Bloodthirst in Babylon

by Searls, David

  Whatever it was, it was right behind him.

  Before he had time to fully execute a turn, something crashed into the center of his spine, pile-driving him to the ground and punching the air from his lungs. Todd could hear a ruined jaw flopping open and shut close to his ear. He caught a sideways glimpse and found that the old vampire’s mouth wasn’t half as broken as he’d remembered it. The thing had recovered quickly.

  They can’t be killed, he thought, just before the thing sank its teeth into his shoulder.

  Todd closed his eyes, kept them shut, didn’t even much care when Duke Gates’ gun roared again and again, blasting his hearing to hell and running warm wet matter down his cheek and neck. The vampire bucked and was lifted off him by the force of the multiple blasts.

  “Jesus, they keep getting up,” Todd heard Ponytail Pete say. All sounds were bass-heavy, muffled in cotton, the upper ranges lost in the incessant ringing. “What’re we gonna do if we can’t keep ‘em dead?”

  Todd still kept his eyes shut, rode out the ringing. He remembered slipping his dad’s new Buick out of the garage one night, releasing the brake and rolling it down the driveway before getting shitfaced with his friends and wrapping it around a telephone pole. He’d kept his eyes sealed the next morning on that occasion, too, in the impossible hope that when he opened them again the old man’s Le Sabre would be unmarked and back in the garage where it belonged.

  “Hey man,” said Duke. “You okay?”

  He opened his eyes. His cheek nuzzled black grass. He smelled the rich, wet aroma of the neglected lawn, but also the acrid scent of gunpowder, the sour odor of body sweat and the metallic tang of blood. He felt a solitary tear trickle from one eye and roll into his ear. And in the distance the voices, drawing nearer.

  “Todd, you all right?”

  Tonya dropped a warm, sticky hand onto the back of his neck, a hand that shook in delayed reaction to her wide-awake nightmare.

  The vampire lay motionless on the grass and weeds at the edge of the ravine, its skull as shattered as a stolen pumpkin.

  Todd nodded slowly, though it was a motion that would be difficult to see. He heard running footsteps drawing near and rose to his feet to see a biped shadow approaching fast. Duke had his Mauser pointed, Jermaine a burning torch cocked over one shoulder. Tonya said “Don’t,” just as Pete took aim with his flashlight and the shadow turned into Carl Haggerty.

  “Over here, there’s five of them,” Carl shouted to someone out of the light, waving a smoldering log like a beacon.

  Jermaine asked what had happened elsewhere, and Carl rattled on about rats and vampires and gun battles, a tale that, for all its familiarity with their own situation, Todd had a hard time following.

  “We kept hitting them and they kept coming,” Carl was saying, but Todd found that he could repeat the words verbatim without fully comprehending the message.

  He couldn’t concentrate, couldn’t form or hold a thought. Couldn’t care. His shoulder throbbed. He felt warm drool form a trail from the corner of his mouth to the end of his chin. He shuddered, gasped, sobbed.

  Tonya Whittock laid a hand on his undamaged shoulder, but didn’t seem to know what to do when the sobbing didn’t stop. “I don’t think no one got killed,” she said, as if that addressed his concerns.

  “The goddamn thing’s still moving,” someone called out hoarsely, and that’s what cut Todd out of his personal fog.

  He leaped to his feet to watch with the others as the ancient vampire stirred yet again. It was on its back, flailing its wrinkled limbs like an overturned turtle. The old woman who’d taken a bullet in her chest had crawled into the ravine and they could hear her stumbling away.

  “You can’t kill them,” Todd said with listless calm.

  “You’re not doing it right.”

  If motel owner Mona Dexter had been a vampire, they would have all been dead. No one knew she’d joined them until she spoke. “You have to take more permanent action,” she said.

  On her hip she balanced a long object that suddenly roared to life. She advanced slowly on the wounded vampire, holding her snarling chainsaw in a two-handed grip as gasoline fumes filled the still night air.

  The vampire rose on two elbows to utter a growl that changed to a squeal of panic as she kept coming. A plea heard even above the gas-fueled roar of the chainsaw.

