Dominion of the Damned (14 page)

With a sigh, she rummaged through a drawer and found a hairbrush and a ponytail holder. She pulled old hair out of the brush, noting its redness as she tossed it in the trash can. She gently brushed her hair around the bandages, careful not to pull too hard on the strands that were attached to her wound. She started to pull it back in a ponytail, but her eyes fell on the plastic floral shower curtain behind her. Only the cold water worked, but even a cold shower would feel good at this point.

She put the ponytail holder back on the counter, went to the tub and pulled back the curtain. And screamed.

Before she could even reach for the gun, the doctor appeared in the doorway. She grabbed the gun and pointed it at him out of reflex. He held up his hands. “What is it?” he asked. “Are you okay?”

She pointed the gun back at the tub. At the grinning skeleton in the tub. Well, it was mostly a skeleton. Most of the flesh had rotted away, but patches of decayed skin still clung to it here and there. Konstantin picked up the lantern and brought it closer. Hannah saw a few wisps of red hair clinging to a patch of scalp on the skull. She looked back at the hairbrush on the counter, and felt nauseous.

“I don’t know how I missed this,” said Konstantin, sitting on the edge of the tub. “I guess I relied too much on my nose and not enough on my eyes. This one’s way past giving off a scent.” He glanced at the gun. “You can put that away. She’s not getting up.”

“How can you be sure?”

“Because a bite didn’t kill her. This was suicide.” He pointed to a reddish brown substance that coated the bottom of the tub. “That’s not rust, it’s blood.” He reached into the tub to pick something up, and held it up for her to see. “Razor blade.” He stood up. “I guess she decided to take her fate into her own hands.”

Finally, Hannah lowered the gun. She realized she was still panting, and tried to slow her breath.

“Are you okay?” He put a hand on her shoulder. “That must’ve been hard to see.”

She shrugged him off. “I’ve seen worse.” Glancing back at the remains, she said, “We should do something with her.”

He nodded. “I can move her to the basement.”

“No. I mean, like, bury her.”

“We can’t. At least, not now. The sun’s coming up, and the house is still surrounded. None of us can go outside.” He reached over and closed the shower curtain, hiding the remains from view. “But if our rescue hasn’t arrived by sundown, Carl and I will bury her this evening.”

Hannah leaned against the sink and stared at the shower curtain. “I tried to bury my parents.” She didn’t know why she told him that. She supposed she just needed to get it out, and he seemed willing to listen for some reason. “I dragged my mom outside, and I dug a hole. But then my dad showed up, except he wasn’t my dad. I had to put a bullet in his brain, and that brought others. I put them both in the grave, but I didn’t have time to fill it in all the way.”

“You did the best you could for them.” After a moment, he added, “I wasn’t able to bury my wife.”

Hannah looked at him, startled. The possibility that he could be a widower had never even occurred to her.

“She was buried in a mass grave,” he continued. “I’m not even sure where. It’s a hard thing, when the world you know ends, and you’re forced to face a harsh, new world without the people you love.” His lips turned up into a small, sad smile. “You’re better at it than I was.”

Hannah wasn’t so sure about that. She shut her eyes against a wave of tears that tried to escape. She’d thought she’d spent all of her grief in her cell a couple of nights before, but here it was again, welling up in her chest.

But she didn’t let it out. She knew it would be a mistake to show that kind of vulnerability in front of him. Possibly even suicidal. So she wiped away a stray tear, and nodded. “Thanks,” she said, and picked up the lantern. Outside the bathroom, she paused, and looked back. “I’m sorry about your wife.” Even if he wasn’t human, she could tell that it had been painful for him to talk about her.

“Thank you.” He followed her into the hallway, where she walked toward the bedroom. The sun had risen, and it filled the room with light that spilled through the open door into the hall. Hannah stepped into the light, but Konstantin stopped at its edge, just past the stairs, safely ensconced in shadow. “Try to get some sleep,” he told her. “I’ll be downstairs, keeping watch.”

