by Jon F. Merz
THE LAST VAMPIRE
JON F. MERZ
Copyright © 2017 by Jon F. Merz
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
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CONTENTS
Disclaimer
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
About the Author
Also by Jon F. Merz
DISCLAIMER
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
1
The woman sat in the middle of the clearing in the middle of the forest in the middle of the night.
A chill breeze blew through the pine boughs and made the pale hairs on her forearms stand like miniature trees barren of branches and leaves and life. Her eyes were wide, pupils darting from side to side at the slightest sound from beyond the range of her vision. She wore a sleeveless shirt that looked more like a simple tunic and jeans that had faded so much the denim looked almost transparent, like her skin. Strands of her hair blew in the breeze and she used one hand to wipe them away from her eyes as if desperate to keep her vision clear so she could see into the night that surrounded her.
She sat on the ground, amid the dusty dirt and pine needles. Her shoes - once sneakers of some forgotten brand - barely covered her feet properly, and her toes stuck through the tops of them while the broken laces had been knotted and retied with little effect.
Fingers clawed at the ground, clenching and unclenching with the same frequency as her darting eyes.
Her breathing was a train chugging down the track. But she had no idea what a train was; she’d been born far too late to ever have seen the giant behemoths flying down the abandoned and rusted rails that pockmarked the country now, skeletal reminders of a time when things were different.
Of a time…before.
She shifted in the dirt, and the metallic chain clinked as she did so. Links ran from the metal collar around her neck, fell down into the same dirt, and then traveled a short distance away to where a thick stump of wood jutted out of the earth holding the other end of the chain to a rusted padlock.
Without thinking, she tugged at it. But it was heavy and she had no strength to pull it free from the post. She’d eaten little the past few weeks. Scraps, really. Whatever he chose to give to her. Enough so she could keep walking. Little more.
What was his name? She frowned. It didn’t matter. He was a bastard. Cruel. Unwavering in his devotion to some grand ideal she didn’t give a shit about. What sort of human would do what he did? What sort of human could?
She tugged the chain again. Hearing it clink made her feel momentarily better. The clinking was a familiar sound. It comforted her. It reminded her the sun would rise again in a few hours.
Safety.
That was all she lived for now. Not the synthetic drugs that she’d been a slave to for years until he found her.
She glanced down at the needle tracks on her arms. If she’d known what a ball point pen was, she might have connected them and been able to create some sort of strange graphic. She could have done the same thing with the ones on top of her feet. In between her toes.
Cold.
She shivered. The breezes blew stronger around her and she rubbed her forearms, trying her best to calm the hairs standing up all over her skin.
In a few hours, the warmth of the sun would make all this cold seem like a bad dream.
A branch cracked and she jerked her head toward the sound.
She swallowed. Quiet. She must remain absolutely quiet.
Movement. She caught a quick glimpse of something just beyond the range of her vision. It darted from shadow to shadow.
Breathing.
Was it hers?
She wanted to cry out for help, but what help would possibly come? There was none.
Another crack on the forest floor. This time closer. How was it able to move like that? It seemed to be able to jump from place to place without being seen. Almost like it was invisible.
She turned to the direction she heard the last sound, peering deep into the darkness, trying her best to make out any sort of detail.
Nothing.
She turned back-
And screamed even as the face materialized before her.
It was tough to even know what she was looking at in those jumbled, panicked seconds. She saw a gaping maw filled with razor sharp fangs jutting out of translucent gums, dripping with an ooze that resembled saliva but stunk more like the thing had gargled with rotting flesh.
The eyes were the worst; they reminded her of the same hunger she’d seen on the faces of other junkies back at the flop house. She’d worn the same expression when she was frantic for the next hit - willing to do whatever it took to feed the craving.
Craving.
The creature before her was ravenous.
Even as her scream echoed in the clearing, the creature drew closer, its teeth bared in a sort of sickening smile, dribble spilling down its chin and stretching to the dirt below.
Her feet bit into the dirt, trying to push herself as far away as she could possibly get. But the chain wouldn’t allow it. And worse, the creature would be upon her in a split second.
Its breathing was a steady hiss that scraped the back of its throat as it stained the air before it. She would have retched if she’d had anything in her stomach.
“Delicioussssssssss….”
She watched as it came toward her on all fours, its limbs long and spindly like an awkward spider. Its hair was a mat of grease and lice and maggots spilled off it, writhing in the dirt they fell to.
Closer now. Ever closer.
