They Thirst Part 42

"That one, way over there." She pointed to a building about sixty yards beyond them and across the road.

"You'd best get in for the night, miss. Climb in and we'll take you over."

"No, really I..." She paused, frowning, and tried her best to summon up some tears. All she got was a glazed expression, but she figured it was probably good enough. "I ... need to be alone. Please. I need to think."

"Ten o'clock curfew, miss," the SP said. He checked his wrist.w.a.tch. "It's tenoh-eight right now."

"I ... lost my husband in the earthquake," Gayle said softly. "I just needed to get out and walk. The walls were closing in on me." The first SP nodded, glanced over at the other one, and then back to Gayle. His face had softened a fraction, but his eyes were still hard. "I'm sorry to hear about your husband, ma'am, but I'm afraid you'll have to obey the curfew like everyone else. Of course, I don't suppose it would hurt if you finished your walk, do you, Roy?"

"Nope," the other SP said, and gunned the engine.

"Okay, then. But afterward, straight to your barracks, ma'am. Good night." He gave her a quick salute and then the jeep had rolled on past her, its red taillights flaring briefly before it turned to the left and disappeared. s.h.i.t! Gayle thought. Have to watch out for those cops! She walked quickly around the barracks, the noise of her footsteps disquietingly loud on the pavement. She kept looking back over her shoulder, but the SPs didn't return. Why would they? she asked herself. They bought my story.

She found the jeep parked on the other side of a large green dumpster. The keys were in the ignition, and under the pa.s.senger seat there was a canteen and a few items rolled up in cellophane. She tore the packet open and found a small penlight, a compa.s.s, and a map of the base that showed the desert terrain and lava rock that lay to the east. It looked like hard country, but she had no choice. Chaplain Lott had helped her as much as he could-now getting there was her responsibility.

Okay, she told herself. Time to go. She flicked on the light and'studied the map for a minute, then found an easterly heading on the compa.s.s and started the engine. The noise seemed loud enough to wake up every Marine within ten miles.

She saw a light come on in a building just a few yards away and, with fear galloping through her, she pushed down on the accelerator. She was determined to head as near due east as she could, but several times she saw the lights of an oncoming truck or jeep ahead, and she either turned off onto another road or stopped behind a building for a few minutes to wait and muster her courage. The farther east she went, the more scattered and dark the buildings became. Finally she could look back over her shoulder at most of the base. Ahead of her, like black hulks in the starlight, loomed a ridge of mountains directly in her path.

The pavement ended at a group of sheds surrounded by a high barbed-wire fence. Gayle turned off the road and started across the desert, the jeep's tires jubbling over rocks and sagebrush.

A monstrous apparition suddenly came sweeping over the mountains, red and green and white lights flashing. It was another Hercules transport plane, coming in low toward the airstrip. She could see the green c.o.c.kpit glow, and the noise of the plane's pa.s.sage deafened her. Then it had pa.s.sed over, a wave of scorched air churning behind it, the roar slowly receding. Gayle recalled what Lott had said about the observation towers and immediately cut her headlights. The night enveloped her, but soon she could see fairly well just by the starlight. The desert stretched out on all sides, the mountains coming up to meet her. Several times she had to risk flicking on the penlight to check the compa.s.s.

An observation tower came up on her right frighteningly close, like an oil derrick topped by a black square of gla.s.s. Gayle angled away from it, expecting a piercing shaft of light, but none came. Cactus-strewn foothills began to rise out of the earth, carrying her into the mountains. She found what seemed to be no more than a rutted, boulder-strewn goat track, hardly wide enough for the jeep, but she started up along it. She became aware of a faint chuck-chuck-chuck that seemed to be steadily drawing closer. She stopped the jeep's engine. A helicopter pa.s.sed overhead, flying slowly, and vanished toward the west.