She watched him head down the stairs before going into the bedroom and crossing to the window. She drew back a lace curtain and looked outside. In the yard below, the dead still milled about, without any direction or purpose. She started to turn away when a flash of orange caught her eye. Looking back at the yard, she saw a small, flame-haired child wandering into the middle of the zeds. She turned to the bed, where Noah lay sleeping by himself. “Oh my God,” she muttered as she ran for the stairs.

SEVENTEEN

Hannah ran down the stairs and ran for the front door. It was standing wide open. Carl stood in the doorway, holding a blanket. He glanced at Hannah as she approached. “He’s going to get himself killed.”

She didn’t need to ask who he meant. Beyond the front porch, Dr. Konstantin ran after Abby, moving with impossible speed. But speed didn’t protect him from the sun, and he was already smoking by the time he reached the little girl and scooped her up in his arms.

Hannah grabbed the blanket and ran after them. He was halfway back to the house with a crying Abby when she met them and threw the blanket over him. Together, they stumbled back into the house, where Carl slammed the door shut and locked it behind them. “Are you nuts?” Carl shouted at the doctor as Hannah took Abby from him. “What the hell were you thinking? You got yourself burned to a crisp. You could’ve gotten killed!”

“What would you have me do, Carl?” he asked, his voice filled with obvious pain. “Just let the little girl get swarmed?”

Carl didn’t seem to have an answer. He just shook his head in frustration and went to look out the window. “That got their attention. They’re coming.”

“We’ll deal with them,” said Konstantin.

“You mean
I’ll
deal with them. You’re in no condition to fight.”

Ignoring Carl, Konstanin turned to Hannah. The extent of his burns startled her. His skin was blistered and cracked, and it looked like simply speaking caused him agony. “Take her upstairs and barricade yourself in the room,” he told her. “Don’t worry. We won’t let them get that far.”

Hannah left the vampires arguing and carried Abby upstairs and into the bedroom, where she sat her down on the bed. The little girl was still sobbing. “Shh, Abby,” said Hannah. “What were you doing? Why did you go outside?”

“I thought I saw my daddy,” she cried. “I want my daddy!”

“Shh. It’s okay.” Hannah pulled the child into her arms. Was it possible that she had seen her father? It seemed too soon for him to have made it this far from the prison, but the zeds didn’t get tired. If he’d been walking this way since Esme had fed him to those things outside the prison wall, it was feasible that he was out there now.

That he was trying to get in.

She heard pounding downstairs. She took Abby by the shoulders and looked her in the eye. “Abby, your daddy’s gone.” She hated to be so blunt with the girl, but there was no time to be soft. “You have to be strong, and brave. You have to be a big girl now. Okay?”

Abby hiccuped as she tried to stifle her sobs, and wiped her face with the front of her shirt. But she nodded.

“Good girl.” Hannah planted a kiss on top of her head. “I need you to stay in here with the baby, and lock the door. Don’t open it for anybody, okay? Not until you hear my voice.”

“Okay.”

Hannah checked once more on Noah, who was, amazingly, still asleep. Then she grabbed the pistol and, shutting the door behind her, headed downstairs. She found Carl nailing pieces of the now busted up kitchen table over the living room window, while Konstantin leaned against the front door. He looked like it took everything in him to stay upright. “I told you to stay with the children,” he said.

Hannah ignored him and flashed the gun. “There are still three rounds, then I’m out. Is this our only weapon?”

“No. We have Carl. Once he’s done fortifying the windows, he’ll open the door and take care of the shamblers on the porch. If any get past him, I’ll—”

“You’ll what? Carl’s right. You’re in no shape to fight.”

“I’m not as bad off as I look.”

“Really? Because you look terrible.”

“Thanks.” He nodded toward her gun. “You should go back up stairs. Use that on any that get past us and find their way up there.”

Hannah took a long, hard look at the doctor. Despite his protests to the contrary, she could tell he was in bad shape. Going after Abby like that really could have killed him. “Why did you go after her?” she asked him.

