Vampire Dreams (Bloodscreams #1) (7 page)

“Thank you, Briggs.”

He was tired and hungry. He didn't want to admit defeat, but he wasn't as young as he once was. With Briggs gone, the Meyers boy's parents came up to Stroud. They'd just done a spot for McEarn's a.m. report, pleading on the local broadcast for the safe return of their child. Some people were convinced now that young Timmy, and Ronnie Cooper, were the victims of foul play--that it was either abduction for ransom or abduction for lascivious purposes.

Dave and Kitty Meyers were hoping against hope that Timmy was being held for the lesser of the two evils and that a ransom contact would soon be made. Stroud feared the worst. He feared the boy was dead. Feebly, he said to the parents, “Briggs, the other men ... we're all doing everything we possibly can.”

“We know that, Doctor Stroud,” said Dave Meyers, a car salesman in town. “But if you don't mind, we'd prefer you let Doctor Banaker and Chief Briggs handle things now.”

Word spread like weeds here. The Meyerses had already gotten word that the outsider, Dr. Stroud, had gone to their neighbors, the kindly Carroll family, and had accused their son of Timmy's disappearance. Probably even before he'd returned to the old graveyard site everyone from Magaffey to the last volunteer had heard the story of his brutal interrogation of poor little Joey Carroll, and how he had intimidated Ray and his wife.

It was enough to send him to the Starlite Diner to take breakfast there, a box of the scattered bones in the back of his Jeep. He ate while brooding about the imbecility of it all. He wondered if he shouldn't just return to the manse and leave Andover and its problems to itself. He ate alone, the few other patrons staring. When he paid his bill and got to the door he heard the waitress gasp at the size of the tip he'd left behind.

-5-

By noon, little Timmy Meyers remained missing. No ransom calls or notes, no articles of clothing found, no further “tip” calls coming in from people who thought they'd seen the boy flitting about the woods or alleyways around their homes, no nothing. All that Briggs might boast of was a cache of bones, too many bones to count.

Stroud packed some of the bones in a small crate, wrapped them with stuffing and Styrofoam, labeled the box to go to the excellent crime lab in Chicago with which he had always maintained good ties, and asked Mabel Stanica, Briggs's secretary, to see that the box get over to UPS for overnight delivery. Mabel worried about the cost being exorbitant. He snapped at her over the inappropriateness of her concern. Much later, around ten, when he crawled into bed at the manse, he was angry with himself for snapping at the blue-haired Mabel who'd been sniffling when he left the Andover City Police Station.

Overtired, his mind racing with images of the Meyers boy combined with the skull and bones the boys had unearthed like so many pirates playing at Peter Pan games, he rested but fitfully. His sleep was haunted by old Magaffey whispering of burials in sunken churches, ghouls beneath haunted lakes, of death-tolling banshees and sinister changelings. Magaffey's sunken and pinched face spewing forth a ballad of Baal, of specters and unholy creatures, dissolving into Banaker's legion of white-clads looking over him, picking at his body with their probes and forceps, cutting at his cranium to peel back layers of skin to reveal his own artificial skull cap. This steel plate was approximately the size of a tea saucer in a child's tea set. Banaker's people poked and pried it from its moorings amid the bone surrounding it. Cut from its lodging where it covered his brain, they then simply held the steel plate up to ridicule and laughter. The entire operating theater was filled with spectators and the nauseous sounds of hilarity. Meanwhile, his brain lay exposed and palpable, subjected to taunts by cold implements, and it began to come apart like an overripe melon. There was nothing now to protect his head or the pulsating gray matter that rose and swelled and fell as the blood flowed through it.

The horrid image faded only when the tenderest of touches of a human finger was made. It was her touch and it healed the pain. It was Pamela Carr, leaning over him, pressing her body into his and magically closing the large, open wound with her mouth. Her mouth smothered him. He relaxed under her caress. His sleep calmed, and his mind focused on her to the exclusion of the worst night he'd spent in Andover since his arrival back in late November.

In moments he was whole again. He visualized himself a complete man and she had transformed the operating theater into a lovely white and silken bedroom. He watched her uncinch the white lab coat and it fell away in slow motion.

Beneath she wore only lacey underthings. Pamela raised her arms and invited him to take from her all he desired. The dream was so vivid, so real, he felt the firmness of her breasts, the fire of her lips and the force behind them. He felt the thighs as they wrapped about him.

