The Last American Vampire

by Seth Grahame-Smith

  His pack went dead.

  [Tesla] just stood there a moment, not sure what had happened.

  “Uh, a moment, please,” said Tesla, taking the pack off and examining it. Tesla flipped a switch on the pack, and it—pop!—emitted a large spark and a plume of black smoke, which rolled up into the old chandelier above.

  “This is your ‘miracle’?” Rasputin said, laughing.

  “Goddamn Edison and his goddamned direct current…,” mumbled Tesla, examining the device.

  I can’t describe the tension. Again—should I rush in? Should I let it play out? While Tesla was trying like hell to get the thing working, I saw something on the other side of the dining room. It was Yusupov. He was standing in the doorway, peering in. He had a pistol in his hand.

  Yusupov knew he couldn’t keep Rasputin waiting for Irina much longer. Tesla had had his chance, and he’d failed. It was up to him now. Yusupov walked into the dining room, his heart pounding, the pistol hanging by his right side. Rasputin had his back to the door, still distracted by the smoke rising from Tesla’s device. Thrown off by the remaining static charge in the air, the lingering smell. He didn’t sense Yusupov creeping up behind him.

  No, Yusupov, thought Henry. No, goddamn you… not yet.

  Pavlovich could see it unfold, too. He began to tremble as Yusupov neared Rasputin… pressed the revolver into his back. “Vo imya tsarya!” he cried. In the name of the tsar!

  No, Yusupov… no…

  Yusupov pulled the trigger. The bullet went clean through Rasputin’s chest, shattering a china pitcher on the table in front of him, ricocheting off the wall at the far end of the room and whizzing past Tesla’s head, very nearly killing him.

  Rasputin didn’t flinch in the slightest. He pushed his chair out from the table and looked down at his chest. The conspirators stood there, frozen. The smoke still trailing from the barrel of Yusupov’s pistol.

  “Shit…,” Henry muttered.

  Rasputin turned and looked at Yusupov. Then over at Pavlovich. Then finally at Tesla—the copper pack still smoking in his hands.

  “Predateli!” he cried. Traitors!

  His fangs and claws appeared, and his face took its vampire form. This time, there was no hesitation on Henry’s part. He burst into the dining room—all claws and fangs. Rasputin turned around and grabbed Yusupov by the throat, squeezing his windpipe to the breaking point. Henry lunged at Rasputin, knocking him off Yusupov before he could fully strangle him.

  I was in the fight of my life. He was an incredible specimen. So much bigger and stronger. So much faster and more precise. It took me all of three seconds to realize that I was outmatched, and it took everything I had just to keep him from taking my head off.

  Yusupov rolled on the floor, gasping for breath. Tesla, meanwhile, continued to fiddle with his pack, trying different combinations of switches and dials.

  Every few tries, he would get it to power on, only to have it sputter out a second later. I could hear it—power up, sputter out, power up, sputter out—as I fought with [Rasputin]. He had massive hands, absolutely massive, and they were all bone. It felt like being punched with bowling balls.

  Rasputin struck Henry in the mouth with a closed fist, so hard that Henry’s own fangs tore clean through his upper lip, coating his teeth with blood.

  I tried to hit back, but he wrapped me up in his arms—a bear hug—squeezing me the way a boa constrictor squeezes a mammal. My face fully enveloped in that beard. My ribs on the verge of shattering under the pressure. My God, he was strong. I managed to head-butt him—my forehead only came up to his chin, but it was enough to make him loosen his grip for an instant and let me break away.

  “Shoot him!” yelled Henry to Tesla, as the two fought their way around the dining room, grappling, throwing each other into walls with such force that the plaster crumbled and the crystals of the old chandelier rattled as the ceiling shook with each impact.

  Tesla managed to power up the device again. He leveled the transmitter at Rasputin and pressed the button on the handle. Nothing.

  “Shoot him, Tesla!”

  “Stop your yelling! Your yelling does not help, help, help!”

