Dominion of the Damned

by Jean Marie Bauhaus

  SEVENTEEN

  Hannah ran down the stairs and ran for the front door. It was standing wide open. Carl stood in the doorway, holding a blanket. He glanced at Hannah as she approached. “He’s going to get himself killed.”

  She didn’t need to ask who he meant. Beyond the front porch, Dr. Konstantin ran after Abby, moving with impossible speed. But speed didn’t protect him from the sun, and he was already smoking by the time he reached the little girl and scooped her up in his arms.

  Hannah grabbed the blanket and ran after them. He was halfway back to the house with a crying Abby when she met them and threw the blanket over him. Together, they stumbled back into the house, where Carl slammed the door shut and locked it behind them. “Are you nuts?” Carl shouted at the doctor as Hannah took Abby from him. “What the hell were you thinking? You got yourself burned to a crisp. You could’ve gotten killed!”

  “What would you have me do, Carl?” he asked, his voice filled with obvious pain. “Just let the little girl get swarmed?”

  Carl didn’t seem to have an answer. He just shook his head in frustration and went to look out the window. “That got their attention. They’re coming.”

  “We’ll deal with them,” said Konstantin.

  “You mean I’ll deal with them. You’re in no condition to fight.”

  Ignoring Carl, Konstanin turned to Hannah. The extent of his burns startled her. His skin was blistered and cracked, and it looked like simply speaking caused him agony. “Take her upstairs and barricade yourself in the room,” he told her. “Don’t worry. We won’t let them get that far.”

  Hannah left the vampires arguing and carried Abby upstairs and into the bedroom, where she sat her down on the bed. The little girl was still sobbing. “Shh, Abby,” said Hannah. “What were you doing? Why did you go outside?”

  “I thought I saw my daddy,” she cried. “I want my daddy!”

  “Shh. It’s okay.” Hannah pulled the child into her arms. Was it possible that she had seen her father? It seemed too soon for him to have made it this far from the prison, but the zeds didn’t get tired. If he’d been walking this way since Esme had fed him to those things outside the prison wall, it was feasible that he was out there now.

  That he was trying to get in.

  She heard pounding downstairs. She took Abby by the shoulders and looked her in the eye. “Abby, your daddy’s gone.” She hated to be so blunt with the girl, but there was no time to be soft. “You have to be strong, and brave. You have to be a big girl now. Okay?”

  Abby hiccuped as she tried to stifle her sobs, and wiped her face with the front of her shirt. But she nodded.

  “Good girl.” Hannah planted a kiss on top of her head. “I need you to stay in here with the baby, and lock the door. Don’t open it for anybody, okay? Not until you hear my voice.”

  “Okay.”

  Hannah checked once more on Noah, who was, amazingly, still asleep. Then she grabbed the pistol and, shutting the door behind her, headed downstairs. She found Carl nailing pieces of the now busted up kitchen table over the living room window, while Konstantin leaned against the front door. He looked like it took everything in him to stay upright. “I told you to stay with the children,” he said.

  Hannah ignored him and flashed the gun. “There are still three rounds, then I’m out. Is this our only weapon?”

  “No. We have Carl. Once he’s done fortifying the windows, he’ll open the door and take care of the shamblers on the porch. If any get past him, I’ll—”

  “You’ll what? Carl’s right. You’re in no shape to fight.”

  “I’m not as bad off as I look.”

  “Really? Because you look terrible.”

  “Thanks.” He nodded toward her gun. “You should go back up stairs. Use that on any that get past us and find their way up there.”

  Hannah took a long, hard look at the doctor. Despite his protests to the contrary, she could tell he was in bad shape. Going after Abby like that really could have killed him. “Why did you go after her?” she asked him.

  He looked at her as though it should have been obvious. “She’s just a little girl. Somebody had to go get her.”

  “But why you? Why didn’t you just call me when you realized she went outside?”

  “What, and risk you getting bitten or killed?” He shook his head. “I knew I could be fast enough.”

