Vampire Dreams (Bloodscreams #1) (34 page)

“Where are they from, then?”

“They're from...” Static intensified. “...from the dead.”

“Have you flipped?”

“Wish it were that simple.”

“This has to do with that bone field you mentioned?”

“Right! These aliens feed on human blood, Cage.”

“Christ, maybe you'd best call out the National Guard.”

“They're on their way, but they ... much help ... not without the solution.”

“Solution? The S-choline you told me about?”

“Right.”

“You're out of it?”

“Cage, got to rush. Can I count on you?”

“Sure, sure, Doctor Stroud.”

“You're not just humoring me to go along with the sick vet routine, are you?”

“I'll be there. Will you have the bodies for me to examine?”

“I will,” he lied, not knowing how he would regain the Bradley woman's body. Knowing Banaker, it was already destroyed, unless he meant to use it as bait for him.

They signed off and Stroud went back to work on his vampire arsenal. Mrs. Ashyer had been of great help, first taking care of Wilson and her husband, getting their wounds cleaned and tied off, seeing they rested. She then began gathering up various household items that would contribute to creating a new batch of S-choline. The homemade brew would be diluted with other chemicals, yet in theory it ought to work. Using the pharmacological encyclopedia Ashyer had wisely chosen to come away with, they had some notion that while vanilla extract would be of no use to them, Clorox bleach and other routinely used chemicals about the place would. In fact, they were finding the various mixtures they needed at every turn. Before long they had half a drum filled with a substance approximating S-choline. This was loaded onto the chopper.

Stroud opened up some thirty large casings to use in his AK-47 assault rifle which, up until now, had been useless against the creatures. He removed the casings, placed an eye drop of the homemade S-choline into each bullet, reassembled the casing and the lead, and laid each into the chamber.

Using Pepsi bottles and Coke cans, he created Molotov cocktails of larger ingredients that would be touched off in incendiary fashion. He made nine of these and stuffed them into a cloth bag that he could dangle from his shoulder along with the loaded AK-47.

The entire time he used for his preparations against Banaker, he sensed Banaker was also setting up his weaponry and arsenal. In a sense, the monster and the monster-hunter were now so connected that their thought patterns had become entwined. Stroud feared he would be too predictable, that Banaker would know his every maneuver before he did. He must plan his attack wisely. Banaker expected him; Banaker would not be taken by surprise again. Banaker would have scouts watching, waiting ... there in the cemetery where they would struggle to the death.

Banaker began rationing out the blood supply he'd kept on hand at the mausoleum. He wanted his people hale and fit for battle when Stroud arrived. With the sun going below the lip of the horizon, they needed the marrow mix to keep them whole and strong.

Where the hell was Stroud?

The waiting was driving Banaker crazy.

He wondered if he ought not attack the manse again.

But if he did so, at what cost?

Better to remain here on his own ground.

Better to take the defensive.

“There! There in the west!” shouted one of Banaker's closest bodyguards. “It's Stroud! It's the machine!”

The word machine resounded through Banaker's psyche as “the machine that killed his father, housing the grandson of the man who'd killed his father.” Banaker gave out a wild, animal scream that turned to silence as its high pitch rose to such a treble that none but the bat creatures and the bats in surrounding caves could hear. Whole clouds of small bats stormed from their caves in clouds of blackness against the late afternoon sky. They moved as if of one mind, straight for Stroud's machine.

Banaker keened frantically, his own monster form now having taken full shape. The lesser bats would bring Stroud down to the earth, if Banaker willed them to.

The cloud of black, keening, sweeping bats blotted out the image of the chopper as it approached, there were so many of them.

Stroud saw the moving, living cloud of bats coming and he knew they were bent on suicide or any other cost to drive him to the ground and destroy his mobility.

Stroud knew they were honing in on him and his already shaky craft. Should they dive-bomb the rotars en masse, or cover the bubble with their blood and bodies, he'd go directly down and be killed before he even got near Banaker.

