Vampire Dreams (Bloodscreams #1) (22 page)

He imagined she was Stroud's prisoner, perhaps trapped in some manner, her body impaled by one of his grandfather's awful instruments of torture. He imagined her hanging by a thread to what little life remained in her dehydrated form, cut off from any blood source. He imagined her begging for a drop of Stroud's blood. Completely, totally helpless, in great pain and anguish, her life seeping away like a melting ice cube, she was absolutely helpless to save herself. This was why she had not returned. She was trapped ... held against her will, bundled up, tied, restrained in some barbaric manner, drained to the brink of death. Her mind had shut down, his telepathy told him. He could not reach out to her mind any longer, but there was someone with her. Stroud? No ... someone else ... one of her own kind ... a vampire ... a brother ... her brother ... Dolphin.

He pondered Pamela Carr for a time. He had groomed her from childhood. She'd been like a sister to Dolph, although they were not blood related. She'd been taken from her grave and given rebirth in the manner of the old ways; whereas Dolph was the child of Banaker and his vampire wife.

This dawn found Banaker saddened and disappointed. First with Pamela Carr. He was certain that she'd betrayed him after all the years of nursing her along, pampering her, showering her with life and vigor and a place in the vampire community that neither her education nor her talents warranted. Now this--to fail him when he most needed her.

She'd been due back hours and hours before to meet him at the enormous gray concrete fortress of the Andover Mausoleum. Where most of his kind kept crypts. It was preferable to the old caves far out of town, and much more convenient to the Institute where most of them worked. Others had been carefully placed in jobs where they could easily access human blood. Most of the network had been set up by Banaker's father before him. Some of the pires worked at funeral parlors, others in the autopsy rooms of hospitals from Andover to Springfield. Others worked at the Institute as paramedics and doctors. Today, thanks to Banaker, the vampire could live and work among the humans with little chance of detection.

The only man who had seen through the charade was now dead, but his grandson was alive and living in Stroud Manse.

The huge mausoleum afforded a safe place to lie down among the “sheep” in plain sight. Meanwhile, Banaker, like the others here, maintained homes in Andover for appearance's sake. It worked fine so long as no suspicions were aroused. He owned the mausoleum and the caretakers were his kind of folk. Filled to capacity, it housed the entire community of pires, some three hundred now, and growing.

When Pamela did not return, he at first feared she had somehow been won over by Stroud, overpowered by his magic and his charms, and quite possibly destroyed by the man. Then he began receiving the images, horrible and unrelenting, of the way in which she was dispatched. He got a sense of her holding onto life at this moment by a mere thread and her body dehydrated to the point of complete and total helplessness. He knew she'd been drained to near death, and her mind had shut down, and that she was being held somewhere at this moment: cocooned in the ancient manner, stored for later feedings by Dolphin, her brother.

“Damn him, damn my only son!” he cursed. Dolphin was more of a threat now than Stroud. Dolphin would continue until they were all exposed, and as strong a race as they were, when exposure came it meant great liability. They were hopelessly outnumbered. Banaker foresaw a time when they surely would outnumber the humans, but that was far in the future.

It could only be resolved one way. Dolph must die.

Banaker pushed closed the crypt he'd been lying peacefully in and, with others looking out from their crypts, he dissolved into a fog there in the marbled hallway. The fog seeped through the locked doorway and out into the lawn. Aside from Pamela, another pire was missing from his crypt--Cooper. Banaker wondered what Dolph had done to Cooper.

Violence had become a thing of the past for Dr. Oliver Banaker, an unwholesome and unwanted historical tentacle which he'd believed to be severed with his incredible discoveries: the DNA matrix, the bone marrow protein, the drink that made them free of the dependence on human cattle to feed upon. All great gifts to his inhuman race. Gifts built upon the theories expounded down through the ages of his race, theories about blood.

They had come so far, too far to allow any one individual to destroy such progress--even if that one was his son.

Everyone left in the mausoleum sensed his distress and knew the cause. They all had children of their own, or soon would.

