Hag Night, page 36
Still the question remained: Where had they gone?
There was no doubt that they had come out of dormancy this night after many decades of sleep. They had risen up as part of some plan forged long, long ago. It stood to reason that they had a secondary location set up somewhere, maybe an old barn, a disused building, a sewer system or an abandoned warehouse. Chances were, they had a caretaker, too, who was part of the plan. He or she must have found a new hide for them. And it also stood to reason that they probably had many hides. She would have to find them. Somehow.
But that would be for later.
Thinking it over, she was surprised that they hadn’t had a caretaker here, some blind and obedient muscle to deal with intruders. Or maybe they were just too arrogant for that.
Chamber of Horrors was extinct now.
The entire crew had been wiped out. There would be many, many questions. If Wenda went back to what remained of her old life, she would have to answer them. Unless she didn’t go back. Unless she lived on the lam and hunted them down, staking vampires in cellars and attics, dragging them out into the sunshine in lonely places.
Bailey.
Megga.
“Oh dear Christ,” she said under her breath, tears breaking hot against her cheeks.
She gathered up her stakes and began.
2
Bailey was easy to find.
She had made no real effort to hide. She was in a simple trench cut from the earth. She still wore her snow gear. One pale hand rested against the side of her grave, the other was curled at her side. She was lovely even in death, even with the pallor of the tomb on her face. Wenda stood there, looking down at her, her guts crawling with a slow and uneasy nausea. Staking a stranger was one thing, but this was something else.
Suck it up. This is for Bailey. This is the least you can do. Look at her. She’ll make a pathetic vampire. She’ll be no good at it.
That was true. Wenda knew it was true.
Some would have natural cunning and animal instinct that would survive death. Some were probably already black at their core. And some would be efficient simply because they were efficient in all things. But not Bailey. She would make a mess of things because whatever slight tendrils of humanity remained in her would be revolted at what she had become.
Looking down at her, Wenda was sure of this.
The process of vampirism destroyed the warmth and poetry in their souls, replacing it with animal appetites and drives, leaving a great hollow within them. But she could see the self-revulsion, the self-loathing imprinted on Bailey’s face. That’s what had survived: the shame of what she now was.
Wenda found a heavy iron gear about the size of a dinner plate that would work just fine as a hammer. She unzipped Bailey’s coat, placing the stake to the right of her sternum.
“I’m sorry, sweetheart,” she said. “I really am.”
She brought the gear down with everything she had on the head of the stake, pushing it in maybe three inches. Bailey’s eyes fluttered open and stared. She looked surprised, but not unpleasantly so. The next hit with the gear drove the stake all the way through. Bailey gasped, her lips trembled. Then she closed her eyes and began to look very much like a corpse.
In the next hour, Wenda staked Burt and Morris.
She could not find Reg or Mole. Doc had been butchered so he was dead enough. Walking around in the dankness, lantern held high like some graverobber on the late show—or Chamber of Horrors, for that matter—she finally found Rule. The rats had killed him. There was no doubt of that. But while she had battled with Griska and the Death Hag, his body had been dragged off. He was hung upside down and drained. Wenda cut him down and staked him, even though it seemed a bit superfluous.
Megga was not far away.
She slept in a box with the lid closed. Obviously, she had reanimated because there was a smear of blood at her mouth. She made a beautiful vampire as Wenda had figured she would. She had stripped away her snowpants and parka and was only wearing her Graveyard Girl costume, a black and ragged dress that showed lots of leg and plenty of cleavage. The vampiress every teenage boy lusted after. She even had her hands folded over her bosom like one of Dracula’s brides. Nobody could play it to the hilt like she could.
There were two stakes left.
Wenda repeated the process, placing the stake just right of the sternum next to the round of one breast. She didn’t bother apologizing about any of it to Megga because she figured for the first time in her life, Megga was happy. Content.
“I’ll miss working with you,” Wenda said. “Your sarcasm always made me laugh.”
It was probably a very stupid thing to say, but it was true. It was the truest thing she could say about Megga. She brought the gear down and Megga came awake, screaming and thrashing, as the stake pierced her heart. Blood bubbled from her mouth and the stake entrance wound. Her hands flailed at Wenda. She hissed and spit, her fangs piercing her lower lip. Wenda hammered the gear down two more times…and she settled back into the box. With her hands hooked into claws, the blood splashed over her porcelain-white face, her mouth contorted in agony, Megga did not look to be in peace (like Peter Cushing always said on Chamber of Horrors), she looked like she’d died in extreme agony.
Wenda stumbled away, senseless, dizzy, spattered with blood. There was a screeching white noise in her head. She was shaking and trembling, mouth unable to stay closed. It was like some delayed reaction to shock and trauma.
She went down on her ass and held herself, rocking back and forth.
This is the right thing, this is the right thing, she thought. I know it’s the right thing and I have to do it. I just have to.
