“Mother?”
“Mrs. Ashyer.”
Stroud had never heard her referred to as “Mother” by the man. For a moment, he wondered if Ashyer was an “imposter” planted by Banaker. The man-thing was devious enough to do such a thing.
“Did you and she have children?” asked Stroud.
Ashyer came to the copilot's seat and seemed to deflate as he got comfortable in the ripped leather. “We had a girl, once. She ... she didn't survive. Your grandfather did everything in his power, but...”
“I see. I see.”
Ashyer was crying. Stroud knew he was a man. He said, “I'm going after Banaker alone from here.”
“But, sir!”
“No, no buts.”
“I want to help.”
“You've done enough. Mrs. Ashyer needs you.”
“I have something that might help,” he said flatly. “It's a pharmacological encyclopedia. I came back to the helicopter with the S-choline and the book, grew fearful when you and Lonnie didn't soon appear, and that is when I found you. I had to use up the S-choline, but in the book are the ingredients, sir, and they are all found around any kitchen. We can prepare our own arsenal.”
Stroud smiled at this. “Perfect.”
“Where will Banaker be, sir?”
“That's between him and me.”
“Do you expect him to attack Stroud Manse again? Tonight?”
“Not if we strike him first.”
“Yes, very good, sir, take the offensive.”
“We've got to get Lonnie and you looked after. Mrs. Ashyer'll take care of you.”
“When Andover awakes to fires and explosions at the Institute and the warehouse, people will want to know what is happening. They'll think we are mad, sir.”
“Yes, I know. No help for that at the moment. And now what proof of the existence of this threat do we have? Very little, I'm afraid, unless we can recover that pod.”
“But don't you think they've damaged it, burned it, destroyed it by now, sir?”
“Banaker will use it as long as it represents a lure for me. I believe that he believes that if he kills me, things in Andover can and will go back to normal. Normal, that is, by a vampire's definition of the word. At this point, the pod's his bait.
“They'll be puttin' by more pods now ... Now, since we destroyed their source of food. They'll be killing the innocent,” said Stroud. “Unless we stop them now.”
Stroud recalled that Magaffey had believed that some of the monsters, while sporting big houses for show, actually lived--or slept--at the mausoleum in Andover's cemetery. He heard Magaffey's faint voice telling him it was so, telling him now again. The old man's crackling voice filtered through the metal in Stroud's cranium. He knew where Banaker had gone, knew where Banaker wished a final showdown to take place, knew it would be on Banaker's terms.
His only hope lay in a fierce arsenal of the S-choline. He had no idea how many more pires Banaker could amass now. He had no idea of how many of the many hundreds of such beings had this night ingested some bad blood. Banaker had chosen to surround himself with his strongest, sharpest, and fiercest fighters. He'd hand-picked these pires, and he had kept them from the blood paks, thus saving them all a horrible death, and so they owed him. He also kept them from feeding on any other source, and would continue to do so, so that their desire for blood, their frenzy to feed, their hunger hormones would be razor sharp for when Stroud arrived. He was to be the main course.
-24-
Dr. Oliver Banaker had done all that Stroud had believed. He also did much more. He'd withheld blood paks free of the contamination even from himself so that the vampire miracle drink might survive, even if not a single one of them did. There were other pires far from here, other colonies. He'd sent it out to one of these colonies, it and the data. They could not ignore the importance of the elixir. He'd sent it by messenger earlier at the Institute.
But the messenger hadn't returned, hadn't checked in, and it began to trouble Banaker. Suppose Stroud had intercepted the message and the sample? Or, had the messenger become fearful, swallowing up the elixir himself for the courage and strength it brought? Or had it been contaminated, like that on the truck? When had Stroud gotten into the blood bank?
He imagined the humiliation and defeat that would accompany his having sent a tainted supply of blood to his fellow beings in another colony far to the north. After he dispensed with Stroud, he meant to carry on the work. There was always the work, and always work to be done. He missed the peace that Stroud had so disrupted; he missed the time before when Dolph had been young and had no greater ambition than to please himself with harmless distractions, and feed on what his father gave him to feed upon. He missed those calm days before all this had begun.
