Page 86 of The Undead

“Why, I already am.”

I didn’t see him move. He slammed my head back against the wooden post of a table, adding more blood to the spatters, and what strength I had left disappeared. I was just a corpse with a brain still awake and screaming, unable to move, unable to fight. William’s face loomed over me, fangs distended and unreal.

“Secondhand is better than none,” he murmured, and his fangs sliced into the flesh of my neck with a sound like rice paper tearing. I couldn’t feel any pain, not past the overwhelming agony of my head injury, but I could feel the strength bleeding out of me. There was a dull pressure where his lips clung to my neck like the embrace of a leech.

His fangs came free of my flesh. I felt it, heard it from a long dark distance. He was a tiny malevolent shadow in front of my unfocused eyes.

“Get the car started.”

“Aren’t we going to kill him?” Foster asked, pouting.

“Oh, eventually. But he ought to suffer first, oughtn’t he? For your dear mother’s sake?”

She hissed and hit me again with the butt of the gun. Something snapped in my collarbone. I saw William reach out and grab her arm on the way down again, an effortless, thoughtless catch.

“Not yet, Miss Rebecca. I got me better ways to take care of the doctor. Go get the car, now.”

Her shadow disappeared. William’s head tilted back as he surveyed the stairs and the second floor. I thought he smiled.

“She died whining and crying,” William murmured, soft as a lover’s whisper. “You hear me, boy? And I took everything she had. Blood, body, heart. I took more of her than you ever did.” I thought I heard something, over the disorienting waves of pain and lethargy. William waited, but the sound faded and died. He shook his head and reached down, slung me over his shoulder in one careless, one-handed motion, and walked toward the back door. He paused there, one hand on the knob, waiting. Nothing. Waves of pain shattered over me, peaking and falling, never less than paralyzing.

“You come before sunrise and I’ll let him go, Adam. You come tomorrow night and you can pick up his pieces.” William went out into the darkened backyard and drifted toward the side gate. A loud pop froze him for a second, and at the other corner of the house I saw a woman’s body roll to a crouch, hands fumbling at her back. She pulled out a gun at the same time I focused enough to identify the disarranged blond hair, the torn black shirt.

“Maggie-Mae,” William murmured, just loud enough for me to hear him. “Well, it is family night, ain’t it? I could snap her spine, you know. As fast asthat.”

He snapped his fingers and broke one of the chain links of the fence with a soft metallic pop. I felt panic gag me and tried to move. Nothing. The agony still pulsed through me like an electric current, fading but nowhere near gone. William eased the gate open and walked toward my unsuspecting wife as a car engine roared to life and tires squealed.

He hit Maggie with the heel of his hand at the base of her neck, hard enough to throw her forward with stunning force but not enough to kill her. She opened her eyes and blinked dazedly up at us as he carried me past; she rolled clumsily on her side as William tossed me in the passenger side of the car. I couldn’t even turn my head to look at her as Foster gunned the car away with another screech of tires. All I could see from my position was the torn, sagging roof of the car. Sylvia’s car.

Oh, God, I was in trouble. Bad trouble.

Control didn’t return for what seemed like hours, and when it did, it came all at once, a rush that contracted every muscle in my body and jackknifed me into a fetal curl with my knees against my bloody chin. I was as weak as a child. A cold hand trailed over my forehead and ran down my arm; it paused at my broken collarbone and poked experimentally. I gasped.

“We’re home, Doc Mike,” William said. The engine shut off. I lay very still and tried to conserve what there was of my strength for one last struggle. When the door at my feet opened, I lashed out desperately. I hit nothing at all. William and Foster giggled again, sounding weirdly connected. Her hands were almost as cold as his where they touched me in dragging me out. I managed to grab hold of one of her wrists and yanked, hard; bones grated and snapped. Foster screamed and hit me with the butt of her gun. That stopped that.

I had the eerie impression that William could have stopped me from hurting her, if he’d wanted. He hadn’t bothered. It had interested him, seeing Foster hurt; I remembered the macabre care he’d taken with Rebecca’s mother and Sylvia’s body, and matched that against what remained in his eyes. My guts quivered. Vampires were plenty frightening enough without being psychopathic in the bargain.

They dragged me between them up a cracked sidewalk. My head had fallen backward, so I could look up and see that the building, whatever it was, was at least three stories. The architecture was strangely inappropriate. It reminded me of Italy, not Texas. There were lots of windows—but they were all dark. Completely dark.

We came to a barred gate set in an archway; beyond that there was a courtyard filled with winter-killed plants and a fountain that didn’t fount. There was trash floating in the stagnant water below the cracked plaster statue; I caught the sour smell of rot and mold. I was wrong about the lights; therewere.few lights, clustered to one side of a set of buildings behind us. The quadrangle of buildings we faced was totally deserted; a few windows were covered with fading, sagging curtains, but there was no other sign they’d ever been tenanted. There wasn’t a single sound of human presence anywhere around.

William and Foster dragged me up a crumbling stair to the third-story landing. There was a glass door there, locked; William had it open inside of thirty seconds and shoved me inside. There was another door beyond it, heavily baroque, with a tarnished brass knocker of a gargoyle’s head.

William turned the knob and dragged me in. He dropped me on the musty thick carpet and walked over to one of the windows to look out. The only thing I could see from where I lay was the top of a faux-European tower, complete with greenish clock permanently stuck at five till midnight. The moonlight bathed William in silver, and for just a moment he looked oddly normal.

“This is my favorite place,” he said. “How d’you like it? The man who built it must have been crazy, or a genius; it never did catch on. Was supposed to be the big shopping craze. It just turned into a gothic ghost town.”

He turned around and flung his arms out wide, turning in slow dreamy circles. His eyes were closed. I blinked and tried moving my fingers; they twitched and spasmed, but at least it was movement. The agony threatened to take my head off completely, but that didn’t matter nearly as much as somehow getting my body to obey me and get me the hell out of here. Where the hell was Foster?

The gun barrel touched the side of my ear. I closed my eyes. Before I could open them again, William grabbed me and hauled me up; he set me down on soft cushions that sank so far I felt as if I would fall right through. The musty scent of decay and damp rose up around me—like a tomb, I thought, and wished I hadn’t.

“The man who built this was goin’ to live here, right here in these rooms. He had them all finished and then he just up and died. Can you believe that? They never did take the furniture out. Guess they were sentimental.” William slapped my cheek gently. “Wake up, Michael. Sun ain’t up yet.”

“You said I could kill him,” Foster said from behind me. William’s silvery eyes focused on her, then back on me. He smiled, but those eyes never moved.

“I hate to break a promise,” he said to me. “Purely do. ’Specially when it’s a pretty lady like Miss Rebecca who’s done so much for me already.”

Control came back. I felt it slide down my body like warm water, and the pain receded. Slowly. I managed to get my mouth open.

---