They Thirst (48 page)

"I'll make coffee," Jo said. "Do you want yours the usual way? Black with sugar and nails?"

"Yeah, fine," he said. She grunted, rolled her eyes and went out the bedroom door. He went back to his reading. There was an item from the L.A.
Times with the headline

No Bats In Reno? Don't Gamble On It! The pilot of a Delta jet, circling for a landing at Reno International, had suddenly picked up a huge mass on his radar, closing in fast. The control tower had advised him to drop a couple of hundred feet, and as the pilot started down, the jet was engulfed by a cloud of bats heading westward. Luckily none were sucked into the jet intakes, and the pilot was able to bring his plane in. "Must've been hundreds of the things," the pilot said when he got his feet firmly on the ground.

Do the bats precede the vampires,
Palatazin wondered,
or do they follow?
In either case, their presence had meant something to his mother in the days just before her death. He picked up the next item and saw with some amazement that it was a Rona Barrett column dated September 3. He read, ". . . a major Hollywood studio is searching for a successor to the late JOHN WAYNE in a planned remake of the Duke's classic
Red River.
Mentioned most often are
Dallas
big daddy JIM DAVIS and new face CLAY SANDERS. Watch for CLAY in the new Paramount film
The Long Haul . . .
for the fans who asked, JANE DUNNE is alive and well and living in Beverly Hills. She'll be interviewed by this reporter on an upcoming ABC special . . . more royalty's moving to Hollywood. It's all very hush-hush, but rumor has it that a European prince, no less, will soon be remodeling the Hollywood Hills castle that once belonged to horror-film star ORLON KRONSTEEN . . . wedding bells may soon be tolling for JOHN TRAVOLTA. The lucky girl's name is still a secret, but this reporter hears the church bells ringing on Christmas Day . . ." His eyes snapped back to the reference to Orlon Kronsteen. He'd worked briefly on that case about ten or eleven years ago. He'd never seen the decapitated corpse, but he'd seen the expressions of a couple of the officers who had. Their faces were pale, and their lips drawn up into grim, gray lines. That case had never been solved, he recalled. But what bothered him about those lines of type were the two words
European prince.
Those were the words, he was certain, that had caught his mother's attention. If this prince were the vampire king he sought, the castle would be a perfect refuge, hidden away in the hills and probably high enough to be a strategic observation point as well. And now he recalled how the Roach had
stared up into those hills and begged his master for help.

His blood went cold.

Yes,
he told himself.
This is what my mother wanted me to find.

And now another question racked him—was this the same European prince and/or vampire king who had conquered the village of Krajeck on a stormy winter night so long ago? Was this the same creature who had taken his father?

He put the clippings back in the box and snapped the lid down. Rising from the bed, he stepped to the window and looked down on Romaine Street. The earth was still layered with blue shadows. The sky was a dull, slate gray, but he could see the faint pink light coming up in the east. There was a bitter, coppery taste in his mouth— the taste of utter dread at what had to be done. His fingers clamped on the windowsill; the black-painted crucifix was centered in his vision and seemed to be burned across his face. Terror writhed in his stomach. "I can't do it alone," he heard himself whisper. "Not that. I can't."

But then who will?

"I can't." He shook his head, his lower lip trembling. He would have to go to that crumbling old castle and find the vampire king to drive an ash stake through the thing's heart and sever the head from the body, then do the same to as many others as he could find. He would have to set the bodies on fire or drag them out to let the sun bake them into dust. God help him if he was caught up there when the sun went down.

He remembered his father's face, streaked with orange light from the hearth. Those gleaming, terrible eyes. Remembered the shotgun blasts and the hideous thing—not Papa anymore—that rose from the floor, its face ripped away and the long, glistening fangs exposed.

"I can't," he said to his reflection in the glass.

Then who will?

He didn't hear Jo call him from downstairs, finally yelling in exasperation, "You don't want coffee? You won't get coffee!"

