Department 19: The Rising (37 page)

The man who was calling himself Robert Smith pressed the brake pedal of the jeep, bringing the vehicle to a halt at the side of the highway, churning up a thick cloud of orange dust as it did so. Smith waited for the dust to clear, then looked up at the road sign standing in front of his jeep.

CALIENTE 12
CALIFORNIA HIGHWAY DEPARTMENT

The green sign looked exactly as it had during his vision in the sweat lodge: the chipped paint around the edges, the dents and scratches where stones had been thrown against it by passing cars, and the shallow indentations made by small-calibre bullets, presumably fired from cars as they roared along this desolate desert highway.

I found it,
he thought.
It’s real, and I found it.

Smith was coated in dust, his skin as rough as sandpaper where
sand had glued itself to the sweat of his body. He had not showered for two days, had barely even slowed the jeep’s progress west. He had taken food when he stopped to fill its tank with petrol, and slept, for three fitful hours, when the lines on the highway had started to blur before his exhausted eyes, sometime around dawn of the second day.

Just after the sign lay the entrance to a dirt road, rutted by the repeated passage of wide, heavy-treaded tyres. It headed straight into the desert. Smith shaded his eyes with his hand and followed the track through the sand until it disappeared, apparently at the horizon. The desert shimmered with rising heat as he put the jeep into drive, and turned on to the road.

The jeep’s suspension howled in protest as the little vehicle bounced and rolled along the track. Smith kept it slow; he did not want to break an axle or puncture a tyre out here in the middle of nowhere; he had not carried a mobile phone for over a year, knowing that it could be used to locate him even if it was turned off in his pocket, and he guessed he was at least a two-hour walk from Caliente, two hours across uneven, unfamiliar terrain beneath the relentless desert sun.

After ten minutes, the road dipped and turned, following the contours of a wide valley with the long-dry bed of a river snaking along its shallow floor. On one side, built on a small plateau, was a small cabin – a square building with wooden walls and a stone chimney, from which a gentle, winding column of white smoke was drifting up into the morning sky, and a white roof that cast a thick band of shadow around the walls of the cabin.

Leaning casually against one of the wooden walls, as if he had been waiting for the vehicle to appear over the crest of the valley side, was a man in dusty jeans and a red and white checked shirt.
He had an easy smile on his face, and as Smith nosed the jeep down the slope towards him, he checked his watch theatrically, then grinned at the approaching vehicle.

Smith rolled the jeep to a halt, and stepped cautiously out of the car. There was nothing overtly suspicious about the man; yet Smith’s instincts had kept him alive thus far, and he listened to them even when he could see nothing wrong.

“Hello,” said the man, pushing himself away from the wall and extending a hand. “I’m Andy. I knew you were coming. It’s good to see you.”

Smith paused momentarily, but then stepped forward. He had trusted whatever force was guiding him so far, and he knew he had to do so again. So he shook the man’s hand, and told him his name, and accepted when he was invited into the cabin.

Andy’s home was small and neat; a main room that doubled as a living room and a kitchen, with a wood-burning stove, a sink, a sofa and a chest of drawers, the top of which was crowded with photos in frames that looked old. Andy –
if that is his name, you don’t know that for certain, not yet
– filled a coffee pot from the sink and placed it on the stove. As he did so, Smith asked him how he knew.

“I’m sorry?” asked Andy.

“You knew I was coming,” said Smith. “How did you know that?
I
didn’t know I was coming until eighteen hours ago.”

Andy grinned at Smith, as he took two mugs down from a shelf and placed them on the chipped coffee table that sat in front of the sofa. “The spirits told me,” he replied.

“Figures,” said Smith.

“Spirits said you were a searcher. Told me I should help you.”

“I’m looking for information.”

“Guessed that much. About anything in particular?”

“Vampires. One vampire in particular.”

“Don’t know much about vampires,” said Andy. “Know enough to avoid them, but that’s about it.”

“This one is special. He was cured. Does that ring any bells?”

“Can’t say that it does.”

