by Clark Hays
“Of course, of course, let me open the door.” The lock clicked and Sully led Lizzie, carrying Tucker in her arms, and Rex into the lobby. They took the elevator to the top, Sully’s nonstop conversation blending subtly with the drip of blood from Tucker’s still form.
The elevator opened into the foyer of the penthouse where Dr. Vesu waited, worried. He was tall and thin, his features pinched as if the immense knowledge in his mind drew heavily from the flesh. His hair was gray at the temples and he wore a severely cut frock coat that sparkled with hidden highlights. His eyes flared at the sight of Lizzie and the limp body in her arms.
“Heavens,” he exclaimed, striding quickly to relieve her of the weight. “This way, quickly.” He looked back over his shoulder, surprised, to catch Sully’s eyes. “Wait, this is an Adamite.”
“I know,” Sully said. “A very important one.”
“Can you help him?” Lizzie asked. “He’s badly hurt.”
“Indeed,” Dr. Vesu said absently, laying him on a leather-covered couch. He pulled the shirt away gently and fresh blood welled up. “Oh, my.”
“What? Is it bad?”
The doctor stripped his coat off, rolling up the sleeves of his starched white shirt. “Bad enough. But it has been so very long,” he said, shaking his head.
“So long? What has been so long? You mean since he was hurt?”
“No, I mean since I have worked on an Adamite. Fascinating.” He looked up at Lizzie. “For the last few centuries, I have confined my practice to maladies that affect the vampire mind and extensive research into, well, the effects of sunlight and wood implements.”
“I do so hope you are making progress on those,” Sully said.
Dr. Vesu shook his head. “Not as much as I might hope.” He hurried off, returning with an old-fashioned black bag which, when opened, revealed shining rows of surgical instruments. After a thorough examination and a litany of mumbles and exclamations, he began to clean the wound with alcohol and gauze swabs. Tucker groaned from the depths of his unconsciousness and Rex barked fiercely at the doctor. Lizzie held him to her with one hand, reassuring him. He sat down to regard the doctor with open hostility, but deferred to Lizzie.
Dr. Vesu held a compress to Tucker’s wound while probing underneath in the ripped flesh. “What did this?”
“Elita,” Sully said with a conspiratorial nod.
“Ah, so this must be the infamous cowboy, making you,” he nodded at Lizzie, “our special concern for whom Lazarus has gone to great pains to locate. I see he found you.”
“He hasn’t found anybody until Tucker is okay,” she said. “He is going to be okay, isn’t he?”
“It appears she missed vital organs, though I can’t quite remember exactly which are vital.” He withdrew a thin silver needle from the bag and pulled a length of surgical thread through the eye. Moving the compress, he began sewing meticulously. Once finished, he turned his attention to the gash on Tucker’s arm. “Luckily he sleeps the sleep of the dead,” he said, now stitching down the flaps of the wound.
“Which, if I am not mistaken, we also will be doing before long,” Sully said.
Vesu glanced at the window and the hint of dawn evident there.
Lizzie could feel the pull of death already in her mind and body “I can’t leave him alone,” she said.
“I assure you, he will be quite all right by midday,” Dr. Vesu said, examining the contents of a dark cupboard and finally selecting a smoky colored bottle. “I had the good fortune to spend several centuries under the tutelage of a renowned Taoist healer who came very close to distilling immortality.”
He held the bottle up and swirled the liquid inside. “My last bottle. The tonic properties of this elixir are astounding. Though your paramour will undoubtedly be in a considerable amount of pain, his vitality will be quite high.” He opened it and it seemed to Lizzie a vapor of emerald smoke escaped as the doctor tipped the bottle into Tucker’s mouth. Tucker twitched and groaned, and Dr. Vesu covered him gently with a starched sheet.
“I have to leave him a note,” Lizzie exclaimed.
“Too late for that,” Sully said, taking her by the arm and pointing at the window. The sun peeked over the edge of the horizon and a terrible, raging pain filled the room.