The dream was like none he had ever experienced, and in it he became lost in her hypnotic hold.

“Jesus, Jim, leave it to you to get us lost in the middle of fucking nowhere.”

“Will you take it easy, please?”

The car interior was lit as Maude Bradley tried desperately to locate County Road 17 on the map, but all the map offered were state and interstate roads. “How in the hell did we get on this road?”

“Should've stopped at that gas station when we got off the interstate and asked like I said.”

“Now it's my fault. You get us lost and it's my fault, hmmmmmpf!”

“Andover's around here somewhere. Had a cousin who used to live in Andover.”

“Lot of good that does us, Jim.”

They'd gotten off the interstate to find a place to sleep since Jim was dozing at the wheel and Maude didn't drive at night. Now they were lost on one of those unmarked little pavements that was barely wide enough for two vehicles to pass--not that it mattered. They hadn't seen another pair of headlights for forty minutes. They had seen empty fields waiting for the corn to grow, they'd passed a slip of the Spoon River, going over a bridge, and they'd passed a graveyard that stood out in the moonlit glow of the early spring night casting out the faint message that where there was a graveyard there had to be a town ... but where was it?

Now they were angry with one another and their frustrating circumstances. It was the kind of fix Jim Bradley always thought it took a fool to get mixed up with; the kind of situation that ranked with running out of gas, forgetting one's wallet, keys, or losing one's glasses. At the moment, he was so tired and sleepy that he couldn't even see with his glasses, and if Maude said one more word, he feared he'd explode.

“Hell with it,” Jim announced, his protruding Adam's apple bobbing with irritation. “We'll just park it right here, and to hell with it. Curl up in the back--”

“Sleep in the car?”

“Yes!”

“All right ... I guess....”

“I'll sleep in front. Come daylight, we'll find the interstate easy enough.”

“Wish I'd never heard of Sarah Giddings,” she replied, crawling over the seat.

Jim and Maude Bradley were going to Sarah Giddings's third wedding. Maude and Sarah had been roommates in college, but like Maude, she hadn't finished, marrying instead. In Maude's case, she'd remained with Jim Bradley through the years. “Sarah's somethin',” Jim commented.

“You men ... all alike.”

“Oh, Maudie--”

“So Sarah's got long legs and a pencil-thin waist--”

“Don't start!”

“She's a vamp, Jim. Can't keep a man because she runs right over every man she's ever had.”

Not like you,
 Jim thought but did not say. “I got to sleep,” he moaned instead.

“Sure, honey ... you get some rest now and things'll look better in the morning. Lock your doors.”

They both worked to be certain all the doors were locked. “Thank God we thought to bring the car blankets,” she said, spreading one over him and then herself. “Night.”

“Night, Maudie.”

An hour into sleep Maude felt the impact of something like a tree fall over the rooftop of the car. It made her sit up and exhale with a gulping scream. Jim was also awakened by the sudden impact of something hitting the car. Whatever it was, it had been heavy. The sudden pound was like the slamming of a door. When he and Maude opened their eyes, however, all their attention was on the strange fog that engulfed the car. He had seen fog over the river when they drove past the bridge before, but this was pretty far from there. Valley fog, he reasoned, but it was an unusual fog in that the windows hadn't become wet with condensation. They were clear, so clear you could see the swirls in the fog on the other side of the glass, swirls that spiraled and dipped and did little loop-d-loops. It was like looking through thick gauze.

“Fog,” he said, having become somewhat mesmerized by the stuff.

“To hell with the fog! What was that noise? What struck the car?” she wanted to know, couldn't let it go.

“I don't know.”

“On your tombstone! That's what they'll put on your tombstone! I--Don't--Know.”

“Probably a tree branch.”

“Can't you just get out and check?”

“It's over.... What's the use of trudging out in the dark and--”

“Flashlight is in the glove compartment. Hand it to me and I'll have a look!” she said in a tone that clearly challenged Jim.

He shoved off the blanket about him and smacked out at the button that popped open the little compartment, sending papers and a screwdriver to the floor. He snatched out the flashlight and turned it on and banged his shoulder on the door, forgetting to unlock it first.

“Christ,” he muttered, “you can't leave it alone, can you?”