His reverie was demolished by the images of his people in that meat locker bursting into pieces of flesh and blood to decay in rapid succession, even at those temperatures, and turn to nothing more than a fistful of dirt. An eternity as ashen dirt. He knew he must put on a good show for Stroud in order to stop his evil genius bent on the destruction of all vampires, and especially on him, Oliver Banaker. He knew he'd have to provide a stunning display of power and strength and those things the human mind found horrific, if he were to take Stroud down. He knew now he must make Stroud one of them. He knew this in his heart and mind, because his own god had told him as much. His god would find it most pleasing, and he himself would find it a nice, ironic touch to turn the vampire killer into the vampire.
Banaker went about the mausoleum rousing others who had no idea the havoc being wreaked all around them. Only Banaker and his immediate army of body guards knew the full extent of the force they intended to meet head on here. Banaker, nonetheless, ordered his people out of the mausoleum and into the earth, just as in olden times. They must burrow into the graves all around the cemetery and lay in wait for Stroud's arrival.
These pires did as instructed. They'd heard rumors carried back to them about Stroud's powers, but none had seen evidence of it firsthand. All wanted for a fresh, morning cup of the red, life-giving drink, but Banaker had them on rations! They began to disperse among the graves, digging in as small rodents might, shape-changing to accommodate themselves in a kind of hibernation beneath the earth to await a high-frequency screech signal from Banaker. As they were going about this, the caretaker of the cemetery, one of them, saw a car pull up at the gate. A man, the fellow who had come to his wife's gravesite every day for six weeks now, was back again. The caretaker frowned and feared the human would see the disturbed gravesites since he was so bloody meticulous about his wife's, and raise a complaint. He also worried that, as the man had drawn close to the gate, he may well have seen some of the brothers and sisters squirming into their appointed holes in the earth. Some had chosen the good digging form of a large white worm and they had burrowed quickly and efficiently out of sight. But others had adopted foolish methods.
But the caretaker needn't have worried about the secret of Andover Cemetery going abroad, for suddenly several of Banaker's hand-picked guards swooped down over the man and attacked him with a ferocity the caretaker had never seen, even in vampires. The man's limbs were severed, along with his head, as the pires drank of his blood as if they'd never had a meal in their lives, as if they had returned to the old ways. The caretaker didn't understand it, nor did he grasp the reason for Banaker's having them all lie low beneath the earth, another old and out-of-mode custom. But, like everyone who owed so much to Dr. Banaker, the cemetery man found an empty gravesite of his own, shape-changed into the big worm, and burrowed in. Beneath the earth he felt comforted in knowing that he could burrow his way out anytime he wished.
He, with countless others here, dozed a bit as he relaxed to await Banaker's signal.
It could be a long wait.
Nobody seemed to know.
Everybody was confused.
Banaker said.
Simon says...
Sunshine blanketed the streets o
f Andover and a mild bracing breeze felt cool and refreshing on the skin, but the moment people began going about, even to step out to pick up the morning paper, they sensed something was wrong in their town. For one, there was no paper to pick up. Maybe the carrier simply hadn't gotten out of bed, but there were other indications about the little neighborhoods all around the small city that things were not quite right. Down the street the number of lights on, the number of cars pulling from garages, the number of children readying for school had all drastically reduced. Why? Was it one of those school and federal holidays?
TV news had nothing to offer. Tom McEarn's morning broadcast was nothing but a blur on the screen. A check with neighbors showed that half or more of the neighbors were simply missing, gone, their cars, garages, homes, and beds having been untouched. It was as if they'd been beamed from existence by some alien visitors in the night whose selection process was as inscrutable as God's own.
The disturbing morning turned into a much more disturbing day as remnants of ash and an occasional bit of unwholesome and unidentifiable liquid mixture was found amid spectacular arrays of blood-smattered concrete walks, parkways, fences, store entranceways, the interiors of cars and trucks. And the number of the missing among the Andover population steadily grew with each passing hour. A count was organized by the citizenry as the entire police force, too, was missing, along with most of the local media persons, like McEarn. There were many missing firemen. All of the nurses, orderlies, doctors, paramedics, morticians, as well as Dr. Oliver Banaker himself--all missing, gone without a trace.
