Out of the Dark

by David Weber

  Apparently his reluctance had been well placed.

  It had rained heavily for the last couple of days, and he and his brother-in-law had somewhat different approaches to coaxing recalcitrant, wet wood into flame. It looked to Dvorak as if Wilson must have used the better part of a quart of their precious gasoline to “encourage” the kindling. At any rate, when he’d tossed in the match, he’d gotten a most impressive ignition.

  He jumped back, expressing himself in vehement Marine-ese and smacking hastily at the tiny dots of flame busy singeing his Mackinaw’s fuzzy surface, and Keelan laughed again.

  “You’re all sparky, Daddy!”

  “Yeah, and he doesn’t have any eyebrows anymore, either!” Alec put in. He sounded rather less amused than his much younger half sister. Probably because he’d been in closer proximity to ground zero and his own eyebrows had just gotten a little frizzy-looking, Dvorak decided, shaking his head with resignation.

  “Only in America,” he muttered, and it was Ushakov’s turn to chuckle.

  “Oh, I think you could find his like elsewhere.” His smile faded and he looked back at Dvorak. “And a good thing, too. A strong man, your brother-in-law. The kind we need more of.”

  He met Dvorak’s eyes levelly, the implication unstated, and Dvorak nodded slowly, thinking of a conversation he’d had with another strong man.

  A good man.

  • • • • •

  “Are you sure about this, Stephen?” Dave Dvorak asked. “I don’t like lying to your dad, even by omission.”

  “Yeah.” Stephen Buchevsky gazed up at the silver disc of the moon. “Yeah, I’m sure, Dave.” He turned back from the moon, folding his arms across his massive chest. “Maybe the time will come to tell him—and Mom—I’m still alive . . . in a manner of speaking, anyway. Right this minute, though, I don’t think he’d be ready to deal with it.”

  “What? Why ever would you worry about that?” Dvorak shook his head. “A Methodist pastor with a vampire for a son . . . Where could the problem possibly be in that?”

  “Exactly.” Buchevsky shook his head, but he also smiled very slightly. “I love my dad and my mom more than anything else in the world.” His smile faded as he remembered the only people who had ever matched his parents’ place in his heart, but his voice didn’t falter. “I love them, but it’s going to take them time to adjust, and I don’t want them worrying about it, agonizing over it, when I’m not even here.”

  “Should they adjust, Steve?” Dvorak asked very quietly.

  “What? You mean all the ‘damned souls of the undead’ and like that?”

  Buchevsky sounded more amused than anything else, but Dvorak faced him squarely and nodded.

  “Don’t think for one moment I’m not grateful,” he said. “And don’t think I didn’t go down on my knees and thank God when I heard about what happened. But, you know, that’s kind of the point of my concern. I take God just as seriously as your dad does. And that means I can understand why he might have some of the same . . . questions I do.”

  “Course you do.” Buchevsky nodded. “Couldn’t be any other way. But. . . .”

  Stephen Buchevsky reached inside his shirt. When his hand came back out, it held the small, beautiful silver cross Shania had given him less than a year ago. It lay across his broad, dark palm, shining in the moonlight, and he held it out to Dvorak.

  “You see?”

  Dvorak looked at the cross, then reached out and touched it gently. The hand across which it lay was cool. Not cold, he thought—simply cool. The skin was neither shriveled nor leathery. It felt just like any hand’s skin . . . except that there was no warmth.

  “Hollywood got most of it wrong, Dave,” Buchevsky said. “Vampires are still . . . human. We’ve changed, and I’m not going to tell you the change is a pleasant process, because, trust me, it isn’t. And I’m not going to tell you there aren’t things I’m going to miss—a lot—now that I’m no longer what Vlad calls ‘a breather.’ But we’re not automatically monsters.”

  “Not automatically,” Dvorak repeated, and Buchevsky nodded.

  “That’s a choice we all make, isn’t it? Monster, angel, or maybe just . . . man, do you think?” He looked levelly into Dvorak’s eyes. “Anybody can choose to become a murderer. Anybody can choose to become a doctor. One of them requires more discipline and more study, but they’re both choices. I chose to be a Marine, and I killed quite a few people in the service of my country. So did your brother-in-law. So have you, assuming you want to consider Shongairi ‘people.’ Did that make me a murderer or just a Marine?”

  “So you’re saying that even Vlad Drakulya is just misunderstood?”

  “Of course I’m not.” For the first time what might have been a trace of anger flickered around the edges of Buchevsky’s voice. “In fact, he’d be the first to tell you that wasn’t what happened. The truth is, Vlad was a monster . . . but that was true even before he stopped breathing. Becoming a vampire didn’t make him a monster; it only meant he could do even more monstrous things, and for a while, that’s exactly what he did. Ask him about it.”