Soon she pa.s.sed near a second observation tower perched high on the mountain. The other side of the mountain was far roughter terrain-deep gullies, cracked earth, a scattering of high, soft dunes. She wondered where she'd go when-and if-she made it off the base. Las Vegas? Flagstaff? Phoenix? She had no money or ID, nothing left in the world but the clothes she wore. She couldn't even prove she was a survivor of the quake, must less a reporter. If she went ambling into some small newspaper office talking about vampires, they'd either kick her a.s.s out or call the men in white coats. But she had to try. Surely there were a lot of stragglers who'd made it out of L.A. on their own, who had gotten to telephones and started calling friends and relatives with chilling stories to tell. There was going to be a lot of scoffing-ma.s.s hysteria, had Lott said?-but if the stories were repeated often enough, by hundreds of people, every editor in the nation would have to start paying attention. It would first be a matter of convincing somebody to loan her a typewriter and some desk s.p.a.ce in a newspaper office, and if that place didn't take the story, she'd go on to the next, and the next, and the next one after that. h.e.l.l, she thought, she could wash dishes and live in a fleabag motel if she had to, but she was determined to be at the forefront when the story broke. Eventually somebody would buy it, and she could work her way up from there. In a year she thought she'd be able to write her own ticket, possibly with the New York Times or Rolling Stone. In any case, a publication based as far away from California as she could get.

A helicopter suddenly came out of the night from the south, flying less than fifty feet from the ground. It pa.s.sed over her with a thunderous racket, frightening Gayle so much she hit the brakes. The helicopter immediately started veering back, and Gayle realized they must've seen the brake lights flash. She pressed her foot to the floorboard, knowing there was no place to hide out here.

The land was miserably bare, a series of sand dunes and red rock ridges ahead of her. The helicopters swept back over her again. Grit blinded her for a few seconds, and when she cleared her eyes, she saw the copter coming back for a third pa.s.s. A searchlight blazed down from the copter's underbelly and began a long, slow sweep.

Gayle zigzagged desperately. Then the searchlight had crept up behind her, glancing off the jeep. It came back and held, blinding her with its intensity. Over the combined roar of the jeep's engine and the copter's blades, she heard a voice amplified through a loudspeaker command, "Pull over! You're in violation of martial law! Halt immediately."

Gayle spun the wheel to the side and veered out of the light. If they stopped her, she knew she wouldn't have another chance to get off the base. Hot and dazzling, the light found her again. Above her the voice took on new menace.

. . in violation of martial law. If you don't stop right now, you will be stopped."

Christ! she thought. What are they going to do, shoot me? Maybe a warning shot, or perhaps they'd try to hit the tires, but surely they wouldn't shoot a civilian! She was going to have to call their bluff. The wind whipped into her face, a maelstrom of dust and sand churning around her from the copter's rotors.

She was going up over a cactus-stubbled ridge, the tires shuddering over purple rock. She heard a high thrumming sound and winced. About five yards to the left she'd seen sparks and dust fly in an orderly line-bullets fired from a machine gun with pinpoint accuracy struck the ground just ahead of her, she realized they were trying to make her turn. She kept going straight ahead. At the crest of the ridge, she felt the jeep shudder madly. The wheel shook free from her hands, and she knew the b.a.s.t.a.r.ds had hit a tire. She fought for control as the jeep hurtled over the ridge and down. It fishtailed to the right, and through the churn of sand she saw what the helicopter had been trying to turn her away from-a high barbed-wire fence at the bottom of the ridge and beyond it a flat plain stubbled with scrub and cactus. The limits of the base. She spun the wheel back, having an instant to fear that the fence might be electrified, then the jeep had crashed into it, flattening and roaring over it. The copter screamed past, trying to hover in her path. Unintimidated, Gayle drove straight ahead and underneath it, leaving the copter whirling like an angered insect. It found her again and stayed with her for another few minutes until she pa.s.sed a large sign on a post driven deep into the sand. She glanced back at it and saw in the backwash of the copter's light the words U.S. GOVERNMENT PROPERTY-NO TRESPa.s.sING BEYOND THIS POINT. The copter came down low on her, the searchlight striking her savagely in the eyes. Then it veered away slowly, in defeat. The light went out. Gayle didn't reduce her speed. Less than a mile later the left rear tire spun off the wheel, ripped to shreds, and the bare wheel dug a trench in the sand before the jeep came to a halt. She cut the engine and sat there for a few minutes until she could stop shaking. Then she began to study the map. According to it-and she hoped she'd read the compa.s.s right so far-there should be a road a couple of miles ahead that would take her to a white dot called Amboy. She took the map, flashlight, and canteen, checked her compa.s.s again and started walking.