The coffee pot on the stove began to whistle, and Smith felt his temper begin to boil too. His patience was at an end, exhausted by everything that had happened to him in the last year or so, by the cryptic leads he had received from the strange men and women he had met along the way, by his journey west to this scorched, barren landscape that now appeared to hold no more answers than anywhere else. He was about to open his mouth and take it all out on the man called Andy, when he saw something that made him pause.

In the middle of the collection of photos on top of the chest of drawers was a dull silver frame. There was nothing ornate about it: just four strips of metal arranged into a rectangle. Inside the frame was a black and white photo of Andy and a pretty blonde woman. As Smith quickly surveyed the photos, he saw that almost all of them were of the couple: in front of landmarks, outside theatres and restaurants, wrapped in coats and scarves with snow falling around them.

The photo that had caught his eye was different, however. It was a souvenir photo, the kind that was sold in booths at county fairs and showgrounds. This one depicted Andy, who looked no more than ten years younger than he did now, and the blonde woman at the New York World’s Fair. They were smiling at the camera, Andy’s arm around the woman’s waist, with the looming steel globe of the
Unisphere behind them. Smith leant in and read the date that had been stamped at the bottom of the photo.

September 19th 1964

Smith turned and stared at Andy, who was pouring coffee into the mugs on the table, and realisation flooded through him.

“Let’s drink those outside,” he suggested. “What do you say?”

Andy nodded. “Sure thing,” he replied. “There’s a bench out back.”

He opened the door and led Smith round the side of the cabin to where a rough wooden bench, that looked as though it had been nailed together from whatever Andy had been able to find strewn across the desert floor, stood in the shadow cast by the overhanging roof. The two men sat, looking down the canyon at the riverbed. A lizard darted out from underneath a rock and scuttled down the slope, away from the intrusion.

Smith watched as Andy settled on to the bench and stretched his legs out. His feet extended beyond the wide band of shade cast by the oversized roof, and the sun gleamed on a narrow band of skin between the man’s worn leather shoes and the frayed hems of his jeans.

“Adam,” Smith said, staring at the strip of skin.

Andy frowned, then followed his guest’s gaze down to his ankle. When he saw what Smith was looking at, he laughed, briefly. “Knew you’d figure it out eventually,” he said, his voice warm and friendly. “At your service, Mr Smith. So what can I do for you?”

“Tell me what happened to you,” replied Smith, instantly. “That’s all I need to know, and then I’ll leave you in peace.”

“You know that’s not why you’re here, don’t you?” asked Adam. “That that’s not what you’ve been searching for?”

“It’s the
only
thing I’ve been searching for. The only thing that matters. Please. Just tell me.”

“OK,” said Adam. “I’ll tell you.”

“I was turned in 1961,” Adam began. “When I was twenty. I was working in New Mexico, on a cattle ranch near Alamogordo. I was raised in Bakersfield, until my grandmother died, and my grandfather went south looking for work. I was fifteen when he sent me to the ranch, to work for a friend of his from the Marines.

“The guy who turned me was a drifter named Barratt, who was working his way south towards the border; he came on for a few weeks as a night watchman, and we got friendly. He used to talk about the places he’d been, the things he’d done, horrors he’d seen. I thought he was talking about war; this was the time when the first men were rotating home out of Vietnam, after it had started to go bad. And the country was still full of broken World War Two veterans, men who’d left parts of themselves overseas, and found there was nothing for them when they got home. But that wasn’t what he was talking about.”

Adam pulled a leather pouch from his jeans pocket, and quickly rolled a cigarette, his fingers moving with well-practised ease. He put the cigarette in his mouth and lit it with a silver Zippo lighter, breathed smoke into the hot, dry desert air and continued.

“The night Barratt turned me, we got drunk on whisky. We were in a barn at the edge of the ranch, and when he leant for my neck, I thought he was trying to make a move on me, and I tried to push him away. But he was suddenly strong, so strong that I couldn’t move him an inch. I started to get scared, and then I saw his eyes,
and the next thing I remember is waking up the next morning, lying in the straw.”

He looked at Smith, the pain of the memory etched on his face.

