Vampire Dreams (Bloodscreams #1) (35 page)

The smoke pall over the cemetery was dissipated, and Stroud saw that about forty vampires stood around him, all with gleeful snarls on their filthy lips where the occasional worm flashed, reflecting the moonlight. Then a child stepped from the vampire horde and Stroud stared into the eyes of Ray Carroll's boy. He was holding onto Stroud's AK-47, pointing it at Stroud.

“No!” another of the pires shouted. “Doctor Banaker wants him alive.”

“He's to die slowly,” said another.

“He killed my father!” shouted the boy whose shape was wavy, forming bat features and then human again, and back again.

“Kill him! Kill him now!” shouted a female voice in the crowd, the boy's mother.

But one of Banaker's lieutenants slammed into the boy and snatched the gun away. Stroud rushed this one and took firm hold of the automatic's grip, firing as the monster's hands were still on the barrel. The bullet with the S-choline slammed into Carroll's child who laughed nastily in response before he suddenly went into spasms. The others, including the powerful one who had hold of the AK-47 backed off. Stroud stood over them on the steps to the white mausoleum, its pillars a kind of archway into the hell that lay at his back. He stared down at the things surrounding him, the mutant race of the undead whose human and inhuman genes had for centuries commingled; it was a race of beings that lived off his race like the parasitic worms that lived off them in turn; it was a race spawned by Satan.

His eyes holding them in place as they watched the suffering death of the Carroll boy, Stroud opened fire with the automatic, slicing them down. The more courageous of them flew at Stroud in kamikaze fashion, attempting to slam him down so that the others might devour him quickly as the boy had wanted to do. Stroud nimbly side-stepped such actions and blew holes in these intrepid ones. Others raced to the pits from which they came, Stroud trying desperately to destroy each and every monster, to keep each from escaping. Should any one do so, Andover could be repopulated by the hideous things again.

Stroud then heard automobile, van, and truck engines coming up over the rise, their lights like beacons in the black sea of the cemetery, flashing on the disgusting, horrifying sight of creatures burrowing into gravesites in a mad rush to save themselves from the man at the marblelike mausoleum at the center of the graveyard. Rushing from the cars, Stroud saw human forms, but he dared not hope it was human help, and he dared not let down his guard. Banaker had thrown up one surprise and hurdle after another. This could be another of his tricks.

Then he heard Lonnie Wilson's voice, followed by Ashyer's. Dr. Cage was with them, along with state and federal officials who stopped dead in their tracks, seeing the Andover horror in the beaming headlights, but unable to calculate the meaning of it all. It was understandable that most of them froze in place while Wilson and Ashyer rushed in with more of the unusual ammunition required to kill the vampires. They'd apparently gotten hold of more dart guns, possibly from Dr. Cage and the others on hand. They went about firing darts of the S-choline into the scurrying bats. Wise enough to fire on anything else that moved as well, they also destroyed a dog that bounded over the fence, and rats and squirrels that dared move. In almost every case, the shape of the bat creature returned before it melted from existence.

Cage, a big, lumbering man with graying black hair and a walrus mustache, finally got control of himself and he rushed in with his sample bag, trying desperately to get and freeze tissue with a fixative spray that he carried in his bag, creating slides on the spot, as ghouls and humans did battle.

Stroud turned his attention to the interior of the mausoleum, sensing that Banaker was inside, waiting for him. Some thing inside his head told Stroud that perhaps he had to die with Banaker, that the two of them should go out of this world together, and that this somehow would ensure that there would be no more vampires ever again, that the vampire line and that of the vampire hunter had come to an end this night. But he didn't care for the idea of dying here in a death struggle with a gargoyle. He didn't accept the notion. It was bull.

Stroud stepped inside, cautiously; he sensed that Banaker was not alone. He'd held back several others with him here in his last retreat, his bomb shelter. The ones who'd fought Abe outside this structure had been powerful, having three and four times Stroud's strength, like Briggs's deputies. That meant they'd had a recent infusion of blood, Banaker's special distillation, but not the contaminated brew back at the Institute. Banaker must keep a supply here somewhere.

