But the chopper exploded on impact, and while fire and a blast were no match for the enemy, the explosion of chemicals aboard the helicopter sent up a weird mushroom cloud that spread out in a dense blanket all around the graveyard. So dense was the canopy, even sunlight could not filter through.
This Stroud landed in.
He didn't know where Banaker was, but his ears were filled with the agonized, animal cries of the dead and dying. What he saw all around him both amazed and terrified, as the earth over graves began to tremble. He tore himself loose from the parachute, knowing he was helpless buckled to it. He stumbled into a headstone as he did so, and he felt something grab his leg. His eyes fell on the large, bony hand that held his ankle. It was sticking out from a grave. In fact, all around him, things--corpses--seemed to be crawling from their graves, shaking off earth, and making their way toward him, the lone living human in all the cemetery. Stroud stepped onto the body of a giant white worm that was cork-screwing from a grave.
Then Stroud saw one of the walking dead snarl in a salty fashion as if he was readying to pounce and bite off Stroud's arm. In the thing's mouth, curled on the gums, Stroud saw the now familiar miniature white worms. They were Banaker's things, still in their human form, and some were beginning to fall over and quake with the symptoms of the poisonous gas that worked on their nerves, liver, blood pressure and heart, until some began to explode. These exploded with soft, pop-pulp sounds. The kitchen mixture of S-choline was taking more time, and was less dramatic in result, but just as effective in the long run. But for now, the one that had him by the ankle had wisely remained below ground, and the gas had not had the killing effect as a result, and the grip of the monster was threatening to break Stroud's ankle bone. He could not pull loose. Others were moving in to converge on Stroud and rip him apart with outstretched hands. Stroud fired off one of the darts, striking the closest of the standing creatures, sending it into an immediate paroxysm of pain and anguish before it softly burst open. Still he was held in place by the iron grip of the hand from the grave. Stroud jammed one of the hypos into the hand and it opened almost instantly in response, allowing Stroud escape.
But escape to where?
How many were left in the ground? How many were left in the fog. Where was Banaker?
Another explosion from the chopper debris rumbled the earth, toppling headstones. Andover Cemetery was now looking like a war-torn area. Over his shoulder, Stroud carried the conventional weapons of war, his AK-47, hand grenades, and plastique. He was disoriented in the smoke and fog which were causing the things on all sides of him to gag, cry out like wounded bears, collapse, and turn to a kind of molten mass of gelatinous flesh before becoming ash. Stroud tried desperately to find the huge white brick mausoleum that was at the northern section of the cemetery. He believed he was heading in the right direction, and he believed that if Banaker was still alive, he'd be there.
Stroud was hit from atop. One of the vampires had flown above the killing cloud, but now dived onto him, sending its ghastly talons into Stroud's back, right between the shoulder blades. It felt as if the thing were about to take his head off when suddenly it lifted him, his own weight causing more pain against the lifting talons. The creature had gotten in and out of the deadly cloud so quickly that it hadn't taken a breath. They were slow learners, but the vampires were catching on. This one was flying Stroud to some strange destination. Stroud felt for the dart gun, but it was gone, dropped somewhere below as Stroud fought for consciousness. The power of the being that held him was formidable. It slammed him face first into the side of the mausoleum, almost knocking Stroud senseless. Stroud slid down onto the pearly white stone steps before the closed door of the brick edifice.
Two of them now straddled him. They bent to lift him, their eyes black and animal-like, fixing him there as if he were a bug, easy prey. They could have killed him then and there had they lifted him and together slammed him into the concrete. Stroud acted quickly, however, jamming a hypo into one of them. The other watched in sheer horror at the fate of its fellow being. Stroud ran.
-25-
Abraham Stroud stumbled, got up, ran farther, and then saw it was hopeless--there was nowhere to run to.
They were everywhere, and they had encircled him, hatred for him causing a communal keening noise that pierced the human ear with a painful screech. These were the ones who'd survived the contaminated blood earlier and the initial S-choline bomb that had exploded with the chopper. These were the ones who'd witnessed so many of their kind die at Stroud's hand; these monsters had quickly burrowed back beneath the earth when the S-choline cloud came over the cemetery.
Stroud stared back at their angry, animal faces and watched as their snouts twitched in rage at him, as each locked its sonar on him, fixing him in place. Their dead, black pupils were like the unmoving, closed eyelids of a snake that lived below ground, locating prey by smell and feel. They were closing in on him. He'd be devoured by the horde, just as Banaker had planned all along.
In fact, he could almost hear Banaker's order as if he could pull it out of the air: Destroy the one human who can destroy you.
Stroud instinctively reached for the missing AK-47 automatic assault gun that had been dangling from his shoulder, but it was a futile gesture. It had flown from his grasp when he'd been unceremoniously dumped on the stone steps before Banaker's altar. The bag carrying the Molotov cocktails was empty of these and dangling about him like a loose fold of skin. But deep in its bottom, he'd placed a layer of the sanctified earth from his grandfather's coffins. He lifted out a handful of the dirt and flung it in the faces of the bat people. It rose like sand, catching and refracting the moonlight, turning to miniature stars as it cascaded into the crowd of vampires. Where it fell it burned and seared hair and flesh, causing a ripple of fear to hold them in check. He cast out a second handful of the holy dirt and, like water, it wet the creatures but with a wetness of burning sores. But then even the dirt was gone and Stroud was weaponless, defeated.
