And that
’s how Anne Stericki looked down in the trench. Her knees were drawn up, one hand stuck in the mud wall of her grave, the other thrown up over her face, fingers splayed and stiff with rigor. Her neck was horribly arched and looked broken, her eyes gone, her nose fallen in, her head angled down into the trench, her mouth wide in an agonized scream that had literally sheared open the flesh at the corners of her lips in jagged seams. Cooling, clotting blood washed from side to side in the trench, filling her mouth and then running free like the ocean filling a sea cave and then retreating.
It was horrible.
There was no other word for it.
Luke pulled the hatchet from his bag and grabbed her head by the hair and with three quick, savage chops, he had decapitated her. He threw her head behind the shelves and
shivered when her teeth snapped together one last time.
That was it.
He peeled off his bloody face shield and slicker and tossed them away. Quickly, he gathered up his equipment and staggered blindly up the stairs with Stephani and out the front door where the icy February wind was most welcome, blowing the stench from him and cleaning the stink out of his nose.
He stood there for a time, just breathing.
Stephani held onto him and they trembled together. It was 5:36 p.m.
It was fully dark out.
The vampires were in the streets.
—The End—
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