Affliction

69

Henry Crawford wasn't that hurt and normally wouldn't have been on the same floor as Rush Callahan, but putting him a room just down the hallway from Micah's dad meant that all the cops hanging out there could help watch Henry's room, since vampires did have a habit of coming back for humans they'd singled out. Wolves will take the weakest in a herd, the easiest to kill. Though wolves are one of the traditional and most common animals to call for a master vampire, vamps don't think like wolves. They think more like lions.

Lions don't pick the weakest, though they can, and they will take opportunistic kills if offered, or even chase other predators off their kills and eat it. They'll even eat carrion, but when they hunt they go at it like some people enter a bar on Saturday night. They walk into the room, survey the crowd, pick out one they like, and think, 'I'll have that one.' People then spend the night seducing that person to take home for sex.

Lions pick the biggest, toughest water buffalo, or the fastest, juiciest-looking antelope, or whatever strikes their fancy, and then they throw overwhelming force at it. They live as part of a pride of lions, and the bigger the pride, usually, the bigger prey they will bring down, and the more arrogantly they choose it. Lions are the guy, or girl, who believes he, or she, really is God's gift to the opposite sex, and of course, you'll be flattered if they want you, and you will eventually say yes. Most of these people never turn into stalkers, because they are beautiful, sexy, and most people can be seduced. But lions, real lions, don't want sex from their prey, that's what other lions are for; they want to eat you, and unless the water buffalo can fight its way free early in the chase or have enough of its herd to fight back force against force, the lions will bring it down and eat it. Buffalo is big prey, so they kill it first; smaller prey sometimes gets eaten before it's totally dead. Most humans aren't big enough prey for vampires to kill us first. They toy with us, some because they enjoy it, because they can, but others because they're still deciding - do they want sex from us, or servitude, or are we just food?

Henry was still alive. The question was, had they just been playing with him, had they meant to make him their slave, or had the vampire that bewitched him grown to desire him? Food, torment, slavery, or sex; those were the choices between humans and vampires. How could I say that, with Jean-Claude's proposal just a few hours old? In my experience with vampires the overwhelming truth was they saw us as prey. I actually think it was a way of distancing themselves emotionally so they could feed on us. It was the same principle I used at crime scenes to distance myself from the victims. The bodies became its, things, so I didn't run screaming. Live victims are harder; they demand more, and vampires can't feed on the dead.

Some of the vampire community called me a living vampire, but if I was, I didn't have the attitude yet. I would not have picked Henry Crawford junior at six foot seven, or his father, who had not been a small man either, as my victims du jour. I'd seen the group that had been out there in the woods looking for the lost, and there had been so many other men in the group who would have been easier marks than the Crawfords. Why them? Why go for the water buffalo when there'd been so many antelopes to choose from?

Several of my inner beasts sort of 'looked' up at me, if something inside you could look 'up.' They didn't talk like people talk, but I understood them all the same. Sometimes you get tired of antelope, and if you're big enough to take the water buffalo, why not? Until they took the Crawfords the vampires had taken tourists, some families with younger kids, hikers, one runner doing his route through the mountains, elderly couples in isolated areas. They'd been victims of opportunity, like the Crawfords, but everyone else had been much easier marks. Maybe the vampires were learning how to hunt and just decided to take bigger prey?

Tests on the blood around the man's groin had come back human and female. I was betting it was from the female vampire in custody, but we wouldn't know until we got the DNA tests back from the saliva in the bites she'd given to Travers. Because the vampires had lawyered up, we couldn't take DNA samples without them being awake and having their lawyer present. Ares' body had been considered too hazardous to test because of the lycanthropy. They'd been keeping Little Henry knocked out most of the time, because he'd been pretty hysterical any time he started to come to. They couldn't keep him doped up forever, but they also couldn't figure out what was wrong with him mentally and emotionally. Yes, he'd been through serious trauma and his father's death, but it was almost as if he were having hallucinations when he was awake and horrible nightmares if he slept without the drugs. Henry was a very big, strong guy to have the nurses waking him from nightmares or trying to control him during waking hallucinations.