  Yusupov had managed to sit up. He held his pistol, trying to get a clean shot at Rasputin without hitting Henry. But the two vampires were so close together, moving with such speed, that it was almost impossible. Pavlovich, meanwhile, had fallen back on the second rule of vampire hunting: When in doubt, run away. He ran into the kitchen, locked himself in a pantry, and curled up in a ball on the floor, muttering prayers.

  Rasputin drew a huge fist back and hit Henry in the jaw, sending him backward into a wall, shattering one of the old painted-over mirrors.

  If I’d been a human, my head would have come clean off. As it was, the force of it was enough to give me tunnel vision—take me right to the edge of blacking out. I hadn’t experienced that sensation, that fogginess and ringing in the ears, since I’d become a vampire. It’s the hardest I’ve ever been hit in my life.

  Henry would later learn that Rasputin had spent time in monasteries outside Russia as well—namely, those in China, where he’d learned a style of fighting unlike anything in the West. A form of fighting particularly suited to his long limbs and wiry build and made all the more effective by his superhuman speed and strength. The force of Rasputin’s uppercut had split Henry’s chin to the bone and sent blood spilling down the front of his shirt.

  “Shoot him, Tesla, goddamn you!”

  Tesla stopped fidgeting with his switches and dials and gave the pack a swift smack on the side. The needles on its gauges jumped back to life, and its electrical hum returned. Tesla leveled the transmitter at Rasputin and squeezed the button on one of its handles. A quick succession of pops echoed through the room.

  For a second, I thought someone had fired a machine gun. But it was just a few of the chandelier’s remaining bulbs exploding from some kind of electrical feedback.

  This time the device held up. The remaining chandelier lights dimmed, and the low electrical hum grew louder than ever as Tesla kept the transmitter pointed at Rasputin, who still had Henry in his grasp.

  I felt an incredible sensation take hold of my body. A sensation I can only describe as like being strapped in an electric chair—the current making my muscles tense and my limbs contort at unnatural angles. Making my eyes bulge halfway out of their sockets. It lasted for only a fraction of a second, before Rasputin freed me from his grasp and I fell out of the path of the beam—but that fraction of a second was enough to burn the sensation into my brain forever.

  Rasputin froze—every muscle in his body locking up as a flood of microwaves flowed through him, exciting the hundreds of trillions of atoms in his body. Boiling the blood in his heart, his veins, and his organs. Boiling the cranial fluid around his brain and superheating the air in his lungs. Cooking him from the inside out.

  He grabbed his head and tried to scream, but no sound came out. His eyes, those dead eyes, were suddenly alive and popping out of his skull. I can’t imagine how painful it must have been. Worse than being burned. And the sounds—the sounds of that low electric hum and the pops and cracks and hisses of the fluid in his body boiling, his flesh cooking. Those sounds were worse than the screams of the burning.

  Rasputin’s body changed shape, swelling as the blood in his veins vaporized and built up pockets of steam beneath his skin. His already massive hands grew bigger, his narrow neck widening, ballooning up absurdly, reminding Henry of the spring peepers he’d seen in the South, then bursting—the mix of blood and water and bile spilling onto the dirty carpet with an accompanying hiss.

  Tesla’s weapon suddenly sparked, then—pop!—shorted itself out, giving Tesla an electrical jolt that made him yell out and drop the weapon to the floor. The glass on the pack’s gauges cracked, and thick black smoke began to rise from the glass tube in its center. Free from the beam, Rasputin also dropped, smoking, to the floor, and lay still. His body continued to pop and
whistle as pockets of air and fluid made their way to the surface and burst though his skin.

  Henry sat against the wall, the gash on his chin already healing. Yusupov struggled to his feet, still light-headed after being nearly choked to death. He walked a few feet across the dining room to where Rasputin lay still, on his back. His left eye had partially popped out of his skull, and it dangled upon his high cheekbone. His smoldering clothes had fallen away as ash.

  “Be careful,” said Henry.

  Yusupov put the barrel of his pistol against Rasputin’s forehead.