Banaker ascended on wing now, his dark form like an animated night cloud, moving with the surety of a bat toward an old, familiar hunting ground. He wasn't so sure, however, that he could kill Dolphin. Certainly he had the power, but did he have the courage and the heart?

Dolphin Banaker sensed his father's approach and it made him lift his incisors from the flesh showing through the cocoon that dangled from the ceiling of the cave. The meat must be covered with the cocoon to keep the smaller bats from feeding on it. Dolph regurgitated a thick mass of white to beige waxy silk from his stomach, a substance supplied him by the parasitic white worms that lived inside him. He saw Pamela Carr's right eye frozen open and glaring back at him through the gauzy stuff, but he was certain she could no longer feel a thing. Not that it mattered a great deal to him.

As soon as Dolph removed himself from the upside-down Pamela Carr and the protective shell around her, his position was taken up by a multitude of ordinary vampire bats. Their numbers were so great that they blotted out the cocooned form of the female vampire. The effect was of a number of bats resting comfortably over the sides of a stalactite, a natural phenomena. And everyone knew that vampire bats had recently taken up residence in southern Illinois from the sister states across the Ohio; they just didn't know 
what
 attracted them to Andover.

Dolphin wished to pick the time and place of any further encounters with his father. He had no love for his father or the others of his species, due in main part to what they'd become. In fact, it disgusted him. They had the potential for such power and instead they spent their days and nights languishing about as humans, mimicking the cattle they ought to be lords over! It made no sense to Dolphin, not in the long run. And he believed that he was winning some of the younger pires over to his side. Just the night before, he'd led a small band of them into a neighboring county where they'd fed for the first time in their lives on the living, warm bodies of a family in a deserted farmhouse. They'd fed so ravenously and zealously that there was nothing left to store in the caves. They'd left the emptied containers of their four bodies there in the farmhouse for friends and neighbors to find and wonder over.

His father called it reckless endangerment. Dolph called it instinct and drive, desire and will, and, in the last analysis, 
freedom
. He wanted only to be free to be what he was. Taking that brown substitute for human blood invented by his father was a blasphemy against their kind and no one, not even his father, knew of the long-term effects of that shit. For all the great Oliver Banaker knew, it was turning them into a bunch of eunuchs and passionless humans! Look at Cooper, he thought, going to Magaffey and spilling his guts to a human. Wasn't that proof enough that the blood substitute turned their kind into fools and imbeciles?

Besides, there was nothing--nothing--like the real thing. Nothing like the taste of blood. Nothing like the feel of the struggling beast he attached himself to, and the feel of helplessness as its life was slowly drained away. It was power of the most primeval and ultimate kind. It was the source of Dolph's joy and reason for being. It was his heritage and his right. And, if need be, he'd fight to the death to defend it. If need be, he'd kill his father for the right to feed as his ancestors fed.

But he must fly. He didn't wish to be cornered here where there was little room for maneuverability and escape should he require it. He rushed for the high-ceilinged, open cavern at the center of the caves he knew so well.

He'd played here as a boy....

“Smell it?” asked Magaffey again as they trudged into the mouth of the cave.

Abe Stroud did smell it, an odor of decay but more than decay--like the stench that explodes forth when the corroded lid of a septic tank is pried loose, only more so. It was the odor of defecation, but it was also the odor of flesh and blood and urine and earth commingling. “What the hell is it?” asked Stroud.

“Follow me.”

Stroud began to doubt the sanity of this quest; he began to doubt Magaffey's intentions, his wild stories, all of it. But then they came to the source of the odor. “Careful with the flash. You hear them?” asked Magaffey. “One false move and they'll descend on us.”

Stroud's light picked up the fact the ceiling of the cave was moving; it was crawling with bats of several different species.

“Fruit bats don't live in caves,” said Magaffey. “Most of these are insectivores, but some are vampire bats. Shine your light down in that direction.”

Stroud, loaded down with the shovel and the stakes, did as instructed. His flash illuminated in one corner of the chamber an enormous pyramidal dune of bat droppings that spread wavelike across the cave floor, rising in one area to eight feet.

“Some indication of how long they've been here,” said Magaffey matter-of-factly as Stroud's flesh began to crawl.

