Vampires Don't Sparkle! (26 page)

-----

The only sound was the syncopated tick of the cat-shaped clock above the television, a relic of an era of silliness and kitsch, as Jim tried to figure out what to say next. He thought,
Stop talking to this asshole. There’s something wrong with him, this hairless little freak. Have you stopped to think for one fucking second about why he’s here? What he intends to do? What he has to do with the putrid secret cancer growing upstairs?
What he said was, “They’re like … mole-rat people. Have you ever seen those? Mole-rats? They’re hairless and wrinkled and blind and … ugh … ugly. And these mole-rat people … their skin has grown together and now they’re just this big wall of mole-rat men … In a room we never knew was there until ten months ago. Ten months ago! How do you live in a place,” the words spilling out of him as though tied to a string tugged by the skinny fingers of his uninvited houseguest, “for seven years and never see an entire room of it? How can that happen?”

The doorbell man pulled a face, a bawdy parody of empathy, and reached out and patted Jim’s knee. Jim lurched away from him, his pulse swelling and pulsing below his jaw. He wanted to scream at the man, to attack the man, to light a fire underneath him and remove him like a tick from his house. Except this didn’t feel like
his
house anymore, and hadn’t for a long time. His nerves quaked and rattled, and he curled into himself on the edge of the sofa thinking,
I look like a junky. A quivering junky going through withdrawal.
He said, “I’m sorry. Just … I’m really sorry, I just don’t want you to … to touch me, okay? Just don’t … fucking touch me … sir.”

The doorbell man smiled, bit his bottom lip. His teeth were too long, too white. He looked like a theatrical mask. He said, “Mr. Quatro … homeowner … have you ever heard of the
Rattenkönig
phenomenon?”

“No. Nope. I, uh … no.”

“Hmm,” said the doorbell man. “It is said that rats, when isolated together in small spaces, will fuse together at the tail. Can you imagine, homeowner Jim Quatro? A nest of trapped rats, isolated from food, from sunlight, as their tails tangle together and eventually become … one. Amazing, if it’s true, although I myself have never seen any compelling evidence for its veracity. Imagine, then, homeowner, that a nest of some other animal becomes trapped. An animal that survives by different means, adheres to different rules.”

The doorbell man stood up, stepped onto the coffee table, kicked aside the photo albums, crushed his coffee cup beneath his heel. Jim stared, open mouthed, and thought,
You’re standing on my table. You’re standing on my table. I don’t know why, but you’re standing on my table and gesturing at the ceiling like a professor lecturing to the ceiling fan.

“Let us theorize that this species travels through secret corridors, makes its way toward new feeding grounds via an entire sequence of tunnels, much like your … ugly … hairless … wrinkled … blind … mole-rats.” He was smiling now, the doorbell man, breathing fast, haloed by the ceiling fan, lost in his lunatic sermon. “Let us further theorize that the way is one day blocked by some means, homeowner! Let us now hypothesize what might happen to such a marvelous species over decades, over centuries, homeowner, in the dark! In the bloodless, skyless dark, homeowner!”

A pause. The doorbell man stared longingly at some distant point beyond the house, out in the cold dark bloodless, skyless universe, and caught his breath. Jim realized he was digging his teeth into his tongue, gnawing on that same fat ulcer he’d made earlier when the doorbell had interrupted his thoughtlessness. It had been a very long time since he had’t felt angry. But now he did not. Only scared and confused and unbearably sad. He thought,
You’re the same. Same as the things in the Sudden Room. Something with a barely functional understanding of human behavior, something doing a bad impression. And you exist. The universe is huge and cruel.

The doorbell man smoothed his suit and stepped down from the table. He took a seat, crossed his legs, adjusted his fedora. “What do you suppose would happen then?”

-----

This was what they wanted. What they always wanted. Just this slow thick leak, these fat droplets spattering against the floor and sinking into the woodgrain, staining the teeth of her house key. She squeezed the meat of her thumb with her opposite hand, milking the blood from the wound and speeding the drip. The monsters (
No,
she thought,
not quite monsters, are they? Or not just any kind of monster. I know what they are. I know their name. They have been understood and catalogued and thrown behind a partition marked with their species and phylum
) shuddered and salivated and gnashed their rotten broken saber-teeth to match the new tempo.

“I know what you want,” she said. “I know what you are.”

One of them hissed, “Paaaaaglia. Sssssteinemmmmm.”

Another growled, “Behhhhind the hhhhhedges.”

Another, its face fuzed into profile, its mouth almost filled with the metastasized flesh of its fellows, said, “Ennnnjoying the view?”

“I could give you what you want,” she said, and wondered what would happen if she did. Wondered if it could somehow erase the bad decisions and the worse luck, the tense and unpleasant marriage, the dead baby that never lived, the ghost of which floated between her and Jim. She wondered if she’d finally feel like she’d done something worthwhile. Each of the faces in the wall salivated in expectation, wet from lips to chin with thick foamy spit. Could she refuse them? Could she disappoint them like that?

She would tell one more secret. And then she would see.

“When we were in college,” she said, squeezing the gash, “Jim asked me what I wanted to do. With my life, I mean. We were spent, exhausted. We had just finished, you know … fucking, I guess. Making love. I don’t know. We were satisfied with ourselves. We felt philosophical. So he asked me … ‘in the cosmic sense,’ he said, whatever that means, what I wanted to do. And I took a deep breath, and I imagined that I was inhaling the whole universe, the stars and the planets and the dark matter, and I told him what I wanted to do. I wanted to make an impact. I wanted the world to bend a little under my weight. To never be the same after me.”

She lifted her thumb upward, offering it to the chomping mouths in the wall of the Sudden Room. They strained and gurgled and roared, and the house shook.