  “No, no, no, get away,” he screamed.

  Yes, it now possessed a human pronoun in Todd’s mind: he rather than it. The old man began to crawl, inching his broken body toward the edge of the ravine. Pleading for his life as the motel owner advanced. Twin flashlight beams picked him up along with the red smear of blood that trailed him.

  “Jesus, no,” he cried out shrilly.

  Under the vampire’s screams and the roar of the two-cycle engine, Todd heard what sounded like a foot grinding eggshells into cement: the vampire’s cracked skull shifting back into place.

  She kept coming. The vampire made a weak grab for her foot, but she shook him off easily.

  “Let me live,” he screamed, throwing a hand up in front of his face as Mona Dexter swung like Paul Bunyan taking down a tree.

  The blade caught the old man under the chin, immediately snarling up in muscle, bone matter and tendons. The screams ended in a short bleat as the old vampire lost his windpipe in a spray of blood. The chain slowed momentarily as it tangled up in the wrist bone of a defensively thrown hand, but Mona worked her way past the obstruction. Blood and chunks of unidentifiable organic material so gummed up the works that the saw nearly stuttered out before rallying through the wet congestion like a mower through high weeds. The overtaxed motor whined as the saw shot a fine mist at the dark sky. It had even more difficulty cutting through the spine at the base of the neck, and finally did throttle out as Mona Dexter tore up ground beneath the dead man’s head.

  She wrestled the silent chain free and stepped back.

  “That’s for Frank,” she said.

  Gore clogged her tool, hair and clothing, but the cut was so clean that at first the vampire’s head still seemed attached, to hang only slightly askew on the vampire’s shoulders.

  “Gross,” Duke Gates said.

  “James Chaplin,” Mona said, panting heavily. “He always was an arrogant prick.”

  The motel owner’s expression soured as she primly scraped from her blouse the worst of the creature’s spilled body matter. She looked up to fasten her eyes on the horrified cluster.

  “We have to talk,” she said. “I’ll see a couple of you in my living room in a half hour. It’ll give you time to bury this thing and me a chance to take a shower and wash my hair. I hate this shit.”

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  “We want answers, Mona,” said D.B., back in the woman’s apartment behind the motel office after the head and body of the unfortunate James Chaplin had found home in the loose soil by the creek bed.

  “Sit down,” she said.

  Several Sundowners claimed to have killed attacking vampires, but only Chaplin had stayed that way. For their part, the Sundowners considered themselves as lucky at having suffered not a single casualty more serious than rat bites.

  Todd tenderly rubbed his shoulder. He and Joy had cleaned, sterilized and dressed it earlier. He stared with the dullest interest at the tidy apartment. Done in various shades of pastel, it looked as cool as it felt. There was a Navajo rug on the floor, a long couch and, on the other side of a marble table, the plastic-covered love seat anchored by D.B. and himself.

  She lit up without offering to share with either of them. Her hand shook as she leaned her cigarette on the edge of a copper ashtray.

  Mona had wrapped herself to the neck in a thin robe that couldn’t help emphasizing her breasts. She wore a white motel towel like a turban, tied in that complicated way only women could do. With a second towel draped loosely around her shoulders, she blotted her face as if she still felt the blood and brain matter and flesh particles that had clung there just a half hour
before.

  “Tea? Beer?” she offered.

  They shook off the suggestion, but she bounced up again, evidently to prepare something for herself while the men waited in the love seat. Todd could feel the other man’s arm hairs lightly tickling his own, and kept trying to pull away from the sensation, but there wasn’t room.

  She came back with a tall, frosted glass. She held it for a moment against her cheek before setting it down without a sip. She towel-blotted more imaginary moisture from her face while staring at Todd. Not into his eyes, but at the point on his shoulder where his shirt was torn to expose a white bandage already showing some spotting.

  “You got bit,” she said, as if the subject was a new one.

  “A rat.” Again.

  Followed by a silent standoff that only ended with D.B. saying, “Thanks for helping us, Mona, but we’ve gotta know what’s going on. What the hell are those things, and whose side are you on?”

