“Ma!” Billy shouted, eyes staring wide at the window, picturing the highway across the fields. “Didja hear that?”
“I sure did.” His mother’s voice sounded tired, kind of uninterested. “Just a truck, honey. Nothing to get too excited about. Tom Duffy’ll’ve heard it. No need for excitement.”
But no, there was a need. Those air horns signified more than just some dumb old truck-driver finding a tattered and mildewed map and taking the dog’s leg short-cut across from the crater-marked 124 onto US64, which, so other people aiming to pass through Pump Handle had often said, seemed to have withstood the worst of the bomb storm.
Bomb storm.
Seemed to Billy like a funny thing to say, but that was what it had been like. Even he could remember it, and he had only been around two, three years old. Just bombs falling like rain, silver needles dropping out of the sky and turning everything on the ground to mush . . . the way—or so his mom always told everyone—that Billy himself used to turn his supper of grits and potatoes and vegetables and meat into a thickly textured goo of no distinct color. Only a wash of browns and whites and greens, each one taking on some of the characteristics of the one next to it.
It had been a long time since they’d had those suppers, Billy thought now. A long time since anyone in town had even seen an outsider. But the sound of the truck horns—it had to be truck horns—suggested that people were here again. And more people than just one truck. It was more than that. It had to be. Those harrrnk!s were exclamations, promises of life and of survival, proud cries of here we are, come see us . . . and there were surely more than one. And it had been so long since anyone had passed through Pump Handle . . .
“Maybe they’re bringing us food and provisions . . . real food . . . and—” He quickly scrolled through his head at the other things he hoped such mythical cargoes might contain. His eyes lit up. “—and comic books, ma . . . maybe they’ll bring us comic books.”
“Trucks wouldn’t be stopping here, Billy, leastwise not of their own accord. Ain’t no provisions delivered any more,” she said, “and there ain’t nothing to stop here for, more’s the pity.” There was a clanking sound from the kitchen as Billy’s mother shouted, “And there ain’t no comic books, Billy. You know that. Not since the war.”
Billy carefully returned the rabbit he had been playing with to the small cage on the makeshift table at the foot of his bed, walked across to the window and stepped out onto the flat-boarded roof section. Breathing in the night smells of jasmine and hollyhock, he looked to the sky. Way off to the west, over toward Memphis maybe, the sky was black and threatening rain. But here, the air smelled good, clean and fresh and full of opportunities.
It even felt different somehow . . . expectant, maybe. He sniffed the breeze and breathed in the aroma of the plants and the soil and the grasses and the trees. Even that composite smell felt excited, somehow . . . the way Billy was feeling himself. He threw his head back and smiled at the starry sky.
Something was coming. Something was coming tonight.
He grasped the balcony rail outside his window. “I’m going out, Ma,” he shouted. “Going out to see what it is.” And with a single leap, he was down on the ground and running across the grass, his mother’s voice drifting behind him but unable to catch him up, running fit to burst toward the spiraling funnels of light that twisted and turned into the night sky as whatever was coming weaved their way around the perilous bends of Jesmond Hill.
At the stile at the edge of the field that gave onto the blacktop, Billy stopped and leaned on the fence. Two uprights to his left, the fence had long ago disintegrated and rotted into the thick mulshy weed that made up the field. He didn’t need to cross the stile to get onto the blacktop but it felt right . . . felt like the way it must have felt all those years ago before the bomb storm.
Billy looked left along the road leading into town. Alongside the road, he could see the silent shapes of other townsfolk making their way toward him. Over to the right, he could hear the faint drone of motors getting louder and, mixed in among it, there was music. Billy laughed and slapped his thigh. “Hot dog!” he shouted to the uncaring night. This was really turning out to be something, wasn’t it? Real trucks were coming to town. And, from the sound of them, they were going to be a whole heap of fun.