By the time she'd reached the narrow black line of road, a chill wind had kicked up. Her legs ached fiercely, but she had no time to rest. She'd seen more helicopters flying around in the distance, and she expected a truck full of soldiers to come roaring across the desert after her at any moment. She walked north toward whatever Amboy was. Something slithered across the road in front of her, and she realized with a shudder that it must've been a sidewinder. She started watching her step and was surprised when headlights appeared on the flat horizon ahead. She started to wave her arms, then realized that it could very well be a jeep or a truck sent out after her from the base. She moved quickly off the road and crouched down in a gully about twenty feet away.

The headlights brightened, the vehicle took form. It was a white van, and as it pa.s.sed, Gayle saw NEC NEWS printed on its side above the peac.o.c.k logo. She stood up and shouted, "HEY!" but the van went on without even slowing, heading south.

Well, Gayle thought, it was headed in the wrong direction anyway. After another mile her legs felt like taut springs, and the ground seemed to be crawling with rattlers. She wondered if there was a telephone in Amboy. She hadn't seen or talked with her parents in a long time, but she figured they were still up in Susanville, watching the gra.s.s grow. Her brother Jeff would be sixteen now and probably hanging out at the roller rink while her folks ran their little corner drugstore. Though she'd had her differences with her parents, she knew she should call them, if just to let them know she was still alive. If they asked her to come home or even volunteered to come pick her up, she would say no. Definitely.

Headlights came up very fast behind her, scrawling her shadow across the pavement. A dark blue late-model Buick pa.s.sed her and went on perhaps fifty yards before it slowed and stopped. Then it reversed, and the driver was looking out through his window. "You need a ride?" he asked.

"Sure do," Gayle said without hesitation. He waved her over, and she got in, putting her map and canteen on the seat between them. The man drove on, and Gayle rubbed her aching calves. "Where are you headed?"

"East," the man said.

"Yeah, me, too. How far east?"

"As far as I can."

"Good." Gayle took the pack of Winstons out of her pocket and offered him one. He shook his head, and she punched in the cigarette lighter. "Lucky for me you came along. I would've had a long walk."

"What are you doing out here?" the man asked her. "All alone, I mean?"

"I was ... uh ... my car broke down a few miles back. I got out of L.A. before the quake hit, and all I want to do is put a lot of miles between me and that place." The lighter popped out, and Gayle lit her cigarette. In its glow she studied the man. He was chunky with large shoulders and hands; he wore a red-checked shirt and dark trousers, one knee was torn, exposing a raw-looking wound. There were cuts on his knuckles, too, and the one ear that Gayle could see looked absolutely mangled. He wore thick eyegla.s.ses, held together in the middle with black electrical tape, and behind those gla.s.ses his small darting eyes looked watery and . . . spooky. He seemed to be trying to watch her without turning his head. There was a bruise on his chin, another cut on his cheek. His face, lit by the green glow of the dashboard, was large-jawed and thin-lipped.

He carried an air of determination about him, an urgency, and when Gayle glanced at the speedometer, she saw that they were moving at just under eighty. The man finally turned his head and looked at her, then back to the road. Under his gaze Gayle felt . . . slimed.

She shifted uneasily in her seat and blew out a lungful of smoke. The headlights picked out a green road sign. Amboy-3. "Amboy," Gayle said. "That's where you can let me out."

He was silent. His huge hands tightened on the wheel, and Gayle thought that if he exerted an ounce more of pressure, it might break off in his grip. "Were you in L.A., too?" she asked him.

"Yes," he said quietly. A thin smile flickered across his face, then was gone.

"Then you know about them? The vampires?"

He watched the road.

"I hear they're all dead," Gayle continued. "Most of them, at least. Maybe a few got out, but they can't hide forever. They'll make mistakes. The sun'll catch them if it hasn't already. And I'm going to do my d.a.m.ned best to make sure everybody else knows about them, too."

