Shanna jerked a thumb over her shoulder. “One of them was getting away.”
A couple of the soldiers looked past her. She could tell by their expressions they’d never seen a dracula before.
The sergeant said, “Put it down!”
Half the soldiers turned their weapons toward the leaping monstrosity. In a rain of automatic weapon fire, they cut it to shreds.
“Did you see that thing?”
“What the fuck?”
“Some kind of monster.”
Then four of the hospital’s third-floor windows facing the parking lot blew out, belching flame and filling the air with bits of glass and charred flesh.
Jenny
JENNY continued to stare up at the military helicopter. Over the din of the rotors she yelled, “Down here!”
It hovered directly overhead, and she watched one of the bay doors open. Then they began to lower a rescue basket down on a cable.
No…not a rescue basket.
What the heck is that?
Clay
CLAY descended cautiously through the stairwell, Glock out and ready, but nothing leaped out of the shadows. The dracula population appeared to have been reduced to endangered-species level. No loss. This was one species that cried out for extinction.
He was passing the pediatrics floor when he remembered Randall saying he’d had to leave Alice behind. Well, pediatrics was where he’d have left her.
Clay stopped and considered the risk-benefit ratio. What if he allowed himself five minutes to search for Alice? Taurus Raging Bulls didn’t come cheap, but even if someone simply gave him another, it wouldn’t be Alice. He’d grown attached to Alice.
He checked his watch and marked the time. Really. Five minutes—not a second more. What could it hurt?
He eased through the door and made his way down the hall, thinking how anybody watching him would think he was out of his mind. Well, some people thought that anyway, especially when they learned he’d named his Taurus. But every so often you came across a weapon special enough for a name. Look at Davy Crockett. Hadn’t he named his trusty flintlock Betsy? There you go. Nuff said.
Near the nursing station Clay found a door that looked like someone had taken a chainsaw to it. Randall? Through another doorway he saw that clown dracula flat on its back, very dead. And there on the floor, amid fallen plaster and a string of guts that looked like they’d been tied into shapes…
“Alice!”
Shanna
WHAT had happened? An explosion could mean only one person: Clay. But what could he have been carrying to blow out a wall like that? Better not to think about it. Who knew what Clay carried in his bag of tricks?
She just hoped he hadn’t gone up with it.
The sergeant had told two soldiers to escort her—a euphemism—to the trailer at the rear of the lot. They pulled her inside and stuck her in what they’d called “the command center.”
It looked improvised in some ways—a featureless space with no decorations and half a dozen one-piece polymer chairs. But the small, fixed window that had to be at least an inch thick said otherwise. The best thing about that window was it faced the parking lot. Shanna had her nose pressed against it now, hands cupped around her eyes to shut out the room light, straining to see what was going on.
The door opened behind her. She turned to see four disheveled-looking kids being herded into the room by the same two soldiers who had brought her. They moved away and then another soldier—with bars on his shoulders—strolled inside. He had gray hair and a barrel chest, and his expression was grim. He stared hard at Shanna.
“Who are you?” he demanded.
“Shanna Wiener. I’m an anthropologist.”
“Colonel Halford. My men just caught some sort of creature, Ms. Wiener. It attacked them, we believe, with intent to eat them.”
“Not eat them,” Shanna corrected. “It wanted to suck their blood.”
“Do you know what it is?”
“It’s…” Shanna’s voice went soft. “It’s a dracula.”
“A dracula.”
She nodded.
“As in a vampire? The kind you fight with crosses and garlic?”
She shook her head. “Crosses don’t work. I don’t know about the garlic.”
Shanna expected disbelief, but Halford simply nodded.
“Do you know how many there are?”
“No. The infection spread quickly. There could be hundreds.”
He nodded again. Two soldiers came in and saluted. Col. Halford saluted back.
“The autoclave is in place, sir.”
“Sound the sirens. Clear everyone to the perimeter. I want detonation in sixty seconds from the moment I stop talking. Dismissed.”
The men hurried off.
“What’s an autoclave?” Shanna asked. She didn’t like the sound of it.
“Same as in a hospital. Used for sterilizing medical equipment. Except this sterilizes a much larger area.”
“It’s a bomb?”
“It’s a giant shaped charge. When detonated it will shoot a plasma jet down through the hospital roof with irresistible force at a speed of eight-thousand feet per second. The jet will penetrate each of the floors like an anti-tank missile melting through a steel armor plate. The air in the hospital will heat to ten thousand degrees, sterilizing the entire structure.”
Shanna shook her head. “My boyfriend…my fiancé, is still in there.”
“I’m sorry, Ms. Wiener. I have my orders.”