She screamed as it launched itself at her - expecting to feel its fangs sink into her neck where it would greedily suck her dry of her blood.
But that never happened.
As her scream died, a angry shriek erupted from the creature itself as he - the bastard who owned her - suddenly appeared in the clearing swathed in darkness. He was no light bringer. There was nothing good about him.
He was a means to an end.
The creature wheeled around, regarding him for the first time, trying to understand what it faced now.
The man did not move, but kept his stance fixed on slightly bent knees. In his hands he held a six foot staff topped with some sort of point she couldn’t quit make out. But he kept the staff in front of him almost like a shield.
Ready.
She looked at his face, expecting to see something - some t
race of emotion, some clue to a hidden humanity locked deep inside of him. She saw nothing. He was impassive. Locked onto the target before him.
The creature moved so quickly, she didn’t even sense it until it shot directly at him. For a micro-second, she thought he was dead - that the creature had caught him by surprise and that it was his blood the creature would be feasting on tonight.
But then he moved so slightly that it seemed almost as if he hadn’t; but he’d shifted just enough - a hair’s breadth really - so that the creature missed its mark. And as it went sailing past, he flipped the staff so that its point was now upright and jammed it directly into the chest of the creature.
The creature’s momentum tore the staff from his grasp as it flew past, screeching from pain and tumbling into the dirt and pine needles.
It lay there, curled and unmoving. Just more hissing, a rasping cough almost, that seemed to be dwindling fast.
The man moved quickly, striding over to the creature, grabbing at his staff and using it to flip the creature over so that its chest was exposed with the staff still jutting out of it.
And then to her disbelief, he squatted close to the creature’s face. She heard him ask a single question.
“Where is it?”
The creature hissed and he twisted the staff embedded in its chest, causing the creature to screech again in pain.
“Where?”
For a moment, she thought it would die without saying anything. Then as bloody froth bubbled out of its mouth, she heard a single word spill out.
“Diablo.”
The man stood as impassive as ever. Then he tore the staff free from the creature’s chest and even as he did so, the creature’s skin turned to ash and crumbled to the earth. In seconds, the vampire was destroyed.
Gone forever.
He stared a second longer and then kicked at the dust to scatter it among the rest of the dirt and pine needles.
Only then did she see something happen to his face.
It would be much later when she realized what it was.
A smile.
2
They came for us at night.
I don’t know that anyone ever figured out what caused it. Maybe the signs were there all along and we were just too damned stupid to see them. Wrapped up in our own pettiness. People walking around with their faces glued to the screens of the cell phones that we all used to carry; suburban housewives doing their best to pretend their pathetic lives were up to the standards of their so-called friends; Wall Street types figuring out how to make money off of legalized gambling with the hopes and dreams of people who would never be able to weather the storm of an economic recession; kids demanding trophies for merely participating in an event because heaven forbid we teach them the truth: that there are winners and losers in life.
And it pays to be a winner.
The attacks were isolated at first. They didn’t have the numbers. So a lot of people pretended it was all bullshit. Fake news. Blame the media for doing their best to shake enough sense into people that someone would start paying attention.
Start doing something.
But we didn’t.
By that point, the politicians in Washington - home to the most pathetic president in the entire history of the United States - had so thoroughly perverted things that someone could have stood in front of a camera, looked us all right in the fucking eye, and said, “Vampires. Protect yourself,” and it wouldn’t have made a lick of difference.
Then again, maybe that’s just nature. How an ecosystem culls the weak from the crowd. They get rid of the weak, sick, lame…and the stupid.
When the lunatics at both fringes of the left and right finally started screaming about the vampire hordes, it was already getting too late. It didn’t matter how many guns Bubba and his yokel pals had stockpiled against the big ol’ guv’mint coming to take them away. It didn’t matter.
Vampires didn’t give a shit about guns.
They just wanted blood.
With their numbers swelling, the attacks became more organized. Like a horde of locusts, they fell upon our civilization and fed. Oh, how they fed. And those that weren’t bled out, their fleshy husks left hanging from street lights like bloodsucking gangs marking their turf, were turned. They kept building their ranks up. I don’t know how many there were, but they were everywhere. Anywhere that could shield them from the sun’s rays during the daylight hours, you could find the suckers. Nests of them that buzzed with an unholy murmur while they slept and dreamed whatever sort of lurid dreams danced around their heads. As the sun surrendered to the night at the end of each day, they would venture forth, oozing from their lairs - a sea of shadow from which there was no recourse.