Oh, God, why me?
And then he answered the question himself. Because you know them. Because you ran from them once, never knowing they were following, day after day, year after year, all across the- United States. And now they are here, and there is nowhere else to run.

If you don't do it, what will happen to this city? To the millions of people, all of them unaware? Los Angeles would eventually fall, just as Krajeck had fallen, and a tidal wave of vampires would move eastward across America, possibly to link up with other isolated pockets of vampires that awaited their coming. The entire world would lie before them, before their ravenous thirst.

In the window's glass his face looked thirty years older. His remaining hair seemed to have gone white all at once, like a man who has had a nightmare of grinning Death slowly stalking closer.

There was much to be done, and it had to be finished before dusk. But he knew he couldn't do it alone, and he was going to have to have protection. The taste of fear in his mouth was acrid.

Across the street and one house down, he saw a German shepherd settling itself on a front porch. He hadn't realized that the Zemkes had bought a watchdog.
Good luck to you,
he mentally told the sleeping family in that house.
You'll need every bit of it and more.

He turned away from the window and began to dress hurriedly.

"Blackberry brandy," the old woman in the wheelchair offered as she poured from a crystal decanter into three tulip-shaped glasses. There had been four in the set, but the fourth now lay in shards on the hardwood floor. "One hundred proof," she promised, winking at Wes. "Knock the fear of Satan right out of you. Here."

Wes handed one glass to Solange and sipped from the other one. His mouth instantly flamed, and he could feel the liquor spiraling down into his stomach where it seethed for a moment like lava. He drank down the rest of it, squeezed the tears from his eyes, and held the glass out again. "More," he said.

Jane Dunne smiled, the lines across her heart-shaped face deepening, but there was a center of cold fear in her-brown eyes that refused to thaw. "Sure you can handle it, kiddo?" He nodded, and she poured again.

Solange stood on the other side of the wrecked room and drew aside a heavy, wine-red curtain to look out onto the lawn. The first trace of new light hovered in the sky. "The sun's coming up," she said softly. "It'll be daylight soon."

"Thank God," Wes breathed. "Any of them still out there?"

"No. At least I can't see any."

He came over beside her and peered out. The boulevard was deserted, the houses dark. Nothing moved. "I think they've gone. They can't stand light, can they?"

"I wouldn't be so sure about that, kiddo," Jane said, turning her wheelchair around to face them. She drank down her third glass of brandy. "I wouldn't be so sure of anything in this screwed-up world anymore."

Wes stepped away from the window and eased himself into an overstuffed, antique chair with one broken arm. A single candle burned on a coffee table beside him. Over near the door a grandfather clock had been thrown over on its side; the hands, frozen behind shattered glass, had stopped at ten minutes after one. Wes put his glass aside and wiped a cold sheen of sweat from his forehead. "We've got to find Jimmy," he said suddenly, looking up at Solange. She stared at him without speaking for a few seconds, then turned back to the window. "We've got to get the cops," he insisted. "We've got to get
somebody!"

"When the sun rises," Solange said. "Not before."

"So you put two of the bastards in the swimming pool, did you?" The old woman let out a high-pitched cackle of glee. "Hot damn! I was about to drain the thing, tool Hope they weren't wearing their Mae Wests . . ." She laughed again and then stared into her glass. Her smile quickly faded, leaving her eyes dark and hopeless. She muttered softly and reached for the rapidly emptying decanter.

"The thing I can't understand," Wes said quietly, "is why they didn't . . . uh . . . get you after they'd broken into the house."

"Because I live right, that's why. Plenty of Johnny Walker Red and blackberry brandy—that'll keep you young forever." She patted the useless sticks that lay beneath a blanket on her lap, then looked back up at Wes. "I saw their faces," she said. "Two of them, both just kids. The girl had a safety pin through her ear. Rock and rollers, I guess. I took one look at them and thought, This is it, Janie. You've gone through four marriages, a string of box-office bombs, one hell of a smashup on the Pacific Coast Highway, and here's the finale—a couple of dope-heads who are going to kill you in the middle of the night.' I thought they'd come to steal my tons of paste jewelry." She drank from her glass.

