Vampire Dreams (Bloodscreams #1) (17 page)

She nodded and he saw vomit alongside the pavement, vomit that looked unnaturally bloody and yellow, almost like afterbirth, there on the roadbed. “I got a little sick,” she mewed.

“I'm sorry.” He wound up apologizing to her now as he got into his Jeep. “I should've done this to begin with,” he told her, revving up the engine and cutting around her sports car, driving down, and then out of the ditch where he'd been lying. He stopped short just the other side of her car and backed up to shout, “Not that you're likely to need it, or take it, Pam, but I'm going to give you a bit of advice.”

She was getting into her car at this point. “Advice?”

“Go a little slower in your next romantic adventure; you know, give a guy a chance to ask you to dinner, maybe pluck a rose for you, take you home to a cozy fire and an upstairs bed.”

“I'm sorry, Abe...”

“You going to be safe? Get home all right from here?”

She laughed at this. “I'm a big girl.”

“So I noticed.”

“You're sure now ... it's not a blood disease?”

This returned him to the anger he'd felt on waking to find her more concerned with her scraped elbow than his condition. She could no more love anyone than a boa constrictor loved anyone, he realized, knowing he did not want to see Pamela Carr ever again.

Abe's wheels burned rubber on the old paved road as he raced for the confines of Stroud Manse. Maybe it was a great deal safer behind bars there; maybe Grandfather Ananias had ought to've left the bars up all 'round the place.

Stroud momentarily wondered just what kind of doctor Pamela Carr was going to become after her residency at Banaker Institute. A medical professional so completely ignorant of the symptoms of AIDS, not to mention her morbid fear, was unusual. And yet, as a cop in Chicago he'd known many a nurse who'd dropped out of the profession out of just such fears. But this did not explain her revulsion at the convulsions she'd witnessed in him to the point of becoming physically ill. She'd make a lousy physician at best.

The iron gates of home came into his view just as he drove through a wave of fog. Stroud reached up to his throat, feeling something thick and damp clinging there. The white, maggoty leech that he touched there and which now discolored his hand with a red trail curled up and died. His neck was bleeding from a painful, deep incision of some sort. Pamela had cut him and had left him the bizarre prize of the leech.

The mad, convulsive fit that Dr. Stroud had gone through had both terrified and revolted Pamela Carr. One moment she was on the rhythmic sway of his blood as it flowed into her through the tubes at the center of her fangs, and the next he was twisting out of her control. He had overpowered her with bruising blows and kicking. She had been completely unprepared for his sudden surge of strength, as if he were immune to the hypnosis of the vampiress.

She now feared the consequences of not having dispatched Stroud as Dr. Banaker had wanted. But it was not her fault, she silently counseled herself. She'd only just begun the deadly transfusion when he, in a blind rage, reacted in so startling a manner as to throw her into a paroxysm of fear. She'd heard tales all her unnatural life of human disease and decay and how disease was spread among Stroud's kind. Suppose his convulsions were the symptoms of some dreaded disorder, and suppose even a vampiress like herself could catch it? According to Banaker, the vampire gene had been suffocated by human disorders, diseases that caused the introduction of aging into the lives of vampires, for instance. Banaker told cautionary tales, and he knew the history of his kind. He explained that those born to vampire parents were purer of heart, purer of the contaminates of mankind, than those, like her, who had not been born a vampire. Pamela had been 
made
 a vampire by Banaker, who had reclaimed her from an early grave, sharing his vampire genes and his vampire blood with her beautiful, young form.

Some vampires, like Dolphin for instance, believed since a vampire was by definition a walking dead, that no disease could touch him, that he was immortal by virtue of being a vampire. 
Nothing could be further from the truth.
 Vampires were given to severe depression and a weakening of their energies, and like addicts, the only cure was a blood binge.

It was, according to Banaker, through the arrogance of the race and the arrogance of such youths as Dolphin that vampires had become near extinct, because they had had their bloodline diluted over the generations, and infected by the host of human disorders that accompanied living in the midst of their prey.