When the first one edged around the final section of Jesmond Hill, onto the straight that led directly into Jingle Bend and then town and then right out again about a minute later, Billy climbed onto the stile and started waving his arms about his head, whooping for all he was worth. First up came a flapping tarpaulin, then came the polished black of the cab, then the windshield, then the hood, the grill and, at last, there it was in all of its dusty buckled splendor.
It spoke of far-off places and untold adventures; it smelled of prairie campfires and colored rain; and it looked like a slant-eyed beast from his brother’s stories, whispered long ago late at night when pain kept sleep at bay. It might have seen better days, this “gleaming carriage of excitement,” but to Billy it was just the finest collection of sights and sounds and smells that he had ever seen in the whole of his short life.
Billy had been still all but toddling when the first bombs were dropped, China holding good its promise to deal straight with the aggression shown it by the US. And there were the Iraqis and the Iranians and the Turks and . . .
. . . and every other power-mad asshole with strength or inclination enough to draw breath and pass wind . . . his father had said to him on one of those long-since endless nights of swirling smoke and constant thunder.
Both of which amounts to the same, young Billy, he had continued, ’ceptin’ the one smells a sight worse than the other.
Strategic exchanges had followed in quick succession. Billy’s brother, Troy, had told him night-time stories about England and the whole of what Troy called “the British Islands” being sunk, about Europe being devastated—first by chemical bombs and finally by 200-mile-an-hour dust storms—and about how mainland USA (which was where Troy and Billy and his folks lived, Troy had said) was now a wilderness of broken buildings and city-sized potholes, and mile after mile of the strange colored vegetation that had sprung up long after the final dust clouds had settled down and the smells of explosive and burned flesh had all but drifted away completely.
Troy had told Billy, late at night when they were lying in their cots staring out at the stars, that they’d come out of it better than most. Troy said he and their daddy had stood and watched the cloud rise from the first bomb, a beautiful pear-shaped swirl shot through with every color in the rainbow. Shimmering brightly . . .
But Troy was gone, now. Daddy, too.
For a moment, Billy had felt a profound sadness, a bone-numbing hollowness that seemed to burn at the back of his throat, but it disappeared as soon as it had shown itself. It disappeared with the first of the trucks, pulling along the dusty road, throwing up all kinds of grit and dirt and soil behind them. Billy thumped a clenched fist into the palm of his other hand. “Hot dog!” he shouted, trying to get his voice above the sound of the straining motors and the pulsating music, loud thumping rhythms that made him want to shuck and jive his feet, made him want to cartwheel along the roadside, made him want to jerk his head so hard it would almost fall right off his neck . . .
This music, the sounds of it filled the whole of the road, maybe they filled the whole of what used to be the county . . . hell, maybe it filled the whole world, drifting on the poisonous winds forever, fading maybe, getting softer and softer as it traveled, but always there. Always existing.
Why, not too long ago, a wild-eyed drifter—sporting enough burns to have fried any normal man into a blackened stump—had come into town with a bottle he’d found amidst the rubble of a place called Chicago. The bottle was covered with a thick gauze tied around with frayed string. Billy had asked what was in there and the man had told him the sounds of the last day of the world, my friend and then he had laughed loud and long, his mo
uth hanging wide and gums dripping yellow pus onto his tongue.
When the man had carefully removed the top from the jar, Billy had heard a hundred voices—no, maybe a thousand or a million or even a thousand million voices—all crying out in agony. He had run then, run away from the wild-eyed man, trying to drown out the despair of those cries . . . trying to drown out the sound of the man laughing again, laughing for all he was worth as he placed the gauze around the jar once more.
No sound ever dies, the man had called after him, particularly the sound of death itself.
Moonlight glinted off the dusty black carapace of the first truck as it pulled up alongside Billy Kendow, suddenly jolting him back to the present. Eyes wide, mouth wide, senses wide open and shouting feed me! for all they were worth, Billy stared up at the cab and came face to face with a man chewing on a smoldering cigar.