In the distance he saw Banaker surrounded by several huge bat things. He determined to swoop, avoiding the first army of the bat colony sent to destroy him in midair. He shoved the stick forward at full throttle at the last possible instant, missing the bulk of the small bats who nonetheless gave chase. Leveling out, he was faced with trees directly ahead, but before pulling up, he threw down three of the cocktails, causing confusion and a gas cloud to erupt on the ground at the cemetery. He then pulled up as madly as possible, feeling the skids at the bottom of the chopper tear away the top limbs of the trees.

He circled around, the bats still in pursuit, enough of them jamming into the tail rotar to effectively shut it down. It was only a matter of minutes before they'd do the same to the top rotar.

Stroud cursed to himself. He hadn't expected trouble in the air. He'd planned to dump the final drum of home-made S-choline out the back and onto Banaker's party. It was held onto a platform firmly bolted to the chopper. There was only one way to explode it. It must be done kamikaze fashion, but Stroud didn't particularly wish to die.

He instead took the bird straight up over the top of the cemetery field. He had strapped on a parachute, and now he cut loose from the straps holding him in the seat, dashed to the rear, holding firm to the dart gun, hand grenades, Molotovs, plastique, and hypos in the pack lashed to him, and jumped. The bats kept at the dead machine like ants feeding on the carcass of an enormous beetle as Stroud flew down and yanked the chute open. Above him, he saw and felt the powerful aircraft coming at him. It missed by mere feet, sending him off like a feather in its wake. His grandfather's tough old chopper was covered in bat hair and bat blood. Other bats dive-bombed him as he was descending, some trying to rend holes in the fabric of the chute. Stroud used every maneuver he knew to descend as quickly as possible, knowing he'd have a welcoming committee waiting below. As they gathered, he sent down a rain of Molotov cocktails for the beasts.

But the chopper exploded on impact, and while fire and a blast were no match for the enemy, the explosion of chemicals aboard the helicopter sent up a weird mushroom cloud that spread out in a dense blanket all around the graveyard. So dense was the canopy, even sunlight could not filter through.

This Stroud landed in.

He didn't know where Banaker was, but his ears were filled with the agonized, animal cries of the dead and dying. What he saw all around him both amazed and terrified, as the earth over graves began to tremble. He tore himself loose from the parachute, knowing he was helpless buckled to it. He stumbled into a headstone as he did so, and he felt something grab his leg. His eyes fell on the large, bony hand that held his ankle. It was sticking out from a grave. In fact, all around him, things--
corpses
--seemed to be crawling from their graves, shaking off earth, and making their way toward him, the lone living human in all the cemetery. Stroud stepped onto the body of a giant white worm that was cork-screwing from a grave.

Then Stroud saw one of the walking dead snarl in a salty fashion as if he was readying to pounce and bite off Stroud's arm. In the thing's mouth, curled on the gums, Stroud saw the now familiar miniature white worms. 
They
 were Banaker's 
things
, still in their human form, and some were beginning to fall over and quake with the symptoms of the poisonous gas that worked on their nerves, liver, blood pressure and heart, until some began to explode. These exploded with soft, 
pop-pulp
 sounds. The kitchen mixture of S-choline was taking more time, and was less dramatic in result, but just as effective in the long run. But for now, the one that had him by the ankle had wisely remained below ground, and the gas had not had the killing effect as a result, and the grip of the monster was threatening to break Stroud's ankle bone. He could not pull loose. Others were moving in to converge on Stroud and rip him apart with outstretched hands. Stroud fired off one of the darts, striking the closest of the standing creatures, sending it into an immediate paroxysm of pain and anguish before it softly burst open. Still he was held in place by the iron grip of the hand from the grave. Stroud jammed one of the hypos into the hand and it opened almost instantly in response, allowing Stroud escape.

But escape to where?

How many were left in the ground? How many were left in the fog. Where was Banaker?

Another explosion from the chopper debris rumbled the earth, toppling headstones. Andover Cemetery was now looking like a war-torn area. Over his shoulder, Stroud carried the conventional weapons of war, his AK-47, hand grenades, and plastique. He was disoriented in the smoke and fog which were causing the things on all sides of him to gag, cry out like wounded bears, collapse, and turn to a kind of molten mass of gelatinous flesh before becoming ash. Stroud tried desperately to find the huge white brick mausoleum that was at the northern section of the cemetery. He believed he was heading in the right direction, and he believed that if Banaker was still alive, he'd be there.