Dr Bill Aimes was tall, athletic in that I-hit-the-treadmill-and-light-weights kind of way, with short blond hair and steel-rimmed glasses. He was stumped at how to help Little Henry. 'Is there anything that a vampire could do to him that would cause waking hallucinations and night terrors?'

'Some vampires can cause terror in a person and feed off it, like a sort of metaphysical snack, but usually they have to be physically closer to do it. It's usually a touch-distance kind of thing.'

'Could they be causing the fear and visions so they could keep feeding off him from a distance?'

I thought about it. 'I'd normally say no, but this vampire has done so many things that I would have said were impossible that I wouldn't rule it out. I can tell you, though, that if he's got a connection to a vampire, I should be able to sense it.'

'How would you sense it?'

'It's hard to explain unless you have a background in psychic ability,' I said.

He smiled and shook his head. 'No, I'm strictly a touch-it-and-it's-real person. I don't even believe in God, because I can't put him in a test tube.'

'You're an atheist?' I asked.

He nodded.

'Then you can't use holy objects against vampires, or faith against the demonic.'

'I think holy objects glow because of the individual's faith in them, and I've never met a demon.'

The way he said it made me ask, 'Do you not believe in demons?'

'If I don't believe in God, it's very hard to believe in the rest.'

'Angels?' I asked.

'Sorry, but no.'

'I'm so sorry,' I said, before I could stop myself.

'Sorry about what?' he asked.

'Your world is very ... narrow, Dr Aimes. I find that sad, and it also means if vampires attack us you have to hide behind all of us believers.'

He laughed. 'I will hide behind you proudly and keep not believing in all the glowy stuff.'

'All right, you can hide behind me, but in the meantime I'll see what I can sense from Henry Crawford.'

'I hope you can give us some clue, because it's almost as if he's continuing to be freshly traumatized in the dreams and hallucinations.'

'Aren't night terrors by definition traumatizing?' I asked.

He seemed to think about that and then nodded. 'I suppose so, but these seem different. I've worked with patients with post-traumatic stress disorder and helped them work through some truly terrible memories, and all I can tell you is that there is something different going on here and I have no idea what it is.'

'Vampire mind games can fuck with stuff,' I said.

He grinned suddenly and gave a small laugh. 'Well, I guess you would be the expert on vampires.'

I agreed with him, gathered up Nicky, and went to see Little Henry Crawford.

70

Little Henry looked smaller lying down than he had standing up, and hospital gowns make us all look somehow shrunken and weak, but none of it could hide that he was still six foot seven, with a spread of shoulders that was almost wide enough to touch the metal railings of the bed. Who would look at this guy and think, Him, I'll have him, and I'll totally fuck - him - up!

Everyone in the search group had been physically smaller, so why him and his dad? I asked Nicky, 'Why did they take him and his father? They're both ex-military, ex-special forces, in good shape, and they are both well over six feet tall. You saw the other search team members; would the Crawfords have been your choice of prey?'

'None of the vampires I saw were ex-military. They're undead, but that doesn't give them experience they didn't have in real life.'

'You're saying they couldn't judge who was dangerous and who wasn't?'

'Not like you and I can.'

'But the two men are still huge; that's not something you need training to see,' I said.

'True.'

'It's like a lion pride going after a giraffe when there are plenty of gazelles to choose from.'

'But if you have enough lions you can bring down a giraffe, and if you have too many lions you need something that big to feed the pride. You said it yourself, Anita. This was the largest group of flesh-eating zombies you've ever seen.'

'Yeah, but they didn't eat the men - the zombies, I mean. The lions caught the giraffe but then didn't eat it; why not?'

'They ate one of them,' he said.

