Draculas

by J. A. Konrath

  Said something that sounded like, "I don't feel right."

  Adam reached out to touch her shoulder, but she retreated and ran out of the room.

  He turned back to Stacie, took her cold hand in his.

  "I'll be right back, sweetie. You're going to be okay now. Just rest."

  He leaned down and kissed her on the cheek, and as he turned to leave the room to see what was wrong with Herrick, something standing in the doorway stopped him cold.

  A little demon-girl.

  "You get out of here," he said.

  She hissed at him.

  He noticed a pair of scissors protruding from her chest.

  "Go on!" he shouted.

  But she didn't go on. Just stood there, drooling out of those horrific teeth, black eyes gleaming in the blue-glow of the emergency lights, watching him almost like she was gearing herself up for something, and then he realized she wasn't looking at him.

  It was the blood bag.

  She moved forward and before he knew what he'd done, Adam swung and hit the little girl with a devastating left hook to the face, felt her nose sink in, his knuckles pop, and she went sliding back across the floor.

  Something possessed him--a livid, white-hot jolt of rage, and as the little girl tried to sit up, the minister rushed forward, grabbing a knot of her hair as he shot past, and dragged her out into the corridor.

  He could feel her struggling, trying to regain her feet, so he ran harder, hit a full-on sprint as he approached the junction, and then he gave one hard tug and sent the demon-girl careening into the nurses' station.

  She crashed head-first into the wood paneling and lay unmoving on the floor.

  Adam could hear noise everywhere now.

  From Room 12--Brittany's room--God-awful screams, figured she was pushing the baby out, and he hoped Nurse Herrick was in with her.

  The barricade was rattling, too, a demon trying to squeeze itself through the square window-frame.

  The demon-girl jumped to her feet, hit the ground running, coming straight toward Adam, talons out, screeching like some battle cry, and it happened so fast Adam didn't even react, just let the monster slam into him at full-speed.

  They crashed hard to the floor, the little girl's talons digging through his black pants, pinning him to the linoleum.

  He looked down, saw her head moving toward his crotch, those shark teeth snapping.

  Adam reached out and grabbed another handful of the little monster's hair and torqued her head a half second before she decapitated his johnson.

  He brought his legs up around her and squeezed her between his thighs, straining to crush her ribcage.

  She screamed, tore one of her talons out of his leg and swiped it at his face.

  Adam could hear those demons trying to break through the barricade, couldn't see them from where he lay, but he could hear the ominous crack of wood splintering.

  The girl struggled to inch toward him, close enough now that he let go of her hair and started punching--direct, solid blows to her face, her eyes swelling shut as she screamed.

  And then suddenly he felt her talons close around his neck, and her face--the nightmare wreck of it--inches from his.

  He stared into those black, soulless eyes that glistened with...

  ...joy...

  It was unmistakable.

  This little demon-girl looming over him, saliva dripping in long, bloody strings from her fangs, was pleased as punch, as if she'd finally managed to catch her first real prey.

  I can't be killed by a little girl.

  Please God.

  Not like this.

  Wait! Someone had appeared behind the girl--he craned his neck to see who it was as those monsters ravaged the barricade beyond the nurses' station.

  Brittany! It was...Brittany?

  Brittany stood in bare feet on the cold linoleum, her head tilted, watching Adam.

  Her face had exploded, and her stomach too, and in the cavity a little eight-pound demon with a face full of half-inch razor whites was slowly chewing its way out, Adam thinking...

  This is a hell worse than any I ever read about. Please God, please...where are you?

  Jenny

  IN a night filled with countless horrors, killing Lanz had to be the worst one of all.

  Jenny huddled with the children once again, not even knowing what she was saying, but continuing to speak in soothing tones until their hysterics leveled off. Then she found a spare blanket and draped it over Lanz's body so they wouldn't have to look at it. She kicked something wet and lumpy--is that his stomach?--underneath the cover and then retreated back to the corner of the storage room.

  "It's okay now," she said. "We're all going to be--"

  But she heard something that stopped her.

  Squeak...

  Squeak...

  Squeak...

  Could it be...?

  The boys screaming in unison, so loud and shrill it hurt Jenny's ears. She whipped her head around, following their shocked stares and saw...

  That clown. That damn clown.

  It stood next to the window, peering inside. Benny the Clown's teeth were gone, and it looked like he'd been gumming barbed wire. But the red nose and the fright wig remained, as did patches of white make-up, reflecting multicolored hues of pastel in their glow lights.

  Jenny summoned up courage she didn't know she had and said, "It's okay, kids. It's okay. He can't get in."

  "I hate clowns!"