It was pitch-dark at the center of the place, the only light coming in at the door where the noise of the struggle and dying going on there filtered through. Stroud could see nothing. He reached for the matches he'd stuffed in his pocket earlier, the same ones he'd used to touch off the Molotov cocktails the bat creatures had so enjoyed. Stroud lit one just as the door behind him slammed, blowing the light out, but not before he saw the army of creatures arrayed against him here. There were seven, maybe eight and they flew at him as the match went out.

“Welcome, Doctor Stroud,” came Banaker's voice in mock politeness. “Welcome to my coffin.”

Stroud was pinned by the powerful hold on him. He could not move so much as a muscle as the deadly weapon was wrenched from him. At the moment, he was helpless and in Banaker's power, completely.

“Good of you to have me,” he said with mock humor.

“Oh, I will have you all right ... every drop of you, Abraham Stroud.”

Neither of them could see one another in the pitch-blackness here, but Banaker's echo-location organs had Stroud in his sight.

“Bring the human bastard along,” he told his followers. “We must hurry.”

Outside the mausoleum, demolition men used explosives to blow away the door. Wilson, Ashyer, Cage, and the others rushed through with torches, but they found nothing. On inspection, they found there were no bodies in the crypts in the walls, but there was the sure animal smell they'd all come to despise, a smell like bad mildew, wet wool, permeating the concrete coffins.

They brought in lanterns and flashlights and torches. They scoured every inch of the mausoleum for a way out. Everyone had seen Stroud enter. There had to be a way out. They began to dissassemble the place, tearing open every wall drawer. In one a vampire leapt out and latched onto the throat of one of the men in the party, tearing at his neck so viciously as to sever the jugular, killing him instantly before Ashyer's dart drove into the monster, turning it into a gelatinous mass that Cage scooped bits from, splatting it onto a slide, covering it with a fixative moments before the Jell-o on the floor tiles turned to ash before their eyes.

Behind where the creature had crawled from was a sheer drop into a black hole. They'd have to go down one at a time, and it was likely that more guards would be waiting for them. Ashyer pushed forward, prepared to go first. Wilson argued for this honor, holding Ashyer at bay. No one else wanted the job, but Dr. Cage grabbed his bag and said, “I'm with you.”

The line of men began to climb single file into the open hole where the slab had been pulled away with the door, and began the descent into the underground passageway. It was rough going. There were no steps, no ladders, and it was tar black inside, and cramped. Flashing lights did not penetrate beyond a foot or so here. The cavernous hole had a slight tilt downward and it seemed to go on forever.

Once on solid footing the passageway opened a bit wider. The tunnels seemed to be bored out by some machine, so smooth and orderly were they. Wilson was suddenly grabbed from behind by Ashyer, sending a quake through him.

“What?”

“Flash your light up and to your left.”

Wilson did so. Cage, just behind the other two, followed by others less intrepid, stared at what the light illuminated. In the dirt wall they could make out the visible side and bottom of a coffin.

“My God,” said Ashyer.

“We're beneath the graveyard,” said Cage.

“We've got to find Doctor Stroud,” said Wilson almost tear-fully.

As they continued, the sight of bones and coffin parts, several having been broken into, became almost commonplace. It was like being in a haunted house, except for the fact that there was nothing bogus here. This was for real, and any moment one of them could leap out at the men who must pass this way.

But none came ... until suddenly someone at the far end of the line screamed. One of the monsters had attacked the rear of the line of humans. The terrified cries and the sound of mangling filled the tunnel when suddenly from overhead an upside-down coffin firmly held in the ceiling popped open and a vampire was atop Wilson.

Ashyer pumped two S-choline darts into the creature before it let the trembling, terrified Wilson loose. Wilson leapt to his feet and stomped at the creature but his feet went into a soupy mixture of flesh and dissolving bone as the vampire poison did its work. Wilson screamed obscenities at the mush before him but Ashyer rushed to the rear to determine the extent of damage there. They'd lost two men before someone had the presence of mind to fire one of the S-choline darts that'd been distributed to them.

Ashyer feared that Dr. Stroud was already dead, but knowing this and knowing Stroud, he also knew that they must go on until they were certain that every vampire in the colony was destroyed.