'But even the one they killed, they didn't eat it, not the way they did the others. You saw them, Nicky. They eat all the flesh. They ate enough to disfigure Crawford senior and kill him, but they didn't eat enough of him for the lion pride to be full of giraffe. It's like they were thinking more like serial killers than zombies.'

'Some vampires are serial killers,' he said.

'True, but that doesn't feel like what's going on. I mean, technically most vampires are serial killers, but it's because they have to feed on people, not because they want to kill them. Same outcome, but very different motives.'

'But the person ends up just as dead either way,' Nicky said.

'But serial killers get off on the torture, or the method of killing. The bodies down in the basement were just dead.'

'Throats torn out on most of the bodies I saw,' Nicky said.

'I didn't get much of a chance to see, but the ones near us had intact throats.'

'Probably tore out other major arteries and veins,' he said.

'Probably.'

'From what you've told me, the zombies should have just eaten everything they could hold in their stomach and then left the bodies to be found, or rot, whatever.'

'That's typical,' I said.

'So what caused these zombies to just kill the people and store them?'

I looked at him. 'Say that again.'

'They stored them like groceries, or cords of wood for winter,' he said.

'I thought about the pictures in my history books of the concentration camps with the bodies stacked on top of each other in piles.'

'They weren't piled haphazardly, Anita. It was neat, orderly stacks. You don't body-dump that way, and you don't stack like that for disposal.'

I had a thought for how he knew that, but instead I asked, 'Why would you pile them up like that?'

'It was a food cache.'

'Zombies, even flesh eaters, don't do that, Nicky.'

'Do ghouls do that?'

'If it's an old pack that's been around for a few years undetected, they'll start removing the freshly buried bodies from underneath so that the grave looks undisturbed, and I've seen them keep bodies in a crypt for eating later, but it's rare. I mean, I only know of two cases where ghouls were that organized. They're usually more animalistic.'

'A lot of predators store food for later, Anita. They drag it up trees, bury it under leaves, hide it from other predators, but they plan on eating it later, if nothing else finds it and eats it first.'

I thought about it; he was right about animal predators. 'Okay, if we think of it as just another kind of predator, then why so many bodies?'

'The group must be larger than we know.'

I shook my head. 'There aren't that many people missing. Even if you add up the vampires and zombies that we've already destroyed, there aren't enough missing to need that kind of food. The bodies were the missing, Nicky, if we could have left anything unburned to identify them from.'

'How many zombies would need that kind of food?'

'Hell, I don't know. I've never heard of a group that big.'

'Ghouls then; how many would feed off that kind of stored food?'

I thought about it and tried to figure it out. 'The largest ghoul pack I've ever heard of was more than a hundred, and it was in Eastern Europe. I guess something that big would need that kind of food.'

'But ghouls will eat badly decayed bodies, right?'

'Yes.'

'Will zombies?'

'No, they like fresher meat than ghouls.'

'So, either these zombies are more like ghouls and would have eaten the bodies as they continued to decay, or what?' he asked.

'Or the vampire was planning on needing more food,' I said.

'There's only one reason to need more food, Anita.'

'He's planning to make more zombies,' I said.

'A lot more, but we destroyed his creepy grocery store, so if he still raises that many zombies, where does the food come from?' Nicky asked.

There was a voice from the bed, hoarse as if he hadn't been talking much lately. 'Us, us.'

We turned and found Little Henry looking at us with big brown eyes.

'Us, who?' I asked.

'People,' he said. His eyes went a little wider, lips parting as his breathing sped up.

'What people?' I asked.

Henry opened his mouth and screamed, 'God! God! God!' He sat up in bed, clawing at the tubes and wires.

My cross flared to white-hot fire. I got out my gun, because when the cross flared it meant a vampire was nearby and doing bad things. Nicky had his gun out, too, so we were armed as the nurse and doctor came through the door.

'What did you do?' Dr Aimes demanded as he shielded his eyes from my cross and ran for his patient.

'It's a vampire,' I said. I'd known vampires that could be invisible in plain sight even to me.