No. This couldn’t be happening. The military was here. They could help him.
“Please. He’s a good man. A cop. He saved a lot of people tonight.”
“I know. I just heard from four children who talked about a policeman with a big cool gun. But I also heard from Dr. Driscoll, my medical officer. She confirmed these creatures are contagious. We simply can’t risk any of them getting away. They’ve managed to kill six of my men in less than ten minutes, Ms. Wiener. Good men, well trained. Durango has a population of fourteen thousand, and it’s only ten miles away. If one of those things manages to get there, it will be a slaughter.”
Shanna didn’t think, she acted, running for the door, leaping out into the night, sprinting for the hospital as fast as she could.
She had to get Clay out of there. Had to—
Two men tackled her.
A few seconds later she was in handcuffs, being dragged away, screaming at the top of her lungs, “Clay! CLAAAAAY!”
Jenny
BY the time she realized that the object they had lowered onto the roof was a bomb—a huge, army-green charge—Jenny had just enough time for a belly laugh. She thought of Randall…dear, sweet, Randall. He would have appreciated the humor of surviving a dracula outbreak only to be killed by the good guys.
It was damn ironical.
Clay
HE snatched up the Taurus and began wiping her off. Poor Alice was a mess—blood, plaster dust, and who knew what else.
He hugged her to his chest. “Hey, baby. Gonna take you home and get you cleaned up and oiled and good as—”
Then he heard screaming. He’d heard a lot of screaming that day, but this seemed to be coming from outside. And rather than the incoherent, senseless terror he’d gotten used to, this sounded a lot like his name.
He hurried to the nearby window, broken out by Adam’s farewell blast directly above, and stared out over the parking lot.
One floor down and maybe a hundred yards away…that looked like Shanna, being dragged away by some soldiers. She continued to cry out to him.
Why was she so panicked? She was safe down there.
Then he grinned. Probably worried sick about him. Or missing him something fierce.
“Don’t worry, babe. I’ll be right—”
He heard a boom from above and then a blast of heat like a solar flare seared through the hospital, hurling his burning body through the window.
Shanna
SHANNA was still screaming
when the roof of the hospital exploded in an incandescent flare. The boom and shockwave stopped her in her tracks and she watched in horror as the windows and walls of the fourth floor vomited flame and debris, followed almost immediately by the third and second and first. Every entrance, every exit blew its doors and shot flames like giant blowtorches.
And then the floors began to collapse—first the roof onto the fourth, then the fourth onto the third, pancaking all the way down to ground level, leaving only a flame-riddled cloud of smoke and dust and debris on the far side of the parking lot.
A cheer went up from the watching soldiers and she wanted to kill them. Instead, she began to cry. Huge, wracking sobs shook her to her toes.
Clay… she felt the ring box in her pocket pressing against her thigh. A good man, a hero, and no one would know. No, wait. Those kids would know. They’d remember the guy with the big cool gun. Clay would love to be remembered that way.
Colonel Halford walked over, told his men to release her.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“You can take that sorry and shove it up your ass.”
She stormed away, and no one bothered to stop her. The cool night was now hot as the summer in Nevada, and the burning hospital bright enough to see the damage that had been done to it. The autoclave had performed as advertised. The building wasn’t just sterilized. It was annihilated. Nothing could have survived that.
Choking back a sob, Shanna headed toward the TV crew. They were interviewing a man. A doctor. Incredibly, his scrubs were pristine, not a mark on them. He held a sleeping baby close to his chest, while a good-looking brunette asked him how he had managed to save the infant.
“Her name is Daniella. She was handed to me by your cameraman when the helicopter landed. Incredibly, some soldiers almost shot both of us, until I could prove we hadn’t been bitten.”
“Is the baby okay?” the reporter asked.
“I’m happy to report she’s completely healthy. Even in tragedies such as this, miracles happen.”
Something about the man’s voice was familiar. She walked closer, to get a look at his face. He was young, longish brown hair, had a strong jaw and deep eyes. Shanna immediately found him attractive, and the feeling shamed her, especially so soon after Clay’s death.
But something about him drew her.
The TV reporter seemed to feel the same way. It appeared that at any moment, she’d leap into his arms.
“Thank you, Doctor Cook.”
As soon as the camera turned away, Dr. Cook approached.
“Hello, Shanna.”
Shanna sniffled. “Do we know each other?”
“We met once before. I was Mortimer’s doctor.”
He reached out his hand. Shanna took it, finding his grip surprisingly cold.
“You seem familiar, but I’m afraid I really don’t recall you.”
