As Duffy started to speak to him, Blaumlein was vaguely aware of two of the townsfolk lifting the inert body of his wife onto another table. The scream was short-lived, to be followed by squelching noises and grunts of exertion, and then the distant dripping of liquid into a jar.
“He came to our town after the bombs had hit. Tried to pick someone off out on the road, but I guess his powers were shot. He didn’t make too good a job of it.”
“Who is he?” Blaumlein asked.
“He’s our mayor. Mayor Ladd.”
“But who is he?”
“He said he was Dracula. That’s why we called him Ladd—kind of like Vlad. But Dracula ... I mean, can you believe that? He could’ve said Nosferatu, Count Yorga or Barnabas Collins...” Duffy shrugged. “All of these and none of these. Maybe he was Dracula ... who the hell cares. Whatever the name, he may be the very last of his breed.”
“Breed?”
“A vampire, mister Blaumlein.”
“A ... a vampire? A real vampire?”
Tom Duffy took hold of Blaumlein’s arms and started to lead him to the table. When he struggled, he caught sight of Pat’s body, wires and tubes and pipes protruding from veins and tears in the arms and upper thighs, being hoisted along a pulley to take up a position at the front of the lines of upside-down cadavers. Deedee and young Eddie were already in place, waiting for him. Waiting for Joe Blaumlein, too.
“You see, when we hit on who he was we figured he might be able to help us,” Duffy said in a quiet sing-song voice that calmed and soothed. Blaumlein didn’t feel afraid at all. Only curious.
“I was a surgeon before . . . before the bombs. Over in Atlanta. I was visiting friends nearby when all hell broke loose. There was no way to get back and no place to get back to. The towns—the big towns; even the small towns—went to hell quickly. Looting, fighting ... no place to be. So my wife and I walked until we hit Pump Handle. Had a boy with us. Martin, seventeen years old. Had him late, Mildred and me.” Duffy paused. “He didn’t make it.”
“What happened to him?”
“My, but you do have a lot of questions. He died. Wasn’t nothing I could do for him.”
Blaumlein glanced across at the table. The townsfolk were doing something to the bodies, injecting them with something. He turned away.
“Squeamish? Don’t worry. It’ll pass.
“Anyways, we got here and settled in. Wasn’t anything else to do. Wasn’t any point in carrying on. We knew that. This—Pump Handle—was as good as it was going to get. And even that wasn’t great.”
“Not great?” Blaumlein was trying to play for time. He could not loosen the old man’s grip. He had to wait for the right moment.
“Scurvy, pestilence, a few skin cancers ... no food, no real sunlight only those damned coloured clouds. It was a waiting game, and we knew it. But, as places to die go, it wasn’t a bad choice. And then he came along.”
Blaumlein followed the old man’s stare and his eyes fell on the naked man hanging in the centre of the room.
“Like I say, we tackled him and ... well, we found out who he was.”
“A vampire.”
“Yes, it sounds a little silly, doesn’t it. But that’s what he is ... or, rather, was. He’s just a litmus flask now.”
“A litmus flask?”
“When I said he was dead, I might have been wrong. I mean, vampires are dead to start off with, aren’t they?”
Blaumlein shrugged.
“He didn’t have any pulse. That was the first thing we noticed. Then I sounded him out and he didn’t have any heart. I know, I know,” Duffy said when his captive smirked disbelievingly. “But he didn’t. I opened him up and there wasn’t one. Simple as that.”
“So how did he live?”
“Well, the short answer is he didn’t. Turns out that vampires are simple walking chemical reactions. It’s some kind of virus that reacts with the blood and freezes the ageing process. But it kills the body at the same time.”
“And the mind?”
“Nope, doesn’t kill the mind. Not as far as we can tell, anyways. And we should know.” He laughed. “You about ready for another one?” he called out.
Eleanor Revine turned around and nodded. “Five minutes.” She was stitching something that Blaumlein couldn’t see. But he could see the needle. He was glad he couldn’t see anything else.
“So what’s he doing now? Is he alive or is he dead?”
“He hasn’t moved or spoken since we brought him in here, and that was ...” His brow furrowed as he calculated. “Must be eight, maybe nine months now.”
“And he just stays that way? I mean, he doesn’t, you know ... decompose?”
Duffy shook his head. “Nope. Strange, isn’t it. ‘Vampirism’ is a very emotive term and not a very accurate one. It conjures up fangs and cloaks and mumbling east European accents. Some might say he was cursed,” he added, nodding towards the body. “I prefer to say he was blessed. I studied the body for some time and was unable to figure out what the root of the problem—or rather, benefit—was.”
“How did you kill him?”
Duffy shook his head. “We didn’t. At first, we thought he was just some crazy man—we get them from time to time: radiation fever and the like—trying to eat one of the townsfolk.”
“Eat?”
“That’s the way it looked, at least at first. Then he started mumbling about how he needed blood and about how he’d been around for centuries and he’d seen so many things happen ... and that’s when we noticed he didn’t have a pulse.
