Blood Run – The Complete Trilogy – First Promise, Two Riders, Last Chance

by Dougherty, Christine

  She missed her family.

  Jim and Linda Riser died as they had lived, in lockstep with everyone around them and firmly in the middle of the pack.

  Within one week, there had been two killings and nine disappearances in Wereburg, and people were beginning to avoid the night, as it seemed the mayhem had finally hit their town. A meeting was held (during the day) in the high school, and the Wereburg mayor had shakily read the instructions from the mimeograph the National Guard had distributed to each town. The essence of which boiled down to: don’t go out at night, don’t go near someone who’d been bit, don’t believe in crosses, garlic, or calls to a personal savior as protection–the only protection was the sun or any implement that pierced the heart of the afflicted. Guns were not to be used, as the sound had been shown to attract more vampires.

  The mayor had then set a curfew that coincided with sundown, in accordance with the National Guard instructions.

  Even then, it still seemed mostly unreal to the people of Wereburg.

  Destiny’s dad, Jim, had been caught out at night.

  The Riser house on Oak Street had been one of the last houses built in the neighborhood. Oak Street’s north side, where the Risers lived, was considered highly desirable because the houses backed to open meadow and, beyond that, the woods. You could barbecue and sunbathe to your heart’s content secure in the knowledge that only the neighbors to either side could spy on you.

  Jim had been certain that he could make it to their small shed and back, after all, it was the suburbs! Nothing bad happened in the suburbs, not when you lived virtually cheek to jowl with three hundred or more other people. Not when you had a four-foot chain-link fence to protect your property. Not when you had a brand new motion-sensing floodlight that gazed watchfully over your backyard like a one-eyed god. How could Jim know the innocently unlocked shed had been colonized?

  He wanted to get the dowel rods he’d stored out there. The mayor’s speech and the National Guard mimeo had inspired him into remembering the two-inch diameter, hardened and treated pine rods that he’d bought originally to fashion into tomato stands for Linda’s garden. In the confusion of the past few months, he hadn’t gotten around to the tomato stands. Of course, fashioning the rods into vampire-killing stakes was more an exercise in handiwork for Jim; he didn’t imagine he’d actually have to pound something into a vampire’s heart.

  Secretly, he believed the whole thing was some sort of mass hysteria, and his largest concern was closing the store so early every day. There would be little to no profit, and he felt slightly angry that everyone (including the mayor) seemed so ready to go along with something so crazy. And as yet unproved.

  There were no such things as vampires.

  “I’m just going to grab them and run right back in. You can even keep an eye on me from the slider, okay? No big deal, honey.” Jim laughed at the set and stubborn expression on Linda’s face. “It’s only thirty feet! Sixty if you count the round trip.”

  Destiny looked up from the kitchen table where she was trying to keep her mind on her research paper. She was writing about President Reagan’s years as an actor and trying to draw a correlation on how it would help him as a politician, but she couldn’t keep her mind on it. School was still in session as Wereburg tried to hold onto a sense of itself, but Destiny had a feeling that school, sports, the lake, everything…everything they knew and everything that seemed important…was beginning to crumble down around them.

  She glanced at Chance in the family room as he sat watching a Magnum P.I. rerun and shooting worried glances at his parents fighting quietly at the back door five feet from him.

  “Hey, Chance,” Destiny called, and he turned with a smile. “Come help me with something, okay?”

  Chance padded to her, his pj’s and slippers already on, since he went to bed at nine and it was a quarter to. He leaned against Destiny’s chair, and the warm, yellowish smell of Johnson’s No More Tears from his damp head filled her with a nostalgia shocking in the depths of its sadness.

  “Just wait until tomorrow morning. What’s the big deal?” Linda said, her frustration growing in tandem with her fear. She believed the news…she saw more of it than Jim did. In fact, he never watched the news or even read a paper. Linda’s hippy dippy tie-dye days were long behind her, and she’d become more clear-headed and practical as the years had gone on.

