Bloodthirst in Babylon

by Searls, David

  The three men—D.B., Jermaine and Denver—had squealed out of the gas station in the stolen pickup, Jermaine waving his .38 like a black Dillinger. As they hit the ‘S’ curve where Main View became Pleasant Run, Denver poked his scoped deer rifle out the passenger window.

  “We had to assume the squad car that had been parked at the foot of the Sundown most of the day would still be there, the cops alerted by radio,” said D.B.

  But if the radio had been on, the two cops, not much more than boys, hadn’t been listening. One lay sprawled on the car hood with his shirt unbuttoned, taking in the afternoon rays. The other had just found a tree for relieving his full bladder. They scattered as the pickup came roaring at them, Jermaine and Denver riddling the cruiser just for the mean hell of it.

  Yes, thought Todd. He remembered this part. Sort of. But the images came back to him like the parts of a movie glimpsed while in the process of nodding off on the couch. You have to rewind it some the next day to make it all make sense.

  “They fired a couple wild shots at us, I think, but didn’t try coming after us.”

  “They won’t,” Todd said. He was fading fast. He moved his numbed fingers over his wife’s hand just to try to get feeling back into them. “Purcell’s daylighters are after immortality, or as close to it as they can get.” He had to struggle for every word, his mind as tired as his body. “But that don’t mean shit if they get killed before they can get it. That’s why they won’t take any chances they don’t have to take. And they sure won’t call for outside assistance. But watch out for them. They’re…”

  Sneaky, he meant to say. But the merciful blackness set in and took him once more out of the agony of daylight before he could get the warning out.

  Chapter Fifty-One

  There was no sudden movement as they crept into the small room. No charging, hissing vampires. It was a tidy rectangle, a windowless space that might have once been a wine cellar. With only the light from the larger basement room behind them, it was hard to see much detail. Paul’s roving hand snagged the cold, musty wall just inside the doorway and crawled along it until he found the switch he was fervently hoping would be there.

  It was wired to a small lamp sitting on a nightstand behind one of the room’s two single beds. A lamp whose smudgy yellow shade seemed to capture most of the bulb’s glow, but enough escaped to show Paul more than he wanted to see.

  He heard Freddie suck in his breath behind him. He waited, really needing a wisecrack that never came. Holding the hatchet as far out in front of him as his arm would allow, the lawyer jerkily backed out of the small room, looking like he could bolt for the stairs at any moment. Paul was right with him.

  He said, “Freddie,” trying to steel his own nerves as well of those of his friend.

  His voice rang out too sharply in the heavy silence. It bounced from wall to wall, eliminating whatever element of surprise they’d somehow managed to keep, but caused no movement of either sheeted figure in the space whose doorway they precariously blocked.

  Paul gently pulled his friend back into the small room.

  “Jesus,” Freddie whispered. It sounded as much like a prayer as an exclamation.

  Paul read plenty into that single word. Freddie had accompanied him on a lark. Never really believing in vampires, for God’s sake, but possessing enough of an imagination to be frightened at all the right moments. Until now, the fear was that of kids too old to believe in ghosts even while telling ghost stories at night.

  Now it was the real deal.

  Paul jumped nearly as high as Freddie at the piercing shriek that bounced from wall to wall. Freddie spun in circles, waving the hatchet wildly. At Paul, at the beds, at the sheeted figures, the doorway and everything beyond.

  “Easy, Freddie, it’s just the telephone,” Paul gasped, only fully realizing the fact as he said it.

  He tore his cell phone out of his pocket, but only to use its digital timepiece.

  “Darby,” he said as the sound tore through the darkness a second time. “Just like we planned.”

  In all the suspense and drama he’d forgotten all about her scheduled nine o’clock phone call. Since cell phones were so undependable, she’d taken the Drake home phone number with her so she could call him here to tell him she was safe.

  Paul backed once more out of the small room and eyed the rotary dial phone on the wall of the larger space. Evidently the thing actually worked.