A creature of Satan, feeding on carrion that was tainted, no less than a bird that swallows a diseased insect, might survive, but over generations and generations, the chemistry of the vampire had slowly given way to human frailties. One of these was 
aging,
 a problem Banaker was frantically attempting to correct through a research project the U.S. government had no idea it was funding.

Although the aging process in a pire was far slower than in his human counterpart, the days of vampires who lived to see successive generations come and go, were gone. Unless Banaker could succeed in fully restoring the primal vampire gene back to its original state.

As for vampires like her, Pamela's bones had grown and she had reached maturity only through the miracles wrought by Banaker. She was dug from her grave as a child of nine, dead of meningitis. He had literally raised her from the dead, creating of her not a vampire born of pire parentage, but a bastardization of his kind. Yet, he had always treated her as if she were a daughter, until now ... until Stroud had arrived. Now he had used her like a whore.

Banaker had frequently warned her of the horrid possibilities of feeding directly from the human host, that she must feed on the elixir distilled at the Institute, where the blood was fortified with the vampire strain, screened and tested and purified. She'd never fed on a man like Abraham Stroud before, a man going into an epileptic type of seizure in the throes of her passionate vampiric embrace. It had so shocked her.

It had therefore been natural for her to instantly let go of the bite, repulsed by the twisted human form at the other end.

These thoughts and more weaved through her mind as she pictured herself in Banaker's office the next morning trying to explain the unexpected end to the evening. She went toward her own car, preparing to leave. The red was a purple under the cover of darkness, the white interior a soft beige. She was given the car by Banaker, her mentor and her “father.” Pamela Carr's headstone still stood at the Andover Memorial Gardens Cemetery on Dunne near Sycamore, on the outskirts of Andover. Sometimes, when she'd visit she'd stand before the tombstone and read the chiseled lettering and wonder about the little girl who'd died so many years before. The headstone read:

Susan Marie Muncie

Beloved Daughter

1947--1956

Beside this headstone were other people named Muncie, Susan's parents. Pamela was drawn to the spot even as a child, although none of the others had ever told her that Susan Marie Muncie and Pamela Carr were one and the same--at least in body. No one needed to tell her.

Her life was the life of the recycled body. It was not so cowardly an existence, after all, and the torturous hunger was controllable, so long as she got her supply. And she got that supply, like all the others, from Banaker. She owed her life to Banaker. There was no failing him ... and yet, she had failed him miserably tonight.

She opened her car door, but the sound of a beating wind made her look up just in time to see the massive black cloud blotting out the sky overhead. Her inner sonar told her that it--he, Banaker--was coming for her.

She must either face him here, like this, or flee. She'd failed him most certainly, and she expected his wrath, but she did not expect his punishment to come in this form and so swiftly. Why had he chosen to approach her in his most sinister and threatening aspect? When a vampire concealed himself in a black fog created via the cold breath stored in its lungs, it was 
stalking
.

It came like an animal, creeping toward her. It intended to show itself as it truly was: a huge, carnivorous bat with hard, unseeing black eyes, peaked ears, and fangs twice the size of any snake's--a creature blessed by Satan, that picked its way about with sonar so accurate that it could reach down with its massive talons to rip off her head or hoist her to its mouth to slowly drain life from her.

Was this Banaker coming?

But he had worked so tirelessly and long to create a community of Pires who could live in mutual harmony and peace with humankind, going undetected among them. She thought of all the grueling years of service that she had spent in helping fulfill the goals of Banaker's Institute, thought of the years of lab work, searching endlessly for better and better blood additives, preservatives, and substitutes. She'd been there when the discovery came on withstanding sunlight. She recalled the experiments with the cross. She helped on fund raisers and drives, and saw to it that the monies were diverted instead to the study of rare blood disorders and poor strains among her kind, and how to improve the stock. She recalled the breakthrough in the DNA lab. They'd been testing a theory of Banaker's: that bone marrow held many of the ingredients for vampire needs. Banaker was proved right. He'd been ecstatic for days over the discovery.