  “But what if you weren’t?”

  He shrugged. “Then you’d have one less vampire to worry about in the world.”

  She didn’t really know what to say to that. All she knew was that his actions weren’t that of someone who only saw them as lab rats or slave labor. In fact, nothing she’d seen from him so far lined up with the things she had been told about him, about his intentions. Evil mad scientists weren’t exactly known for risking their own lives to protect their subjects.

  She glanced around the room, and spotted a wrought-iron poker hanging on a stand next to the fireplace. She retrieved it, and returned to Konstantin just as one of the zeds managed to break the glass on the front door and reach its arm in to grab at the doctor. Hannah jabbed the poker through the broken window and straight into the zed’s eye. There was hardly any resistance as she drove the poker deeper, until it burst out of the back of the zed’s head. She pulled the poker back inside, and the thing dropped, and didn’t get back up again.

  The look Konstantin gave her as she stepped back from the door was somewhere between amused and amazed. “Get to the stairs,” he told her. “Stand your ground there. If too many get past us, run, and lock yourself in with the children. If you can get them out on the roof, they shouldn’t be able to come after you there.”

  Hannah backed up to the stairs as Carl finished nailing up the broken table. He came over to the door and, gripping the hammer in his fist, nodded to Konstantin. “Let’s go.”

  Konstantin opened the door.

  He staggered back behind Carl, who flew into action. Hannah stood there, gripping the iron poker in one hand and the gun in the other, and watched in amazement as he morphed into a killing machine before her eyes. She had been too distracted during their previous confrontations with the zeds to witness just how efficient the vampires were at destroying them. Even the doctor, despite his injuries, made quick work of the few that managed to get past Carl. It was a whirlwind of claws and teeth, of flying gore and falling bodies.

  And then it was over. Both vampires were covered in blood and slime, and the floor was littered with corpses and severed heads. Hannah hadn’t needed to fire a single shot.

  No wonder the vampires were the ones in charge.

  “Let’s clean this up,” said Konstantin. He seemed a little stronger and steadier as he grabbed a lifeless zed by the ankle and dragged it out onto the porch. Once all of the bodies had been cleared out, they shoved a bookcase in front of the door. “We’ll burn them at nightfall,” he told Hannah, “once our ride gets here. You should go check on the children. I’m going to see if I can get that shower working.”

  She watched him make his way slowly up the stairs, still moving as though in a great deal of pain. She looked back at Carl. “Thanks,” she told him.

  He shrugged it off. “Just another day at the office.” He jerked his chin at the wreck they’d made of the living room. “Guess I’ll get this cleaned up.”

  “Why bother?” she asked him. “We’re leaving once your friends get here.” She looked around at the house, and sighed. “We might as well burn this whole place down. It’s just another grave now.”

  She left Carl to do whatever he thought best, and made her way upstairs to the children. Abby had curled up next to Noah and fallen asleep. Hannah heard the shower come on in the bathroom, and wondered briefly if the cold water would bother the doctor. She supposed it would feel good on his burned skin.

  She looked out the window. This time, the yard was empty of zeds. Even so, she closed the window and locked it, and locked the bedroom door. Then she set the gun carefully on the
nightstand, propped the poker up next to it, and crawled into bed.

  EIGHTEEN

  After nightfall, Konstantin brought the remains of their host back up from the basement and carried her outside. With a nod to Hannah, he carried her past the pile of bodies stacked on the front porch and instead laid her in a grave that he and Carl had dug in the front yard. As they filled it in, she took the children into the kitchen and fed them a cold supper of canned peaches and mashed peas. She was in the middle of trying to coax Noah to open his mouth for a bite when Konstantin opened the door and leaned in. “Our ride’s here.”

  Hannah gathered up Noah and Abby and followed him out to the front porch. “I don’t see anybody.”

  “I hear them. They’re getting closer. Carl ran out to meet them.”