Old civil service rules were instantly put into place and many lamented the lack of safety shelters below the ground, certain that some bizarre radioactive cloud had passed over Andover, or that something had gotten into the drinking water, or that a kind of Love Canal gas had seeped from the earth to claim its victims.
A few men organized a hastily got up Vigilante Committee that would see to organizing against the unknown. The police department was taken as central headquarters and an alert was sent out to Springfield for help. From the description of the chaos and nature of the disturbance, word was instantly dispatched to the National Environmental Protection Agency. By two in the afternoon the EPA reps out of Chicago and Springfield and St. Louis were on the scene, arguing territory and putting machines and personnel to work on the problem.
Andover was scoured by men in protective wear looking like astronauts far from the moon and quite out of place. Farmers coming in from the surrounding rural areas parked their trucks for hours just to sit and watch the unusual “space men” in their midst. The locals sat on porch chairs, carved wood, spat tobacco, and swapped theories about the catastrophe. Meanwhile, sensing devices were set up at key locations in the search for the cause of the catastrophe which had claimed several hundred of the population of the small city. Banaker's white coats had been replaced by the EPA's. The search went on until dusk without result. By evening, the only sure thing was that people were missing en masse.
News teams from the major surrounding areas flocked to Andover to film it all, but there was really nothing to film, and the footage being sent back to their respective stations drew dull groans.
During the day Stroud had not remained idle. He had sent for his own experts. He had used the ham radio to get through to Chicago and was patched into Cage, who, thank God, was available. When Stroud described his situation, he knew he sounded like a madman, but already Cage and others in Chicago were getting disturbing reports from the previously unheard of rural city of Andover, Illinois--something either to do with UFOs or toxic waste, no one seemed to know what, except that literally hundreds of people had disappeared overnight. Nothing like it in recent history had ever been heard of, and yet there were recorded cases of whole colonies of people who'd seemingly disappeared overnight, leaving food in dishes, doors ajar, animals unfed. Cage agreed to put together a team of scientists who would see Stroud at his manse sometime this evening.
“Can you get the governor?”
“No way.”
Static interrupted them.
“Deputy governor, then. A goddamned senator, then ... FBI, CIA?”
“I'll try but...” More static. “Can you give me more to go on?”
“Only that we do have an alien race among us here, Cage, but they're not from outer space.”
“Where are they from, then?”
“They're from...” Static intensified. “...from the dead.”
“Have you flipped?”
“Wish it were that simple.”
“This has to do with that bone field you mentioned?”
“Right! These aliens feed on human blood, Cage.”
“Christ, maybe you'd best call out the National Guard.”
“They're on their way, but they ... much help ... not without the solution.”
“Solution? The S-choline you told me about?”
“Right.”
“You're out of it?”
“Cage, got to rush. Can I count on you?”
“Sure, sure, Doctor Stroud.”
“You're not just humoring me to go along with the sick vet routine, are you?”
“I'll be there. Will you have the bodies for me to examine?”
“I will,” he lied, not knowing how he would regain the Bradley woman's body. Knowing Banaker, it was already destroyed, unless he meant to use it as bait for him.
They signed off and Stroud went back to work on his vampire arsenal. Mrs. Ashyer had been of great help, first taking care of Wilson and her husband, getting their wounds cleaned and tied off, seeing they rested. She then began gathering up various household items that would contribute to creating a new batch of S-choline. The homemade brew would be diluted with other chemicals, yet in theory it ought to work. Using the pharmacological encyclopedia Ashyer had wisely chosen to come away with, they had some notion that while vanilla extract would be of no use to them, Clorox bleach and other routinely used chemicals about the place would. In fact, they were finding the various mixtures they needed at every turn. Before long they had half a drum filled with a substance approximating S-choline. This was loaded onto the chopper.
Stroud opened up some thirty large casings to use in his AK-47 assault rifle which, up until now, had been useless against the creatures. He removed the casings, placed an eye drop of the homemade S-choline into each bullet, reassembled the casing and the lead, and laid each into the chamber.
