Darker Than Weird: Fourteen Tales of Horror

Love in the Time of Dracula

“There is no greater glory than to die for love.” —Márquez

We never should have come to New York. The skyline was jagged, like broken fangs against the sunrise. The streets were deserted. The vamps were all sleeping deep in their holes, their slaves locked in underground pens during daylight hours. That Big Apple landscape in the morning, all those magnificent towers like sparkling mountains, it messed with our heads, made us think for a minute that there was no danger. We knew better, but still the splendor of the ruins made us careless.

There were about seventeen in our group at that time, strapped with rifles, crossbows, and silver blades. A few carried pistols. We were young and fearless.

Sunlight flared against the shattered skyscrapers, and the wind howled like a ghost chorus. Rats scuttled between heaps of rusted-out vehicles. Mounds of skulls overflowed a line of dumpsters.

“We can’t stay here,” I said. “Too many places for vamps to hide.”

Mudder had been a sharpshooter before the plague. He agreed.

“Sewers and subways full of bloodsuckers,” he said. “A whole city of ’em down there. Thousands of prisoners in the breeding pens.”

The others looked from me to Marion. As usual, they waited for her to make the final decision. She shielded her eyes from the sun’s glow and scanned the empty streets.

“We came here to find transport,” she said. “So we’ll be here until we do. For now, we find an old hotel with some intact beds. “ Our bus had broken down a hundred miles west, and we’d hoofed it since then, sleeping mostly in abandoned basements.

“What we need is a good boat,” Mudder said. “Sail away from all this shit.”

“To where?” I asked. “Everywhere else is just as fucked up.”

“Boys,” Marion said. “You’re missing the point.” She rested her big gun across her shoulder and lowered her shades so I could see her green eyes. Deep green eyes, like the summer leaves I remembered from childhood. Green, fresh, and full of sunlight. The most beautiful eyes in the world. “We’re not leaving until we find something to drive. So we might as well make ourselves comfortable.”

We found a big luxury hotel that hadn’t been completely stripped by raiders. Getting into the building was no problem, and we climbed to the thirty-third floor before we found a suite that was pretty much intact. We built a fire in the stairwell to cook some squirrels we snared in Central Park. We slept with our bellies full as the sun went down.

So far the search for a functioning vehicle — and the fuel to power it — had been fruitless. Most of the cars and trucks we found were burned out, trashed, or rusted to immobility. And we had yet to find any gas. The vamps had secured all of these resources and tucked them away underground somewhere. We heard rumors of blood-warrens, underground cities where vamp hordes lived for years without ever coming up for moonlight. I had hoped we’d never find one of them. I should have known that Mudder was right. We were camping on top of the new New York — the one that only came to life in the dark. The NYC underground used to belong to the rats, but now even they served the master.

Sleeping with Marion in that fantastic hotel room — a relic from the world we both remembered — I dreamed about the slave-pens. Half-starved families stuffed into tiny cages, kept alive in the dark until their time came. Then the hooded ones came to choose the victim. The vamps would feast and the shriveled bodies were burned, or dumped into mass graves. In the dream I lay among the dead bodies, thirsty for the blood that was drained from my withered body. I suffocated and choked, and finally fangs grew from my mouth, and I rose up as one of them. That’s when I woke up shivering and sweating, like I always did. Always that same damn dream. Marion held me tight, and her whispers brought me back to reality. The first time I ever told her that I loved her was after one of those nightmares. She had gotten used to them over the years.

“Let’s get out of here,” I said. She hushed me with a finger to my lips. We made love, and the fear faded as it always did. Fear can’t stand against love. It never could.

“It’s all right,” she said. “It’s all right.” She knew what had happened to my parents, my sister. She knew I never wanted to talk about it. But I couldn’t help dreaming about it. I told her again that night how much I loved her.

“You better,” she said. She kissed me.

That night we couldn’t hear anything from the streets below. There must have been vamps down there, roaming about looking for strays. Or maybe they stayed in their underground city enjoying the comfort and privilege of their status. The next day we searched another sector of the city for transport. We found some tires that were still in good shape, but nothing to put them on. A few old car batteries that were still operational, but not a drop of gas.

“Tomorrow let’s hit the docks,” Marion said.