He smiled, revealing absolutely perfect teeth. “That’s okay. I’m arranging a ride into town. Would you like to come along?”
Shanna seriously considered it, but something about the handsome man struck her as creepy.
“No, thanks.”
Darkness flashed across Dr. Cook’s eyes, so quickly Shanna couldn’t be sure she hadn’t imagined it. The doctor bowed politely.
“Some other time, perhaps.”
Then he pressed his cold lips to her hand, turned on his heel, and walked off into the night with the infant.
Shanna wondered where she should go next. She thought of Clay’s father. He didn’t sound like someone she’d want to hang around with, but a survivalist type might be just what she needed right now. He deserved to know that his son was dead, and how he died. And he’d be the type to believe why he died.
Where had he said Daddy lived?
Up near Silverton?
That was where she would go.
The Man in the Pristine Scrubs
“YOU are hungry, aren’t you,” he cooed to the infant in his arms. “Well, we’ll fix that.”
His canine teeth extended. They were so much better than the previous, unwieldy set he’d shed in the laundry room less than half an hour ago. This new form was superior. His thoughts were clear, focused. And he looked human. Better than human. Better than his best days on Wall Street. He’d blend in much better than those monsters.
Better still, he was young and healthy again.
He bit the tip of his index finger and watched the blood well into a bead, then touched it to the baby’s mouth. She made a face at first, then began to suck.
“Looks like we’ve got our work cut out for us, little one. We seem to have experienced a setback on the way to a brave new world, but it’s only temporary. We’ll get there eventually, and you’ll play a big part. Oh, yes, little one. I have big plans for you.”
Epilogue
HE hurt. Hurt bad.
Burns, for sure. All over.
Broken arm.
Broken leg.
Make that two broken legs.
But somehow he’d managed to survive that explosion, that fall.
He was too weak to cry out. But that was okay. He heard soldiers sifting through the rubble.
They’d find him soon.
Until then, he had good company to kill some time with.
The best company a man could have.
He set Alice on his chest, and wondered how long it would be before they found him.
But he could be patient.
He could wait a little longer.
Not a problem.
THE END
From Joe Konrath, about this bonus content
Welcome to the supplements section. One of the cool things about ebook technology is that page count no longer matters. In print, paper costs money. The longer the book, the more it is to produce it and ship it.
Since we’re not bound by this (technically we’re not bound at all) we can include a bunch of DVD-style extras that don’t increase the cost of the ebook.
You’ve probably just finished reading the interview with all four authors about writing Draculas.
If you’re a writer, or you’re interested in how four different authors crafted a single novel, we’ve included a lengthy selection of our emails to each other during the writing process. In this, you can see how our final draft changed from our original vision, and how we put it all together.
We’ve included complete Kindle bibliographies, bios, and excerpts from our latest novels.
We’ve also included these three bonus short stories.
I’ve been fortunate to have collaborated with all of these authors on separate projects. Here’s a brief explanation of each.
Years ago, a friend of mine told me I had to meet Jeff Strand because he wrote “funny but sick shit, just like you.” I read some of his Andrew Mayhem books, loved them, and we began to correspond. I thought it would be a lot of fun to team up his Mayhem character with one of my characters from the Jack Daniels series, a private eye named Harry McGlade. We wrote a novella called SUCKERS, which came out in a limited edition hardcover and sold 250 copies. Later, I put SUCKERS up on Amazon Kindle, and it’s made us a small fortune.
A while later, we were both invited into a tiny werewolf anthology, and decided to hash out a quick story. The result was CUB SCOUT GORE FEAST. The anthology never came out, but the story lives on as a supplement to this ebook.
Blake Crouch and I met under similar circumstances. A mutual friend told us we both wrote dark, scary serial-killer books, so we checked each other out and found our writing was very similar. On a lark, I asked Blake if he wanted to try a writing experiment. I write about a driver who kills hitchhikers. He writes about a hitchhiker who kills drivers. Then, without showing each other our sections, we try to kill each other.
The result, SERIAL, was released as a freebie on Amazon, and downloaded more than 250,000 times. Amazon now carries the longer, expanded SERIAL UNCUT, which is about five times the length. Here’s the original.
I’ve been a fan of F. Paul W
ilson since I was a kid, and we met a while ago at a writing convention. When we were both invited into a horror anthology, neither Paul nor I had time to write a story, so I asked him if he wanted to collaborate, which would be faster. He graciously agreed, and the result, A SOUND OF BLUNDER, was released in the antho BLOOD LITE. It’s a parody of the famous Ray Bradbury story. Thanks to Pocket Books for allowing us to include it here. Jeff Strand was also in that collection, and it’s well worth seeking out.
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