“He’ll wake up alone,” she said, reaching for him, but already shafts of first light lanced through the window and gnawed at the blackness settling into her mind.
Sully and Dr. Vesu pulled her into the inner chamber and the comforting darkness. “Quickly, into the casket,” Sully said. “He’ll be there when you arise.”
THIRTY-EIGHT
Tucker cracked open his eyes and found himself alone and in an unfamiliar room. His memories of the night before were little more than a blur and he stared at the strange ceiling and tried to piece it back together.
Judging from the way he hurt all over, whatever happened, he must have lost.
As his scattered senses began organizing themselves, he took stock of his surroundings. He was lying on a strange leather couch with a stiff sheet over him. Swinging his feet over the edge, he nearly stepped on Rex who was sprawled beside a pile of bloody cloth which he vaguely recognized as his shirt. Beside them were his boots, also bloody.
“Wonder if all that blood was mine,” he said, trying to stand. A wave of weakness forced him to hold the edge of the couch. “Guess so.”
He limped to the window with a worried Rex close at his heels and looked out over an expanse of dirty water and boats. He pushed the sliding doors aside and stood on the balcony. They were on the top floor of an exclusive stack of apartments. “Where the hell are we this time, Rex? And where’s Lizzie?” Rex didn’t answer, so he limped back inside to look around.
“Let’s see what there is to eat,” he said, but the fridge was barely stocked with mineral water and little else. Rex looked up at Tucker inquisitively, but Tucker just shook his head. Bottles of wine filled the cabinets with vintages ranging from old to extremely old, but no food. Definitely a vampire, he thought and that jolted his memory of the night before. A twinge of pain radiated from his ribs and he cursed Elita under his breath.
Off the main room, he noticed a heavily lacquered door and pushed it open. Inside the windowless room was a row of coffins, all handsomely built and all occupied. Lizzie was lying dead in the center, one hand reaching toward the door. On one side lay Sully and on the other, a man Tucker had never seen before. A handsome man with gray at the temples, wearing a blood-spattered white shirt.
“Must be my blood,” Tucker whispered to Rex. “Guess he’s a doctor.”
A wave of jealousy welled up in him at the sight of Lizzie with her own kind and him on the outside. He took a breath and held it, trying to straighten out the twist in his thinking. Sully saved both of them from Julius, and the tall one probably saved his life after Elita’s attack. Still, the separateness clouded his mind. He closed the door behind him.
Back in the main room, Rex sat by his foot and Tucker slid down the wall to sit beside him. He peeked under the bandages at the wounds, surprised to see there wasn’t much healing left to be done. Good Lord, he thought, I hope they haven’t turned me into a vampire. Just to be sure, he looked directly at the sun and it didn’t have an impact, except that it brought tears to his eyes.
He kept petting Rex and questions and images flooded his thoughts, images of Lizzie and happiness and darkness stealing across the face of the moon.
Maybe Lizzie was right, he thought. Maybe he should just walk away right now. Rex nuzzled his hand as if reading Tucker’s thoughts. “Well, why not?” he asked Rex. “When she woke up, she’d understand. Sure, she’d miss me at first, but what the hell, she’d have the rest of eternity to deal with it. It ain’t like I have that much to offer anyway, not compared to these guys. No power. No air of mystery. No desire to suck the life out of innocent folks. All she could really look forward to with me was a whole lot of nothing but cold winters and hot summers in a Godforsaken little town in Wyoming.
Not much thrill there.”
Rex lay down at Tucker’s feet, staring up, a look of genuine pity in his brown dog eyes.
“Don’t look at me like that. You expect me to be happy about watching her stay young and beautiful while I just get more and more ruggedly handsome with the years? Having to keep her stashed by day and never being able to have the boys over for a beer at night for fear she would eat them?”
Tucker shook his head, his words now continuing as thoughts. She was right. He had seen her through the worst. There was no shame in that. Besides, she left him at the church. It was her idea. Their lives were no longer compatible and the smart thing to do would be to just walk out. To just find a clean shirt and walk right out. Put his hat back on and gather Rex up and just walk on out. That would be the smart thing to do.
