UNQUENCHABLE
by
David Dvorkin
Chapter Two
First, he needed money.
He went back inside the coffee shop and called Dale Whitmer on the pay phone. As soon as she answered, he said quickly, "Don't hang up. Just listen. I think I know how to find Elizabeth and get her to come back here, but I'll need some money for a plane ticket."
There was silence at the other end, but he could sense Dale listening. She too had been bitten by Elizabeth. She too yearned to feel that bite again.
"A ticket to Colorado, where I first met her," Venneman continued. "She has a house there, in the mountains. It's home to her. I'm sure she's gone back there."
"Yes," Dale said in her dull voice that had been full of life before Elizabeth. "I should have thought of that myself. I'll go there and find her." She hung up.
Venneman cursed aloud. He searched his pockets and found another quarter. He punched in Dale's number again, but this time there was no reply. Christ, he thought, she could already be on her way to the airport to try to get a flight out there!
Now where was he to get the money for an airplane ticket?
Perhaps the same way he used to get money when he was a vampire. The thought astonished him. But why not? There were differences between now and then, of course - mainly that he couldn't take his victim the way a vampire did. He wasn't strong enough to become an ordinary mugger. However, there might be a ready-made victim waiting for him. Jill and Hapgood had eluded him, but their victim was probably past eluding anyone by now.
Suddenly it occurred to him where he should look for that victim.
He wished he had thought of the place earlier, but there was no point in reprimanding himself now. Perhaps you didn't want to think of it before, he told himself. Perhaps you were too frightened to let yourself think of it. Now the vampires are gone, and it will be safe.
In Denver, he and Jill had hunted together one night. After Jill had selected their prey, they had taken him to an area of partially demolished buildings. There was a similar place within walking distance of the coffee shop. There was no logic involved in Venneman's thinking of the place. As soon as the image of the ruined buildings occurred to him, something drew him toward them. Once again, he felt a vague hint of something, a tendril of some other reality intruding into this one, a faint trace of a vampire sense. He responded to it without hesitation.
He didn't walk, though, despite the closeness of the place. He drove. He felt weak from his wound, and the chill of the night air was making him shiver with what seemed almost to be a fever. But more than his illness caused him to take his car. He wanted the protective metal shell of the car around him just in case the two vampires hadn't yet left the area.
Venneman parked on a dark side street. The sidewalk here was narrow. Beyond it was the blank wall of a parking garage. It was solid brick for the first three stories. Above that, Venneman knew, it was mostly open. He could not see the openings, but he was familiar with this block and knew they were there. Across the street was the shattered wall of an old building in the process of being torn down. It was in the rubble-strewn lot beyond the wall that Venneman thought Jill and Hapgood might have drained the young man he had earlier seen them with.
He thought: Young man, that's what I call him now. I think of him as their victim. When I was a vampire, I used to think of them as walking sacks of blood, just the way Jill and Elizabeth do. And Hapgood, no doubt.
He thought: I'm killing time. I'm hiding in my car, because I'm afraid to get out and look. I'm afraid of the dark. When I was a vampire, I loved the dark.
He had loved the grey, pearly light that illuminates the night to a vampire's eyes. Later, when he had moved on to become something greater even than a vampire, he had loved the warm, red glow that had replaced the grey light - until the red glow had become transformed into something that threatened him. Now, parked in the middle of the block, far from the nearest streetlight, he could see little even after his eyes had grown accustomed to the dark.
He opened the door and got out. I'm just a sack of blood myself, now, he thought as he walked across the street. A half-full one, too weak and empty to appeal to a vampire.
He walked cautiously, holding his left arm against his side. He was terrified of falling these days.
He had fallen once. His side had split open agonizingly and audibly. Blood had spurted from the opening.
He had been at work at the time, at one of his series of menial jobs. He had staggered down the hall to the first-aid station, his arm pressed to his side to hold himself together.
He had managed to close the opening in his side with tape. He had been sure he would die from loss of blood or infection, but the wound had closed itself again, as it always did - partially, incompletely. A layer of skin had formed over the opening and he had been able to get on with his normal, diminishing life. Ever since then, he had been frightened of unseen hazards on the ground.
He reached the broken wall and stopped, leaning against it. His heart was pounding. He could feel every pulsation in the pool of blood that filled the hollow in his side. He put his hand against his side and pressed gently, as though to make the pounding quieter. The layer of skin covering his wound pulsated with the beating of his heart, with the waves coursing through the miniature sea of blood filling the hole in his side.