“Yeah, let’s find that boat.” Mudder said. He drank from an ancient bottle of whiskey. Marion laughed. We sat around the stairwell fire, eating canned beans.

“Where you wanna go, Mudder?” she asked. “Europe?”

“Yeah,” Mudder grinned, his dirty face lighting up. “Par-ee, the City of Lights!”

“Paris is a graveyard,” I reminded him.

He gave me a dirty look.

“The whole world’s a graveyard,” Marion said.

The others didn’t talk much. In our band talking could get you killed. We had learned to be silent, to the point that it had become our greatest habit.

Torres found an old flat-screen television. Nobody thought it would work, but he plugged it in anyway. The electrical grid had fallen apart years ago. To all of our amazement, the stairwell was suddenly full of blaring voices. Colorful images sprang to life on the screen, rabid pixels assembling into faces and figures.

“Holy shit,” Mudder said.

We gathered around the tube and watched as Torres turned the sound to a bearable level. And there he was, staring us right in the face: Count Dracula, Master of the World. It was some kind of talk show hosted by vamps, interviewing Drac like they used to interview heads of state. His voice was soothing, his face handsome beyond belief, his eyes miniature suns, red as blood and impossible to ignore. He wore a black suit and red silk tie, a golden amulet bearing his family sigil hanging at his breast. His hair was black as night, groomed to perfection, not a single strand out of place. About his golden chair lay or squatted his Brides, half-naked vamp women like lazy cats, rubbing their cheeks against his knees and hands. His shoes were black patent leather, and his fingers were long and expressive as he spoke directly to the camera.

There was too much interference and static to hear exactly what he was saying, but his smile held us all at attention. His ivory smile and his blood-bright eyes. Snatches of conversation emerged from the static: “…Old Romania is new again…”, “…human stock being managed toward optimum levels…”, “…after thousands of years the world’s true order has been restored…”, and something about “…carrying the wisdom of our blood to the stars…”

An audience of vamps shouted and applauded onscreen. A crowd of slaves were led into the TV studio by their neck-chains, and the pleasant talk-show atmosphere became an orgy of bloodletting. The vamps drank deep from the throats of their victims, while the master watched from his high seat. His eyes were still smiling.

“Turn it off,” I said.

Marion sat transfixed by the spectacle, along with everybody else.

“Turn it off!” I screamed. I grabbed the set and tossed it down the stairs. It exploded in a shower of sparks and lay still.

Marion looked at me. “Never seen him before,” she said. “Not his face.”

“Me neither,” said Jenny. She was only sixteen, the youngest member of our group. Another survivor from a massacred family. Sandy and Colleen, both in their 60s, sat in quiet contemplation. Drac’s irresistible beauty had scarred their minds.

“Marion?” I slapped her face gently. “Snap out of it.”

She looked at me and the spell was broken. She smiled.

“Hey, man,” Torres said, as if waking up. “You broke my television.”

Marion was too quiet that night. I knew something was wrong.

The next day we searched the harbor where the wrecks of trading ships lay like dead gargantua, slowly rusting into oblivion. There wasn’t much international travel these days. No more airlines either. Vamps didn’t like to cross water much, and they had no real reason to travel for the most part.

We found a small trawler — a fishing boat with a working motor. A few hours later we liberated six barrels of fuel from a wrecked warehouse and fired up the engine. The sun was low above the ruins as the boat’s engine disturbed the air. I knew the engine was too damn loud. It must be echoing off the stone walls of the city, seeping through the cracked streets into the blood-warrens. Into the places where the vamps slept, waiting for sundown.

“It’s getting late,” I told Mudder. “We need to get back. The boat’ll be here tomorrow.”

“Why not set sail right now?” Mudder said. His face turned to Marion — the question was really for her. The dusk light was golden on her braided hair. I should have grabbed her right then and ran, taken her far from that place. But that wasn’t how it worked. The group followed her, not me. I didn’t care to be the leader. Didn’t want the responsibility.

Marion stared at the dark water as night rolled in above the waves. “Yeah, we better get back,” she said. “Unless you want to be caught on the open ocean with nowhere to hide when the vamps wake up and start flying around. Leave now and we won’t get very far.”