  “What if it’s not her?” Freddie asked as Paul moved toward it.

  He stood stock still. It seemed like he, Darby and Freddie had thought of everything. For instance, if she heard a stranger’s voice when she called she was to ask for someone else, apologize for the wrong number and get the hell out of whatever rest stop they were at. And even if Paul did answer, she was not, under any circumstance, to tell him where they were.

  All of those sensible precautions but they’d never thought to devise a way for him to safely answer in Drake’s house. Presumably, anyone who knew the family would know that Miles was “indisposed” during daylight hours—but what if it was someone expecting Tabitha to be available? How long would it take for word to get around the tiny town that a stranger had picked up the Drakes’ line?

  “You gonna get it?” Freddie said after the third stomach-twisting ring.

  They should have devised a code: ring twice, hang up, three more rings, pick up. Whatever.

  Four rings.

  “Do it,” Freddie hissed. “For chrissake, you’re waking them up.” The lawyer, eyes wide, nodded toward the sheets twitching in both narrow beds.

  Paul moved to the larger room and pulled the receiver off the hook.

  “Yeah. Hello?” he said before he could overthink it.

  “My God, you did it.”

  It was Darby. Paul closed his eyes in relief. It felt like every muscle in his body slackened. He let himself sag against the cold, damp wall.

  “Paul? Paul?”

  “Yes, honey, I’m here. You’re at a pay phone, right? Don’t tell me where, but you’re going to immediately leave the location when you hang up, right?”

  She told him that everything was fine and that she knew what to do, and asked him how he was doing.

  Paul chuckled, a sound that slipped off the basement walls. “Well, we got in the house. As you know. The…things…are in the basement, and we were just about to—”

  “Things? As in, plural?”

  “Come on, Paul. Hurry up,” Freddie whispered hoarsely.

  Paul waved him off. “Two of them. We’re not sure which two yet. We just got started. But tell me what happened last night.”

  Musty. The place smelled like his nightmare concept of a tomb. Paul tried stretching the cord as far as it could go, but couldn’t get enough flex to check out the sheeted figures Freddie was watching in wide-eyed repugnance from the relative safety of the doorway.

  Meanwhile, the story poured forth from Darby like she’d been waiting for him to ask. She was telling him as though for the first time, but it sounded a little like a summary of a film he’d forgotten having long ago seen. New…and yet maddeningly familiar. It took several seconds before it dawned on him that she was telling him the up-close-and-personal account Todd Dunbar had earlier relayed from a psychic distance.

  Darby’s voice expressed all the terror that had been missing in the tale previously. He could now feel what it felt like to be stalked by a silent van on a desolate road in the middle of the night. Gunshots, bullet holes, shattered glass, crumpled metal, screams, flames, hysterical children.

  “I’m sorry,” he whispered when she’d finished and he could hear the tears clogging her throat.

  They listened to each other breathing on the line until Freddie interrupted with, “Um, Paul? They keep…moving.”

  He told Darby he loved her and she said the same and he told her to be safe and to keep their son and his daughter well.

  As he cradled the phone, he turned to see Freddie holding the Canon in the pal
m of one hand.

  “I think we should hurry, man,” he said.

  Meaning it was time to unwrap those things. Paul stood in the doorway of the smaller room for a closer look. One narrow bed lined up against each parallel wall, with maybe four feet of walking space between. There was a single nightstand with a single lamp filling up that common area, a rag rug underfoot so the sleepers wouldn’t have to wake up to cold feet on bare concrete. The walls had been whitewashed in a bleak attempt at brightening the place.

  “Now what?”

  “Turn it on.”

  Paul had given his friend a brief lesson in operating the camera in video mode. Still, Freddie looked and acted like he’d never seen a digital camera before. He struggled with buttons, toggle switches, the zoom setting, the record button and viewfinder.

  “What if the batteries—?”

  “They’re fully charged,” Paul snapped. “I handled it overnight. Just point and shoot.”

  “Nothing to shoot.” Freddie looked up at him. “Yet.”

