DRACULAS (A Novel of Terror)

Something that would allow him to infect the whole world.

Oasis

HUNGRY again.

So hungry.

Oasis moved through a corridor. The hospital lights had gone out and come back on, though much dimmer. Just these soft blue lights above the doorways, which left lots of shadows.

She didn’t like shadows. The dark scared her even though she could still see so much better than before.

She came around a corner and stopped.

A big sign on the wall read, THE BIRTHPLACE.

Oasis moved carefully down the corridor.

She’d learned her lesson. You couldn’t just go running into things when you were a little girl. Adults were strong and mean, and none of them wanted to share their red candy.

She passed a woman lying on the floor, but the others had gotten to her and been thorough.

Finally came to a set of double doors. She hooked a talon through the handles and pulled.

They didn’t budge.

She looked up at the window in one of the doors—the glass had been broken out, and someone had stapled a piece of paper across the opening from the other side.

She reached up, punched a talon through the paper, thinking there must be something really good on the other side of these doors if someone had gone to the trouble to lock them.

She crouched and jumped.

Got her arms halfway through the window frame.

She struggled to pull herself the rest of the way inside.

It was a tight fit, really tight, but she had a good feeling now that she was going to make it through.

Clay

SO stubborn! he thought as he led Shanna down the stairs.

Didn’t she realize that two people had a much better chance of survival when both were armed? But no. She was too scared to pack even a little heat.

He didn’t understand fear of guns. Guns eased fear. They were equalizers.

“Are you mad at me?” she said, close behind him.

Lucky for them, all the stairwells had battery-powered emergency lights. Still, he didn’t want any shooting in here, especially with a shotgun. A miss would send buckshot ricocheting every which way.

“No, honey. I understand.”

And he did, sort of. First time she ever pulled a trigger she killed someone she’d known. Even though that person had no longer been the person she’d known, it still had to give one pause.

“I wish I were like you.”

“Now that’s a surprise.”

“I mean with guns. You seem so at ease with them.”

“Shanna, I’ve been preparing all my life for this moment.”

“What do you mean?”

“My daddy. He was what people called a survivalist.”

“You mean with the bomb shelter and the freeze-dried food and…?”

“The guns? Yep. The whole nine yards. He bought the whole package. And he made all of us buy into it too.” He remembered the emergency drills, the nights spent underground in the shelter, the constant target practice. “At least until we were old enough to go out on our own.”

“What was he afraid of? Aliens? Minority uprisings? Islamic fanatics? Economic holocaust?”

“None of the above. Daddy was old school. For him it was commies.”

“Commies? But—”

“I know, I know. But he believed they tore down the Berlin Wall to fool us. They never let go of their quest for world domination. Especially the Chinese commies—they were the ones who scared the crap out of my daddy. Because there’s so many of them. He kept saying, ‘They’re coming, Clay. A human tsunami. They’ll overrun us because we won’t be able to shoot fast enough.’ Can’t tell you how many times I heard that.”

Shanna gave a soft laugh. “He wasn’t so off about the Chinese, just about how they’d take over.”

“What do you mean?”

“They’re practically buying the country.”

“Yeah, well. Daddy prepared us for invasion. We grew up to think he was crazy, but he wasn’t. It’s happening right now. Except it ain’t commies, it’s these monsters.”

They reached the ground-floor landing and peeked through the slit window in the steel fire door. Empty—at least as far as he could see. But instead of opening the door, Clay turned to Shanna. He dug in his pocket, pulled his truck keys from where they snuggled up against the ring box, and handed them to her.

“All right. Here’s the plan: We’re gonna cut our way through the ER to the parking lot. When we reach my Suburban, you’re gonna jump in and hightail it out of here. I’m gonna stay.”

“But—”

“That’s it. No discussion. I’ve got to hang around until the staties arrive, and that shouldn’t be long. When they get here, we’ll team up and clean up this mess. But a couple of things first. You called Moorecook ‘patient zero,’ said he started all this. From what you said, it sounds like he cut himself on purpose to get this going. Any idea why?”

Shanna shrugged. “He was terminal with cancer. Maybe he was trying to prolong his life.”

“By turning into a monster?”

“You’re assuming he knew what would happen. I can’t believe he’d want to become the thing I saw in the lobby.”

“Can you tell me anything else? I’m going to have to fill in the staties on what I know, and the more I know, the better. Even if you don’t think it’s important, tell me.”

Shanna pursed her lips, and her nose crinkled in that cute way that indicated she was trying to make a decision.

“It’s kind of complicated, Clay.”

“I can handle complicated.”

“Okay. You ever heard of a secret society called the Order of the Dragon?”

“That’d be a no.”

“It was formed in the early Fifteenth Century, ostensibly to fight the Turks and Ottoman Empire.”

He winked. “You mean the people responsible for the furniture you rest your feet—”

“Hang with me, Clay. Members of the order were called Draconists. Around this same time, the black death was raging throughout Eurasia. Today, historians and scholars believe it was the bubonic and pneumonic plague that caused the black death, but there has been no absolute evidence to support this hypothesis, only educated guesses. My contention, based on all the research I’ve done for Mort, is that the black death caused dracula-like symptoms in some of its hosts, especially in people with certain genetic precursors. Certain royal bloodlines.”

“You lost me, girl.”

“I’m saying the black death, in some cases, caused a mutation, resulting in vampirism.”

“Mutation. Got it. Like in Blade II with Wesley Snipes. Remember the scene with Ron Perlman when he—”

“Do you want to talk about movies, or about what I think is going on?”

Clay would have preferred movies, but he needed to hear what she had to say. “Okay, tell me what’s going on.”

“The son of Oswald von Wolkenstein, a member of the Order of the Dragon, was afflicted with horrific dental deformities. While the Draconists were killing vampires, Oswald hid his son, kept him chained up in a cellar. But the son escaped, went on a killing spree, ending up in Transylvania and causing a dracula epidemic. Ever heard of Vlad the Third of Wallachia?”

Clay knew that from the Coppola flick. “That guy who went around impaling folks?”