  “I was going to take them downstairs and mess around a little bit; see what I could make of them,” Jim said. Although Jim thought it was all very reactionary–over reactionary, even, he was a go-along kind of guy and anyway, he did like puttering with projects in his small workshop in the basement. The dowel stakes gave him something comforting to pin his mind to. He put a hand on Linda’s shoulder and squeezed. He smiled. “The shed isn’t even locked! I’ll be back in five seconds, and you can watch the whole time. Relax, Linda, okay? Just relax.”

  He pushed the heavy sliding door open by a foot and a half and exited. He walked across the concrete patio in the still darkness. When he got to the grass, the floodlight flashed on, making a black shadow leap out from under his feet and stretch toward the shed. He kept on, skirting the low, iron fire pit, and when he was halfway across the yard, he turned to wave at Linda, shielding his eyes against the floodlight and smiling.

  Linda waved and smiled back, feeling silly and a little bit embarrassed. Then her eye was caught by movement just over her husband’s shoulder–the shed door was creaking open.

  Linda gasped, her eyes going wide and her hands coming up to smack once on the glass, flat palmed. “Jim! Behind you!”

  Jim’s expression squinched into one of confusion, and he shook his head at her, still shielding his eyes against the floodlight.

  “Behind you! The shed!” Linda said and smacked the glass again. It shivered in its frame.

  Jim turned and peered into the dark, obviously blinded from squinting into the floodlight, trying to get his eyes to adjust. He took one confused step toward the shed, and behind him, Linda yelled his name, her voice threaded with tight alarm. Now he could see the shed door swinging open, and the pit of his stomach filled with an instant and all-encompassing dread. He turned to run, but his second step landed on the fire pit, and it tilted up, catching him in the stomach as he tumbled over it, whoofing as if punched.

  Linda screamed again and, without thought, yanked the slider open all the way and ran out. Destiny and Chance stared in shock at the place their mother had just been. Then Chance broke for the back door.

  In the yard, Jim was coughing on his hands and knees, struggling up from his fall. Linda was on him in a second, still screaming, pawing at his arms, pulling him backward toward the house, making him tumble over again. Jim looked at her in shock, forgetting the shed in his pained confusion. Linda’s eyes were wide, the whites showing all around her blue irises. She was looking past him, into the yard.

  He remembered the shed door opening.

  He struggled up, almost in spite of Linda’s help, and turned just in time to see a figure was almost upon them. He pushed Linda protectively behind him, causing her to stumble over the fire pit.

  “Stay back!” Jim yelled, the fear and adrenaline charging his voice to a level he’d never achieved in his formerly temperate life. Then he recognized his assailant. It was Bill Miller from three houses down. Bill and Jim had split the cost of a snowblower with four other neighbors last year. Their families had barbecued together. Bill and Jim had gotten drunk together.

  Relief crashed into Jim. “Jesus, Bill, you scared the shit out of me.” He turned to Linda, bending to help her disentangle herself from the fire pit. “Honey, are you okay? There’s nothing to be afraid of, it’s just–”

  Bill fell on him, tumbling him over onto Linda, and the three of them struggled and rolled like some nightmare ménage à trois. Bill wrapped his arms around Jim, keeping Jim’s back to his chest and leaned his head to Jim’s neck, his lips seeking the carotid, seeking that heat and pulse of life.
r />   Bill bit.

  His teeth, grown long and sharp, sliced easily into Jim’s skin, and Jim’s dark red heart’s blood shot into Bill’s sucking mouth. It also rained down on Linda. She struggled under the men, screaming. She flailed and got an arm free and pushed at Bill’s nightmare face, trying to make him release her husband. In her heart, though, she knew there was too much blood. She could feel Jim dying, feel the rhythmic tremors tightening his body on hers. Then even worse, she felt it as his body began to relax…his life fading with each stinging gout of blood.

  But still she pushed, her hand planted on the underside of Bill’s jaw. His head snapped to the side, and he hissed with rage. Deep gashes appeared in Linda’s palm and forearm. He’d bitten her, too.

  Then Bill put his mouth back on the jagged hole in Jim’s neck, and he hugged Jim’s body, rolling him over until Jim lay on top of Bill and the blood ran freely.

  Linda got shakily to her feet, panting painfully, her mind wiped clean by shock and something else, something she could feel glowing at the edges of the gashes and sneaking up her arm toward her heart and brain. The sickness. She had it.