“Where're we going?” he asked Magaffey who began to trudge over the dung heap. Underfoot was a glistening, moving carpet of cockroaches and maggots feeding on the droppings. The heavy stench of ammonia rose from the frenzied feeding.

At the top of the largest of these hills of life they found the larger vampire bats roosting in narrow, horizontal clefts in the rock. As Stroud's light hit them, some detached themselves as others merely began to lick the slick membrane between their fingers that formed their wings. Some swept past them, their wings brushing Stroud's face. Still others just hung there, twisting their snub-nosed faces and beady eyes with frantic nervousness.

Beyond these Stroud could see thousands and thousands more. They seemed packed as thick as heads of grain in a wheat field, except that they were upside down. As the alarm among them moved through the pack, it seemed a wind passed over them. Their blind eyes needn't tell them, for their sonar had detected the intruders. They erupted in panic.

Desperate to escape, they rocketed outward as if of one mind, forcing Stroud and Magaffey to their knees amid the insects. But instead of racing out into the light where the men had entered, they directed themselves deeper into the caves.

“Follow them,” said Magaffey, getting to his feet.

Very soon they came on a large, open cavern. In this main chamber a torrent of the black creatures circled overhead. They seemed penned by fear of the unfamiliar daylight outside and terrified by the presence of the men. They became one vast eddy, beating the air with frantic wings.

Their sonar was beyond human ears, yet the lower components of their squeaks created a strange cosmic rustling. The already suffocating atmosphere was made worse by the heat created from the thousands of racing bodies. Stroud and Magaffey were spattered by their angry droppings. There were several thousand bats, as thick as snowflakes in a driving gale, circling around and around their heads, flying at such speeds they must all be using their sonar. Stroud wondered how they kept from jamming one another's signals, how they kept from colliding with one another. Their capabilities were beyond science and technology. He was momentarily entranced by the dance of creatures that predated man by eons.

Their huge wings beat steadily now as long skeins of them kept a level, purposeful course across the huge cavern and out through another tunnel. As they exited, they left behind several pods of resting bats that seemed to be covering the stalactites in an attempt at gaining the moisture and coolness there.

“Some bats have taken to feeding on meat, Stroud.”

He turned to look into Magaffey's eyes. “Vampire bats, I know.”

“Some prey on roosting birds, some take frogs and small lizards, and one species is reported to feed on 
other bats
.”

“I thought they just sucked the blood of animals, like feeding at a horse's throat, penetrating the vein.”

“Some do that as well. An American species even manages to fish, Stroud. Remarkable adaptors, actually. At dusk the fisherman bat beats up and down over ponds, lakes, or even the sea. The tail membrane of most bats extends down to the ankles. In the fisherman bat, it's attached much higher up, at the knee. So, the legs are quite free. It trails its feet in the water, talons I should say--hooked-shaped claws. When they strike a fish, the bat scoops it up into its mouth and kills it with one powerful crunch of its teeth.”

“You seem to know a lot about bats.”

“I do now. The most specialized of the bunch is the vampire bat. It lights on a sleeping mammal, say a cow or even a human. Something in its saliva contains an anticoagulant, so that the blood, when it appears, will continue to ooze for some time before a clot forms. The vampire squats over the wound, lapping the blood. It flies by sonar ... the reason dogs are seldom attacked by them. Dogs are attuned to very high frequencies. They can hear them coming.”

“What does all this have to do with Banaker and--”

Magaffey grabbed up the flash and fired its light at one of the pods of remaining bats--the stalactite just over Stroud's head. Stroud instinctively ducked when the maddened flock erupted in a whirlwind, beating past them. When Stroud straightened up, he saw that the light revealed a stalactite that was translucent and in the see-through stone was the form of a human being rooted to the ceiling by its feet, its head nearest the swelling dung heap on the floor below it. Stroud, aghast at the horrendous sight, thought of fossils and whole skeletons and even completely preserved bodies in arctic ice. The facial characteristics were indistinct, blurred by the webby, cottony, slick, and icy-looking covering. Whoever it was, she--for the hair was dangling and long--had been drained of all color. She was as white and as still as stone sculpture.