That made her feel scarcely better, but it seemed to clear her head. She wanted to stop. She wanted to get out of there. She needed some kind of closure, but there was one last thing to do. She looked amongst the crates, searching, searching. It took her some time, but she was guided by an inner directional sense that led her, in a roundabout way, exactly where she needed to go. The route took her past the remains of the Death Hag—which looked very much like a dozen different animals melted into a common hole: a rent wing, a bony vertebrae, a fan of claws, a desiccated rat tail the size of a python, a cloven monstrous skull—and through the wreckage of the mill that had fallen from above. She crawled under mangled iron gears, over shattered rafter beams, around piles of stone and heaped planks.
When she found a heap of boards hastily pulled together, she pulled out her last stake.
3
Wenda tossed aside the scraps of wood, dug some soil free, and found herself looking down into a passage that looked like the entrance to a prehistoric barrow tomb. She lowered her lantern down at arm’s length. The tunnel dropped down about eight feet and then curved upward, disappearing into the darkness.
Clever. Very clever, leech, but it won’t save you.
Sucking in a breath and ignoring the survival instinct that told her to get out, that she had beaten the odds again and again, she lowered herself down into the hole. It smelled dank, moist, and dirty down there like underground pipes clogged with human grease and rotting animal matter. The passage was low and she crab-crawled its length until a pit opened up before her, banked with black soil. It dropped down maybe five feet and down there was a single oblong packing crate. Its lid was smeared with ancient bloody handprints, what looked to be scraps of tissue and clumps of hair. The lair of a human rat.
She slid down there and sat before the box on her knees.
This was it.
This would be the last one.
Oh no, you’re wrong. The swarm left and you’ll never rest until you track it down and stake every one of them. You can already feel it inside you, the need to destroy all of them. Almost like the choice has been taken away from you as if you are no longer in control of your destiny.
And, God above, it sure seemed that way.
But that was for later so she tucked it away in the back of her mind and gathered her strength. She had to be vigilant and strong now. Any sign of weakness and he would exploit it as he had done for century upon century. Things like him never died because they were too cunning to die.
She set the lantern atop a stone so the light would be good and even for what she had to do. She set the silver blade next to it and took the last stake out of her belt. Then, with her free hand, she worked her fingers under the lip of the lid. Right away, like making contact with some high voltage line, she went stiff. Her belly rolled. Her hair stood on end. She was filled with a curious thrumming energy that made her feel weak, beaten, a heavy inexplicable anxiety feeding through her.
She shook it off.
It was only powerful if you believed it was.
She flipped the lid free. It landed in the dirt.
And screamed as a flurry of bats came winging out, circling around her, and flying off.
Griska was there, wrapped in his ragged hide coat. It was patched with mold, tufts of black fur spiky with dried blood. It looked like the wing of a buzzard. Bats crawled over it, others suckled at his throat. Two long white fingers were hooked around the edge of the box, the nails of which were dirty, splintered, and clawlike, dug right into the wood. The other three fingers of the hand were missing because she had chopped them off herself. He was still badly damaged, his face divided by the cleft she had slashed, one side set down lower than the other. His graying, scarred face was filled with hollows, ancient punctures, the left eye now a blackened scab, the right wide open, bleeding red and owl-like. His lips were pulled back from his hooked, pit viper teeth. They were stained pink from his feedings, black crud packed between them, the gums mottled like those of a wolf.
That single juicy blood orb of an eye was staring at her.
Its gaze drilling deep inside of her like a hot needle.
But Wenda was no fool. She’d watched the movies and she had read the books. Studious by nature, she had studied the undead in detail to prepare for Chamber of Horrors and various public appearances and signings. She knew what Griska was doing, how he was probing at her mind. How, had she not been a virgin of all things, he would have invaded her brain, drowning her mind in blackness until he owned her.
“No,” she said, her voice dry and scratching. “No, it won’t be that easy for you. You’re powerless and I know it.”
Gripping the stake in both hands, she brought it down with considerable force. A force strengthened by the memory of her friends and how they had died and how this repellent leech had taken her life away from her.
Griska screamed with a wild, hysterical screech of agony and desperation. His hands flayed at her, his head shook from side to side, his teeth gnashed, bats crawled from folds in his coat spreading their wings.
She brought the stake down again and again and again, shearing through his chest, cracking rib bones, ripping open his black beating heart, splitting it, rupturing it, mutilating it until it would beat no more. His final scream blew into her face with a stink of hot decay.
Blood burst from his cloven chest, it spouted from his mouth and nostrils, it squirted and sluiced from him, his remaining good eye popping like a red bubble. Wet and stinking with his drainage, Wenda fell back and away, her hands and the sleeves of her parka a brilliant crimson right up to the elbows. Griska squirmed in his bloodbath, writhing and twisting and shrieking. Bats flew free of him, hornets poured from his mouth in buzzing swarms. The box jumped and shook. His feet kicked out the lower panel, his clawing fingers cut trenches in the wood.
Then he sank in the steaming and bubbling blood. He tried to rise from it one last time like some hideous, jerking puppet. He was more skeleton than man by that point…bony digits scratching at the box for purchase, teeth chattering madly, his fleshless face hanging with strips of tissue, his scalp set with sparse clumps of hair. Then he sank back down, drowning in his own filth and ichor.
And that was it.
He was done.