The truck came to a stop right in front of Billy, its air brakes hissing and whining, and the man leaned out of his open window and looked at Billy. Then he looked around, up the road ahead and back over behind Billy, back across the fields to Billy’s house. “Where the hell are we, boy?” He waved an old, torn map at Billy and then threw it to the floor of the cab. “Map shows dots of towns on it but no names to speak of.”
“Pump Handle, sir,” Billy exclaimed, trying to imbue the words with some kind of significance. Like it was Valhalla or Bethlehem instead of a run-down collection of shanty houses that would have been perfectly at home getting on for a century ago in the dust-blown cardboard cities of the Oklahoma flatlands.
He pointed ahead along the road. “Up ahead a half-mile or so. But there’s trees and stuff all across the road at Jingle Bend . . . might need some help in moving them before you can make any headway.”
The man nodded. “Sounds good to me.” He looked aside to a scrawny and pale-looking woman sitting beside him. “Sound good to you, Deedee?”
The woman stretched her arms out in front of her and yawned fit to split her face wide open. “Anything gets me outta this goddam truck sounds good to me.”
“That settles it,” the man said to Billy. “Looks like we set up here.”
“Set up?” Billy felt his heart skip a beat.
“Sure.” The man jerked a thumb back behind him. “The Post-Apocalyptic Shadow Show? Don’t you read?”
Billy stepped back and glanced along the tarpaulin covering the truck. There it was, in glorious swirls of white and yellow picked out by the headlights behind, a legend of typeface design, a blaze of curlicues and serifs, the words:
Joseph and Deirdre Blaumlein’s
Post-Apocalyptic Shadow Show
and, below that,
See The Wonders That Survived The War!
and then, below various blurbs, a single line that made the blood rush to his face in sheer frantic anticipation:
Count Dracula, The Last Vampire!
Billy breathed in deep, a quick gasp of breath, and, almost choking as he tried to get the words out, he said, “Is that for real?”
The man in the cab was holding a cigarette to his mouth, his hands shaking. Billy could see that the man bit his fingernails, could see the little rounded stumps high above the nail, and the whitened quick of skin extending from beneath the nail itself. “Which is that, young fella?” the man said, holding a quivering match to the cigarette and drawing in smoke.
“This here.” Billy ran to the tarpaulin and pointed to the words. “This here about the last vampire,” he said.
“Sure is,” said the man. “And I’ll tell you all about him, too, if’n I kin just get this rig off the road. Can’t say as how you prob’ly expectin’ any other visitors—” He paused and gave a wheezy laugh. “—but never pays to take chances, know what I mean?”
Billy shook his head and then nodded it, eyes wide. He had no idea what the man was talking about. All that mattered was the last vampire—and all of the other things, too, but the vampire was the one that most interested Billy Kendow. And the cheesy hand-drawn picture beneath it, of a middle-aged man—maybe around Billy’s father’s age, just before he died, maybe a little younger—with a high forehead and kind of sleepy, heavy-lidded eyes, grinning menacingly off the tarpaulin, his lips pulled back to reveal two canine-sized incisors at either side of his mouth.
Some vampire, Billy thought. He didn’t look anything like the proud and regal Transylvanian Count from the old dog-eared comic books he had read and re-read so many times he knew every word. The man in the picture, his eyes badly drawn so they were actually crossed, looked more like a fool. “The Last Idiot” was what the tarpaulin should read. Billy smiled to himself at the thought.
The man shifted gears, worn cogs crying out, and pulled the truck up onto the grass. When he was completely off the road, he leaned out of the window and waved on the second truck.
By now others from the town had appeared, walking slowly across the grass from down around Jingle Bend, where he knew they had been to greet the visitors. The man from the first truck—Billy supposed he was Joseph Blaumlein—was already down on the grass, slamming the cab door behind him and staring at the approaching figures. The woman—Deirdre, or Deedee—moved around the cab and stood by his side. Both of them looked nervous—real nervous—him pulling on his cigarette like he was being lined up against a wall to be shot, and her pushing herself further and further into the gap between her husband and the truck.