  “No thanks.”

  Dvorak shivered. He’d met Drakulya twice now, and while he suspected that he felt less uncomfortable around him than many might have, there was a vast difference between “less uncomfortable” and anything remotely like “comfortable.”

  “That man—and whatever else he may be, he is a man, Dave, trust me—has spent five centuries learning not to be a monster. He thinks he hasn’t pulled it off yet, but I think he’s wrong. I’ve seen him, I’ve watched him. You know, we can enter churches. We can pray—I still do that fairly regularly. And I’ve seen him in a church, seen how he stares at that cross, seen how he still thinks of himself as unclean. I’m not going to tell you he’s a ‘nice’ man, because he was born in the flipping fifteenth century, and he’s still got more than a few fifteenth-century attitudes in him. I don’t think he’s ever likely to care much for ‘Turks,’ for example. Had what you might call an unpleasant boyhood experience with them, which doesn’t even consider the way they treated Romania while he was still a breather. Or the way his own brother, Radu, converted to Islam and invaded Wallachia under Mehmed II. And you might want to take a look at what the boyars did to his father and his older brother, too. He’s been in some really bad places—inside his head, as well as physically—in the last six hundred years or so, and he’s never going to be what you might call a very forgiving sort. But whatever he may once have been, he’s not a monster anymore. And I won’t let him be one again.”

  Dvorak’s eyebrow rose.

  “That’s why I can’t stay and work this out with Dad and Mom,” Buchevsky said, putting the cross gently back inside his shirt and buttoning it once more. “Vlad needs me. I promised to keep him sane, and I’m going to. But I know what we’re going to be doing to the Shongairi, too, and that’s why I have to be with him. He needs me, I think, as the proof that he can make another vampire who isn’t a monster. Because, maybe, if there’s one vampire in the universe who isn’t a monster, he can not be a monster, too. And as long as he needs me for that, I’ll be there. Because I owe him that. Because every surviving human being owes him that. And because he damned well deserves it.”

  • • • • •

  Now Dave Dvorak’s attention returned to the present, looking into the lantern-lit eyes of yet another vampire.

  No, he told himself. Into the eyes of another good man who simply happened to be a vampire, as well. One of the two or three dozen vampires—no one knew exactly how many, and the vampires weren’t telling—who’d been left behind as Vlad Drakulya’s deputies. Not to rule the planet in his name, not to terrorize the living, but simply to be there. To be sure that in the turmoil and upheavals certain to accompany the world’s rebuilding and the adjustments to all the new technology and capabilities about to pour down over humanity, the “breather” monsters were held in check.

  You know, he reflected now, if I’m a
corrupt strongman somewhere, or a warlord who hates to let a good crisis go to waste and thinks it would be really cool to build a new little empire all my own, and somebody like Pieter Ushakov pours himself through my keyhole in a column of smoke and suggests I really ought to think about changing my ways, I’d probably do it. I mean, I don’t know for sure, but . . . probably.

  He chuckled at the thought, then gave himself a shake.

  We’re going to have to get used to the notion of a galaxy with other intelligent species in it. I don’t think we’re going to like all of them very much, either. But maybe what we really need to do is get into the habit of recognizing that our lowly little planet is actually home to two intelligent species all its own. One that breathes, and one that doesn’t. If we’re going to avoid the Shongair pattern—or the Hegemony’s, for that matter—and learn to really coexist with other folks, maybe we should start practicing right here at home.

  “Well,” he said out loud, “now that ‘Sparky’s’ stopped blowing himself up, I suppose I should go see whether or not the charcoal’s ready.” He smiled at his wife. “It’s been—what? Six months since I grilled a steak? God, that really brings it home somehow.”

  “So does the fact that Mr. Steak Nazi Dvorak is about to grill steaks that he actually froze,” she retorted.

  “Hey, if I hadn’t stuck them in the freezer before all this started, we wouldn’t have them today. I mean, sure, freezing a steak comes under the heading of an unnatural act, but sometimes you just don’t have a choice. And as far as grilling them today—or, rather, tonight, now that Pieter’s been able to join us—I’ll simply point out that today is the girls’ birthday, and Tuesday is my birthday, and next Friday will be the first day of the new school year. The schools are going to be open again, Sharon! If all of that isn’t grounds enough to thaw out some of the world’s few remaining sirloins, I don’t know what is!”

  “You’re right,” she said much more gently. “You’re right. Of course, school’s never going to be quite the same again, is it?”

