incredibly, he still wore the red clown nose and the fright wig.
The clown sprinted at her, its hands outstretched, talons wiggling. Jenny barely had time to scoot back when it pounced—
—on Peter’s dead father. Benny the Clown’s fangs tore into the corpse’s throat, and it shook its head like a dog and pulled away, stretching out the carotid artery as if it were a long string of spaghetti. Jenny managed to get to her feet. Then she danced around Benny the Clown and sprinted toward the playroom. Slamming the door after her, she got behind the nearest table and braced it up against the entrance.
“Help me! Everyone, help!”
Peter and one of the boys began to stack chairs against the door. The others watched through the picture window as Benny the Clown feasted. The woman—the one Jenny guessed was in shock—had locked her eyes on the spectacle. They widened abruptly, and the woman began to scream.
When the door was as secure as Randall had had it, Jenny told Peter and the one boy to sit on the other side of the room and look away. Then she rushed to the screaming woman.
“Miss, you need to be quiet. You’re upsetting the—”
“What is that terrible clown doing?” the Grandmother cried.
Jenny forced herself to look. Benny the Clown had torn open the man’s abdominal cavity, his claws cradling several loops of glistening intestines. But rather than gorging on them, the clown was stretching and pulling the bloody loops, twisting the organ into knots.
“Is that…a flamingo?” asked the old woman.
Jenny couldn’t answer. She stared, slack-jawed, as Benny the Clown continued to make balloon animals out of that poor man’s innards.
One of the boys passed out.
The screaming woman passed out.
The old woman threw up, her dentures plopping into the puddle of puke.
Besides the flamingo, Benny the Clown also created a wiener dog, a giraffe, and what could have been either a lion or a poodle—some animal with a poofy mane. Jenny summoned up her last bit of courage and rushed the window, banging her palm on the glass.
“Get away from here! Get away from us, you fucking evil clown!”
Benny stared at Jenny. Stared without moving. Without making a sound. Jenny saw cunning, there. Cunning, and the same kind of cold, watchful malevolence that alligators had.
Then Benny the Clown reached up and squeezed his red nose, the fake flower on his chest squirting blood on the window, blurring Jenny’s view.
A moment later, the clown was gone, his oversized shoes
HE couldn’t get enough of the blood.
It had the same punch as coke. The same rush as an orgasm. The same high as morphine. The same satisfaction as a huge meal when starving. All wrapped up in one overwhelming sensation that made Lanz’s eyes roll up and his body quiver in absolute fucking ecstasy.
But the feeling didn’t last. The moment the blood ran out, so did the jolt. And in its place was a longing, an ache. That ache became painful after just a few minutes, and the pain turned into crippling, mind-searing agony, getting worse and worse until more blood was consumed.
The part of Lanz’s brain that still had some higher functioning recognized the symptoms of addiction, but also knew this was something more. He’d become a higher life form. Sharper vision and hearing, a sense of smell so powerful he could detect a drop of blood from a hundred meters away, faster reflexes, accelerated healing power, abnormal strength.
But unlike the other infected, who seemed to be operating at a reduced mental capacity, Lanz still had some reasoning powers, and some memory of his previous life. He realized this could have been due to the locus of the disease. The others were all infected intravenously, the agent making direct contact with their bloodstream. Lanz had ingested contaminated blood. This could have resulted in a different variation of the infection. Different transmission meant different symptoms.
Medicine certainly had precedents for this. Yersina pestis—known as the black plague—was a bacteria that could infect a host in three entirely different ways, and cause different symptoms as a result. Perhaps this dracula bug was similar.
Or perhaps Lanz’s strong will and extraordinary intelligence were too much for the bug to cope with.
Either way, Lanz felt like the proverbial one-eyed man in the land of the blind. While other creatures ran around, blithely attacking anything that moved—people, each other, and even themselves if the blood urge became strong enough—Lanz could still use his cognitive faculties.
As the disease spread, turning more humans into creatures, Lanz decided competition for blood was getting too fierce. But he knew of a good source. A source that would be like picking low-hanging fruit from a tree.
Children would be easy to catch, and not put up much of a fight. Plus, there was an added bonus.
That bitch nurse, Jenny, had said she was headed to the pediatric ward.
Lanz would enjoy tearing her sanctimonious throat out.
He’d enjoy it quite a bit.
SHE’D fought a long and valiant battle against the diabetes, but it had finally claimed her right foot, the infection spreading into her blood, sepsis hours from killing her before the amputation.
Now she rested peacefully in a morphine slumber.
Fresh, clean blood flowing into her body and dreaming of a picnic she’d had just last summer up at Vallecito Lake, her two sons with her, and their children, the apples of her eye—six-year-old Benjamin, and eight-year-old Vicki playing by the shore. Grandchildren. Was there anything better? They were like your kids, but without the hassles. A perfect relationship, a dynamic where everybody won.
A crack ran through her dream like a fracture through glass, and she could feel herself tumbling out of it, the phantom pain in her right foot spoiling the memory.
She opened her eyes, but she must have still been sleeping because what she saw made about as much sense as a nightmare.
A little girl who looked to be the same age as her precious Vicki was standing at her bedside with her back turned, sucking down the chilled contents of the blood bag through the needle that had been attached to her left forearm.
It was an image that simply didn’t compute, and because of this, she was certain she was dreaming, but God, it
“Excuse me. Little girl?”
The little girl didn’t answer or even move. Grammy Ann eyed the blood bag, watching the level of the dark liquid quickly lowering.
“Little girl?”
Then there was only a sucking noise, like slurping down the dregs of a cup of soda.
“Little girl?”
The girl let go of the clear, plastic tube and turned around.
Grammy Ann recoiled, the beeping of the heart monitor accelerating.
Oh God, that face!