He backed toward the mausoleum door, trying desperately to gain entrance, but it remained locked against him. Banaker was inside, he could feel his presence deep within the concrete walls. He was inside, and yet he was out, watching the drama unfold, orchestrating from afar, at a safe distance, cowardly at heart.
Somewhere deep inside the crypt, Stroud realized Banaker had a route out. He was too smart to seat himself up without an escape hatch. He concentrated on Banaker and willed his own thoughts through to the creature that could read his mind, and that of his fellow creatures. He willed Banaker to know that he had killed Dolphin and that he, Stroud, believed Banaker a skulking coward, afraid to face him, afraid to open the door and let him through.
Behind him, Stroud felt the others closing the distance to the mausoleum. Stroud fought back the image of his own body being ravaged, lying on the white steps, a bloodless pulp of flesh. He instead concentrated on challenging Banaker with his mind. The attempt put great strain on him and for a moment he feared he would black out and it would be over; they would then feast on his life's blood.
But then the door he leaned against moved and it came suddenly open, displaying a sheer, clean black gaping hole into which Stroud might run, if he dared. Stroud turned to face the oncoming rush of vampires, knowing he had no choice but to accept Banaker's new challenge now. The army of pires moved ever closer, eerily reaching out for him now, closing in. He had little choice left but to step into Banaker's home.
The smoke pall over the cemetery was dissipated, and Stroud saw that about forty vampires stood around him, all with gleeful snarls on their filthy lips where the occasional worm flashed, reflecting the moonlight. Then a child stepped from the vampire horde and Stroud stared into the eyes of Ray Carroll's boy. He was holding onto Stroud's AK-47, pointing it at Stroud.
“No!” another of the pires shouted. “Doctor Banaker wants him alive.”
“He's to die slowly,” said another.
“He killed my father!�
�� shouted the boy whose shape was wavy, forming bat features and then human again, and back again.
“Kill him! Kill him now!” shouted a female voice in the crowd, the boy's mother.
But one of Banaker's lieutenants slammed into the boy and snatched the gun away. Stroud rushed this one and took firm hold of the automatic's grip, firing as the monster's hands were still on the barrel. The bullet with the S-choline slammed into Carroll's child who laughed nastily in response before he suddenly went into spasms. The others, including the powerful one who had hold of the AK-47 backed off. Stroud stood over them on the steps to the white mausoleum, its pillars a kind of archway into the hell that lay at his back. He stared down at the things surrounding him, the mutant race of the undead whose human and inhuman genes had for centuries commingled; it was a race of beings that lived off his race like the parasitic worms that lived off them in turn; it was a race spawned by Satan.
His eyes holding them in place as they watched the suffering death of the Carroll boy, Stroud opened fire with the automatic, slicing them down. The more courageous of them flew at Stroud in kamikaze fashion, attempting to slam him down so that the others might devour him quickly as the boy had wanted to do. Stroud nimbly side-stepped such actions and blew holes in these intrepid ones. Others raced to the pits from which they came, Stroud trying desperately to destroy each and every monster, to keep each from escaping. Should any one do so, Andover could be repopulated by the hideous things again.
Stroud then heard automobile, van, and truck engines coming up over the rise, their lights like beacons in the black sea of the cemetery, flashing on the disgusting, horrifying sight of creatures burrowing into gravesites in a mad rush to save themselves from the man at the marblelike mausoleum at the center of the graveyard. Rushing from the cars, Stroud saw human forms, but he dared not hope it was human help, and he dared not let down his guard. Banaker had thrown up one surprise and hurdle after another. This could be another of his tricks.
Then he heard Lonnie Wilson's voice, followed by Ashyer's. Dr. Cage was with them, along with state and federal officials who stopped dead in their tracks, seeing the Andover horror in the beaming headlights, but unable to calculate the meaning of it all. It was understandable that most of them froze in place while Wilson and Ashyer rushed in with more of the unusual ammunition required to kill the vampires. They'd apparently gotten hold of more dart guns, possibly from Dr. Cage and the others on hand. They went about firing darts of the S-choline into the scurrying bats. Wise enough to fire on anything else that moved as well, they also destroyed a dog that bounded over the fence, and rats and squirrels that dared move. In almost every case, the shape of the bat creature returned before it melted from existence.
Cage, a big, lumbering man with graying black hair and a walrus mustache, finally got control of himself and he rushed in with his sample bag, trying desperately to get and freeze tissue with a fixative spray that he carried in his bag, creating slides on the spot, as ghouls and humans did battle.
Stroud turned his attention to the interior of the mausoleum, sensing that Banaker was inside, waiting for him. Some thing inside his head told Stroud that perhaps he had to die with Banaker, that the two of them should go out of this world together, and that this somehow would ensure that there would be no more vampires ever again, that the vampire line and that of the vampire hunter had come to an end this night. But he didn't care for the idea of dying here in a death struggle with a gargoyle. He didn't accept the notion. It was bull.