Before she could answer, he got out. Two feet from the car he was out of the eerie fog. It was bizarre. The fog seemed to be seeping from the tree under which they'd parked, and the car was rocking, literally rocking now, with Maude inside. He could hear her gulping and shouting as the thing bounced within the fog.

“What the hell ... is going on?”

He flashed his beam up into the tree, the light slicing through the unnatural fog, the edges of light turning the stuff into a gooey, dripping substance. It was like looking through an egg held up to the light. Inside the huge fog egg something dark and large moved, shook, and began to take form. The outline became larger and larger as the fog decreased, sucked up into the black Goliath, until it just hung there at the end of Jim's light, enormous and black, a large, six-foot-long inky seed pod, just dangling in the tree.

“God...” he moaned. It was finally happening, and it was happening to him and to Maude. 
Aliens
 ... aliens from another time and place, the fog some sort of protective covering, the seed pod the ship, and inside ... 
inside
?

Fascinated and fearful all at once, he went to stand beneath the looming black form in the tree over the car. The rear car door opened and Maude got out as if in a daze. She walked to the rear of the car and began climbing up the trunk and to the top, reaching out to touch the black conical shape there. She seemed as mesmerized by it as he, maybe more so.

“Maude, Maude,” he cautioned. “Don't touch it, Maude.”

She acted as though she could not hear.

“Maude!” he shouted, his voice echoing all the way down to the Spoon.

She reached it with her fingertips and said, “Take me.... I want you to have me ... I do, I do...”

The black torpedo opened up and Jim fell back with abhorrence at the power of the wind that hit him like a whale fluke. Two enormous wings unfurled to take Maude in, stabbing her about the shoulders with talons that jutted out, and lifting her large frame into their folds. Jim saw the fetid eyes of the creature and they locked on him with enthusiasm. From its mouth flowed the fog, escaping with it was some dribbling material that was neither saliva nor blood. It plopped onto the top of the car just as the fangs sank deep into Maude's flesh. The creature took another more powerful gripping hitch with those fangs on Maude's throat and began feeding on her.

Terrified, Jim, knew he could not possibly save Maude; he knew instinctively that this creature that traveled by cover of fog, perched upside down in trees, had more strength and power in its smallest part than he had in his entire body. Jim hadn't a weapon on him, nothing beyond the Ford.

He threw down the light and leapt into the driver's seat, turning the key, burning the ignition when it did come on, tearing away from the tree. Tears streaming down his face, he saw Maude's ankles in the rearview mirror in the distance where she hung, lifeless, in the tree beneath the creature.

“God, oh, God!” He shook as he cried and pleaded, hitting the gas full throttle.

He tore back the way he came, rampaging over the little bridge at the Spoon River, rattling the timbers. He screeched tires at the hairpin curve that he'd taken at twenty just hours before. He saw a sign for a main road in the distance and blubbering, crying, he saw that he was going to make it out alive. Maude ... there'd been no way he could've saved her, and had he tried, he'd be dead now, too. This way, at least, he could get help, return with weapons to the scene.

The road here skirted the Spoon, a deep ravine to his left leading to the silvery stream. He was doing eighty, eighty-five in a car that couldn't take it, a car with a four-cylinder engine.

A sign came up so fast he could hardly read it: andover--4 miles.

Then something smashed into the car overhead, denting the top inward. It made him weave, almost lose control. Another powerful pounding rent the top just above his head. It was the thing! Finished with Maude, it was now atop the car, after him. He hit ninety just as the driver's side window was smashed in and his throat was gripped in a powerful vice. The grip choked off his air and suddenly snapped his neck.

The car careened off into the ravine with something large and black atop it, tearing out the human prey from the window, latching onto a passing tree just moments before the vehicle hit the water. The top where the creature had been lying seethed with an acidic smoke at the touch of the water.

Jim Bradley, neck broken, felt his limp body being heaved up and up into the branches of a gnarly tree, his last sensation the smells of pine sap and blood intermingling with the smell of an animal, a smell he had not forgotten since childhood, the odor of a nest of rats found beneath the old rotten boards of his father's tool shed. The last thing Jim saw was the humanlike eyes of the monster which had hooked itself once again upside down to the top of the tree and had hooked its prey up in the manner of a large IV, to feed on Jim's blood.