He looked at her as though it should have been obvious. “She’s just a little girl. Somebody had to go get her.”

“But why you? Why didn’t you just call me when you realized she went outside?”

“What, and risk you getting bitten or killed?” He shook his head. “I knew I could be fast enough.”

“But what if you weren’t?”

He shrugged. “Then you’d have one less vampire to worry about in the world.”

She didn’t really know what to say to that. All she knew was that his actions weren’t that of someone who only saw them as lab rats or slave labor. In fact, nothing she’d seen from him so far lined up with the things she had been told about him, about his intentions. Evil mad scientists weren’t exactly known for risking their own lives to protect their subjects.

She glanced around the room, and spotted a wrought-iron poker hanging on a stand next to the fireplace. She retrieved it, and returned to Konstantin just as one of the zeds managed to break the glass on the front door and reach its arm in to grab at the doctor. Hannah jabbed the poker through the broken window and straight into the zed’s eye. There was hardly any resistance as she drove the poker deeper, until it burst out of the back of the zed’s head. She pulled the poker back inside, and the thing dropped, and didn’t get back up again.

The look Konstantin gave her as she stepped back from the door was somewhere between amused and amazed. “Get to the stairs,” he told her. “Stand your ground there. If too many get past us, run, and lock yourself in with the children. If you can get them out on the roof, they shouldn’t be able to come after you there.”

Hannah backed up to the stairs as Carl finished nailing up the broken table. He came over to the door and, gripping the hammer in his fist, nodded to Konstantin. “Let’s go.”

Konstantin opened the door.

He staggered back behind Carl, who flew into action. Hannah stood there, gripping the iron poker in one hand and the gun in the other, and watched in amazement as he morphed into a killing machine before her eyes. She had been too distracted during their previous confrontations with the zeds to witness just how efficient the vampires were at destroying them. Even the doctor, despite his injuries, made quick work of the few that managed to get past Carl. It was a whirlwind of claws and teeth, of flying gore and falling bodies.

And then it was over. Both vampires were covered in blood and slime, and the floor was littered with corpses and severed heads. Hannah hadn’t needed to fire a single shot.

No wonder the vampires were the ones in charge.

“Let’s clean this up,” said Konstantin. He seemed a little stronger and steadier as he grabbed a lifeless zed by the ankle and dragged it out onto the porch. Once all of the bodies had been cleared out, they shoved a bookcase in front of the door. “We’ll burn them at nightfall,” he told Hannah, “once our ride gets here. You should go check on the children. I’m going to see if I can get that shower working.”

She watched him make his way slowly up the stairs, still moving as though in a great deal of pain. She looked back at Carl. “Thanks,” she told him.

He shrugged it off. “Just another day at the office.” He jerked his chin at the wreck they’d made of the living room. “Guess I’ll get this cleaned up.”

“Why bother?” she asked him. “We’re leaving once your friends get here.” She looked around at the house, and sighed. “We might as well burn this whole place down. It’s just another grave now.”

She left Carl to do whatever he thought best, and made her way upstairs to the children. Abby had curled up next to Noah and fallen asleep. Hannah heard the shower come on in the bathroom, and wondered briefly if the cold water would bother the doctor. She supposed it would feel good on his burned skin.

She looked out the window. This time, the yard was empty of zeds. Even so, she closed the window and locked it, and locked the bedroom door. Then she set the gun carefully on the nightstand, propped the poker up next to it, and crawled into bed.

EIGHTEEN

After nightfall, Konstantin brought the remains of their host back up from the basement and carried her outside. With a nod to Hannah, he carried her past the pile of bodies stacked on the front porch and instead laid her in a grave that he and Carl had dug in the front yard. As they filled it in, she took the children into the kitchen and fed them a cold supper of canned peaches and mashed peas. She was in the middle of trying to coax Noah to open his mouth for a bite when Konstantin opened the door and leaned in. “Our ride’s here.”