cartoonish, except in juxtaposition with the other four, which were all occupied.
The bodies in the coffins were decayed beyond recognition. They were bones, mostly, tied together with scraps of flesh. Some showed old brown stains where blood had washed over them. One had nearly a full head of long white hair like uncombed cotton. One had a single eyeball still in his head, though it was shrunken and dried up until it looked like a white prune. None of the skulls were human. The jaws were thick, sturdy bone full of broken teeth. Just from the teeth I knew they were all vampires. Maybe they were Lares’ family, in a perverse way. Maybe there was a whole lineage of them sleeping in that cramped little ship’s hold.
There was something about them, something that made my skin crawl. It took me a long time to realize what it was. The bones in those coffins weren’t dead. They were moving. Just barely, just almost imperceptibly, but the bony hands were reaching out. The necks were craning forward. They wanted something. They were desperate for it, desperate enough to strain their dried-up sinews to get at it. As decayed and dilapidated as they might be, these corpses were still undead and still aware of their surroundings. Vampires were supposed to live forever, if they weren’t killed. I guess maybe they didn’t stay young forever, though. Maybe that was too much to ask.
Lares caught my attention as he started moving around the little space. He looked different. I focused my eyes and saw that the curly hair on top his head had been a wig—it was gone now and his head was as white and as round as the moon.
Triangular ears poked out on either side. Those weren’t human ears. I guess I was finally seeing what a vampire really looked like. It wasn’t pretty.
Lares knelt next to one of the coffins, his hands bracing him on the wooden lip.
He lowered his head over the body and his back began to shake. One of his laughing eyes kept me pinned the whole time. With a horrible retching sound he vomited a half pint of blood into the coffin, right over the corpse’s face. He clutched at his sides and heaved again, and again, until the skull was bathed in clotted gore.
Steam rose from the hot blood in the cold room. Steam wreathed the skull, the rib cage of the corpse. Steam coalesced like watery light around the bones, wrapping the vampire remains in illusory flesh and skin. The body plumped out and began to take on something like human form as the blood dripped into the corpse’s mouth.
Lares moved to the next corpse. He started coughing and blood flecked his lips.
Like a mother bird feeding her young he coughed himself into a spasm until blood dangled in thick ropes from his mouth. Where it touched the corpse steam rose up and a second transformation began. Skin like old mildewed paper rattled as it stretched around the second corpse’s ruin. Dark skin, criss-crossed with scars. This one had a tattoo on his bicep. It read “SPQR” in jagged, sloppily-done letters.
The pink hue I’d seen in Lares’ cheeks before was gone. He was white as a sheet again. If he was going to feed all of his ancestors he would need to find another blood donor, and soon.
I didn’t like my chances.
He managed to vomit up blood all over a third corpse, just with what he had inside of him. He was throwing up death. The death of the waitress in the diner. The deaths of the SWATs we’d foolishly thought were safe under twenty pounds of crosses. He was throwing up bits of Webster, the good cop, throwing up part of Webster’s body.
Lares turned to look at me directly. His whole body was shaking. Trembling, even shivering. Feeding his grandparents had taken everything he had. Before he’d fed on the waitress in the diner, had he been this shaky? He tried to meet my gaze but I refused to let him hypnotize me again.
I looked down at my right hand. I was still carrying my sidearm. How I could have held onto it through being carried over Lares’ shoulder, through the shock of hitting the river, through being dragged into the boat was a mystery. The cold must have turned my hand into a solid claw around the weapon.
Lares lurched toward me. His speed was gone. His coordination was shot. He was still a bulletproof vampire.
I knew it was hopeless. The SWATs had hit him center left with full automatic machine gun fire but the bullets had never even pierced his skin. They hadn’t even grazed his heart, the only vulnerable part of him. I had nothing better to do at that moment, though, then to shoot every last bullet I had.
I discharged my weapon into his chest. I shot him. Again and again until I was deaf with the noise and blind with the muzzle flash. I had three bullets left in my gun and I put all of them into his chest. The hollow point rounds tore him open, splatted the boat’s hold with bits and strips of his white, white skin. He tried to laugh but his voice came out as a weak hiss, air escaping from a punctured tire.
I saw his rib cage torn open, exposed, flayed. I saw his lungs, slack and lifeless in his chest. He came closer. Closer. Closer. Close enough—I reached out with my left hand and grabbed at the twisted dark muscle that had once been his heart.
He howled in pain. So did I. His body was already repairing the damage I’d done, his cells knitting back together around the gun shot wounds. His ribs grew back like scissor blades crunching down on the more fragile bones of my wrist, trapping my hand inside of his body. His skin grew back over my arm and pulled at me, pulled me toward him.
I plucked his heart out like pulling a peach off a tree.
Lares’ face turned dark with horror, his eyes wild, his mouth flapping open like he couldn’t control it, blood and spit flying from his chin. His nostrils flared and a stench like an open sewer bellowed up out of every one of his orifices. The heart leapt in my hand, trying to get back where it belonged, but I used the tiny shred of strength left to me to squeeze, to hold on. Lares slapped at me with his hands but there was no real strength left in his muscles. He dropped to his knees and howled and howled and howled. It started to sound like mewling after a while. He was losing the strength to even scream properly.
Still he wouldn’t just die. He was holding on to what strange kind of unlife he had ever possessed, clutching like a junkie at an empty syringe, trying through sheer willpower to not die.
His eyes met mine and he tried to suck me in. He tried to hypnotize me, to weaken me once more. It didn’t work.
When he finally stopped moving it was nearly dawn. I held his heart in my clenched fist and it felt like an inert stone. The other vampires, the decayed ones, came slithering out of their coffins, reaching for him, reaching for me. They didn’t understand what had happened. They were blind and deaf and dumb and all they knew was the taste of blood. I kicked them away and through the pain, through the shock, managed to get to my feet.
I found a can of gasoline in the engine room. I found a matchbook in the disused galley of the boat. I set them all on fire and stumbled up and out into the cold rain, pitched headlong onto a narrow wooden dock and waited for the sun to come up, waited to see if the local police would find me first, or whether hypothermia and my injuries and general horror would finish me off.
Part II - Congreve
4.
A fool there was and he made his prayer
(Even as you and I)
To a rag and a bone and a hank of hair
(We called her the woman who did not care)
But the fool he called her his lady fair.
-Rudyard Kipling, The Vampire
Twenty years later Pennsylvania State Trooper Laura Caxton pulled apart a road flare until red sparks shot across the leather elbow of her uniform jacket. She dropped the sputtering flare on the road and turned around. She’d felt something behind her, a presence, and on this particular night she had reason to be seriously creeped out.
The man behind her wore a tan trench coat over a black suit. His hair the color of a steel wool was cut short and close to his head. He looked to be in pretty good shape but he had to be at least sixty. Maybe seventy. In the flickering light of four in the morning the creases on his face could have been wrinkles or they could have been scars. His eyes were hooded by deep, pouchy lids and his mouth was nothing more than a narrow slot in the bottom half of his face.
“Good evening,” he said, his voice thick and a little hoarse. His face folded up like a gas station road map. He was smiling, the kind of smile you give a child you don’t particularly like. The smile submerged his tiny eyes entirely.