  Her stomach lurched with the deepest hunger she’d ever known, and she dropped to her knees, whimpering. She crawled toward Bill and her husband, still cradling her injured arm. She mewled like a lost animal and reached out tentatively, wanting to dip her fingers in the blood. Bring it to her mouth. Assuage this hunger.

  Bill turned and hissed at her advancing hand, and he snapped three times, his teeth clicking together millimeters from her trembling fingertips. He grabbed Jim’s body and, still hissing, pulled him further to the back of the yard, into the deep shadow next to the shed.

  Linda shrieked in frustration. Then a new sound reached into the red fog that had taken over her mind.

  “Mom!”

  “Mommy!”

  A boy sound, a lovely young boy sound, warm and rich with pulsing life…she rose and turned.

  Destiny had grabbed at Chance before he could follow their mom out the door. She’d held his struggling body in one arm and trundled the door closed with the other. She looked up just in time to see her dad push her mom behind him and her mom tumble over the fire pit. They were strongly backlit by the floodlight, and beyond them, all was blackness.

  Chance was still struggling, reaching for the door handle. Destiny pulled his hand away.

  “Chance, I don’t want you going out there. It’s okay; they’re okay,” she said and glanced out the door again. She saw the figure coming across the yard from the shed and saw her dad turn away from the advancing figure to help her mom. “It’s just Mr. Miller, Chance, relax. It’s no big deal.”

  She looked again just in time to see Mr. Miller crash into her dad, and the men fell onto her mom. Confusion poured through Destiny, hot and disturbing. She reached for the door handle and then hesitated.

  The floodlight was so white and strong, the scene before her was picked out in an almost black-and-white sharpness. The struggling forms looked two dimensional, cut off at the edges where the light stopped abruptly. She watched in horror as Mr. Miller’s head came down on her dad’s neck, and he snuffled there, searchingly. Then the wash of black, like oil, cascading in a freshet, and it wasn’t oil, it was blood, of course it was blood. It was her dad’s blood. Grayish yellow clouds crowded in around the periphery of her vision, and she felt her stomach lift and drop as bile rose up in her throat.

  “Mom! Mommy!” Chance yelled from beside her, and it served to snap her from her impending faint. She had to protect Chance–no harm could come to him.

  Her mom was turning, facing them, coming across the yard.

  “Mommy!” Chance yelled again, and then screeched like an injured animal as Destiny’s arms tightened on him. Tears rolled down his reddening cheeks. His hand went to the door handle. “Mommy, Mommy!”

  Destiny stared at her mom, her eyes bouncing from her mom’s bleeding arm to her dazed and vacant eyes. She’d been bit, her mom had been bit. By a vampire.

  Now Linda stood on the back patio, swaying, the floodlight picking out the detail of her torn flesh, the hunger accumulating in her eyes. Chance reached for the door handle, and Destiny pushed his hand down again, clicking the lock in the same motion. She had begun to cry. She flipped the security pole down, effectively blocking the door. She let Chance go.

  He dropped to his knees beside her, his hands pressed to the glass. His breath hitched and whooped as he sobbed. Then Linda was at the door, her face to Chance’s face, and she opened her mouth as though preparing to bite through the glass. Her eyes burned with orange fire. Then something seemed to click in her eyes, and she backed away, bent over.

  “Mom!” Destiny yelled through the glass, panicked and unthinking. “Are you okay?” Tears burned their way down her cheeks, and her mom blurred, doubling and tripling.

  Linda looked up, and her gaze went from Chance to Destiny. She threw her head back and howled with grief. Destiny felt an answering wail wanting to start up in her own throat; she thought if she could yell like that, it might wash the crazy, unreal feeling from her brain.

  Linda lowered her head and looked at her children behind the glass. She panted, her chest rising and falling. Her eyes burned with that slow, sludgy fire that all survivors would come to recognize.

  She took one step closer, and her mouth opened in a snarl, exposing her growing incisors. “Don’t let me in!”

  She bent over, clutching her stomach, and looked up again. She took another involuntary step toward the slider. Her eyes were deep pits of grief and anger and hunger. “Destiny! Don’t let me in!”