Stroud was hit from atop. One of the vampires had flown above the killing cloud, but now dived onto him, sending its ghastly talons into Stroud's back, right between the shoulder blades. It felt as if the thing were about to take his head off when suddenly it lifted him, his own weight causing more pain against the lifting talons. The creature had gotten in and out of the deadly cloud so quickly that it hadn't taken a breath. They were slow learners, but the vampires were catching on. This one was flying Stroud to some strange destination. Stroud felt for the dart gun, but it was gone, dropped somewhere below as Stroud fought for consciousness. The power of the being that held him was formidable. It slammed him face first into the side of the mausoleum, almost knocking Stroud senseless. Stroud slid down onto the pearly white stone steps before the closed door of the brick edifice.

Two of them now straddled him. They bent to lift him, their eyes black and animal-like, fixing him there as if he were a bug, easy prey. They could have killed him then and there had they lifted him and together slammed him into the concrete. Stroud acted quickly, however, jamming a hypo into one of them. The other watched in sheer horror at the fate of its fellow being. Stroud ran.

-25-

Abraham Stroud stumbled, got up, ran farther, and then saw it was hopeless--there was nowhere to run to.

They were everywhere, and they had encircled him, hatred for him causing a communal keening noise that pierced the human ear with a painful screech. These were the ones who'd survived the contaminated blood earlier and the initial S-choline bomb that had exploded with the chopper. These were the ones who'd witnessed so many of their kind die at Stroud's hand; these monsters had quickly burrowed back beneath the earth when the S-choline cloud came over the cemetery.

Stroud stared back at their angry, animal faces and watched as their snouts twitched in rage at him, as each locked its sonar on him, fixing him in place. Their dead, black pupils were like the unmoving, closed eyelids of a snake that lived below ground, locating prey by smell and feel. They were closing in on him. He'd be devoured by the horde, just as Banaker had planned all along.

In fact, he could almost hear Banaker's order as if he could pull it out of the air: Destroy the one human who can destroy you.

Stroud instinctively reached for the missing AK-47 automatic assault gun that had been dangling from his shoulder, but it was a futile gesture. It had flown from his grasp when he'd been unceremoniously dumped on the stone steps before Banaker's altar. The bag carrying the Molotov cocktails was empty of these and dangling about him like a loose fold of skin. But deep in its bottom, he'd placed a layer of the sanctified earth from his grandfather's coffins. He lifted out a handful of the dirt and flung it in the faces of the bat people. It rose like sand, catching and refracting the moonlight, turning to miniature stars as it cascaded into the crowd of vampires. Where it fell it burned and seared hair and flesh, causing a ripple of fear to hold them in check. He cast out a second handful of the holy dirt and, like water, it wet the creatures but with a wetness of burning sores. But then even the dirt was gone and Stroud was weaponless, defeated.

He backed toward the mausoleum door, trying desperately to gain entrance, but it remained locked against him. Banaker was inside, he could feel his presence deep within the concrete walls. He was inside, and yet he was out, watching the drama unfold, orchestrating from afar, at a safe distance, cowardly at heart.

Somewhere deep inside the crypt, Stroud realized Banaker had a route out. He was too smart to seat himself up without an escape hatch. He concentrated on Banaker and willed his own thoughts through to the creature that could read his mind, and that of his fellow creatures. He willed Banaker to know that he had killed Dolphin and that he, Stroud, believed Banaker a skulking coward, afraid to face him, afraid to open the door and let him through.

Behind him, Stroud felt the others closing the distance to the mausoleum. Stroud fought back the image of his own body being ravaged, lying on the white steps, a bloodless pulp of flesh. He instead concentrated on challenging Banaker with his mind. The attempt put great strain on him and for a moment he feared he would black out and it would be over; they would then feast on his life's blood.

But then the door he leaned against moved and it came suddenly open, displaying a sheer, clean black gaping hole into which Stroud might run, if he dared. Stroud turned to face the oncoming rush of vampires, knowing he had no choice but to accept Banaker's new challenge now. The army of pires moved ever closer, eerily reaching out for him now, closing in. He had little choice left but to step into Banaker's home.