Mudder couldn’t deny the wisdom of her words. We had all seen vamps sprout wings, or melt into the shapes of giant bats. At night they not only ruled the earth, but also the skies above it. Never forgetting this was key to our survival.

We killed the engine and hid the boat behind a wrecked battleship. We stocked it with the barrels of fuel we had found and planned to return the next day. We reached the hotel just before sunset, but dark shapes were already moving through the rubble as we crept indoors.

Everybody in the group was excited, nervous about the nautical adventure we planned. “What if we found an island out there?” Mudder said. “Somewhere there ain’t no vamps? Would could hide there forever.”

Marion said nothing.

“If we stay here,” Torres said, “it’s only a matter of time until they find us. Drain us dry. We have to try this…it’s the only possible way to escape hell.”

“I agree,” I said. I waited for Marion to add her own agreement. She stared at the fire, and I wondered what she was seeing. I remembered Dracula’s blood-red eyes glaring through the TV, spanning space and time, unholy photons gliding from the screen to caress her eyeballs and brain. Invading her soul.

“Lemme sleep on it,” she said. I tried to get more out of her, but she only kissed me and distracted me with lovemaking. Afterwards I heard her whispering to the other women. I lifted my head and called out to her. She came back to kiss my forehead.

“Sleep, Danny,” she said. Her hand was cool against my forehead. “No more dreams. Just sleep…”

I should have tossed away the dirty blanket and demanded to know what was going on. Instead, I fell asleep in that comfortable bed. I don’t remember having my usual nightmares that night. I don’t think I dreamed anything at all. I woke up with the first rays of sunlight seeping through the window. I rolled out of bed and stretched my limbs. Outside and far below the broken city spread for miles, a kingdom of rust, dust, and vermin. At first I didn’t notice that Marion was gone. She usually woke up earlier than me and let me sleep for awhile. But she wasn’t in the stairwell stoking the fire or making coffee. None of the other men were awake yet. Then it hit me.

The women gone. All of them.

I ran down the stairs, screaming Marion’s name. I ran all the way to the street, when Mudder caught up with me and dragged me back into the shadows, trying to calm me down. Slowly it began to sink in. Marion was gone, along with Jennifer and the two older women. At some point in the dead of night they had abandoned us.

“Where are they?” I asked. “Where did they go? There’s nowhere to go.”

“Yes there is,” Mudder said. Our eyes locked.

“The boat.”

Now there were only thirteen of us — ten grown men and three boys between 10 and 14. They might as well have been full-grown men after growing up in such a world. We stopped thinking of them as kids once they had killed their share of vamps. Now we all ran through the cold bright morning, clutching our weapons and packs, hoping that we hadn’t really lost our women, that they would be waiting for us at the boat. That they had come along early to prepare for the exodus.

We reached the docks and saw that the boat was gone. Not a sign of it.

I sat down on the wharf’s edge and stared at the sparkling blue ocean. Somewhere out there four women were gliding into the unknown. Why had they done it? Why had they forsaken us? A couple of the men began to weep. Others started beating on each other to release their anger. Mudder sat down next to me, almost as heartbroken as I was.

I reached into my pocket for cigarette and found a letter from Marion. She had written it with a ball-point pen from one of the hotel desks, on stationary printed with curling lavender flowers. I didn’t need to read it to know what had happened. I already knew it in my heart. I read it anyway.

She started with an apology, then told me how much she loved me, how good I was for her. She went on about how grateful she was to have known someone like me. She saved the real message for the end of the letter:

The master calls, Danny.

He whispers in my dreams.

Even when I’m awake, I hear him.

I didn’t know until I saw him. Until I saw his face on that TV, I mean. I didn’t understand. But now I do. I know you’re going to hate me for leaving, but I am sorry. I had no choice.

I saw it in his eyes.

I belong to him now. We all do.

I’ve spoken with the other women and we’ve all agreed. Together we stand a better chance of crossing the water and reaching Romania. It’s where we belong.

Stay here and keep yourself alive, Danny.

Please forgive me.

There’s nothing I can do to resist him. Not since I’ve seen his face.

I belong to him.

Don’t come after me.