The man glanced at her quickly. "How?"

"I'm a reporter," she said. "Fm going to write the hummingest story you ever read, once I find someone who'll give me the chance. It'll just be a matter of time. Hey, you're pa.s.sing . . ." But then they were roaring through a cl.u.s.ter of dark, white-washed buildings, the speedometer still hovering at eighty.

"That was Amboy," Gayle said anxiously. "That's where I wanted to get out."

"No. That's not where you're going."

"What do you mean?" Her eyes narrowed, and she felt a sharp needle of fear pierce her.

"Not Amboy. You're a liar. I didn't pa.s.s any car on the side of the road. So you're a liar, aren't you?"

"Listen, I"

"I don't want to listen," the man said. He touched his forehead and winced as if in pain. "I've heard too many lies. And now you're going to go out and write some more lies, aren't you? About them." He spoke that word with reverence. "I know ... I know what kind of person you are." His gaze darkened, his lips curled in bitterness. "You're all the same, every one of you. You're all like she was-"

"She? Who?"

"Her," the man said softly. "She did things to make my head hurt. She said she was never going to leave me, never going to let them take me away. But she lied.

She said she was wrong, that I was crazy and she was leaving. That's who." Gayle squeezed herself against the door, her eyes wide with terror.

"Can't fool Waltie," he said. "Can't laugh behind his back anymore, no. Because I've got the power now! It's inside me!"

"Yeah, okay. Why don't you just pull off up here and I'll-"

"I'm not stupid!" he said loudly. "I never was!" He glared at her with a burning gaze that seemed to shrivel her into a cinder. "That one thought I was stupid.

He wanted to take me to the police. I knew what he was doing all the time! Go oh, look. LOOK, I SAID!" He motioned with a jerk of his head toward the backseat.

Gayle looked, her heart pounding. Jammed down on the rear floorboard was a dead man, shirtless, with black bruises on his throat. His face had been pulped by heavy blows. Her stomach lurched. She gripped the door handle and saw desert flatlands blurring by at eighty miles an hour.

"I stopped her from leaving," the man said, "but they took her away in an ambulance. Then the doctors came. They all kept . . . picking at me. Picking .

. picking my brain apart," the man groaned. "But they won't laugh anymore. n.o.body will. I've got the power . . ."

"What . . . power . . .?"

"His power!" the man said. "He's gone now, they're all gone, but I've got to carry the message to the ones who are waiting! I've got to ... got to tell them that it's time to strike!" His eyes were wild, like cracked black saucers behind the magnifying lenses. "They will. They'll do anything I say because I was the Master's pupil and I sat at his feet and worshipped him and I ... I touched him . . .!"

"Nooooo," Gayle whispered hoa.r.s.ely, cringing away.

"I'm the one, it's me who has to go on for him. I've got to find them in all the cities and tell them it's time to find a new Master, to band together." He rubbed at a spot on his forehead. "They'll win next time," he whispered. "And they'll make me like them so I can live forever . . ." He giggled, then his face immediately clouded over.

The Buick flashed past a sign that said Junction Interstate 40-5. The man began slowing the car. He turned off the road and started across the desert. Gayle looked around desperately, but there was nothing-just flatland, cactus, sagebrush. The stars burned with cold indifference. When the speedometer had dropped to under thirty, Gayle tried to leap out, but the man grabbed her by the hair and dragged her across the seat. She whirled, striking him with the lit cigarette, but he gripped her wrist and shook it out of her hand. The car stopped, and he clamped a hand around the base of her neck. The terrible pressure numbed her. He opened his door and dragged her out, flinging her to the rock-stubbled ground.

She started crawling frantically. He followed, his lips wet and gleaming, and kicked her down when she tried to rise. "I can't let you live," he said quietly.

"You want to hurt them, don't you? You want to hurt me . . ."