  “Nothing is, and we’re just damned lucky Howell managed to hold so much of North Carolina together. I was talking to Sam about it yesterday, you know. They’re talking about going ahead and merging North Carolina and South Carolina into one state, at least for a while.” Dvorak shook his head. “Hard to believe we’re about to become the wealthiest, most stable, best educated state—or states—in the entire Union. They’re even talking about putting the new national capital in Raleigh! Somewhere down to the cemetery John C. Calhoun and Daniel Webster must be spinning up a storm. And don’t even get me started on William Tecumseh Sherman!”

  “I know little about this Calhoun or Webster,” Ushakov said, “but Sherman I have heard of. And from what I have seen and heard so far, I would not be at all surprised if your Governor Howell does not become even more famous than he, when the history books are finally written. For that matter, I suspect he will become President Howell as soon as your nation can organize new elections. It would seem to me that he truly deserves it.”

  “Well, maybe he does,” Dvorak agreed, “but I’ll tell you right now, Sam and Longbow and Howell are out of their damned minds if they think I’m going to agree to run for the Senate.” He shuddered. “Oh, no, you’re not getting me into Washington—or Raleigh, or wherever the hell else we put the capital when we get around to rebuilding it! I’ve got me a cabin up in the hills with a bunker, by God, and I’m a-stayin’ in it!”

  “Amen, Lord! Amen,” his wife said fervently. Then whacked him on his good shoulder. “Now get your lazy nonsenatorial butt over there to the kitchen and start cooking!”

  “Yes, Ma’am. To hear is to obey,” he said, and the two of them and Ushakov started across towards the bonfire, followed by Zinaida and their own children.

  “You know, Pieter,” Dvorak said, looking over his shoulder at the Ukrainian, “before he left, Stephen said there were things he was going to miss about breathing. I have to say, one of the things I’d hate to give up is eating. Especially”—he grinned at Morgana—“steak.”

  “Yeah, steak!” Morgana agreed with a huge grin.

  “I want mine well done, Daddy,” Malachai said, and Dvorak shook his head.

  “Such sacrilege,” he murmured.

  “Well,” Pieter said, running one finger down the muzzle ridge of the sleepy puppy still stretched out along his right forearm, “I may not partake of your meal myself, but I always enjoy the conversation. And perhaps if I cut the pieces up small enough, Renfield here might enjoy a nibble.”

  Dvorak and his wife stopped dead, turning to look at him in disbelief.

  “What?” he asked, eyebrows rising.

  “What did you just call that puppy?” Sharon Dvorak demanded. “I don’t know if the records are still around anywhere, but Merlin and Nimue are both AKC-registered, and I’m not sure that name is going to fly, you should pardon the expression, for one of their offspring!”

  “What are you talking about?” Ushakov asked, his expression puzzled.

  “You just called that puppy ‘Renfield,’” she said, reaching up to jab a finger under his nose, deadly creature of the undead or not. “Don’t pretend you didn’t, Pieter Stefanovich Ushakov!”

  “Of course not!” he said, cradling the puppy protectively closer to his chest. “That is his name—Milo Renfield!”

  “No!” Sharon cried. “Don’t tell me you named one of my dog’s puppies Milo Renfield! What did you think you were doing?”

  “I thought it was a fine name,” Ushakov protested.

  “Funny, you don’t look depraved,” Dvorak observed, then cocked his head thoughtfully. “Tell me, just how did you come up with that particular name, Pieter? Did someone, oh, suggest it to you, by any chance?”

  “Perhaps.” Ushakov tilted his own head to one side, narrowed eyes speculative.

  “Well, I was just wondering. Was it Stephen . . . or Vlad?”

  “Vlad,” Ushakov replied. “Why? He said it was the name of a character in a film he saw once. A character he felt rather close to.”

  Dave Dvorak covered his eyes with his good hand and shook his head.

  “I should’ve guessed,” he said.

  “Guessed what?” Ushakov demanded.

  “Who suggested it.” Dvorak shook his head again, then lowered his hand and put it on Ushakov’s shoulder, urging him on towards the waiting charcoal grill and the steaks. “Don’t worry, we’ll explain.” He shook his head again. “And you know, that suggestion just goes to prove Stephen was wrong.”

  “Wrong about what?” his wife asked, still clearly torn between outrage and amusement by the name which had been bestowed upon her four-footed grandson.

  “Well, I hope Pieter here won’t take me up wrongly on this, but if Vlad Drakulya, of all people, could bestow that name on a puppy that’s busy adopting a vampire, then deep down inside, he is still a monster.”