The fading eyes are green.
I pierce them with the stakes and watch the face turn to goo before it dissolves.
When I was up on the roof of the barn, being chased across the shingles, I thought that they almost had a human shape. Sure, they moved in a strange way, but they still had arms, legs, a torso, and a head. I’m beginning to think that was more camouflage.
Their real shape can only be seen in that moment between death and melting. They’re more of a serpent or reptile than anything else.
When it has melted away and I push back up to my knees, I take a good look at the wrist. The claws punctured into my skin. I can only imagine what kind of infections they might carry. I drop both stakes and rush for the bathroom.
Uncle Walt kept a big bottle of alcohol in the cabinet. I spin off the cap and pour the contents over my wounds. The sting is white hot pain, rocketing up my arm. My flesh bubbles and foams, almost like hydrogen peroxide, and then the alcohol runs clear.
I don’t know if that did anything or not.
I press a hand towel against my wrist until the burning stops and I look at the oozing blood. In the movies, a person bitten by a vampire is doomed to become one themselves. They never talk about puncture wounds from the claws. I guess that means that there’s no danger.
“Ha,” I say.
(The next one is roosting.)
The next one is roosting.
I find it in the top of the coat closet off the living room. Beyond the shoe boxes on the shelf, there’s a dark place up there and it has found a way to cling to the ceiling. Maybe they have some kind of sticky feet, like a salamander or something. I don’t see anything. When I poke my stick, I feel it up there. I squeeze my eyes shut—there’s no way to tell where its hypnotic eyes might be—and I stab upwards. The beam of the flashlight smears red against my eyelids whenever I pull back.
It drops from the assault and I stumble backwards over a stack of books.
There’s a patch of sunlight reflected off the glass door of the china cabinet. It drops into that light and shrieks. When I hear that sound, I immediately remember the smell of the burning truck. Those two senses are linked in my memory.
I thrust a stake at the green eyes when they turn on me. This one has a scarred, stretched-out neck. One eye pops and I get the other one as the thing writhes in agony. I’m not sure if it’s the light or the stabbing that kills it, but it is an evaporating puddle of disgusting slime before long.
How many is that?
I’ve exterminated four, I believe. I wish I knew how many I was hunting. The one thing I know for sure is that I haven’t yet seen the one with violet eyes. Unless the color of the eyes changes. I suppose I can’t rule that out.
This is purely instinctual, but hear me out—I’ve come to think of the one with violet eyes as female. What if they’re like a hive of bees and she is the queen? The ones that I’ve been dispatching might be the drones or something.
That would be too easy.
My compulsion is to look for definitive solutions to things.
I’m constructing a narrative where I can wipe out all of the vampires just by killing the one with the violet eyes. I’m trying to establish her as the boss or mother.
I shake my head, banishing the thought. Even if I find the one with the violet eyes, I can’t assume that I’m safe. That would be foolish.
I stand in the kitchen, waving at flies. They must be coming in through the broken windows. I’m staring at the cellar door. There are no windows down there. The only light will be what I bring with me. Based on what nearly happened under my bed, this is a recipe for disaster.
I can’t use this cellar door or the stairs beyond it.
There is one another option. Before I head outside, I move the table aside so I can make an escape up the cellar stairs if I have to.
It’s already getting hot outside and the sun is still low in the sky.
I don’t even bother trying to lift the handle of the bulkhead doors. I locked them from the inside. Hopefully, the hasp on the door isn’t very strong. Uncle Walt has a long steel bar that he used to use to lift the corner of the garden tractor when it was time for an oil change. I shove that under the corner of the door and lift.
Pain flares through my shoulder and I remember Uncle Walt.
One time we were trying to lift one of the barn doors a few inches so we could put a new roller on the top. I couldn’t lift it with the bar. He pointed and said, “Use your assets.”
When he positioned a block of wood under the bar as a fulcrum, I thought that the asset he was referring to was my brain. It wasn’t. He meant for me to stand on the bar—using my weight to lift instead of my muscles.
I roll a big rock into place near the bulkhead and position the bar. When I step onto the long end, the door lifts and the hasp pops free.
The hinges screech and I remember the smell of burning truck. A shaft of light cuts into the dark cellar and shows me a small patch of the gravel floor.
I have another idea.
When I come back out, I have three mirrors from