"No . . ." Gayle said quickly. "No ... I wouldn't-"

"LIAR!" he snarled, and kicked her in the side. She cried out in pain and curled up, trying to shield her face with her hands. He stood over her, a dark shape against the night, his breathing quick and harsh. At his sides his hands clenched and unclenched, tendons standing out in the wrists as if he were squeezing a pair of invisible grips. "You have to die. Right now." And then he was on her, pressing a knee into her stomach. He gripped her throat and started to squeeze. She fought and thrashed, trying to roll away, but his weight had her pinned, and now her head was filling up with blood. She struck him across the face, knocking his gla.s.ses off. "Go on," he said, and grinned.

"Yeah. Fight. Go on . . ."

Gayle pushed against his chin, whimpering like an animal. He moaned in ecstasy as her body shuddered. Her hands clawed at the air, then fell back to the earth.

His eyes closed, his breath coming out in a rasp.

Her right hand touched a rough-edged rock lying just above her head. She concentrated on making her fingers close around it as black and red motes spun before her eyes.

Then she brought her hand up in a savage arc, smashing the rock against the side of his head. He grunted, his eyes opening in surprise. She struck him again, right at the temple, and he fell to one side. Gayle kicked away from him, panting for breath. When she tried to stand up, a tidal wave of dizziness sent her crashing back to her knees, and it was all she could do to crawl. When she looked back over her shoulder, she saw him lying there, one hand clenching like an automaton.

Then he abruptly sat up. His head twitched to the side, as if the blows to his skull had scrambled his nerve impulses.

She crawled away madly, still clutching that rock. "I'll find you!" he shrieked.

"You can't get away! Got to serve the Master .. . got to ... serve . . ." He rose to his feet, fell again, stood up unsteadily, and started coming after her, his hands searching before him.

And then Gayle found herself on the edge of a five-foot gulley stubbled at the bottom with brush and flat rocks. She stared down into it and thought she saw something move very slowly in there. Another movement. Something coiled on a rock. A third one, slithering through the brush into a hole. She saw a diamond design on leathery hide, a flat head with a flicking tongue. Three or more snakes coiled over each other. Another lifted its head toward the human scent. The rattlings began, soft and insistent.

Bellowing with rage, the man was on her. He gripped for her throat again, his face shiny with sweat.

Gayle hooked a foot into his crotch and struck him in the head with the rock as hard as she could. His bellowing was abruptly silenced. She reached up, fingers digging into his shoulders, and shoved him toward the gully. He stood balanced on the edge for a few seconds, hands flailing, then the sand collapsed beneath his feet and he toppled over, falling right into the midst of the rattlesnake nest. There was an enraged cacophony of rattlings and quick, slithering sounds, and then the man began screaming. The screaming went on for a long time. When it had died down to a low, guttural moan, Gayle forced herself to look over the edge.

A four-foot rattler lay coiled on his chest. It struck, hitting him in the cheek; it withdrew and struck again. The man's graying face was covered with punctures. The snakes swarmed around and over him, striking everywhere. They coiled around his arms and legs like bracelets. His left hand had caught one, and the head was crushed, but the tail still writhed. The man's eyes were open, transfixed with horror, and seemed to have sunk back into his head. As Gayle watched, he started shuddering as if electricity rippled through him. The snakes gathered and struck again.

Gayle crawled away and threw up in the sand. After a long time she crawled toward the car, but before she could get there, the pain in her throat and head flared. She put her cheek down against the cool sand and closed her eyes. When she could lift her head again, she saw that the car's headlights had dimmed. A cold wind rustled past her, whispering through the brush. A terrible urge to sleep almost overcame her; she wanted to lie there forever, listening to the wind. If she closed her eyes and slept, she'd be all right, she thought, and she wouldn't have to worry about anything anymore. But the story. She had a job to do now, an important task to carry out. Her voice might be the first of hundreds, warning others to check their bas.e.m.e.nts, their root cellars and their abandoned buildings, to watch for the track of the vampire. It would take time to find all of them, but they were out there ...

waiting. It would have to be done; she had to do it.