  “Yusupov, be careful! He might still be—”

  Yusupov pulled the trigger, shooting Rasputin through the brain for good measure. Rasputin’s head jumped up off the carpet as the bullet exited, then lay still as the report echoed off the walls of the dining room and down the marble hallways of the palace. Yusupov collapsed into a seated position beside Rasputin’s body, sweating buckets, his chest heaving.

  “We must hurry,” said Yusupov. “The noise… people will be coming soon.”

  “Did you see?” cried Tesla, examining his copper pack. “Did you see it? Ha! It works! It works! It works!”

  Yusupov looked around the dining room.

  “Where is Dmitri?” he asked.

  Before Henry could answer, Rasputin’s eyes darted open and he bolted upright, his pupils cloudy white. He lunged toward Yusupov and took a blind swipe with his claws, just missing the prince’s face, and ripping one of the epaulets off his uniform instead. Rasputin’s vocal cords had cooked along with the rest of him, and the sound he made as he thrashed and stabbed at Yusupov sounded to Henry more like the squeal of a pig in the slaughterhouse than the cries of a man.

  Despite being blind and deaf and having his brain partially liquefied in his skull, he managed to get ahold of the prince’s hair with one hand and was drawing the other back to deliver a death blow, when a hand came out of the dark of the dining room and grabbed the top of Rasputin’s head. Henry held him still just long enough to drive a claw through each of Rasputin’s eyes and into what remained of his brain. The mystic’s body bent back as if a final jolt of electricity had just coursed through him. He gave a long, raspy wheeze, then collapsed again.

  Silence, save for Yusupov’s rapid breaths.

  “I told you,” said Henry. “Stay away from the head.”

  Henry and the others rolled Rasputin’s naked body up in a carpet and loaded him into the back of Grand Duke Pavlovich’s car.

  We couldn’t throw him in the Moika [River]. It was right across the street from the scene of the crime, and as stupid as we’d all been that night, we weren’t that stupid. We drove the body a short way to the Neva River and backed the car up to a dark section of its banks. I walked down to the river’s edge to stomp a hole in the ice, so we could slip [Rasputin’s body] beneath it and be done with this nightmare. It was either just before or after I gave the first stomp—I can’t remember, honestly—that I heard the yelling back by the car.

  Henry turned and saw the carpet unraveled on the ground and a naked Rasputin running away into the dark as Yusupov and Pavlovich chased after him. Tesla was leaning against the motorcar, smoking a cigarette. He looked at Henry, shrugged his shoulders, and took another drag of his cigarette. He was done participating in this farce.

  “Shit…,” Henry sighed, and took off running.

  The next day, the tsarina ordered the city searched for her beloved Rasputin. She feared (correctly, as it turned out) the worst—that the jealous, treasonous members of her own royal family had conspired against him. That they’d had her dear prophet, her dear son’s savior, murdered. She suspected Yusupov at once. Yusupov and Pavlovich were placed under house arrest (albeit in a palace) while the police continued their search for Rasputin.

  On the first day of 1917, the tsarina’s fears were confirmed when divers pulled her mystic’s frozen corpse from the Neva River. An autopsy specified that Rasputin had received “bullets to the forehead, back, and abdomen… trauma to the skull, chest, abdomen, and face… knife wounds14 to the abdomen and heart…” His penis had also been severed.

  I’d run after Rasputin and tackled him to the ground, but he tossed me off. He was still fighting. Still surviving. He wrapped his gigantic hands around my skull and lifted me off the ground. Then he squeezed. It felt like a bear trap had snapped around my skull. I kicked and thrashed, but he might as well have been a golem made of solid stone for all the good it did.

  Rasputin would have crushed the life out of me if I hadn’t glanced down and noticed his penis. It was enormous.15 I reached out, wrapped my hands around it, and with all my strength ripped the thing right out of his body.

  The fight went out of him after that.

  And yet, after all that—after being shot at point-blank range in the forehead, bludgeoned, burned, and stabbed all over his body, and having his manhood ripped from between his legs, it had been drowning that had finally done Rasputin in. The doctors were mystified. How could any man have survived such an assault long enough to drown?