  "That's not a real clown," another boy said. "That's just some guy dressed up like a clown!"

  "It's a monster clown!"

  She hugged them. "Don't worry. The monster clown is out there. We're in here."

  "He's doing something!"

  Jenny didn't want to look at the creepy thing again, but she felt compelled to. Benny the Clown was holding something in his hand and waving it into the broken window.

  A blue handkerchief?

  Squinting at it, Jenny realized it was sticking out of the vest pocket of his clown outfit. Benny the Clown gave the cloth a sudden tug.

  The first handkerchief was tied to a second, yellow handkerchief. He fed both through the window and kept pulling.

  Attached to it was a red one.

  Then a green one.

  "Go away, you goddamn clown!" Jenny ordered.

  But Benny the Clown continued to pull out handkerchief after handkerchief. Five...ten...fifteen...then...

  That's not a handkerchief.

  The next thing he yanked from his pocket was a human spleen.

  The spleen was attached to a kidney.

  The kidney was attached to a gall bladder.

  Then a lung. A bladder. A descending colon. And something that might have been a trachea.

  Jenny was speechless. Not only because this horrible perversion was being presented to her and the kids. But because of the effort that went into it. Benny the Clown had taken the time to tie all of these unconnected parts together.

  Finally, with flourish, he ended the ghoulish display by tugging out the last organ. A human heart.

  Then the bastard actually bowed.

  "You sick son of a bitch!" Jenny screamed. "Get the hell away from us!"

  But Benny the Clown didn't go anywhere. He continued to stare at them, as if expecting a round of applause.

  Jenny turned away, hugging the children. "Don't look at him, kids. We don't have to worry about him. He's just a big bully, trying to scare you. He doesn't even have any teeth. He can't hurt us. The big loser can't even get in."

  Then Jenny heard a sound that chilled her to the very core.

  A sound that was both familiar, and totally out of place.

  BRRRR-RRRR-RRRRR-RRRREEEEEEEEEE!

  The starting and revving of a chainsaw.

  The blade poked through the aluminum door like a finger through a wet tissue.

  The children screamed. So did Jenny. She screamed for their lives, and hers, and for Randall's, because she knew it was her husband's chain
saw, and he never would have let Benny the Clown take it, which meant he wasn't going to save her because he was dead.

  As Benny the Clown cut the door off its hinges and stepped into the storage closet, Jenny's biggest regret was that she hadn't gotten to tell Randall how much she loved him.

  Randall

  HE hated to admit it, but Randall felt a lot better after his encounter with Clay. The new gun helped. But, really, the guy wasn't a complete dickhead after all. Oh, he was still a dickhead, but perhaps a smaller one than Randall had originally thought.

  Randall turned a corner. The emergency lighting in the corridor wasn't nearly bright enough to give him a full view of what was happening, but he could see blood all over the floor, and two draculas on their hands and knees, greedily slurping it up.

  Two draculas. He had four bullets. If Clay's advice about making sure that loved ones weren't behind what you wanted to kill was correct, then Randall could line up his shot carefully and take them both out with a single bullet.

  Then again, they seemed really distracted by the blood. And there was a lot of it.

  Maybe he could just walk on by. Save a bullet for when he desperately needed it...or at least for when Jenny could see him shoot it.

  He kept the gun extended in front of him and picked up his pace as much as he could. The draculas continued slurping up the blood. Hard to believe that Randall was so concerned with the blow to his own dignity when these things--human beings who probably would've had a good chuckle at his injury just hours ago--writhed on the floor like animals. Disgusting. Pathetic.

  He quickly stepped past them. They didn't look up from their meal.

  How much blood did they need? If you tightened the muscles in your arm just right, you could get a mosquito stuck as it was sucking your blood, and the little bastard could keep drinking and drinking until it popped. He'd love to see one of these draculas pop.

  Wow, he'd done it. Walked right by the distracted draculas.

  If not for the absolute shitstorm of misery he'd gone through tonight, he'd almost think that the rest of this was going to be easy.

  Okay, his mind had more or less returned to where it needed to be to get himself back to Jenny and the other kids. He'd be fine now. Nothing but redemption from this point forward.

  He continued down the dark hallway, still ready with the gun.

  More blood on the floor. Better not slip on it.

  There was some sort of commotion behind a closed door. Randall didn't open it. He kept moving forward.

  He tried to focus on the layout of the hospital. He was a floor above pediatrics, but distance-wise, he hadn't really gone that far. If there was another stairwell close by (or an elevator, if by any chance they were still working, which they probably weren't) he'd be in good shape.