Using Pepsi bottles and Coke cans, he created Molotov cocktails of larger ingredients that would be touched off in incendiary fashion. He made nine of these and stuffed them into a cloth bag that he could dangle from his shoulder along with the loaded AK-47.
The entire time he used for his preparations against Banaker, he sensed Banaker was also setting up his weaponry and arsenal. In a sense, the monster and the monster-hunter were now so connected that their thought patterns had become entwined. Stroud feared he would be too predictable, that Banaker would know his every maneuver before he did. He must plan his attack wisely. Banaker expected him; Banaker would not be taken by surprise again. Banaker would have scouts watching, waiting ... there in the cemetery where they would struggle to the death.
Banaker began rationing out the blood supply he'd kept on hand at the mausoleum. He wanted his people hale and fit for battle when Stroud arrived. With the sun going below the lip of the horizon, they needed the marrow mix to keep them whole and strong.
Where the hell was Stroud?
The waiting was driving Banaker crazy.
He wondered if he ought not attack the manse again.
But if he did so, at what cost?
Better to remain here on his own ground.
Better to take the defensive.
“There! There in the west!” shouted one of Banaker's closest bodyguards. “It's Stroud! It's the machine!”
The word machine resounded through Banaker's psyche as “the machine that killed his father, housing the grandson of the man who'd kill
ed his father.” Banaker gave out a wild, animal scream that turned to silence as its high pitch rose to such a treble that none but the bat creatures and the bats in surrounding caves could hear. Whole clouds of small bats stormed from their caves in clouds of blackness against the late afternoon sky. They moved as if of one mind, straight for Stroud's machine.
Banaker keened frantically, his own monster form now having taken full shape. The lesser bats would bring Stroud down to the earth, if Banaker willed them to.
The cloud of black, keening, sweeping bats blotted out the image of the chopper as it approached, there were so many of them.
Stroud saw the moving, living cloud of bats coming and he knew they were bent on suicide or any other cost to drive him to the ground and destroy his mobility.
Stroud knew they were honing in on him and his already shaky craft. Should they dive-bomb the rotars en masse, or cover the bubble with their blood and bodies, he'd go directly down and be killed before he even got near Banaker.
In the distance he saw Banaker surrounded by several huge bat things. He determined to swoop, avoiding the first army of the bat colony sent to destroy him in midair. He shoved the stick forward at full throttle at the last possible instant, missing the bulk of the small bats who nonetheless gave chase. Leveling out, he was faced with trees directly ahead, but before pulling up, he threw down three of the cocktails, causing confusion and a gas cloud to erupt on the ground at the cemetery. He then pulled up as madly as possible, feeling the skids at the bottom of the chopper tear away the top limbs of the trees.
He circled around, the bats still in pursuit, enough of them jamming into the tail rotar to effectively shut it down. It was only a matter of minutes before they'd do the same to the top rotar.
Stroud cursed to himself. He hadn't expected trouble in the air. He'd planned to dump the final drum of home-made S-choline out the back and onto Banaker's party. It was held onto a platform firmly bolted to the chopper. There was only one way to explode it. It must be done kamikaze fashion, but Stroud didn't particularly wish to die.
He instead took the bird straight up over the top of the cemetery field. He had strapped on a parachute, and now he cut loose from the straps holding him in the seat, dashed to the rear, holding firm to the dart gun, hand grenades, Molotovs, plastique, and hypos in the pack lashed to him, and jumped. The bats kept at the dead machine like ants feeding on the carcass of an enormous beetle as Stroud flew down and yanked the chute open. Above him, he saw and felt the powerful aircraft coming at him. It missed by mere feet, sending him off like a feather in its wake. His grandfather's tough old chopper was covered in bat hair and bat blood. Other bats dive-bombed him as he was descending, some trying to rend holes in the fabric of the chute. Stroud used every maneuver he knew to descend as quickly as possible, knowing he'd have a welcoming committee waiting below. As they gathered, he sent down a rain of Molotov cocktails for the beasts.
Vampire Dreams (Bloodscreams #1) Page 26