By the time Wenda looked down inside his grave, the blood was evaporating, leaving nothing behind but what looked like fragments of bones, clotted dirt, and a floating white seam of fat. The air stank horrendously. It was as if every moldering casket in a cemetery had been blown open at the same time.
That was it.
Nearly out of her head from trying to breathe in that vaporous envelope of hot corpse gas, she scrambled out of the pit and back up the passage, crying and whimpering, Griska still screaming in her head like a banshee. She crawled out of the hole and didn’t stop moving until she found a ray of sunlight filtering through the mill wreckage above.
She had left her lantern below.
Once she had gathered herself, or as much as she would ever be able to, she didn’t bother trying to retrace her steps in the darkness. She started climbing, using the fallen beams and stones from the mill. It was dangerous and more than once she nearly fell, but after about twenty minutes she made it to the mill. The air up there was fresh, unbelievably fresh after the charnel pit below.
She fought her way through snowdrifts that came nearly up to her waist in places and made her way down to Cobton below. It was as she stood in the snow, looking over at Rule’s car, very close to where Burt had been killed, that certain practical matters began to occur to her.
There would be questions. Many questions.
The only thing she could do was create more mysteries. With that in mind she went around front of the Georgian house where Doc had died. His corpse was still in there. Upstairs, she found two more kerosene lanterns and she emptied them downstairs until the walls and rugs of Doc’s tomb were quite saturated with fuel. Something breaking inside her with a nearly audible crackling, she lit the place up with a match. The fire consumed the room, rushing up the walls and licking at that fine, dry woodwork, tasting the curtains and engulfing the furniture. It was her hope that the entire house would fall into the cellar so that the passage to the catacombs would never be found.
I’m sorry, Doc. So sorry. We all loved you so much.
4
The keys were in Rule’s car.
It started instantly and it wasn’t until she was driving past the wrecked bus in the Subaru, that the pain and trauma of it all began to take hold of her. She gripped the wheel and shook, but she did not slow down and she did not stop. She didn’t dare. Even in four-wheel drive, the Outback was just making it through the snow and drifts. The heater felt good. She was cold to her core and hadn’t realized it.
She thought of the undead.
She thought of cells of them waking up across the country, across the world. In her mind she could see them reaching from the shadows: pallid horrors, long-armed, grinning with red mouths. They would have to be stopped. They would have to be tracked down and destroyed wherever they were hiding. She wouldn’t be the only one. She knew that. Others would shrug off their disbelief to do what had to be done. She only hoped it would be in time.
“I’ll find you,” she said. “I’ll kill everyone of you.”
Two miles down the road, it began to snow again. The Subaru slowly vanished into a white wall of snow, shrinking away, becoming a dot and then vanishing altogether.
—The End—
Read on for a free sample of “The Hunt
ONE
The road bumped, rattled, and bit through Doreen’s stomach. She could feel the car’s shocks failing at every dirt pothole, the wheels groaning as dust kicked up in its tail-wind like the ghosts of the river men her mother had warned her about as a child. Each bump felt like a fresh punch in the kidney.
Breathe ... breathe ...
She closed her eyes, hunched over, bit her lip.
It would have been bad enough being driven along a dirt road if she were stone sober, Doreen thought. Drunk, it was outright torture.
“Where are we going?”
“This girl Jessie’s house in South Lyon,” Katy answered.
Doreen wrinkled her nose. “South Lyon? What the hell is in South Lyon?”
“Jessie’s house.”
She groaned and forced out a sharp burp that made her wince. Her stomach was on the verge of letting loose.
“Blake, slow down. Seriously.”
Blake shrugged his shoulders and lifted his hand to check the speedometer.
“Dude, I’m going five under.”
“I don’t care ... I feel like I’m gonna puke ... ”
“Don’t! Seriously! This is my mom’s car!”
“Just pull over ... ”
Katy patted her shoulder. “No, we’re almost there. You can make it.”
“I want to go home. Why are we going to fucking South Lyon?”
“We won’t stay long.”
“You assholes should’ve left me at Razor.”
Katy snarled. “You called us to come get you.”
They hit another pothole and Doreen almost lost control of her stomach. The scare gave her a moment of frantic agreeability. She accepted it as clarity.
“I know. Sorry. How far away are we?”
“About five minutes.”
“Where’s Drew?”
She wasn’t too far gone to notice the look Katy gave Blake, Blake gave Vic, and Vic gave Lindsey, no matter how smoothly it had been executed.
“We’ll figure everything out when we get there and you feel better.”
That wouldn’t do at all. It wasn’t any good leaving Drew with single girls, or really any girls at all.
She’d lost track of him on their way out of the club and that made her exceedingly nervous. She couldn’t protest, though, because just then she was feeling like all the legions of Hell were storming through her esophagus with blazing torches of undigested burrito and unsettled alcohol. Besides, Drew would figure out where she was on his own if he wanted to. He seemed to always find her when he needed her, no matter the obstacles or distractions. He was good that way ... and sometimes bad that way, depending on who Doreen asked. She liked it well enough, though, and the thought made her want to smile. She could still feel the burn of his kiss on her lips and in her nose, the press of his hips against her thighs.