“He meant it as a kindness, I’m sure of that. A lot of what he talked about was not letting your life drift away to nothing, that you only had one chance to do something extraordinary, and I’m sure he thought he was giving me that chance. But he never asked me if I wanted it, he just assumed, and when the hunger hit me ten minutes later, he was gone, and I had no idea what was happening.

“I remembered just about enough of the things he’d said the night before, things I thought were just stories, like campfire spook tales, that I pulled out the throat of one of the horses, and drank her dry. I ran out of the barn, and as soon as the sun touched my skin, I burst into flames. It was the worst pain I’d ever felt, at least up until then. I made it back into the barn, and rolled out the fire. The last of the horse’s blood repaired me most of the way, and I hid there until nightfall. Then I ran.”

Adam carefully crushed the remains of the cigarette beneath the heel of his shoe, and stared out across the canyon.

“I ended up in New York, working on the docks,” he continued. “I kept myself to myself; night shift was quiet, the docks were crawling with rats that I could feed on and my workmates left me alone. Then one night a man came ashore from a freighter out of Indonesia, a man that didn’t look like he had any business on a cargo ship; he was wearing a suit as elegant as any you’d see on Fifth Avenue, but he had no luggage. He took one look at me and knew exactly what I was, because we were the same.

“I was scared, but a bit of me was relieved, to tell you the truth; I really didn’t know if there was anyone else in the whole world apart from Barratt that was like me. And I was lonely, and I guess
that made me weak. He took me to his brother’s apartment on Central Park West, gave me some clothes and a bath, then scolded me for living the way I was, for wasting the gift I had been given.”

Adam paused, and favoured Smith with a look of incredulity. “That’s what he called it. A
gift
. Although when I look back, knowing what I know now, I’m not surprised; he was a monster, barely human at all. Over the years I heard stories of the things he had done, the cruelties and the tortures, and I thanked God that I only saw him that one time.”

“What was his name?” asked Smith, although he was sure he already knew the answer.

“Alexandru,” replied Adam, and shivered momentarily in the heat of the desert. “Alexandru Rusmanov.”

“The middle brother,” said Smith, in a low voice. “You were lucky to cross his path and escape with your life. Not many were so fortunate.”

“So I came to realise,” replied Adam. “It’s been almost fifty years, and the memory of him still scares me.”

“It needn’t,” replied Smith, with vicious satisfaction in his voice. “He’s dead.”

“Dead?” replied Adam, his eyes wide. “Are you sure?”

“I’m sure. He was destroyed in England, three months ago. Destroyed completely.”

“Thank God for that then. One less monster walks the earth.”

“Agreed.”

Adam shook his head, as if to clear it, and continued.

“His brother was throwing a party the night Alexandru found me, and he insisted that I accompany him, that I allow him to show me how a vampire should live. He took me downstairs and opened the doors to the ballroom and…”

Pain clouded Adam’s face as memory overwhelmed him.

“It was a massacre,” he said, flatly. “An orgy of violence. There were at least a hundred vampires in the room, and God knows how many men and women. They were running, trying to hide, screaming for mercy, and the vampires were laughing at them. They were
laughing
as they tortured and violated and murdered them.

“There was blood everywhere, and so many screams I couldn’t think, and I looked at Alexandru, who was still standing next to me, and he looked back at me with those red eyes, eyes that were almost black, and I saw what madness looked like, true end-of-the-world, implacable, relentless madness, and I was about to scream as well, but then Alexandru disappeared into the crowd, and I was on my own.

“I ran for the doors, but they were bolted from the outside, and even my vampire strength wasn’t enough to force them. There was a band playing, I remember it so clearly, playing on a small stage at the back of the room as horror after horror was visited upon innocent men and women, some of them little more than children. Then a hand grabbed my arm, and I screamed.”

Adam quickly rolled another cigarette, lit it and inhaled hungrily.

“It was a girl. A beautiful, terrified girl, about my age, looking at me with huge red eyes. I took a step away from her, but she held on to my arm, and her face twisted and she looked like she was going to cry. ‘I’m so scared,’ she said. ‘Can you help me get out of here? Please?’