There was more, but that was the gist. His insane power drew women to him and made them his willing slaves. It worked even through broadcast media. Or maybe that old TV had never really worked at all; maybe it had been some kind of spell. Dracula’s dark magic, cast across the world from his icy mountain, summoning fresh concubines to his castle. Now he had Marion. Or he would, as soon as she reached his mountain, looked into his perfect face again, bared her neck to his fangs. To him she would be another piece of livestock, another slave to satisfy his needs both carnal and bloody. Just another stolen soul, another Bride of Dracula.

Unless of course she died on the long journey to Romania. I knew she would make it. I didn’t know if I could survive without her — if any of us could survive without her — but I knew she would make it to that castle. I knew Drac would admire her strength as he made her his slave. He would taste it in her sweet blood.

“Whadda we do?” Mudder asked.

He and Torres looked to me for an answer. So did everybody else.

“Let’s go back to the hotel,” someone said. “We need to hide.”

“No,” I said, watching the sun reach its zenith. “No way in hell.”

“Then whadda we do?” Torres said.

“Find another boat,” I said.

And just like that I was their new leader. I didn’t ask for it, didn’t really want it, but the guys just followed me. I guess they figured I had been the closest to Marion, so I would have to do now. Or maybe they were just scared shitless and needed me to pull them out of it.

The vamps came for us that night. We heard them coming up the stairwell, so we had time to prepare. Mudder greeted the first blood-sucker with a Molotov cocktail in the face. I knew he’d regret losing the booze, but it was an effective method. The vamp went down in a blaze of flames, wings and skin blackening to ash. They poured through the doorwell, trampling the burnt one’s body, hissing open-mouthed at us like cobras, ripping at our throats and bellies with their filthy claws. We opened fire until our ammo was gone, then the bladework began. It was Marion’s go-to strategy. She had turned our haphazard brutality and survival instincts into focused teamwork. Automatic weapons were good to have, but ammo never lasted.

It always came down to cross and blade. Wetwork.

We lost two men that night. I don’t remember their names. Admitting that still shames me. In my defense, they were new to the group. Next day we found a new hiding spot. That’s the trick of surviving in a world of vamps — stay invisible unless the sun is out. Any sign or whiff of you in the night, and they’ll track you like bat-nosed hounds. The sound of the trawler’s engine before sunup must have tipped them to the presence of wild humans in the city. They had followed Marion’s trail right back to the hotel. In the process of leaving us behind, the women had also revealed our location.

I didn’t blame Marion for it. She was under his spell. She loved me as much as I loved her. She couldn’t help the call that made her leave, but she had still tried to spare me. It’s why she left that note for me.

It took us weeks to find another intact fishing boat and scavenge a few more barrels of fuel. Sometimes we tussled with roaming bands of vamps, but we managed to sail out of NYC harbor before its subterranean hordes came pouring out to devour us. We sailed past Lady Liberty, something I had never seen with my own eyes. Blackened by fire and scored by dozens of mortar wounds, she looked more like a Goddess of Death than a symbol of freedom. Someone had spray-painted a pair of crimson fangs protruding from her lips. I wondered if vamps had a sense of humor after all. Maybe some stray resistance fighter had done it to make a final statement. I never got an answer.

On the open ocean we retched and puked and clutched our bellies. Twelve of us living on canned food, bottled water, and a stash of beef jerky Mudder had found in a burned-out supermarket. Only one of us had any real experience at sea. His name was Gimble, he was from Florida, and he hadn’t said a word in six years. Not since his own family was wiped out. He’d been in the Navy back when one existed, and after that was he was an avid boater. He wrote messages to me on little pieces of paper he carried around with one of those stubby little pencils.

“Our lives are in your hands,” I told him. The boat rocked beneath us as the coastline faded away. I held onto the rail and tried not to dry heave again. Gimble shook his head. He wrote something down and showed it to me.

We can’t hide out here.

When sun goes down we’re fucked.

“You got a point,” I said. I stared across the waves, watching the sunlight dance like diamonds. “But they may not follow us over the big salt. They don’t like the water one bit.”

Gimble wrote again. Do you think they went after Marion?

“No,” I said. “I think they wanted her to go. She’s going to him. They all are.”

Sorry, Gimble wrote.