“His condition deteriorated and, eventually, he just stopped talking. There was no breath, no vital signs, no nothing. He didn’t take any food—not that we had much to offer: we still don’t... not regular food, anyways—and he didn’t decompose. He just lay there.”
Duffy nodded to Eleanor Revine. “They’re ready for you, I’m afraid.”
Blaumlein felt a flutter of panic. “Wait... wait just a minute.”
“Why?”
“Well... what is it that you’re going to do with me? And what do you do with all the cabbages?”
“Okay,” Duffy said with a sigh. “Must be quick, though. When we realized what we had—or what we might have: we were still sceptical for a time—we, or I, wondered if his blood might have recuperative powers. After all, that’s what vampires were all about ... giving eternal life. So we took a sample and I tested it as well as I could, and we realized that this was indeed a life-giving and life-prolonging elixir. We fed it to some of our people who were sick and the results were both amazing and immediate. Increased, almost superhuman strength, little or no need for sleep or any kind of rest, and curative powers for burns and fevers that were quite unbelievable. In fact, if I hadn’t conducted the tests, I wouldn’t have believed it myself.
“But there was one problem.” Duffy smacked his lips contemplatively. “The supply was finite. Not having any heart or system, he doesn’t regenerate his blood. What there was was all there was. Simple as that. And then I had an idea: what if we could continue to supply his body with the blood he would originally have taken for himself. As I said before, he was, to all intents and purposes, dead ... but he didn’t go through the usual mortification process.
“Basically, the thing above him that appears for all the world as some huge turnip is, indeed, a heart. I made it, fashioned it out of tissue and veins removed from what livestock we had available. All that’s gone now.
“It quickly became obvious that I must do something to extend his abilities and make the most of dwindling supplies. Attached to the heart are a series of left- and right-ventricular assist devices to ensure maximum through-motion. I fitted three sections of steel—titanium being in somewhat sort supply—to the abdomen, each one weighing in at 800 grams, plus 600 yards of tubing in the aorta and sixteen external vents to reduce clotting. We rigged up a generator and ... well, I won’t bore you with the rest.”
Keeping a rock-steady grip on his capt
ive, Tom Duffy waved his free arm majesterially at the dangling bodies. “They’re all alive -saline drips and a constant diet of cabbage ... very good for the blood and the heart—and we have them on a constant, very slow blood transfusion to the main body. That, in turn .. .well, who the hell knows what it does: let’s say it turns the water into wine. We drink the wine. Simple as that.”
“You injected them ... I saw her—” Blaumlein pointed at the waiting Eleanor Revine. “—I saw her injecting something into my wife.”
“A simple mixture of base metals that destroys the nervous system,” Duffy explained. “They’re alive but they can’t move. Not anything significant, anyways. They can open and close their eyes, and sometimes they try to speak ... but it’s all a jumble of incoherence.”
Blaumlein looked at the naked man, then across at the hanging bodies and, finally, at Tom Duffy. “You sound different. You’ve dropped—”
“The accent? I’m an educated man, Mister Blaumlein. That’s not to say I’m any better than the rest of the folks here in Pump Handle ... I just know more. Mildred and me, we’ve picked up some of the local colloquial parlance but when I get to talking about my work, well ...” He assumed a hillbilly stance. “Don’t seem natural not to give it its due gravitas.” He laughed, straightened up and affected a quizzical expression. “Know what I mean?”
Blaumlein nodded.
“Come on, time-to-go time, I’m afraid.”
Blaumlein struggled and locked his legs. “Wait!”
“What now?”
“Let me join you ... let me drink the treated blood.”
Duffy shook his head. “We need one more body. They die—heart failure, embolisms and so on—nothing we can do. And when their hearts are not working, they cease to be of any use. Whatever else happens, we have to keep the supply of new blood flowing into our Mayor.”
“But I’m young ... I can-—”
“Age doesn’t come into this. The blood gives youth no matter what the age of the person drinking it.”
Blaumlein looked around at the townsfolk. “Is this it? Is this your full number?”
Duffy nodded.
“What does one more matter?” He suddenly had a thought. “And you can have the guy in the truck—my vampire . . . and you can have the triplets. You said you only needed one more. This way you’ll have even more than you need. And you’ll increase your own number.”
“Yes, and we’ll increase the number depending on the Mayor.”
“But I can drive... there are the trucks ...” Blaumlein realized that these were poor bargaining tools. There were undoubtedly people here who could drive ... and they would have the trucks anyway when they ... He tried not to think of that. “We can travel ... I’ve seen lots of towns, on the way here, places we can go back to for fresh supplies ...”
Duffy thought for a moment and looked across at the others. Eleanor Revine shrugged.
“He does have a point there, Tom,” Mildred Duffy said. There was something about the way she raised her eyebrows that Blaumlein didn’t like. He couldn’t figure out what it was, but he knew he didn’t like it.