There was no time for sleep. She looked up again and saw the first pink traces of dawn on the eastern horizon. There were headlights in the distance, coming along the road. Gayle crawled to the Buick and pulled herself up painfully to sit in the driver's seat. The car was moving past. Gayle hit the horn, but the battery was so weak it gave out only a m.u.f.fled squawk. The car was driving away now, probably headed toward Interstate 40. She found the headlight switch and started punching it on and off as fast as she could. The lights burned low, casting a dim brownish light that she knew would hardly be noticed from the road. "Stop," she whispered hoa.r.s.ely. "Please stop, please stop, please .

The car's brake lights flared. It stopped and sat there for a moment or more. Then, slowly, it began to back up. Gayle watched as a man got out. He stood beside his car, as if uncertain. Then he started walking toward the Buick as a woman in the pa.s.senger seat rolled down her window. The round faces of two children peered out the rear windshield.

The man was middle-aged and looked terribly haggard. There was a bandage on his forehead. His eyes were wide and fearful and, as he approached the Buick, Gayle saw that he had something in his hand. "What's wrong?" he said in a trembling voice. "Miss? You okay?" He stopped several yards from the car, as if he might decide to run at any second.

"Need help," Gayle whispered. "Need . . . ride . . ." She stepped out of the car toward him, and as her knees buckled and she fell to the ground, she saw him thrust his hand forward. The object he held gleamed with dawn's faint light, and it was the most beautiful thing Gayle had ever seen. A crucifix.

Afterword.

Robert McCammon Tells How He Wrote They Thirst With They Thirst, my fourth novel, I decided to kick out all the stops and go for the throat.

They Thirst began, actually, as a novel called The Hungry. It was set in Chicago, and involved a gang of vampiric teenagers. I got about two hundred pages into it before I began to feel constricted. When you get that feeling, you know things aren't going right. You have to put aside the ma.n.u.script and think about it, and let me tell you that deciding to cast away two hundred pages of a ma.n.u.script and start over again from scratch is the kind of decision that makes cold sweat break out on your skin.

I wanted a vampire novel with a huge cast, set in a city where anything was possible. Ah, Los Angeles. The City of Angels. Eternal Youth Shall Reign Forever, Amen.

So I started over, and They Thirst was born.

It has always interested me that from time to time I meet someone who has read They Thirst and lives in Los Angeles. They usually want to know how long I lived there, because certainly I had to be a native of L.A. to get all those streets and landmarks correct. The truth is that I visited Los Angeles for an intensive weekend of research. I trundled off in my rented car on the freeways, maps in hand, and went to every location that I'd already decided needed to be in the book. It was my first trip to Los Angeles, I was there alone, and I was staying in a Hispanic hotel in downtown L.A. that supposedly had been a mecca for stars back in the 1920s. At least that's what the guidebook said. Valentine had a suite there. I fear he wouldn't recognize the place now.

But I spent most of my time like a real native-on the road. And while I was in Los Angeles, I read a magazine article about runaways that seemed to me to hit the heart of the atmosphere I was after.

A young girl who'd run away from her home in the Midwest was talking to the reporter, telling him where she lived. It was a shuttered-up motel near the Strip, she said. She and her friends crashed in the rooms on an upper floor. It was an okay life, she said. There were rats, but it was okay. They had mattresses to sleep on, and they panhandled on the Strip for drug money. It was okay. Like another society, just different. But, she said, she and her friends didn't have anything to do with the men who lived down in the motel's bas.e.m.e.nt. She couldn't understand how anybody could live like those men did, down in that place with no light. She said they did . . . terrible things. But hey, live and let live, right?

The thing is, there are so many dark bas.e.m.e.nts in Los Angeles. And shutteredup motels. And houses with histories. And so many, many victims. A friend of mine, also a writer, lives in Los Angeles and asks me why I hate his city. I don't hate L.A., but it scares the h.e.l.l out of me, even without vampires. My first sight of his city, from the airplane, was a sprawling urban wasteland unlike anything I've ever seen in my life. I mean, the place is huge.

I grew up and live in a city that hasn't yet reached a million population, so you might imagine my reaction when I saw the Los Angeles area for the first time. It was a beautiful day: the sun shining, the traffic buzzing around, people going on about their lives.