“Can you get us to the French coast? No bullshit.” I had only half-believed him when he told me the first time. I would risk anything to go after Marion. I’d have made the voyage myself in a goddamn rowboat if I had too.

I can do it, Gimble wrote. Unless something kills me first.

I showed him the automatic rifle slung across my shoulder.

“We have plenty of ammo and real sharp eyes,” I said. The boys had stocked up at an abandoned department store before we left. More guns, plenty of bullets.

I don’t trust guns. Not against vamps, Gimble wrote.

I pulled the silver blade from its sheathe. It sliced the sunlight into tiny rainbows.

Now THAT I trust, Gimble wrote.

He pulled out a sharpened iron cross that he used as stake. He’d staked hundreds of vamps with it. We all carried something like it. Gimble’s other hand scribbled with the little pencil.

That and this.

During a month at sea we saw three minor storms and ran completely out of provisions. We tried fishing, but the things we pulled out of the ocean were not fish. They weren’t quite squids or urchins either, but something like a combination of the two. They bit a few fingers off before the men stopped fishing altogether.

I sat hungry in the bow of the boat, watching the flat horizon of neverending blue. The NYC vamps never did come after us. Maybe they wanted us gone. Maybe they knew we were headed toward the master. Or maybe they knew we’d starve and die out here, and we weren’t worth the trouble of a chase. They had millions of slaves to feed on, mile after mile of underground pens. Vamps never went hungry in Drac’s world.

I thought the sea would kill us long before vamps did. The long nights were the worst. We had been used to hiding and sleeping at night — living only during the daytime. It was the key to our survival on the mainland. But out on the ocean we couldn’t sleep much. The rocking of the boat was constant, and even when it no longer made us sick, it still kept us awake. The threat of being exposed on the open water kept everybody on edge. We all knew that if we let our guard down, that’s the moment something shitty would happen. So we sailed on, bleary-eyed and hollow-bellied, day after day and night after night.

Something huge passed over us one night. It blotted out the stars and I wondered how such a massive bulk could stay aloft. It must weigh tons. A mountain of black flesh glimmered with slime, which fell across the sea like a soft rain. Men rushed for the shelter of the cabin to avoid getting that scum on their skin. Samuel, the 14-year-old, took a glob of slime right in the face. His flesh dissolved into a steaming mess as he stumbled over the railing and fell into the sea.

The leviathan’s wings made terrible winds as it passed over us. The lights of its roaming eye-clusters glowed like red moons. I thought it might swallow us whole, until I realized that we were actually beneath its notice. Just a tiny speck of metal bobbing on the ocean with a few tiny meat-morsels clinging to it. Torres wouldn’t stop screaming, even after the leviathan rose into the stars. Or maybe it flew behind the moon. I couldn’t really tell.

Mudder slugged Torres to knock him out, but when he woke up again he came at me like a rabid dog. His eyes spewed green mucous and clots of blood, his yellow teeth tore at my sleeve. Mudder shot him in the back of the head, and we tossed his twitching corpse over the rail. Jenkins said a few kind words, but we all knew Torres was better off dead than starving out here with us.

“How do you do it?” Mudder asked me. He drank from his last bottle of Tequila, drowning out the guilt of killing Torres. They had been friends. “How do you keep going? Why not just give up and die?”

“If you wanna die, then go ahead and die,” I said. “Nobody can stop you. Me, I’m gonna find Marion.”

That seemed to satisfy him. We finished off the bottle.

It’s almost time to make that final climb. The sun will be up soon, and I won’t have to hide in this crevice anymore. There isn’t much time to tell you how we came to ground south of Paris and marched on foot across the vamp-infested countryside.

We found provisions in abandoned hamlets and bombed-out villages. Nobody starved to death. The French countryside was quiet, green, and beautiful during the daytime. At night we hid in old cellars, caves, and decrepit factories, always making our way toward Switzerland, then on into Austria and Hungary.

We even met a few resistance bands in those mountains, folks hiding away from Drac’s world right in the shadow of his own kingdom. They helped us out more than once, getting us out of jams, offering us a place to stay, restocking our ammunition when we needed it. But we were outsiders who didn’t speak their language. We never stayed more than a single night with any band of survivors. Somewhere along the way we lost Gimble, along with about half our number.