Dr Aimes and a small blond nurse were trying to hold Henry so he didn't yank any more tubes out of himself, but it's hard to hold down someone that big. I'd have had Nicky help, but we had other things to do.

'Search the corners of the room by walking along the wall,' I said.

'You think the vamp has been here all along?' he asked.

'I don't know, but my cross says it's here.'

Nicky and I walked the perimeter of the room, guns out and ready, shoulder scraping the wall so even if it tricked our eyes we'd run into it. Invisible doesn't make you less solid.

I was half-blinded by the glow of my own cross. I thought about going for my sunglasses, but I didn't want to let go of the gun with either hand. I caught movement out of the corner of my eye, but it was the nurse being tossed across the room. Henry was still screaming, wordless, ragged, and frantic. Cops and more nurses came in to try to help hold him down, but their holy objects flared to blue-white light, too. The cops pulled their guns.

It was Deputy Al who asked, 'Where's the vampire?'

I explained what we were doing, and we had almost too many people searching the room while the medics fought to hold down Henry and he threw them around like toys. We finished our perimeter walk of the room. Nicky had gotten to the bathroom before I had, and he and another uniformed officer had checked it and called it clear. My cross was still white and blue and glowing, but there was nothing here.

'It's not here, Anita,' Nicky called to me over the screaming.

'There's nothing here,' Al said.

I glanced up at the ceiling; vampires could do that, but not while invisible. It took too much concentration to levitate and use mind tricks to that degree. If there'd been more shadows in the room, maybe a vampire could have done both, but the lights were full on and it was bright as day.

'Then help hold down Henry,' I said.

Nicky put up his gun, because I'd said so, and went to help the doctor and battered nurses. When he moved to help, so did a couple of the other bigger officers, and as soon as they touched Little Henry their holy objects flared brighter, going from blue-white to a pure burning incandescent white. His screams intensified, and he almost threw all that muscle off him, but one of them was almost as big as Nicky; they had enough strength to pin him to the bed.

I saw Dr Aimes pick up a syringe through the glow of the holy objects.

I yelled, 'Aimes, don't do it!'

Dr Aimes turned and looked at me. His glasses were gone, lost in the struggle. His cheek was already swelling a little. 'We have to calm him down. He's going to hurt himself, or someone else.'

'I know where the vampire is,' I said.

'What are you talking about?' He turned toward the IV tube with the syringe.

The room was small enough that I was there in time to grab his arm. 'It's in Henry.'

'What are you talking about?'

'Look at the holy objects when they touch him.'

He blinked at the bed as if he hadn't noticed, and maybe he hadn't. It looked like he'd gotten a good hit to the face. That can ring your bells and disorient you for a while. He turned back to me, looking puzzled. 'I don't understand.'

'I think I do,' I said, 'but it's going to be unpleasant.'

'More unpleasant than this?' Aimes said.

'Maybe,' I said.

'Will it help my patient?'

'Yes,' I said.

'Then do it.'

He should have asked more questions, or maybe I should have waited for him to recover from the blow that he'd had to the side of his head, but I didn't. Because he might get all cautious and reconsider and I didn't want that.

Nicky called to me from the bed, where he was still helping hold down Little Henry. 'What are you going to do?' Nicky was having to work at holding just one arm and part of the upper body. He could bench-press small cars if they had a balance point. He shouldn't have been having to work that hard to hold a human down, not even a really strong one.

I didn't know how to explain it to a room full of people with no psychic or vampire experience, so I said, 'I'm going to find the vampire.'

'How?' Deputy Al asked.

'Little Henry's going to help me.'

'How?' Al asked again.

'Easier if I just show you,' I said, and I started stripping off my weapons. All the men by the bed should have done the same, but there hadn't been time; now there was. I'd take off anything that Henry could grab and use against us, and then I'd have the men do the same one by one, and when we were as safe as we could manage, I'd go exploring. I'd go exploring inside Little Henry Crawford's mind.