  A dracula burst through a swinging door, less than ten feet in front of him. He had a pasty complexion and too much gel in his hair. The dracula saw Randall and immediately charged, arms outstretched.

  For a split second Randall considered conserving his bullets, but the stupidity level of being ripped apart while holding a handgun was more than he was willing to commit to, so he pulled the trigger. The top half of the dracula's head virtually exploded. The creature kept running forward for a moment, as if the message that it was dead hadn't quite reached its legs, and then it collapsed to the floor.

  Clay Theel was a man who knew his guns. And that kick felt good.

  Randall continued down the hallway, his confidence further boosted. He moved quickly, probably fucking up his numb leg beyond repair, but for right now he didn't care. There were a lot of shadows, lots of places where something with claws could hide and jump out at him. Though Randall couldn't pretend that he wasn't scared, nothing was going to stop him.

  Another dracula stepped into view at the end of the hallway. Looked like a teenage girl. She wore a hospital gown, had long blond hair, and much less blood on her than most of the other creatures he'd encountered. Randall imagined that she was rather adorable in her previous life. Not so much now.

  She rushed him. He aimed for a spot right between her eyes and pulled the trigger.

  His aim wasn't spot-on, but he got her in the neck. It burst in all directions, her head flopped backward, and she tumbled to the floor just like the other one.

  Half of his bullets gone. Damn. Randall needed to pick up the pace.

  He reached the end of the hallway. Left or right? Both looked equally spooky. He was pretty sure pediatrics was to the right, so hopefully there'd be a staircase close...

  He laughed out loud. There was. Right there. Finally some good luck.

  Randall opened the door to the stairwell carefully, half-expecting dozens of draculas to tumble out and make him look dumb for having believed that he was having some good luck. But the stairwell seemed clear.

  He sat and scooted down the stairs on his butt. It wasn't comfortable or dignified, but it got the job done.

  When he reached the bottom, he heard some screams.

  And a sound that was...familiar. Couldn't be, though.

  As he pulled open the door at the bottom of the steps, the noise became much louder. Thought he had to be imagining this, because it sounded a hell of a lot like a chainsaw.

  He stepped into the hallway. Definitely a chainsaw. How in the world...?

  Randall walked down the hallway. Yes! This looked familiar! Now he knew exactly where he was! He was getting closer and closer to the sound of the chainsaw, and hoped that it was being put to good use on one or more of those monsters.

  There it was. Pediatrics.

  He pushed through the door, and the first thing he saw was that goddamn, motherfucking, toothless, unfunny son of a bitch clown holding his chainsaw.

  His chainsaw!

  This was blasphemy! Fucking blasphemy! You could dunk a cross in a pool of urine while environmentalists burned the American flag and Randall would not have been more outraged than he was at the sight of Benny the Clown holding his precious chainsaw. The grease-painted fuckhead didn't even know how to hold it properly.

  Heroes in the movies that Randall so dearly loved said cool things before they blew away the bad guy. But that would mean a few extra seconds of the clown holding his chainsaw, and that was unacceptable. Randall pointed Clay's gun at the clown, who stood in front of a closet or something, and pulled the trigger.

  Missed completely.

  Shit!

  Benny the Clown turned to look at him. He tossed the chainsaw from his right hand to his left, and then back again.

  What the hell was he trying to do? Juggle?

  Somebody inside the closet screamed. Even over the roar of the chainsaw motor, Randall recognized it.

  Jenny.

  Alive.

  Randall was not going to miss a second time. That shiny red nose was just begging to have a bullet rip through it. He stepped forward, focusing on the spot with every bit of concentration he could summon, narrowing the distance between them. He'd fire into that clown's head from just out of chainsaw range. His brains could make shadow puppets as they scattered against the wall.

  He continued walking forward.

  Focus...focus...focus...

  His foot came down on something slippery and wet.

  His legs flew out underneath him and he landed on his ass.

  The gun went off, blowing apart a chunk of the ceiling. He winced as a large piece of plaster struck his eye. Dignity, gone.

  With his other eye, he saw what he'd slipped on: a tied-together string of guts. What the hell...?

  The clown tossed the chainsaw from one hand to the other again, then pointed the blade at Randall and took a big squeaky step forward.

  Randall realized that he might very well be about to die, and he was going to die pissed.

  He threw Clay's gun at Benny the Clown.

  Missed.

  He needed something else to throw.

  There wasn't much in the way of dracula-killing equipment left in his ut
ility belt, but he yanked out a tape measure as he scooted away from the chainsaw-wielding clown. His left eye kept blinking by itself--the falling plaster had really gotten in there.

  The large, bloody hole that comprised most of Benny the Clown's face curled up slightly on one side, as if he were trying to smile.