At some point, they started arguing among themselves and killing each other. I guess that’s when someone - one of the survivors - coined the term The Equilibrium. We started finding piles of dust - the corpses of vampires - everywhere. Something swept through their ranks and simply decimated them. Until their numbers had been thinned to the point that there was enough prey for the remaining hunters.
They started killing us, too. Instead of simply turning us. Those early days were long gone. Like some directive had gone out from the high command. Those of who had been able to eke out an existence amid this hell, we were being killed off one by one. Each night, more of us would be taken and bled dry.
Cities fell. Populations disappeared. Whole swaths of our planet simply went dead.
And what about God?
That was laughable. Didn’t matter what religion you were. Your God or gods weren’t answering their phones. And all that religious shit didn’t make a bit of difference to the bloodsuckers. Holy water, a crucifix, menorah, or koran? Didn’t matter.
The only thing that stopped them was a stake through the heart.
If you were lucky enough to find a nest of them and could expose them to the sun, then you’d kill them that way, too. And that shining orb in the sky proved a better deity than anything man had ever created. It was reliable. It rose every single day and even a cloudy day could kill a sucker. The sun became our god. We relished its rays; prayed that somehow the Earth could stop spinning so that we never had to experience another night.
But that’s not how the universe works. So with the sun doing its job on this side of the planet, the other side of the world entered the dark of night.
And the battle went on.
When all this shit started, I was overseas. A pawn in another stupid war waged by gutless cowards in Washington who would never have the stones to shoulder a rifle themselves. Back at the forward operating base, we got bits of news. We heard stuff. But it all sounded so incredibly unreal. My phone calls home to my wife and son were different, though. Denise was scared. She was trying to put on a brave face for our son Cole. But there was only so much she could do to counter the waves of paranoia that started gripping the nation.
Kids talk, after all. And they were still sending kids to school at that point. Cole and his pals would jabber. They’d pretend they weren’t scared.
They were, though.
The worst part was being tucked away on the other side of the world while this was going on. We seemed so removed from it until the suckers found their way into our little sandy slice of paradise - the most useless country ever to have existed. But the suckers were damned good at using all the caves in those mountains to hide.
They fell upon us when we went out after dark to hunt our enemy. We used to think we owned the night. We were the elite, after all.
We didn’t know shit.
Our forward operating base was overrun one night and we barely managed to make it out alive. We fell back to one of the last outposts in the area - one that happened to have a runway and a fueled airplane. They’d been evacuating apparently. No one had told us.
Expendable. What else was new?
We fought our way onto the airplane and when the ramp finally closed, we were headed home at last. I willed that plane
to fly nonstop, but obviously, it couldn’t. We would have had a midair refueling before the suckers. Now, we had to touch down and refuel ourselves because no one was left to fly a tanker.
We lost three guys when we did. We barely made it aloft again and as we raced down the runway, we saw waves of suckers washing over the fences and swarming everything in sight like some undulating mass of army ants over a cow carcass. Anything living down there soon wouldn’t be.
We debated on the way home about where we should land. Everyone wanted to get close to where they lived because they had family they wanted to be with. In the end, we touched down in Norfolk, Virginia, figuring that for most of the people on the plane, it was enough of a compromise. Close to Washington, D.C., Alexandria, Langley, Dam Neck, and Fort Meade. We had a few guys based out of Fayetteville and they weren’t too pleased with the decision, so they said they’d fly there after they dropped us off.
I never found out what happened to them.
Norfolk was a ghost town when we came in low as the sun’s rays were first kissing the night away. When our wheels touched down, we let out a collective whoop. But all I was thinking about was Denise and Cole.
We treated it like a hot LZ, coming off the plane ready to shoot anyone or anything that stood in our way. But with the sun climbing in the sky, we didn’t have any suckers trying to get their teeth into us.
What we should have done was band together and be smart about trying to reach our respective families. What we did instead you can probably put down to human protective instinct. None of us wanted to wait any longer. We grabbed enough weapons and ammunition and supplies and went our separate ways, telling each other we’d get in touch and bring everyone back together and try to figure this shit out.
When I drove off the airfield that day, it would be the last time I did so as a member of the US military. And it would be the last time I wouldn’t have the horrible memories that I would soon confront.
Sometimes, I think I should have just stayed on the plane.
Or stayed overseas.
Anything to avoid the sights that would soon burrow into the deepest reaches of my mind.