Stroud stepped inside, cautiously; he sensed that Banaker was not alone. He'd held back several others with him here in his last retreat, his bomb shelter. The ones who'd fought Abe outside this structure had been powerful, having three and four times Stroud's strength, like Briggs's deputies. That meant they'd had a recent infusion of blood, Banaker's special distillation, but not the contaminated brew back at the Institute. Banaker must keep a supply here somewhere.
It was pitch-dark at the center of the place, the only light coming in at the door where the noise of the struggle and dying going on there filtered through. Stroud could see nothing. He reached for the matches he'd stuffed in his pocket earlier, the same ones he'd used to touch off the Molotov cocktails the bat creatures had so enjoyed. Stroud lit one just as the door behind him slammed, blowing the light out, but not before he saw the army of creatures arrayed against him here. There were seven, maybe eight and they flew at him as the match went out.
“Welcome, Doctor Stroud,” came Banaker's voice in mock politeness. “Welcome to my coffin.”
Stroud was pinned by the powerful hold on him. He could not move so much as a muscle as the deadly weapon was wrenched from him. At the moment, he was helpless and in Banaker's power, completely.
“Good of you to have me,” he said with mock humor.
“Oh, I will have you all right ... every drop of you, Abraham Stroud.”
Neither of them could see one another in the pitch-blackness here, but Banaker's echo-location organs had Stroud in his sight.
“Bring the human bastard along,” he told his followers. “We must hurry.”
Outside the mausoleum, demolition men used explosives to blow away the door. Wilson, Ashyer, Cage, and the others rushed through with torches, but they found nothing. On inspection, they found there were no bodies in the crypts in the walls, but there was the sure animal smell they'd all come to despise, a smell like bad mildew, wet wool, permeating the concrete coffins.
They brought in lanterns and flashlights and torches. They scoured every inch of the mausoleum for a way out. Everyone had seen Stroud enter. There had to be a way out. They began to dissassemble the place, tearing open every wall drawer. In one a vampire leapt out and latched onto the throat of one of the men in the party, tearing at his neck so viciously as to sever the jugular, killing him instantly before Ashyer's dart drove into the monster, turning it into a gelatinous mass that Cage scooped bits from, splatting it onto a slide, covering it with a fixative moments before the Jell-o on the floor tiles turned to ash before their eyes.
Behind where the creature had crawled from was a sheer drop into a black hole. They'd have to go down one at a time, and it was likely that more guards would be waiting for them. Ashyer pushed forward, prepared to go first. Wilson argued for this honor, holding Ashyer at bay. No one else wanted the job, but Dr. Cage grabbed his bag and said, “I'm with you.”
The line of men began to climb single file into the open hole where the slab had been pulled away with the door, and began the descent into the underground passageway. It was rough going. There were no steps, no ladders, and it was tar black inside, and cramped. Flashing lights did not penetrate beyond a foot or so here. The cavernous hole had a slight tilt downward and it seemed to go on forever.
Once on solid footing the passageway opened a bit wider. The tunnels seemed to be bored out by some machine, so smooth and orderly were they. Wilson was suddenly grabbed from behind by Ashyer, sending a quake through him.
“What?”
“Flash your light up and to your left.”
Wilson did so. Cage, just behind the other two, followed by others less intrepid, stared at what the light illuminated. In the dirt wall they could make out the visible side and bottom of a coffin.
“My God,” said Ashyer.
“We're beneath the graveyard,” said Cage.
“We've got to find Doctor Stroud,” said Wilson almost tear-fully.
As they continued, the sight of bones and coffin parts, several having been broken into, became almost commonplace. It was like being in a haunted house, except for the fact that there was nothing bogus here. This was for real, and any moment one of them could leap out at the men who must pass this way.
But none came ... until suddenly someone at the far end of the line screamed. One of the monsters had attacked the rear of the line of humans. The terrified cries and the sound of mangling filled the tunnel when suddenly from overhead an upside-down coffin firmly held in the cei
ling popped open and a vampire was atop Wilson.
Ashyer pumped two S-choline darts into the creature before it let the trembling, terrified Wilson loose. Wilson leapt to his feet and stomped at the creature but his feet went into a soupy mixture of flesh and dissolving bone as the vampire poison did its work. Wilson screamed obscenities at the mush before him but Ashyer rushed to the rear to determine the extent of damage there. They'd lost two men before someone had the presence of mind to fire one of the S-choline darts that'd been distributed to them.
Ashyer feared that Dr. Stroud was already dead, but knowing this and knowing Stroud, he also knew that they must go on until they were certain that every vampire in the colony was destroyed.
Ashyer returned to the front of the line and told Wilson that he would now lead the way. Wilson, still shaken by the incident, did not argue but allowed Ashyer his way.
“Come along then,” he told the others.
“I've never been so frightened and sickened in my life,” said the coroner and paleontologist, Dr. Cage.
Stroud had been knocked unconscious and carried off by the pires, and now he awoke to find himself hanging by his ankles from the ceiling of a cave.
Vampire Dreams (Bloodscreams #1) Page 27