As we crossed the Romanian border a patrol of military vamps ambushed us. They wore the shapes of men with black-and-crimson uniforms, but the wings of demons grew from their backs. I could tell you every bloody detail of that fight. It still replays in my head every damn night. I watched them tear out Mudder’s throat, and there was nothing I could do. I took out the vamp that killed him, but there were so many more of them. I could tell you that I killed twenty of the bastards, or even thirty. I could lie and say I was a hero that day. But I ran away. They tore the last of my friends to pieces as I slipped into a gulch and ran until the sun came up.

It was a coward’s escape. But I was too close to die now.

Too close to Marion.

Day after day I watched the towers of Castle Dracula rising from the range ahead of me. I would reach it alone, weeping for those I had abandoned. Only when I came to stand before the mountain did I realize there was no more road to follow. No way up to the master’s house. But I had come prepared for that.

For six days I’ve been climbing, and every night I write in Gimble’s notebook.

But now it’s time to leave it behind and do what I came to do.

Time for one last climb.

Time to find Marion.

I wrap the notebook in a plastic bag and stash it beneath a flat rock. A message for future generations, if there are any. A record of my existence and Marion’s. A love note for the ages. The gun is too heavy and clumsy for this part of the climb, so I leave it behind with the heavy pack. Now it’s just me, my ropes and crampons, my iron spikes. The wind screams in my face like a devil.

The sun comes up and the great wall of ice turns into a wall of fire.

I climb. Halfway up the ice-wall my hand slips, but I only fall a few hundred feet. The impact knocks me out, and I wake up hanging from the ice over a snowy abyss. Clutching my way back upward, I have to ignore the pain. Like the cold, it simply doesn’t exist. Only love exists. Drawing me closer to Marion with every frozen inch.

I don’t know how long I’ve climbed, but the sun is almost down when I finally reach the walls of black stone. The outer wall is far easier to climb than the icy slope of the mountain. I catch my breath, adjust my gear, and scale it quickly.

I stand before the dark towers as the sky turns crimson, and I don’t have to wonder which tower holds Marion. I can hear her voice. She calls out to me on the frigid wind. A mass of bloated bats swirls into the sky. Flamelight glimmers in the windows of the fortress now. I follow Marion’s voice. But I don’t speak her name. Not out loud. Not yet.

In the courtyard below the wall vamps rise from their stone couches and rush to intercept me. They shriek at the iron cross as my silver blade cuts them down. I leave a trail of severed limbs and heads behind me. Another crimson trail made by the magic of cross and blade.

Daniel…

Marion’s voice. Calling for me.

I am here…

Come to me…

No need to ask, babe.

By the time I crawl through the window of her bed chamber, my clothes are sticky with vamps’ blood. The silver blade drips in my fist. I leap from window casement to a floor of exotic carpets. It’s slightly warmer in here than outside. Silence replaces the moaning wind. She sits across from me, her eyes bright as lamps. A cold flame burns in the fireplace. Candles along the walls make shadows dance. I smell lavender, and blood, and that unique smell that was always hers. The lovely scent of Marion.

My heart beats faster, and my numb fingers begin to ache.

“Oh, Daniel…” She rises. “I told you not to come after me.”

“But you knew I would,” I say.

She only smiles, showing fangs bright as pearls. Her eyes are still green. Green and glowing. Her lips are bright as blood, her skin pale as snow. She wears a diaphanous gown woven from fog or dreamstuff.

“I love you.” I say the words like a magical spell, feeling stupid and giddy.

She stares at the blue flames writhing in the fireplace.

“I belong to the master now,” she says. Avoiding my eyes.

“No,” I say. “You love me, Marion. I feel it.”

She looks at me the way she used to. She doesn’t deny it.

“It’s not possible,” she says. “You’ll have to kill me.”

Her eyes focus on the iron cross in my left hand. I drop it and the silver blade to the floor. More stains for the master’s fine carpets. My hands tremble like an old man’s.

“I could never hurt you,” I say.

“Then why come all this way? What do you want from me?”

I tear off my shirt to bare my neck.

I don’t have to say another word.

She knows exactly what to do.