  Paul’s cue. He stared at the two wrapped lumps. The sheet on the left twitched. An elbow, maybe. Looking closer, he could see both sheets inflating and deflating where mouths would be.

  “When you get a red “Rec” icon in your monitor, you’re recording,” he said.

  “I figured that out already. Quit stalling.”

  They looked like a pair of mummies. Paul inched closer to the one on—flip a coin—the left and took hold of the sheet. It was warm with body heat. Paul pulled his hand away and wiped it off on his shirt.

  “Come on,” said Freddie, barely breathing.

  “You getting this?” He sure as hell didn’t want to have to do it again.

  Freddie didn’t even dignify it with a response.

  Paul started to rip the sheet away in one fluid motion, like an amateur magician doing the old tablecloth trick. Started to, but caught himself. Bad plan if it disturbed the thing’s sleep. He remembered with a shudder poor Jamey Weeks letting that shade fly.

  He moved through it cautiously. Slowly peeled back the sheet, the camera soundlessly documenting. At least it better be.

  He picked up his pace, revealing a head of hair not as white as Drake’s, and less of it. The head rounder, the skin more wrinkled but less mottled. He pealed back more. The inverted smile, the forehead creased in a sleeping scowl against the lamplight…

  John Tolliver.

  The eyes were going to fly open, the irises hard and brown and knowing, and he’d be captured by the vampire’s hypnotic glare.

  Paul stepped way. “Wrong one. Turn it off.”

  “So that’s it,”Freddie said, lowering the camera. “I guess I thought it’d be more…”

  He didn’t finish it, but the unspoken word dramatic hung in the air.

  You want drama, you should have been with us yesterday, Paul thought.

  He went to work on the other bedded figure, faster this time. “You getting this?” he asked over his shoulder.

  “Yep.”

  “Come closer. I mean, zoom in. Remember how?”

  Paul sat next to the prone figure, his face nervously posed no more than a couple feet from the other’s. The thing had the pallor of putty. His face looked dry and chalky to the touch, the lips with barely more color than the cheeks.

  “We’re getting a close-up, Drake,” he murmured. He had to concentrate to steer the fear from his voice.

  He even managed a small, tight smile. “You’re gonna be a big star, Miles Drake,” he said, speaking loud enough to be picked up by the camera’s microphone. “Think back to Sunday night, when your cronies attacked the Sundown while you gave me more than a century of background. Everything, Drake. Dear homicidal Frederick Darrow and that sweet daughter of yours. And the murder of Frank Dexter? But I think the highlight of the long evening was how your vampire buddies wiped out the Jeff McConlon family in Ithaca, New York.”

  The vampire’s mouth twitched. Just reflex action, Paul told himself. He had to believe that.

  He cleared his throat. God, it was hard sounding calm and self-assured when his stomach roiled, when his skin ran slick with sweat on a cool morning in a cool basement.

  “Quite an earful, Drake, but who’d believe such a bizarre story if I went to the police? No one. That’s why you were unconcerned about giving me every last detail. That and the fact that you had to keep me busy while John here and your old friend Chaplin and the others attacked the Sundown.”

  He could feel his anger growing as he chatted on. He leaned even closer so Freddie could catch him in close frame with the putty-skinned vampire.

  “Get ready for this, Drake. Darby and I ran video and audio the whole evening.”

  That was the hardest part, having to implicate his wife. But it was necessary to lend credence to his story, so Drake would know he wasn’t bluffing. Paul briefly explained how she’d caught him on videocam from the second floor balcony and how they’d rigged a second camera in a bookcase and a digital recorder between the cushion and his easy chair.

  “We got two video angles and an audio file out of it, Drake,” he told the sleeping creature. “Now Darby’s long gone and even I have no idea where she is. But what I do know is that she found a coffee shop or a library somewhere along the way—an anonymous place where she could download the files and send them as email attachments to various addresses.”

  Paul thought he saw REM activity under the vampire’s nearly translucent lids, and he moved his head away.