  Hannah listened. At first she heard nothing. Not even the expected night sounds, the chirping of crickets or other insects. Were there any animals left? Then she heard it, the soft rumble of a motor in the distance. It grew louder as it came closer, and after another minute she could make out the outline of an Army tank barreling down the road toward them. It slowed to turn into the driveway, and drove all the way to the house before stopping in front of the porch. Carl rode on top of it.

  Abby pulled on Hannah’s hand. “Do we get to ride in a tank?”

  “It sure looks that way.” She handed the little girl up to Carl, then let him pull her and Noah up onto the tank. “You coming, Doc?” he asked, and Hannah looked back to see Konstantin walking back to the porch.

  “Just a minute,” he told them.

  He reached into one of the pockets of his blood-caked fatigue pants and pulled out a flare. He struck it, and thrust it into the midst of the corpse pile. Within seconds, the bodies were all engulfed in flame. Only then did the doctor turn and approach the tank, and let Carl give him a hand up. “Let’s go home,” he said.

  He climbed down into a hatch, and Carl handed Abby down to him. Hannah and Noah went next. Once they were all inside, an older-looking man with a middle-aged paunch and graying hair turned to face them from the driver’s seat. “You think we can make it back without wrecking this, too?”

  “That’s why you’re driving, Ned,” said Konstantin.

  The driver chuckled, but then looked the doctor up and down. His burns had healed a lot since morning, but he still looked like hell. “What the hell happened to you, Doc?”

  “Damn fool decided to go and be all heroic again, that’s what,” said Carl as he climbed into the gunner seat next to Ned. “Don’t worry. He’ll live.”

  “Not really something I worry about with you folks,” he said, and turned back around. “All right. Everybody get settled. Here we go.”

  “Where did you get a tank?” Hannah asked as they started to roll.

  “Our camp’s at an Army base. It comes in pretty handy sometimes.”

  “So what happened to the Army?”

  “The same thing that happened to everyone else.” Konstantin shook his head, sadly. “Humanity simply wasn’t equipped for the aggressiveness of the plague. Or of the infected.” He turned to Ned. “How are things on the home front?”

  “Quiet. Not much to report. Oh, except Shelby had her calf this morning.”

  Konstantin smiled. “Boy or girl?”

  “Girl. Good thing, too. The kids have already made her their class mascot.”

  Konstantin chuckled. Hannah tried not to stare. It was strange, seeing him laugh like that, all easy-going. She remembered what Phyllis had told her about a farm. “You have animals?”

  He nodded. “Cows and chickens. We found the cows out in a field that the others hadn’t gotten to yet, and carried them in one at a time by helicopter. The chickens, we found newly hatched at a farm that had just been ravaged. Apparently shamblers don’t bother with eggs.”

  Hannah shuddered at the thought of those things roaming across the countryside, like a swarm of locusts, devouring every living thing in their path.

  “Are there puppies?” asked Abby.

  Konstantin smiled at her. “There are no puppies, but there are a couple of dogs, and some cats. And I think one surviving family at the base managed to save their pet turtle.”

  “Those damn cats are breeding like rabbits,” called out Ned. “I bet we could find that little girl a kitten, if we can catch one of the damn feral things.”

  Abby grinned and clapped her hands.

  “It sounds like a nicer prison than the one we left,” Hannah admitted.

  “Prison?” Ned looked back at her. “I’m no prisoner, girl, and neither are you. I can drop you off right here if you like.”

  Hannah leaned forward to get a better look at his eyes. “You’re human,” she said, surprised.

  “’Course I am. What the hell else would I be?”

  “One of us,” said Carl.

  Ned stared at him a moment. Then he burst out laughing.

  “Hannah’s had some bad experiences, Ned,” said Konstantin.

  “Well, sure she has. Who hasn’t?”

  “With our kind, I mean.” He looked back at Hannah and held her gaze as he said, “We’re all going to have to work to earn her trust.”