-----

Jim could hear them gurgling and roaring upstairs, louder than they’d ever been. And here he was, downstairs, listening to the doorbell man, whatever he was, stumble through his best estimation of what human conversation might sound like. He wasn’t sure how much more of this his brain could take.

“Now imagine,” whispered the doorbell man, “that some homeowner just … stumbled onto the secret corridor where that
Rattenkönig
had become stuck. It would have to have been a sleepwalking homeowner, a homeowner catatonic with despair and disappointment. Sound familiar, homeowner? Sound like anyone you know?”

“Okay, enough!” Jim was standing. “Enough, man, alright? Now what?” He was leaning over the doorbell man, shaking his fists, gesturing, shouting. “Why are you here? Are you here to help? Can you help us? Can you, what, kill those fucking things?” He grabbed the doorbell man by the lapels, shook him. “Can you do fucking anything? Huh?” He crumpled, came down onto his knees before the doorbell man, buried his head in the doorbell man’s chest, wept.

The doorbell man caressed the hair at the nape of Jim’s neck and shushed him, rocked him back and forth. “No,” he said. “No, I’m not here to kill them. I just wanted to … see. I wanted to see, homeowner. I’ve never seen a
Rattenkönig
before.”

Upstairs, someone screamed.

-----

Abigail Quatro screamed. She tried to pull herself away, but she was trapped, held by dozens of scrambling arms and legs against the pulsing wall of skin. She felt their razor fangs at her wrists, her thighs, her shoulders, felt their dry, sore-covered lips wrap around the wounds and suck, drinking desperately from her, and it hurt, it hurt, God, it hurt. She struggled, kicked, squirmed, but even piled into a single gigantic body, they were stronger than anything she’d ever known. They weren’t letting her go. Her vision was getting hazy, and the part of her with the will to fight back was shrinking, fading. It wasn’t fair. None of this was fair.

She heard the door to the Sudden Room slam against the wall, felt the hall light burst through onto her skin, saw two silhouettes through the haze. One of them was shouting her name, rushing toward her. Jim. It was Jim. It had to be Jim. She was so very tired. And this wasn’t fair.

The other silhouette clapped his hands, bounced on the balls of his feet. It said, “Marvelous. Absolutely marvelous.”

Jim was at her side now, pulling on her, trying to remove her from the wall of mean mouths and blind eyes. He was screaming. He was struggling.

When they finally let her go, she knew that Jim hadn’t saved her. Her monsters just
…
weren’t hungry anymore.

Her vision was coming back to her now. The pain was receding. She felt numb and betrayed. She kept trying to speak, but her throat wouldn’t let the words pass.

“God, Abby. Oh Jesus, Abby, it’s okay,” Jim, above her, faking his way through normal again, “it’s okay, baby, I’m here. I’m here. God damn it, god damn it. Okay, it’s okay. I’m going to call the hospital, baby, okay? Everything is going to be
…
”

She hated to be called Abby. Always had.

The other man
…
the bald man with the sunglasses and the fedora and the umbrella hanging from his arm
…
put his hand on the back of Jim’s head. She watched all of this from the floor. She didn’t like the floor. It was so dirty. So uncomfortable. The bald man said, “Well, that was fun, homeowner. Bye, now.”

Jim’s head jerked up to stare at the bald man, watched him strolling through the door, down the hallway. Out. She stared at the slope where his jaw became his throat. She watched his pulse announce itself in the throbbing vein there. It seemed to be beating so much faster than hers.

“What?” he screamed. “What?” Loud, raw, unhinged. “What?” A real question. A question to which he desperately expected an answer.

For many moments, they listened to the bald man’s footsteps. They listened to the door slamming on his way out. And then all there was to listen to was the gurgle and slurp of the wall of monsters.

When her voice returned, Abigail Quatro said, “Nothing changes. Nothing is different. Everything is always the same.”

VAMPIRE NATION

Jerry Gordon

Jerry Gordon is the co-editor of the 
Dark Faith
 and 
Last Rites
 anthologies.  His fiction has appeared in 
Apex Magazine
, 
Shroud
, and 
The Midnight Diner
.  His apocalyptic thriller, 
Breaking The World
, will be released through Apex Publications in 2013.  When he’s not contemplating the end of the world, he’s blurring genre lines at www.jerrygordon.net. 

His favorite vampires overwhelmed humanity in Richard Matheson’s classic, 
I Am Legend
.

–––––––––––

“A
frica?
When are you going to pick a cause you can actually win? From what I hear the continent has maybe two months at best.”

“That’s about right.” I poured myself a scotch and walked along the wall of captures that adorned Senator John Mitchem’s office, stopping in front of one frame that showed him and his older brother as college students. The low-res motion clip followed their volunteer group as it worked to restore oil-ravaged beaches on the Gulf Coast some twenty years ago. I handled most of the camera work for that trip. It was my first and only adventure as an honorary member of the Michem family.

“So what’s to save?” John darted in and out of his senate office’s private bathroom, fiddling first with his tuxedo jacket and then with a mangled excuse for a bow-tie. “I mean the Chinese have a pretty good handle on containment.”

“Come on, you know the Chinese have a vested interest in Africa’s demise.”

“Sure, they get the land. We’ve agreed to that much, but you’re assuming anyone will ever use it. The Chinese are going to have a hard time convincing their people to build on vampire central.”

“I thought you guys were only allowed to refer to it as the quarantined zone?” I smiled and took a quick sip of scotch to hide my nerves.

“Did you see the footage of that human rights group in Johannesburg? The vampires ripped out their throats and drank their blood. On camera. Once the networks got hold of that footage, fangs and all, the name ship sailed.”