  She tore her gaze from Todd’s shoulder so she could glare at D.B. “Whose side I’m on.” She studied the words. Puffed. Pulled the robe tighter as if chilled by the air conditioning.

  Todd wondered why she didn’t just turn the damn thing down.

  “Whose side I’m on,” she said again, making it neither question nor statement.

  She looked away suddenly, aiming a finger at one of the framed photographs of her with the broad-shouldered, bearded man, both of them dressed for someone else’s wedding. The bride was in the background, hugging an older man. Her father? Whatever. Where the hell was this going? Todd wondered.

  “If anyone’s, I’m on his side,” she said. “Frank Dexter. No one’s idea of a saint.”

  “Tell us,” D.B. said.

  She stood to move a curtain from a window. “You have guards posted out there?”

  “Yeah,” said both men together.

  They’d spent the last half hour rallying the troops. Todd had checked in on his family and found them playing Old Maid, only Joy’s eyes showing the strain. Duke Gates, so brave during the firefight, had flatly refused to leave the room he was sharing with Kathy Lee to take guard duty, and had sworn he’d be gone by morning.

  Mona nodded. “Good. They lost one of their own, so that should keep them away for the rest of the night. They’re not used to death. Their own, I mean. The concept’s even more horrible to them than it is to us since they’re so much closer to immortality. So I don’t think they’ll come right back, but you can’t tell. It’s better we keep a lookout.”

  “We?” D.B. asked. “So you really are with us?”

  She smiled. A sad smile. “I was scared before. Still am.” She examined her hands. “Can’t believe I really did it, but it felt good after what they did to Frank.”

  “Frank was…” D.B. began.

  “My husband. A loudmouth, cocky, arrogant son of a bitch. Best-intentioned and dumbest thing he ever did was try to rid the town of Duane Purcell.”

  It came in fits and starts. She got easily sidetracked, sometimes contradicting herself, other times spicing it up with imagined dialog. Things got especially confusing as Todd’s attention kept drifting to his torn shoulder and ragged thoughts he couldn’t escape. But even with all the detours and roadblocks and unmarked highways, Todd was able to piece together the story.

  Frank Dexter’s family had owned the Sundown Motel since the 1940s.

  “The town vampires never objected to overnight guests, truck drivers and the like. They pumped dollars into the community without hanging around long enough to get suspicious.”

  It was becoming so easy to discuss vampires. Like condoms and vaginas, it was a once taboo topic that could now be raised in polite company.

  Frank and Mona, the story went, had been married for seven years when they assumed control of the motel upon the conversion and retirement of Frank’s parents. That had been four years ago if Todd got the chronology right.

  Everything had gone well except for the Friday and Saturday nights when Duane Purcell came to unwind with his hoodlum friends.

  “He and Jason Penney and the others would use the long drive and the parking lot to drag race,” Mona said, staring intently at the Navajo rug under her bare feet. “Or they’d check in with some drunk-ass farm girls and keep us up all night.”

  Frank and Mona would usually end up in a fight because he’d want to throw the troublemakers out while his more pragmatic wife knew they literally couldn’t afford to take such a stand. As a destination for travelers, the town was practically off the map. It had gotten so that Purcell’s raucous business was all but the mainstay of their survival.

  And there was more to it than economics. Mona shrank from the thought of confrontation. “I know I make them sound like a pack of unruly teenagers, but these ‘boys’ are closing in on thirty. Jim Zeebe’s well into his forties.”

  She blotted her face again. “The way I see it, the daylighers of this generation are a dangerously impatient lot. They see their lives stretching so far into the future that they’ve lost all ambition, all enthusiasm for day-to-day existence. They’re guaranteed power and centuries of life, but they can’t cash in that chip till they’re old and useless. At least that’s the way they’d see it. They see a bunch of old men holding them down. Old men who commanded much more respect and awe in the old days. The young ones won’t wait any longer, and that’s why I think this town’s about ready to explode.”

  Todd’s attention kept drifting to the dull pain deep in his right shoulder. Joy had helped him wash the wound and all of the tinier punctures, but he’d felt a compulsion to splash more alcohol into it in an attempt to burn away whatever ghastly poison might be coursing through him.