  Many members of the Russian royal family were quietly overjoyed to see Rasputin go, as was a huge segment of the Russian population. At last! The tsar would return to his senses! At last he would listen to his generals again!

  It wasn’t to be. While Rasputin failed to deliver a Russian retreat for the elusive Mr. Grander, he succeeded in his greater goal—eroding the tsar’s standing with his people to the point that revolution became inevitable. Three months after Rasputin’s murder, the tsar was forced to abdicate his throne by his own troops, setting in motion a chain of events that would set the stage for much of the coming bloodshed of the twentieth century.

  Most of the Russian royals—including Yusupov and Pavlovich—grabbed what wealth they could carry and fled the country, seeking exile in France, Italy, and elsewhere. The tsar and his immediate family were held as captives as the revolution spread through Russia and a civil war broke out between the Bolsheviks’ Red Army and the White Army, loyal to the tsar.

  On the evening of July 17th, 1918, Tsar Nicolas, his wife, Alexandra, and their five children were roused from sleep in the middle of the night. They’d been held as prisoners by the Red Army for more than a year, shuttled from place to place, allowed few amenities, and denied contact with the other members of the royal family, including young Alexei Romanov. After getting dressed, they and four of their faithful servants were taken to a small basement room under the pretense that they were once again being moved.

  But it was a lie.

  Their jailer had just received an urgent telegram. The White Army was closing in on their position, and it had been decided that drastic measures were needed to ensure against the unthinkable: the rescue of the tsar and his restoration to the throne.

  “Nikolai Alexandrovich, in view of the fact that your relatives are continuing their attack on Soviet Russia, the… Executive Committee has decided to execute you.”

  Before the words could even register, several guards raised their machine guns and opened fire. Tsar Nicholas, his wife, and their four servants died almost instantly. Alexei fell with them. But unbeknownst to the guards, the tsar’s four daughters had sewn pounds of diamonds into their clothing for safekeeping and in doing so had created makeshift bulletproof vests. The girls fell in the hail of bullets, wounded but alive. Seeing them move, the guards came forward and stabbed them with bayonets, eliciting screams that could be heard half a mile from the house, then shot each girl through the back of the head. Finally, the room fell silent. The age of the tsars was over. The doors were opened to clear the room of gun smoke, and, in essence, clear the way for the rise of the Soviet Union.

  The bodies were placed on a truck and driven into the nearby woods. The next morning, with loyalist forces closing in, the decision was made to remove the bodies and bury them deeper in the woods, where they were less likely to be found. A small detachment of Red Army forces returned to the grave site and uncovered the bodies. All of them w
ere there.

  All but young Alexei Romanov’s.

  For nearly a century, rumors have persisted that the Grand Duchess Anastasia, youngest of the tsar’s daughters, somehow managed to escape that night. That she grew old under an assumed name.

  But in truth, it was her baby brother, thirteen-year-old Alexei, who had escaped. The hemophiliac, whom the late Grigory Rasputin had cured by making him a vampire.

  NINE

  The Maker

  I believe the power to make money is a gift of God… to be developed and used to the best of our ability for the good of mankind.

  —John D. Rockefeller

  Headquarters, Fifth Regiment,

  Marine Corps, American E.F.

  Germany, December 19th, 1918

  From: Maj. Julius Turrill

  To: Regimental Commander

  Subject: Statement of First Lieutenant L. Greggs, substantiating recommendation for the Medal of Honor, case of Corporal , USMC.

  Corporal was a member of Sixty-Seventh Company, Fifth Marines. On the morning of June 6th, 1918, during the counterattack against the enemy in Belleau Wood, near Château-Thierry, our company was assigned the objective of taking and holding Hill 142, to the southern limit of the regimental sector. We fixed bayonets and advanced across a wheat field but came under heavy machine-gun and artillery fire almost immediately. Our losses were excessive, one of the first casualties being the company commander. We were able to retreat to a line of hastily dug trenches, but once there, the artillery fire and shelling only intensified. Several shells landed near our position without exploding. At first we thought that these were duds, but we soon realized that the Germans had switched from explosive shells to gas shells when we detected the smell of HS1 in the air.