He remembered how acute his senses had been during his vampire days. Vampires could smell blood and hear heartbeats. If they were still there, beyond this wall, waiting silently in the darkness, they would know he was here.
He held his breath and willed his pulse to slow.
He closed his eyes, not wanting to see death swooping down on him.
Minutes passed. Nothing happened.
After a while, Venneman stepped cautiously over the tumbled bricks and into the rubble-strewn lot.
The wall cut off what little light there was on the street. Venneman stared into the darkness, straining his eyes. He could see nothing. He could hear nothing, smell nothing. In his vampire days, he had never felt threatened because his senses had given him such a complete picture of his surroundings. He had been fully aware of all humans near him, of animals, even of insects in the underbrush. Now he felt bereft of all senses, swaddled in cotton, at the mercy of invisible dangers.
Venneman slid his feet forward. The ground was rough, uneven. In the daylight, he had seen the piles of old bricks. Now he felt them with his feet.
Despair overcame him.
How could he navigate through this yard in the darkness? Even in daylight, it would be a dangerous place for him in his current condition. A fall could kill him. Suicide to try to walk around here in the dark! Even if the young man were here, lying dead in the dark, how could Venneman find him?
He gave up and returned to the sidewalk. Here he could at least see the distant streetlight. That faint light would offer no protection should the vampires be here and decide to attack him, but it gave him spiritual comfort. He was a creature of the light, these days.
He walked slowly and painfully back across the street to his car.
As the temperature dropped, the air grew clammier. Venneman leaned against the car and remembered a night in the dry, bracing winter cold of the Colorado Rockies. Newly minted as a vampire, he had walked along a country road, easily carrying his heavy suitcase on his shoulder while he waited for a ride. He had listened to tiny animals in the underbrush while he walked. He had breathed the bitterly cold air, and it was a tonic to him. He had found his ride with two vacationing policemen, two scoffers at the regulations governing hunting. Later, he had gorged himself on the two men's blood. He thought of that vigor and sensual pleasure and utter healthiness now while he leaned weakly against his car and shivered and the blood pounded in his unhealing wound.
He felt someone die.
Venneman jerked back from the car and stared wildly about him.
He had felt it! It couldn't be an illusion. An illusion couldn't feel so strong, so real, so textured. In front of him, across the sidewalk, in the parking garage, three or four stories up, someone had just died.
My God, he thought, it's a vampire sense! Something is left in me!
His pain and weakness forgotten, Venneman ran along the sidewalk, looking for the entrance to the parking garage. He found it. There was a staircase leading up. It was made of concrete and had a rusted metal railing beside it. Venneman could just see it in the light from the streetlight.
Venneman started up the stairs. He slowed as he climbed. His earlier burst of energy deserted him. He held onto the railing and pulled himself up. He moved ever more carefully, afraid of reopening his side, conscious of his weakness. His heart pounded and he gasped for breath.
It took an eternity to reach the third story.
On the landing, Venneman stopped and leaned heavily against the railing. His legs were shaking. Again, he stared into the darkness, trying hopelessly to penetrate it.
Something took form in the darkness, a faint glow, fading even as he became aware of it.
Venneman pushed himself away from the railing and went toward the glow as quickly as he could. For the moment, he had forgotten about the danger of tripping.
The closer he came, the more the faint light took on a shape. By the time Venneman had reached it, the glow had become a human form, a man, stretched out on his back, motionless. He wore a windbreaker, which was open, and his shirt had been ripped away. His chest was big, heavily muscled, and covered with deep gashes. His hands clutched his throat.
Venneman dropped to his knees beside the man and reached out hesitantly to touch him. He put his hand on the man's chest - carefully, avoiding the deep wounds. He could feel no movement at all. No blood came from the gashes. The face was distorted in pain, but Venneman recognized the handsome young man Jill and Hapgood had drawn from the restaurant with them.
Venneman tugged at the man's hands. After a moment, as though reluctant to surrender, they loosened their grip and fell away. Now Venneman could see the gaping, bloodless hole in the side of the man's neck. Ever so faintly, he could smell blood. The smell was so faint that he thought perhaps he was imagining it, or remembering it.
Venneman leaned closer, trying to see more in the vanishing glow coming from the body.
And without thinking, he put his mouth to the wound and sucked.