Instead, he called Dad.
“Hello.”
“Dad, it’s me.”
“Tucker, where the hell you been? I thought you was dead,” he said.
“Well, I ain’t, but it sure does feel like it.”
“Ribs still hurting you?”
“Naw, they’re fine, but this little vampire bitch stuck her hands damn near through me last night.”
“Did you find Lizzie?” Dad asked.
“Thanks for your concern about my well-being,” Tucker said.
“You’re talking on the phone, aren’t you?”
“Yeah,” Tucker said.
“So how’s Lizzie?”
“Well shit, Dad, that’s the thing. She’s dead.”
“What?”
“Yeah. I was too late.”
“Are you telling the truth?” Dad asked. “Because this ain’t something to joke about, not with an old man.”
“I swear. She’s dead as a doorknob and laying right in the other room,” Tucker said.
There was a long silence. “You don’t sound too perturbed,” Dad said at last.
“I am. Mostly because she won’t stay dead.”
There was a moment of silence. “What the hell are you talking about boy? Has all the smog out there caused your brain to vapor lock?”
“Naw, Dad, she’s a vampire now.”
“Like that boy we shot in my kitchen?”
“Yeah,” Tucker said. “Only she’s the queen of the vampires or some such thing.”
“She always did seem a little high strung,” Dad said. “But I would’ve never figured her for a vampire queen.”
“You hadn’t even seen a vampire until just the other day. Besides, she wasn’t a vampire when you saw her. Not for real, anyway.”
“What the hell happened?”
“I don’t know exactly,” Tucker said. “When I got out here, there was vampires all over the damn place looking for her. I found her first but it was too late, and then on account of my natural willingness to see the good in people, I kind of got us caught, and then I had to shoot a whole mess of them to get us out, but in the process one of them got a little friendly with my internal organs.”
“Where are you now?”
“Damned if I know,” Tucker said. “Some fancy penthouse in New York.”
“How’s Rex?”
Tucker reached down to pet him. “Fine. A little antsy to get back.”
“So you heading this way?”
“I don’t know,” Tucker said. “I guess after she wakes up tonight we’ll figure it out.”
“I wouldn’t mind seeing you soon,” Dad said. “There’s a big stretch of fence down and winter is coming.”
“Yeah, I know. And you miss me.”
“I don’t miss you,” Dad said. “Especially since you ain’t got no place to live now. I just got more work than one old man can do.”
“We’ll see. They’re all talking about some other old boy, a vampire, lives out in New Mexico.”
“I always wanted to see that part of the country.”
“I’d just as soon stay in LonePine. If she’s got a better idea, I’ll call and tell you. Otherwise, I imagine we’ll be out that way soon enough.”
“I’ll put a pot of beans on. I suppose I can’t put no onions in it.”
“Why?” Tucker asked.
“On account of Lizzie being a vampire now.”
“It ain’t onions, Dad, it’s garlic. And besides, none of that stuff is true anyhow. I gotta go.”
“All right. Talk to you later. Give my best to Lizzie.”
Tucker hung up and pulled a mineral water out of the fridge.
It would be a while before she woke up, so he turned on the TV and flopped down in a leather easy chair. He flipped through the channels until he found a horror movie. A vampire was chasing some girl through a cemetery. Organ music played in the background and the vampire’s fangs gleamed in the moonlight.
Tucker started to laugh and it made him feel a little better, although the wound opened up and blood began seeping under the bandages.
THIRTY-NINE
Carlos ran from the parlor into the living room. “She’s been found, Master, she’s been found!” he stammered.
Lazarus was dozing, his spectacles slipping down his nose and a National Enquirer strewn across his lap. “What?” he gasped, as he struggled to wake. “Where? Who has seen her? Tell me everything, word for word.” He was completely awake now, commanding in his massive, physical presence as he stood to full height.
Carlos shrank back instinctively, like a man confronted by a grizzly bear. Intellect and memory quickly overcame instinct and Carlos continued. “Sully just called. The cowboy was seriously injured in a narrow escape, but they are with Dr. Vesu and shall be leaving soon.”