  “She stored them online somewhere and sent retrieval directions to various people. Maybe to friends, lawyers, old classmates. Even I don’t know because I told her not to tell me. She told the recipients to only take action if she disappears, at which point they’re to send the files to police agencies and media.”

  He forced himself to smile confidently for the camera.

  “You’ll try to recall exactly what you told me the other night and wonder how much of it is prosecutable. You’ll also figure that the police will dismiss it as nothing more than the ravings of an elderly man—and you might be right. But I’ll bet you gave me details of the McConlon killings that weren’t released to the public. The way you tore into the pregnant woman’s abdomen for the fetus, for instance. That sounds like the sort of thing that isn’t graphically shared even today. And consider this, Drake.”

  Paul moved in closer again, his fear of the sleeping creature at its lowest point since they’d broken in.

  “At the very least, the police will visit Babylon to investigate. Not to mention the tabloid journalists with camera crews. Darby added her own narrative to the digital files, Drake. With lots of names. The cops will want to know what happened to the Highsmiths, the Dunbars, Don Brandon and the rest. And what will your people think when outsiders start tearing this town apart? What if the police demand an interview with you and others of your kind at, say, high noon? When the reporters knock on your door, middle of the day?”

  He pulled away again, but stayed close enough to make camera frame. This was the part he found hardest to deliver. “But your secrets are safe with us, Drake. The only way we’ll give you up is if our lives are in danger.”

  Freddie murmured, “It’s getting late.”

  Paul nodded and returned his attention to the vampire. “Think what we could do to you and Tolliver right now, Drake. We had no problem breaking in, no problem getting to you. But we let you live because we need you as much as you need us. We can’t move all of the Sundowners out without attracting unwanted attention from your daylighters, so we need you to do what you want to do anyway. Take on Purcell.”

  On camera, he sounded so much more confident than he felt. He forced himself to once again move in close to that mottled, ancient skin. He caught a whiff like the long-term storage scent of old clothing.

  “You’ve got a precarious hold on things around here, Drake. Some of the younger generation thinks you’re a joke. Think about what happens to your reputation if the authorities move in becaus
e you said too much and it all got caught for the cameras.”

  While filming, Freddie had been removing one of the final items from the backpack. Now he opened Paul’s laptop, attached the cables and they quickly connected camera to computer and transferred this latest video file to the hard drive.

  Paul, meanwhile, took the memory card out of his camera and stared at it.

  “What?” Freddie asked.

  “I’m not even sure he’ll know what this is,” he said.

  “Then leave the whole camera. Even he’ll be able to figure that out.”

  Paul re-inserted the memory card and left the Canon on the vampire’s pillow.

  “You wake up with a camera by your head that wasn’t there when you went night-night,” said Freddie, “you get curious enough to play it. Don’t you think?”

  To be on the safe side, Paul scrawled some basic usage instruction on the back of a dog-eared business card he found in his wallet and left it with the camera.

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  Many transvestites are practicing heterosexuals. Some, in fact, have more practice at it than a lot of men who can stay out of their wives’ underwear drawers. Furthermore, cross dressers come in tall, short, fat, slim, hunky and frail packages, and as far as jobs go they run the gamut from construction workers to male models to chemical engineers. And the women who stay with them! Positively gorgeous, some of them, the kind you’d never get a shot at if you had a deep voice and five o’clock shadow.

  “It’s unreal, man.”

  Freddie’s words every time he’d come rushing back to Paul at commercial breaks from whatever daytime television show he was watching. “This is wild. Hell, some of those guys are so pretty I’d date them. Can you imagine how memorable your first time would be?”

  Freddie was in denial again, and not only regarding his sexual orientation. He’d spent most of the remainder of the morning and early afternoon in brooding silence. Like a lawyer considering his options. Toward midday he’d found the remote and the flat-screen in an upstairs den and kept checking in with Paul in his and Darby’s bedroom where he was trying to make up for his lost sleep and convince Freddie to do the same.