  “Don’t let me!” she wailed.

  She lurched away into the dark of the side yard and disappeared.

  Destiny sagged against the glass door, and now her fear and shock were too large for mere tears. She became aware of Chance, collapsed on the floor at her feet and sobbing. He’d cried his nose bloody, and the blood had caked in the soft terrycloth at the collar of his pj’s.

  She sat, turning her back to the glass, and pulled him into her arms. She used her own sleeve to wipe away the blood on his lip and neck. His body was hot, and he shivered convulsively. She tried to tell him that it was all right, that it was going to be okay.

  But she couldn’t get her voice to work.

  Because she didn’t think it was ever going to be okay, ever again.

  She’d lost Chance less than a week after losing her parents.

  Still in shock, functioning on only the most basic levels, she’d taken Chance and moved into the high school the next day. The gym was filling rapidly with orphans and displaced adults.

  The high school had been stocked with Red Cross cots at the beginning of the emergency, and now people took them and set up housekeeping as best they could. Destiny tried to put her and Chance’s cots near to a family she recognized from Willow’s End–the Masons. She’d been drawn to their intact family unit–mother, father, three children–and the warmth and safety it implied. But Mrs. Mason shooed Destiny away from the cluster created by her husband and children. She told Destiny that there was plenty of room, don’t crowd them. But Destiny saw a dark truth in Mrs. Mason’s cold, ice-chippy eyes: she only cared about her own. Now that things looked like they might get rough, she and Mr. Mason had decided an every-family-for-themselves stance would be the most successful. Especially for them.

  “Destiny! Over here!” It was Mr. West, her favorite teacher. He was waving to her, his glasses flashing, and the sleeves of his oxford rolled to the elbows. He was in the same kind of corduroys he wore to teach, and she could see his linen jacket folded neatly on a cot nearby.

  Destiny smiled with wan gratefulness and dragged the cots toward him. Chance followed with blank indifference. He wasn’t doing well.

  There were four other cots beside Mr. West’s in a comfortable group. Destiny would just bet that all the cots were parentless kids just like her and Chance. Mr. West was that kind of person.

  “Ar
e your parents on their way, or…?” He didn’t need to finish, he saw the answer in her lowered head. He nodded calmly, but a deep well of sympathy warmed his eyes. “I’m sorry, Destiny…Chance. You’re welcome to bunk near me. I’ve found myself at loose ends, too.”

  Destiny thought he probably meant he’d lost his girlfriend, but she wasn’t sure. Teachers’ lives were a bit of a mystery. She knew that Mr. West wasn’t married and that he was probably somewhere in his mid to late thirties. Other than that, she only knew that he taught in clear, concise language, was quietly respectful of his students and demanded that same respect in return. And he never gave open-book quizzes, only closed-book, which was enough to make some of the lazier students dislike him.

  She turned and pushed Chance down onto the cot, and he sat like a soft statue on the edge where she’d placed him. Mr. West watched with concern. Then he pulled Destiny aside.

  “Would you mind if I talked to him for a bit?” he asked. “Lea Adams and Mark Ralston are in the cafeteria…maybe you could go and see if they need help with anything?”

  Destiny glanced at Chance and then nodded gratefully to Mr. West. Even after only a night and half a day, it was a relief to hand over some of her responsibility to an adult. A real adult. And a nice one, too.

  She’d gone to find Mark and Lea. Lea was a grade below her, and Mark, a grade ahead. She knew each of them, if only peripherally…enough to say ‘hi’ to in the former world. She turned back as she entered the wide hallway, and Mr. West was sitting next to Chance, an arm over his shoulders. Chance was nodding, and as Destiny watched, he dropped his head down into his hands and began to cry. For a second, Destiny hesitated, wanting to go back to him, but Mr. West looked up and gave her a small, sober nod. She turned away.

  She saw Lea first, standing at a long lunch table and counting out small boxes of cereal, stacking like ones together. Mark emerged from the kitchen, carrying a tray of packaged cupcakes that he dumped on the next table over. Other people were doing the same at other tables, counting up food packages, fruit, cartons of juice and milk.