Ashyer returned to the front of the line and told Wilson that he would now lead the way. Wilson, still shaken by the incident, did not argue but allowed Ashyer his way.

“Come along then,” he told the others.

“I've never been so frightened and sickened in my life,” said the coroner and paleontologist, Dr. Cage.

Stroud had been knocked unconscious and carried off by the pires, and now he awoke to find himself hanging by his ankles from the ceiling of a cave.

He felt blood dribbling from his neck onto his chin and into his mouth. It was his own blood from a wound Banaker had inflicted. Banaker had already fed on him once. How soon before he'd feed on him again?

His feet and ankles were wrapped in a gluey substance two of the vampires were regurgitating from their mouths after feeding on blood paks that lay on the floor here. Abe Stroud's first sight was of the blood paks, his eyes beginning to accustom themselves to the darkness. This place was not, however, as black as the mausoleum. It was a wide, large ceilinged cavern, very much like those Stroud and Magaffey had visited on the Spoon. The two ghouls hovered in midair as they worked to cover Stroud in the gooey substance that had encased Pamela Carr, Cooper, the Bradley woman, the child, and the dog. Now it was Stroud's turn. And turn he did, his helpless body twirling in midair like a side of beef. He cursed his foolhardiness and the wrong decisions that had landed him here in this hopeless situation. He'd known men who died of similar fate in Vietnam. Had he escaped the creatures of war only to die at the hands of the creatures of night?

Stroud tried to think but a pain was building in his head where the blood had rushed to it. The steel plate in his head was swimming in it, he imagined. At any rate, it was doing him no good. He couldn't think clearly. The blood rushing to his head was making what little vision he had blur. Before him, upside down, on an outcropping of rock, his hands on his hips, was Banaker as Banaker really was. It was the same monster who had murdered Magaffey. The markings, the size, the feel of the thing to Stroud's mind, was exact, a duplicate.

“Concentrate, damn you!” Stroud heard a voice deep within him say.

“I am trying to,” he told himself. There was something he could still use against Banaker, something he'd held back. He drew on all the strength left to him and he willed for his grandfather's help, his grandfather's interference. It took all of his concentration, but he let it slip because he recalled that he still had a weapon or two at his disposal. He'd taken the precaution for such an event as this, should he no longer have recourse to the S-choline. He had taped to his chest a large crucifix, and strapped to his ankle was a knife in a scabbard which he could feel had gone undetected. The knife could act as a stake.

He must distract Banaker, however. He could feel Banaker's mind pressing in on his own. It was a mind of great power, great ESP. If he were not careful, Banaker would know his plan.

He pulled himself up, holding himself at the mid-section like a marlin jumping in a vain attempt to fight the hook. He desperately needed to clear his mind and he could feel the oxygen level rising, but in an instant, with a sign from Banaker, one of the vampires hit him hard across the face, sending him snapping back into place, twirling and spinning.

Stroud prayed.

Stroud prayed to God.

He prayed to his father, his grandfather, and his great-grand-father. He concentrated on Ananias's features. He willed him to come, to be with him in this, his last hour. He didn't want to die alone.

“You won't die, Stroud,” said Banaker, reading his mind. “No, you will live. You, the great progeny of vampire killers ... you will 
become
 a vampire. You and I then, we'll be linked like brothers, and between us, we'll have no equal. We'll rebuild the race, and one day, as planned, our race--yours and mine--evil married to evil, will be as one. Peace on earth, goodwill to men ... and pires.”

Stroud fought back the words, trying not to listen, trying to maintain his concentration against the pain in his head and Banaker's smugness. “Grandfather, help ... help me now in my hour of--”

A luminous apparition whose features coalesced into those of Ananias Stroud appeared before Banaker. Banaker screeched at it and dived into it, slamming into the wall of the cave, knocking himself near senseless. Abe instantly tore open his fatigues to display the cross there, lifting anew to his ankles and pulling the knife free. One of the puking vampires lunged at him, but Stroud's long knife went into the heart up to the hilt and out the thing's back, gushing blood. The other one backed off, fearful, seeing the cross and the long blade. Banaker sent keening orders to this one, but it had had enough and went racing for the nearest tunnel where it disappeared.