“On their way here?”
“He thinks so, although it is ambiguous. Dr. Vesu is providing them with transportation and supplies. Where else would they go?” His enthusiasm carried him away again. “There is still so much to get ready. I’ll have to make a special casket for her. I wonder if her favorite color is still purple. I still have the stuffed bear, the pink one, that she used to sleep with. Yesterday, it seems like just yesterday, but it was so many years ago. Oh, Master, I am overcome.”
“Calm yourself, Carlos. How are they getting here?”
“By car.”
“Good. That is by far the safest. Who is with them?”
“Sully.”
“Even better,” Lazarus said. “He’ll know the safe-houses along the way.”
Lazarus smiled, reminded of his involvement in the Underground Railroad, funneling escaped slaves to the North. His legions provided protection and quietly helped destroy narrow-minded whites hampering the process. A small aid, but one he liked to think helped defeat the Confederacy as some of its most prominent advocates slowly lost their minds and their life’s blood. Sometimes, he had discovered, it was better for the most evil men to be destroyed slowly. Immediate death often left martyrs, thereby allowing certain evils to gain even greater momentum.
“Carlos, we must prepare. You see to the lodgings. I will see to her defense. Have the jet prepared.”
“You are leaving? Now, at such a time?”
Lazarus continued, patiently, but slightly annoyed at being questioned. “It will take them at least two more nights to arrive here, probably longer. I intend to pay a personal visit to Julius before their arrival.”
Carlos was stunned into silence.
“What are you waiting for?”
“Master, it has been so long,” Carlos said haltingly.
Lazarus was quiet as a memory moved painfully through his soul. When he spoke, it was gravely, but to himself, as if no one was in the room. “Even the passage of these seven hundred years has not dulled my grief.”
Carlos was quiet, afraid to say anything in the face of such sorrow.
Lazarus waved his hand futilely, whispering, “I cannot change the past, but I can change the future.” He knelt down, overcome. “I promise you, I will do now what I should have done then,” he said to an invisible presence, one forever close to his side. “Forgive me.”
&nb
sp; Carlos stood completely still and breathed quietly. “I am deeply sorry for bringing this up now I know you still mourn for the loss of MaryAnne. I apologize.”
“MaryAnne,” Lazarus said. A moment passed, all was quiet. Abruptly, he rose. “Enough.” Though his voice was strong, his eyes were weak. “Julius lost by his own sordid, greedy hand. He has been trying to make up for it for centuries, laying the foundation for the event that will occur in,” Lazarus moved to his desk and paged through the calendar, silently counting the days, “about sixteen days.”
“What shall you do, Master?”
“Do? What anyone would do in such a case?”
“What do you mean, what kind of case is this?”
“Haven’t you figured it out, Carlos? This, my faithful friend, is war. Between myself and Julius. It will be the end for one us.”
FORTY
Lizzie rejoined life with an anxious curse. As her sense of self spiraled back into her body, repopulating her memories, she sprang from the coffin and rushed into the front room where Tucker was dozing on the couch. He awoke to her smothering him with kisses and brushed futilely at her, laughing.
“I was so worried,” she said breathlessly. “The sun was coming up and I had to die, I had to leave you. Dr. Vesu swore you would be all right.”
“I am, I am,” Tucker grumbled, embarrassed at the affection on display with the two vampires now peering from the chamber and smiling knowingly.
An hour later, they were loading what little supplies Dr. Vesu could provide — aseptic cartons of blood and clean clothes — into his Land Rover, given gladly to the expedition.
“Oh, Lizzie, it will be wonderful to spend so much uninterrupted time with you.” Sully was rambling. “I just know I’ll lose you altogether once we get to New Mexico. There will be a line to see you and I’ll never get more than five minutes of your time,” he said, holding her arm.
Tucker glared at his back and Lizzie, laughing, looked back in time to catch his anger. She was briefly puzzled, then realization dawned and she sighed and shook her head.
