Read Online Vampirus (Book 1) by Jack Hamlyn - Free Book Online

dead.”
    She didn ’t, not really. Though she was pale and mottled around the throat, her cheeks were pinched with color, her skin almost luxurious. That’s what Luke saw. But when he looked again, he swore she was different. Her lips had shriveled away from her long teeth, her cheekbones jutting, her eyes sunken. He pulled the sheet back over her face.
    Alger played the light around. They could see hair hanging from beneath shrouds, a few white arms that dangled stiffly in the air. Luke bumped into a small bundle and a child’s cold hand brushed over his own.
    It took all he had not to scream.
    The only reason he didn’t was probably because of Alger. He did not look good. In the flashlight beam, his face was contorted, lips pulled back from gums, eyes huge and glaring and wet. He looked about as near to insanity as anyone Luke had ever seen.  If Luke had screamed, he would have, too, and he might not have ever stopped.
    They found a berth for Anne and got out as fast as they could.
    Alger lost it there for a moment and wanted to stay, but Luke dragged him off. And there was a reason for his haste. All those corpses made Luke uneasy, made his flesh crawl, but it was more than that. For just after they berthed Anne, he saw something that made him want to run right out of there.
    The sheet had fallen off that woman ’s face again and she was grinning.
    Out into the snow they went. Alger was dragging his ass and Luke was practically pulling him through the drifts. The wind found them, throwing snow and granulated ice in their faces, sending icy fingers down their backs. They had to bow their heads to the gale to move at all. Several times, despite himself, Luke grabbed hold of a tombstone with one hand and Alger with the other and waited out the fiercest gales. More than once, through squinting eyes, he swore he saw figures moving about out in the blowing white death of the graveyard…vague, slumped, indistinct. But he could never be sure.
    Maybe it was imagination.
    Finally, they made it to the pickup. Visibility was down to maybe twenty feet, the headlight beams churning with wind-driven snow. Luke had to drop the plow to cut their way back out. Their tracks coming in were nearly gone. It was an absolute tempest out there, the wipers barely able to clear the snow from the windshield and the truck shook in the wind. As they passed through the picnic grounds Alger said he saw someone standing out there, watching them drive by.
    But there couldn ’t have been anyone. Not in that blow.
    When they finally got back from Salem Cross, Luke got Alger into his house and got some whiskey into him, but he wouldn ’t say a word.  Then when Luke was leaving, he grabbed his arm.
    “ Luke…I’m afraid.”
    “ It’s all right. The worst is over.”
    But Alger shook his head. “I’m afraid…I’m afraid they’re going to come for me.”
    “ Who?”
    But Alger would not say.
     
     
    20
    When Luke got home from Alger ’s, he checked on Sonja and Megan. Nothing had changed. Except maybe himself. Deep inside he was thinking things he did not dare put into words. After an hour spent staring out at the storm, he took two sleeping pills that knocked his lights out for six hours. Somewhere in the night he thought he heard someone knocking at the front door downstairs.
    But it must have been a dream.
     
    21
    The storm petered out around noon the next day, but the wind still blew in fierce gusts. Luke forced himself to eat some soup and that’s when he heard a rumbling that shook the windows. Trucks were rolling up the street. Olive drab Army vehicles. Armored tacticals and Humvees with a 2.5 ton plow truck out front clearing the way. The trucks stopped and soldiers in white Hazmat gear climbed out. They were all carrying M4s, looking up and down the streets from behind their masks. Luke watched them go from house to house, knocking on doors. Very few opened for them. They didn’t kick any doors in or anything, but that was