Once this discovery was made, all the Pires in a position to help were summoned to do so. They then went about the process of accessing the human bone marrow--throwaway stuff at death--to support the colony as never before.

Banaker was working toward the day when his brethren could live on a self-replicating supply of his blood elixir, eliminating the need to ever again feed off mankind. He believed that Pires could prosper if they were independent of the human race, and it could be done through careful generations of gene splicing. In his quest, Dr. Banaker had had to unearth literally hundreds of bodies in order to extract the marrow from the bones. He preferred the bones of children because these carried the most marrow, but he and his crews, working among the surrounding graveyards, were not above taking the bones of any long dead human, including the parents of Susan Marie Muncie.

But Banaker's Institute provided a safe haven for the Pires' study; it provided the distillery and distribution center for Banaker's elixir. Human patients provided much needed raw materials. From time to time, the morgue provided a place to party, a place to vent off steam and primitive emotions and needs. The “venting,” as Dr. Banaker called it, was helped along by a vagrant body coming in off the street.

So why was he risking everything now in a wanton, cannibalistic manner, going about a feeding frenzy that was leaving Andover in shock at the disappearances of children and others? Why was he now coming for her?

No time for further speculation, she threw up her own defenses, beginning with her own inner vibrations--a nerve-center antennae. It began quivering warnings both inwardly to herself, and outwardly to her would-be attacker. She bared her fangs to the threat. This display also showed the crawling, white worms that lived on her gums and below her tongue. She snarled and began to metamorphose, knowing she hadn't a chance now of fleeing in a car or on foot. Her shape began to change as her eyes met those in the black fog now directly over her.

She dispensed with any hope of creating and hiding within her own fog. Her only hope now lay in evasion and speed. She felt the familiar bumpy, ribbed furls of skin peel away from her back, arms, and legs, bursting and splitting the tight dress she wore. Small coarse hair sprouted from every pore, covering her body. Each of her fingers and thumbs elongated, the bone going elastic and hollow for speed, for the duration of the change. She feared, as always, that her internal organs would burst like her clothing with the difficult task of change required in the cellular structure. Her skin became leather under the dark mat of hair. Webbed folds of rubbery skin spread in sheets between distended, high-knuckled fingers. Each finger was now the length of her former forearm.

She lifted into flight, but it was too late as she was suddenly hit from out of the fog by a thousand bats. Was Banaker controlling them? She screamed as the multitude of lesser creatures took delight in effecting their thousand bites, drawing blood from so many wounds at once that she was quickly weakened. Her vampire body was carried along by the throng of bats feeding on her.

Each plunged its small incisive hole in her, each took its fill until she was blanketed with them. They then dropped her, as if on command, and she plummeted in her weakened condition until the powerful thud of her weight against the earth knocked her into stupor which was, mercifully, without pain.

Bruised and broken, her tough skin was now matted with blood from a thousand rabid bites. She reached out for something solid to take hold of in her attempt to pull herself to her knees. But she could feel nothing.

Punishment had come swiftly, surely. She prayed it was over, that Banaker had had his evil fun. She felt now the rents and gashes to her face acutely, although she bled from every part of her body. She lapped at the red tears of her wounds in a pathetic attempt to replace her blood as quickly as it was fleeing. But the weakness and the numbness were too much to overcome.

She soundly cursed Banaker. “May the God of the human, the God of Susan Marie Muncie, damn you, Banaker!”

With this curse she lay back on her broken wings and her eyes locked on the conical, black form that hugged the treetops over her. There he was, the Andover Devil, controller of mist, shape-changer, the thing that spanned life and death itself. Here was Banaker, the evil genius, the marvel of evolution that had been born of a creature like himself.

For a flashing instant, Pamela remembered her other life with her true parents. It had been a short life, but one filled with love, cut short by a childhood disease. She realized for the first time that her new life was a sham, that the eternal life Banaker had led her into was not eternal after all. It was in fact moments away from coming to a torturous end.