  Hannah looked away to focus on the baby, but she said nothing. If his actions back at the house were any indication, he was willing to work pretty hard at that. She felt nervous anticipation at the thought of reaching the camp. Ned practically made it sound like some sort of utopia. She supposed she’d know the truth about Konstantin and his camp pretty soon.

  Everyone lapsed into silence. They rode for at least another hour. Hannah kept Noah and Abby entertained until they both fell asleep. She closed her eyes as well, and listened to the easy banter between Ned and Carl. They sounded like friends.

  She opened her eyes and chanced a look at Konstantin. He leaned back against the wall of the tank with his eyes closed. He looked tired. More than that, weariness had etched itself into his face. She wondered how old he’d been when he became a vampire. His features seemed a little more care-worn than the others she’d encountered.

  “Home sweet home,” Ned announced as the tank slowed. “Don’t mind the welcoming committee.”

  Hannah heard rapid gunfire. She flinched as bullets ricocheted off of the tank. “Are they shooting at us?”

  “Probably picked up some riders,” said Carl.

  On a monitor next to Ned at the front of the tank, Hannah could see the problem. A thick wall of zombies stood between them and a tall chain-link fence. People stood behind the fence and fired, mowing down the zombies with automatic weapons to clear a path for the tank. A large electric gate slid open, and they started forward again.

  They rode for probably another twenty minutes before the tank finally came to a halt. “How’s that for front door service?” asked Ned.

  Konstantin got to his feet and thanked him as Hannah woke Abby. “We’re here,” she said.

  “Do I get a kitten?”

  “Probably not right now. Come on.” Hannah helped her up and guided her over to Konstantin, who lifted her out of the tank. Hannah and Noah followed him as the others came behind. They had parked in front of what looked like an administration building. Most of the buildings around them looked like they were made of stucco, with Spanish tiles on the roof. Not quite what she’d expected of an Army base. A man stood out front to greet them. He was short and stocky, with messy hair and thick-rimmed glasses. He wore a white lab coat over a green tee-shirt with white letters that said, “Biologists do it in their genes.”

  “Welcome back,” he said as Konstantin went over to him. “I see you brought home some more strays.”

  “Zachary,” Konstantin greeted him. He nodded toward Hannah. “This is Hannah and her brother, Noah. The little girl is Abby. Hannah hurt her head in the crash. Clean it and stitch it up, will you?”

  “Sure thing, Doc. But what about you?”

  “I just need to eat. And get some sleep.” He nodded at Hannah once more. “I’ll see you soon,” he said b
efore disappearing inside.

  “Don’t mind him. He’s always cranky when he gets back from Esme’s camp. He’s too busy watching his back over there to get any sleep. When he gets home he usually goes straight to bed. Come on. Let’s get a look at that head wound, and you can tell me how he got those burns.”

  Hannah took Abby’s hand and led her as they followed Zach inside and down a hallway. They entered what looked like a typical exam room at a doctor’s office. “Hop up on the table,” Zachary told her as he washed his hands. He dried them off and rummaged through some drawers, pulling out tools and laying them on a rolling metal tray. At last he rolled the tray over to her and pulled on a pair of latex gloves. He picked up a small pair of scissors and cut through the gauze wrappings. “Let’s have a look-see.” He parted her hair and went to work.

  “You’re human,” said Hannah.

  “Yep, so far.”

  “Are you a doctor?”

  “Ph.D. But I won’t make you call me doctor. Zach will do.”

  “Where’d you learn to do stitches?”

  “The doc gave me a crash course in basic emergency procedures. Don’t worry, I’ve had plenty of practice since then. Now, I’m gonna have to cut away some of the hair around the cut, but with your long hair it shouldn’t be too noticeable. When you get home and wash the blood out, you’ll need to be careful not to get your scalp wet. Wait at least three days before sticking your whole head under water.”

  “What home?”

  Just then there was a rap on the door, and a woman stuck her head in. “Howdy!”

  “Here’s the lady who can answer that question,” said Zach. “Come on in, Paula. Meet Hannah.” He leaned close and told Hannah in a confidential voice, “She’s human, too.”