Duffy nodded and relaxed his grip. Then he removed his hand completely from Blaumlein’s shoulder and stepped back. Blaumlein rubbed his arm and shoulder, trying to get the circulation going again. “Okay,” Duffy said. “But there’s something I haven’t mentioned.”
Duffy walked around and stood with the other townsfolk. “There’s one myth about vampirism that’s absolutely true. Crucifixes, garlic, silver ... all that stuff means diddly to us. But we cannot expose ourselves to the sun.”
Blaumlein frowned.
“You see where I’m heading with this?”
Now Blaumlein shook his head. But the smile he had been feeling started to fade.
“The deal is you take us to these places. We’ll fix up the trucks so we can travel during the day without fear of exposure ... but you’ll have to be manacled. Just for security’s sake.”
“But... how can I do that? Take you around during the day?”
“The sun won’t bother you, Mister Blaumlein,” Duffy said softly. “You won’t be drinking any of the treated blood.”
“Hey, now wait a minute ... we agreed—”
“You’re in no position to bargain, I’m afraid. But for the record, you sold yourself on the basis of chauffeur duties. We won’t always be able to travel at night—distances being what they are—so the services of someone who can take sunlight would be valuable. But...” He shrugged. “The choice is yours. Life and some driving responsibilities, or ...”
Blaumlein glanced up at his wife’s body. It wasn’t much of a decision at all. Not really.
Duffy reached under the table and pulled out a thick-linked chain with manacles at each end. He walked over to Blaumlein and stooped to fasten one of the manacles to his ankle. “Time for our rest now, Mister Blaumlein.” He moved across to the first of a series of metal posts attached to the rail for the plastic sheeting and fixed the second manacle. “Sleep well. We’ll see you in the evening.”
“But... but what about food?”
“Food? Ah, yes. That was what you came here for after all. There’ll be cabbage soup for supper. Then we’ll go down to the trucks and bring back the others. Tomorrow we can start to make plans for travelling.”
The townsfolk filed out of the barn. The last one to leave—the boy: Billy something—stopped and smiled coldly at Blaumlein. “I knew he wasn’t a real vampire.”
To Joe Blaumlein, the huge barn doors closing sounded for all the world like a stone slab being pushed over a crypt entrance.
He turned around and saw his wife’s eyes, sleepily staring straight at him. As the whispering started, he remembered he still had two bullets left.
<
~ * ~
F. PAUL WILSON
The Lord’s Work
F. PAUL WILSON resides at the Jersey Shore and is the author of forty-plus books and nearly a hundred short stories spanning science fiction, horror, adventure, medical thrillers and virtually everything in between.
His novels regularly appear on the New York Times Bestsellers List. He was voted Grand Master by the World Horror Convention and received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Horror Writers Association. He has also received the Bram Stoker Award, the Porgie Award, the Prometheus and Prometheus Hall of Fame Awards, the Pioneer Award from the RT Booklovers Convention, the Inkpot Award from ComiCon, and is listed in the 50th anniversary edition of Who’s Who in America.
Over eight million copies of his books are in print in the US and his work has been translated into twenty-four languages. He has also written for the stage, screen and interactive media. The author’s latest thrillers, Ground Zero and Fatal Error, both star his urban mercenary, Repairman Jack, while Jack: Secret Histories kicked off a young-adult trilogy starring a fourteen-year-old Jack.
Vampires finally rule the world. They use humans as either slaves or livestock, but there are still a few who have the courage to fight back against their undead masters ...
~ * ~
AND WHAT ARE you doing, Carole? What are you DOING? You’ll be after killing yourself, Carole. You’ll be blowing yourself to pieces and then you’ll be going straight to hell. HELL, Carole!
“But I won’t be going alone,” Sister Carole Flannery muttered.
She had to turn her head away from the kitchen sink now. The fumes stung her nose and made her eyes water, but she kept on stirring the pool chlorinator into the hot water until it was completely dissolved. She wasn’t through yet. She took the beaker of No Salt she’d measured out before starting the process and added it to the mix in the big Pyrex bowl. Then she stirred some more. Finally, when she was satisfied that she was not going to see any further dissolution at this temperature, she put the bowl on the stove and turned up the flame.
A propane stove. She’d seen the big white tank out back last week when she was looking for a new home; that was why she’d chosen this
old house. With New Jersey Natural Gas in ruins, and JCP&L no longer sending electricity through the wires, propane and wood stoves were the only ways left to cook.
I really shouldn’t call it cooking, she thought as she fled the acrid fumes and headed for the living room. Nothing more than a simple dissociation reaction—heating a mixture of calcium hypochlorate with potassium chloride. Simple, basic chemistry. The very subject she’d taught bored freshmen and sophomores for five years at St Anthony’s high school over in Lakewood.
“And you all thought chemistry was such a useless subject!” she shouted to the walls.
She clapped a hand over her mouth. There she was, talking out loud again. She had to be careful. Not so much because someone might hear her, but because she was worried she might be losing her mind.
The Mammoth Book of Dracula - [Anthology] Page 69
