The Nightmare People

4.

Sandy couldn’t drive; he was bleeding from the mouth, and the hand that had been bitten the day before was bleeding again as well. His shirt was scorched and blackened, and he had minor burns on his arms and face.

Smith seemed dazed; Maggie was incoherent. Khalil took the wheel.

They only had three long blocks to cover to Annie McGowan’s house, but as a group they weren’t fit for walking or running.

Besides, the car would be harder to follow, should the nightmare people attempt pursuit.

Khalil pulled into the driveway at 706 Topaz Court, parked the car neatly on the apron, not blocking the garage, and then turned his attention to getting his passengers safely into the house.

The first step was to get the door open, so that no one would have to wait on the porch. He hurried up the steps and rang the doorbell while Smith helped the burned and bleeding Sandy out of the car and up the walk.

Maggie followed, slowly; now it was she who seemed dazed, while Smith was largely recovered.

Annie answered, and Khalil shushed her before she could exclaim over the sorry condition of the group. He then acted as doorman, herding the others inside before he entered himself.

He made certain the door was locked, and glanced around to reassure himself that there were no open windows before he followed the others into the living room.

Sandy was sitting in one of the armchairs, his head tilted back, while Annie held a cold towel to his lower jaw; the bleeding seemed to have stopped, finally. Maggie was huddled at one end of the couch, curled up in foetal position. Smith was standing by the window, looking out at Annie’s flower garden.

Annie looked up as Khalil entered. “What happened?” she asked.

Khalil shrugged.

“What did happen?” Smith asked. “Sandy, I thought it had you; why’d it let go? What did you do?”

Sandy tried to speak, and almost choked on a fresh flow of blood. He desisted, and managed a half-shrug. He pointed to the knife on his belt – he had managed to sheathe it somewhere along the way – but followed that with another shrug.

“You stabbed one of them?” Annie asked.

Sandy nodded.

“He stabbed it a dozen times, at least,” Smith said. “He cut its throat, tried to cut its head off, and it didn’t even care. And then when it was attacking him he stabbed it in the chest over and over again, and it didn’t seem to notice at first, but then all of a sudden it screamed and let go.”

Annie swallowed, looking at the sheathed knife. “I thought you were going to burn them?”

“We did,” Smith said. “Sandy set one on fire, and its clothes and skin burned off, but that didn’t seem to bother it any more than the knife did.”

Annie shuddered. Maggie curled herself more tightly.

“Maggie,” Khalil said.

Smith looked at her, then at Khalil. “You think it was something she did?” he asked.

Khalil nodded.

Sandy turned his head long enough to glance at Maggie, and then he nodded, as well. “Knife didden’ do nuffin’,” he said, trying not to move his lower jaw as he spoke.

Smith crossed to the couch and sat down. “Maggie?” he said. “What did you do to it?”

“Go ’way,” she said, not moving.

Smith blinked, and wished he’d had more sleep.

“Maggie?” he said again.

“Go ’way,” she repeated, with more emphasis.

Khalil came and stood over her. “Maggie,” he said, “We must know what you did.”

“Don’ wanna talk about it,” she said, and Smith realized that she was sucking her thumb. He reached out and put his hand on her shoulder.

She twitched away. “Go ’way!” she snapped.

“The hell I will!” Smith snapped back. “Listen, Maggie, I know you don’t want to talk about it or think about it, but you have to! Those things are still out there, and they’re probably determined to kill us all, and they’ve already killed Elias and his parents and Bill Goodwin and his whole family and all those other people. We’ve shot them and stabbed them and burned them and driven a fucking stake through one’s heart, and they just smiled at us like we were nothing, and now you did something that hurt one of them, and we have got to know what it was!”

Maggie curled up more tightly than ever.

Enraged, Smith leaned over and yanked her thumb out of her mouth.

She spun around and slapped him across the face, hard.

Smith grabbed one hand, and Khalil grabbed the other, and they held her there, facing Smith.

“What did you do?” Smith demanded.

“I bit it!” Maggie shouted. “That’s all! I bit it, I was so scared and mad I couldn’t help it.”

For a moment, no one spoke, and the room was silent. With a distant hum, the central air conditioning came on.

“You bit it?” Smith asked at last. Maggie nodded.

“What did it taste like?”

“Like shit,” Maggie said, “And there were ashes and bits of skin and it smelled of lighter fluid, and I think I’m going to be sick, let me up.”

Smith and Khalil released her, and she staggered to the bathroom. The others all sat, silently staring at one another, pretending they couldn’t hear her retching.

“Has she been poisoned, do you think?” Khalil asked.

Smith shook his head. “She’s just upset.”

“If they don’t mind knives and bullets,” Annie asked, “Why would a bite bother them?”

Smith shrugged. “Why does a cross bother a vampire?”

“’S no reason,” Sandy said.

“The cross is the sign of God,” Annie said, “and vampires are supposed to be the spawn of hell, so naturally they’d fear it.”

Smith shrugged. “But that’s if you accept the whole Christian worldview. If you don’t know that, it seems pretty arbitrary. Never mind the cross, then; why does it take a stake through the heart to kill a vampire?”

Nobody had an answer to that.

“You mean,” Annie asked, “that it’s all just random? That there’s no sense to it?”

Smith shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said. “As you said, with vampires, there’s the whole Christian mythology thing, where they fear the cross and holy water, and sunlight, which comes from God, and maybe there’s some sort of symbolism to the stake through the heart, I don’t know. Maybe there’s a pattern with the nightmare people, too, a pattern we can figure out.”

“Not Christian,” Khalil said. “The cross did nothing.”

“They’re Jewish?” Sandy suggested sarcastically. The bleeding had stopped again, and he had swabbed away most of the blood.

Smith shook his head. His brain seemed oddly clear for the moment. “No, it’s not that. Look, when there were vampires, people took Christianity and its symbols pretty seriously.”

“They still do!” Annie protested. Smith held up a hand.

Maggie emerged from the bathroom, but stood silently listening.

“No, most people don’t, not really,” Smith said. “A hundred years ago nobody was putting ‘Is God Dead?’ on the covers of magazines. Some people take it seriously, but even for them, the trappings don’t have the same meaning they once did.”

“Whash your point?” Sandy asked. His speech was still a bit mushy, but better, and improving rapidly.

“My point is that vampires were creatures of their time,” Smith replied. “And these things are probably creatures of our time. They’re new, just invented, or evolved, or whatever. They’re meant for now, for the 1990s.”

“So they aren’t Chris… Christians?” Sandy said, working his jaw carefully. “Fine, but what the hell are they, and what’s it got to do with biting? I don’t see biting as the next big fashion trend around here.”

“No,” Smith said, “but nowadays nobody has any grand scheme of good and evil. There’s no moral order to our universe, not when kids are killing each other over crack, and people on Wall Street are getting rich without ever doing anything but playing with other people’s money. We don’t have any God any more, or any real devil, we just have the law of the jungle.”

He realized that Sandy and Annie and Maggie and Khalil were all staring at him, and he hesitated.

“Look,” he said, “It makes sense, doesn’t it? It’s using their own weapon against them, after all. They try to eat us, don’t they? And to kill a vampire, which sucks blood, you stop the blood from flowing with a stake through the heart. It’s the law of the jungle, as I said.”

Smith paused, looking at them all.

“Kill or be killed,” he said. “Eat or be eaten.”