  He tried following the conversation while mentally inventorying his body’s sensations: heart beating at about normal speed…breathing unconstricted…no pain beyond the expected soreness…body chilled by the air conditioning but not numb. No alien sensations of any kind. Some agitation and distraction, but that didn’t seem at all unusual under the circumstances.

  D.B. nudged him.

  “I’m fine,” Todd blurted, subconsciously aware that Mona had asked whether he was feeling alright.

  “We’ve been through a lot,” D.B. explained for him. “So tell us what happened between your husband and Purcell.”

  “Ah,” she said.

  Frank was a fighter, a carouser, an older version of Purcell himself. He’d overstayed a trip into Detroit with several of his bar buddies the night four months ago when Purcell, Jason Penney and Penney’s girlfriend, Patty Craven, spent their last night at the Sundown.

  “Naturally, they were drinking,” Mona said. “The Craven girl was already soused, ragging Jason from the moment they checked in. I heard bottles clanking in a grocery bag they made no effort to conceal, and knew it was going to be another long Friday night. Especially with Frank gone.”

  There were no other booked guests that May evening, so the partying was unusually loud even for Purcell. Mona heard thrash metal pounding from speakers, loud voices and shattering glass as she marched over to confront the problem.

  “They hadn’t brought a radio, so they’d simply cranked up Purcell’s car stereo and opened all the car and room doors so they’d hear it.”

  Some incoherent argument could be heard from fifty feet away. They didn’t take well to Mona’s stern suggestion that they lower the volume of music and conversation alike.

  “There were words,” she said, shrugging into her iced tea. She sucked a frail cube, swishing it around in her mouth before daintily plopping it back onto the surface of her drink.

  “My worst mistake,” she said, lifting her gaze to her visitors, “was telling Frank about it the next day. I don’t know, maybe I was angry at him for leaving me alone all night. Or looking for my big strong man to defend my honor.” She chuckled, a dry sound resembling a cough. “After telling him everything, I told him to just forget it.” Another dry cough of a chuckle. “Yeah. Right.”

  “What happened?” D.B.
asked her gently when it looked like the rest of it wasn’t coming.

  “Okay,” she said, and went on with hardly another pause to tell how a drunken argument in the Winking Dog Saloon the next day escalated into a knife fight, a dying man and a last-second intervention by the master vampire.

  “Miles Drake couldn’t stand Purcell, but he saved him anyway. It’s town politics and some misguided sense of responsibility on the old man’s part.”

  She let out a heavy breath and seemed to consider wrapping it up. “First thing Frank said when he got home that night was that he was dead. Doomed. Drake had turned Frank’s worst enemy into something that, for all practical purposes, couldn’t be killed. Everyone knew it was the wrong thing to do, but who could tell that to Drake?”

  She let out another long breath. “That’s the problem with dictators. There’s no one to warn them when they fuck up.”

  The knifing was called justifiable, and Purcell was told to go in peace.

  “Frank begged me to leave Babylon, but I talked him out of it.” Mona waved her glass. “This motel, this town, these people, it’s all we had. What were we going to do, slip out one night with a couple suitcases and spend the rest of our lives looking over our shoulders? Sleeping under bridges? Anyway, Drake had given us his word that we wouldn’t be bothered.” She set her glass down on the table. “Which shows you what their word is worth.”

  D.B. rasped two fingers through the stubble on his chin. “Drake should have taken out Purcell long ago, before it came to tonight.”

  Mona frowned, then her eyebrows lifted and lips spread in a vague smile. “I see. You think Purcell’s responsible for tonight.”

  The two men leaned forward at the same time. Momentarily, Todd’s shoulder was forgotten. “If not Purcell, then who?” he asked.

  Mona ran a finger through the condensation on the side of her glass and sucked it dry. She seemed to be enjoying their confusion. “The man whose head we removed tonight is—or was—a genteel old fellow named James Chaplin. The town will be buzzing tomorrow with news that one of its leading vampire citizens bit the dust. His obituary will identify him as one of the oldest and dearest friends of town founder Miles Drake.”