Billy turned and looked at the people. There was Mr. McKendrick, Solly Sapperstein, Mr. and Mrs. Revine, young Jeff Winton and a whole load of other folks . . . including his mom, bringing up the rear with Mildred Duffy and her husband, Tom, the deputy town mayor of Pump Handle.
The congregation got to within twenty yards or so of the trucks—both of them now parked up on the grass at the side of the roadway—and exchanged nods with the visitors. There were five of them, now: Joseph and Deedee; a young fellow with a gap-toothed smile and a vacant stare; a woman who looked to Billy to be around sixty years old if she was a day, her hair hanging down in rat-tails that were half-blonde and half-brown; and a wiry-looking old man sucking on a pipe and leaning against the door of the second truck.
Tom Duffy shuffled from the rear of the group up to the front, where he was a few feet away from Billy Kendow and Joseph and Deedee Blaumlein, and touched the brim of his hat. “Welcome to Pump Handle,” he exclaimed. Like as if he were giving them the keys to St. Louis or New Orleans, fabled places of grandness that Billy had never seen but about which he had heard plenty.
Joseph Blaumlein nodded and smiled, dropping his cigarette butt onto the grass and stepping onto it. “I’m pleased to be here,” Blaumlein said, extending a hand of friendship to the deputy mayor. “We all are.”
The smile that accompanied this last statement puzzled Billy. He looked around to see if anyone else had noticed it—the almost rat-like leer and narrowing of eyes—but everyone seemed to be smiling and just having themselves a real ball. Even his mom. He looked back at Blaumlein.
Eleanor Revine stepped around Tom’s wife and, placing her hands on her hips, swayed backwards and looked at the writing on the side of the trucks.
“What the hell’s a ‘post-apoc . . . apocalyptic shadow show’?” she asked . . . not unreasonably, Billy thought.
The old man stepped forward to stand next to Billy. “These here,” he said portentously, waving an arm majestically at the writing on the side of the truck, “are what amounts to some mighty strange occurrences.” He took a deep breath and shifted into put down that rabbit, boy and roll-up, roll-up why dontcha for the show that never ends a sideshow barker’s spiel. “Here we have . . .” He walked to the side of the truck and pointed to one of the scribbled, hand-drawn lines. “A hen which lays empty eggs, each one perfectly formed but containing absolutely nothing; here we have Siamese triplets . . . three legs, two hearts, three heads and five arms between them; and over here, a raccoon with flippers and a long fin on its back; and here—”
“What’s that last vampire lik
e?” said Billy in a small voice.
The man turned to face Billy and, just for a moment, his eyes flashed menacingly. Billy figured it was because he had interrupted his pitch and he hung his head down and muttered an apology. “That’s okay, son,” said the man, blowing a thick plume of acrid smoke from his pipe bowl. He moved across to the illustration and shook his head.
“This here’s maybe the sorriest specimen we’ve come across . . . maybe even sorrier than the Siamese triplets, and that’s sorry indeed,” he said. “Name’s Dracula, like in the book. Thought he was a fiction but now we know better. Came across him up in Carolina, north or south makes no nevermind, and he lives in darkness and drinks the blood of anything and ever’thing he can find. Don’t speak a word, not a single—”
“Were there others?”
“What’s that, son?”
“You say he’s the last one,” Billy said. “Were there more? What about all the folks he . . . you know . . .” Billy made a biting face. “The ones he bit?”
The man glanced across at Joseph Blaumlein who stepped forward and ruffled Billy’s hair. “There’s all manner of strangeness out there, boy,” he said. “Could be he has relatives somewheres but we ain’t seen hide nor . . . nor fang of ’em in our travels.” He gave a snort. “We took the liberty of calling him the last one. Could be he’s the only one.”
The man turned to face all of the people from Pump Handle and raised his arms wide. “All courtesy of the War, ladies and gentlemen . . . and all brought to you here today, for your amazement, in exchange for a little home comforts.”
Now it was the turn of the deputy mayor to speak. “Home comforts?”
In the Footsteps of Dracula Page 62