"Then the boy came toward me, and he . . . it . . . opened its mouth. I could . . . see . . . those teeth. Fangs, just like in the Dracula movies, except there were a couple on the lower jaw, too, and they just slid out like a rattlesnake's does when it's about to strike. God!" She shivered and said nothing more for a moment or so.

"Then he stopped right beside my bed. He seemed to be . . . sniffing the air. I think I saw myself reflected in his eyes, and I . . . I realized how close Death stood to me. Then they were gone, just like that. I didn't even see them leave. Of course, they'd screwed up the fights and the phones, and I had to wheel around in the dark not knowing whether I'd run into one of them or not. When I was downstairs, I heard all the shouting and commotion, so I hid in here. I thought you two were . . . you know . . . like they were until I heard you talking." She swirled the brandy around her glass and drank it down. "I think what saved me is that I . . . smelled
old.
I'll be seventy-five in May and with busted gams to boot. I think they wanted younger blood."

"They got my friend," Wes said, glancing at Solange and then quickly away. "Christ, how many of the things are there? And where did they come from?"

"Hell, kiddo," Jane said. "Straight out of old Satan's black bag of tricks. I thought I'd seen everything this world had to offer up, but I see now I was way wrong."

Solange had gone cold. If there were vampires stalking the streets of Bel Air and Beverly Hills, too, and if there were so many that they could organize themselves to hunt humans at the scenes of traffic accidents, then there must be—and she shivered to think of the possibility—hundreds of them. Outside the light was slowly growing brighter, but there were still huge pools of shadow lying in wait like treacherous oil slicks. Or tar babies. She recalled the stories her father used to tell her—
Lemme go, Br'er Rabbit, lemme go!
Somehow her life had slipped away from that bright childhood, and now she walked the dark side of the moon.

". . . seen you on the tube," Jane was saying to Wes. "That show you've got. You're pretty good."

He nodded, his shoulders slumped forward. "Thanks," he said, his mind sheered away from the image of Jimmy screaming in agony, being pulled from that crumpled car by a grinning vampire.

"Yeah, pretty good." She smiled, her eyes beginning to glaze over now. "Not
great,
mind you. Jack Benny was
great.
But you'll do. PBS ran a special on me last month, showed clips from some of my hits. You catch it?"

Wes shook his head.

"Too bad. You know what they called me? America's Girl Friend. I was wearing sweaters before Lana Turner was even a gleam in her daddy's eye. I had good boobs, too. Oh, Jesus." She looked over at Solange, where the gray light was slipping in around the curtains. "Those were the days. High noon, that's what I called it." She returned her gaze to Wes, who was sitting slumped over with his face in his hands. "High noon. You better enjoy it while you can, kiddo. When that sun starts going down, it can get mighty cold."

"There's a police car!" Solange said, and Wes's head jerked up. He hurried to the window and looked out. The prowl car was slowing, probably to investigate the smashed cars on the curve of the boulevard. Wes ran out of the room, unlocked the front door, and ran onto the lawn, waving his arms. "Hey! Stop! Hey!"

The car slid to the curb. Two officers got out, one of them dropping his hand to his holster as Wes came running down the driveway, shouting like a maniac. As Wes neared the car, he abruptly froze. In the dingy light he'd thought he might have seen the glitter of fangs.
Oh God,
he thought,
not the cops, too!

They came around the car, and Wes took a few steps backward.

"He's scared shitless," one said to the other. Then to Wes, "What the hell's been going on here, buddy?"

Solange stood in the doorway, watching as Wes began talking to the officers, motioning with his hands.
How defenseless he looks,
she thought.
How small. ..