Venneman jerked back in horror. His stomach heaved, and he fell to one side, landing on his outstretched hands, and tried to vomit. Nothing came out of him.
After a while, he sat back on his knees and closed his eyes. Why did I do it? he wondered. Vampirism isn't a virus. You can't catch it from the wound a vampire leaves in someone else.
He tried to remember what he had been feeling when he had leaned down and put his mouth to the dead man's neck. Nothing. He had been feeling nothing. It had been an automatic reaction, as though he were still a vampire and feeding on the blood of a helpless victim was a natural, automatic thing to do.
Venneman put his hand gently on the corpse's throat and knelt quietly beside it for a long time, unmoving, his eyes closed. He willed the wound to close, willed the man to come back to life.
He could feel the body's temperature dropping.
Not my responsibility, he thought. I didn't kill him. I couldn't have saved him. How could I have stopped two vampires?
He removed his hand and sat back and concentrated on his sense of hearing. He could hear no footsteps or other hint of other humans. Oh, for the vampire hearing that had once let him listen to the heartbeat and blood pulsations of human beings far away! That vampire sense had been so acute that he had had to learn how to ignore it in order to be able to function at all in the human world.
Finally Venneman opened his eyes. He could see better in the dark than before. The body was a pale shadow on the ground. It had become just a hint of the human life it had contained. Had it really glowed for him before, or had that been his imagination? If Venneman had been able to see the fading glow of life in it, then he was still something more than a human being.
Maybe I'm still really a vampire, he thought. Maybe Dinsmuir's machine just suppressed my vampire nature somehow, but now it's reawakening, and if I'm patient and wait, it'll come back fully.
Then a lance of pain shot through his unhealing wound, and he knew better.
He pressed his left arm against his side and held his breath until the pain subsided. Moving carefully, trying not to disturb his aching flesh, Venneman leaned forward again. He patted the man's windbreaker until he felt the bulge of a wallet.
Venneman tried to examine the wallet's contents, but his improving night vision wasn't acute enough for that. Details were fuzzy. He resorted to touch.
He seemed to be in luck. He had been afraid that the wallet would be as empty as college students' usually are, but he could feel a thick wad of bills and three different credit cards. The bills might all be ones and the credit cards might all be out of date, but he wouldn't be able to tell that until he got back to his car and its interior light.
A hand lighted gently on his shoulder.
Venneman froze.
Close to his ear, a voice whispered, "You could have joined us earlier. Jill would have changed her mind in time."
Hapgood's breath touched the side of Venneman's face, sending a wave of terror through him.
The hand tightened on Venneman's shoulder, easily lifted him to his feet, and turned him around.
He strained to make out the features that he knew were Hapgood's. Venneman tried to step back, but the deceptively slender hand on his shoulder kept him in place.
Hapgood's voice was smooth and low. "You differ from the rest of us. I can't yet tell how. Jill told me about your strange feeding habits. Is that it? She said you were exceedingly strong, though. You strike me as weak."
Venneman knew instinctively that the truth would instantly convert him in Hapgood's eyes from a potential sex partner to a sack of blood. "I've caught something from the vampires I've been feeding on," he told the vampire. "It took a while. It's been building. Maybe it's a virus that only infects us."
"Indeed?" Hapgood removed his hand. "Perhaps I should take to heart the teaching that one should be satisfied with one's lot and not go in search of more. We'll encounter each other again, I'm sure."
Hapgood didn't seem to move, but he disappeared. It was as though he had mastered the shape-changing talent of fictional vampires, the ability Venneman had once tried unsuccessfully to find in himself.
Venneman stayed motionless, governed by the instinct of a prey animal not to draw attention to itself. At last, convinced that Hapgood had left, Venneman made his slow, painful way back to the stairs, down them, and to his car.
He slid in behind the wheel and locked the door. He knew that vampire strength was more than sufficient to enable Hapgood or Jill to tear the door off the car to get to him, but nonetheless the car's metal solidity and weight provided the emotional sense of being protected.
In the overhead light, he checked the wallet more carefully. Most of the bills were twenties. The total was almost two hundred dollars. The credit cards were still valid. Jackpot, Venneman thought.
He guessed that the body would be discovered in the morning, when the first cars arrived to use the parking garage, or even earlier, when the first employees arrived to open up the place for the day's traffic. Without the wallet, identification might take a while. He was assuming that there was no other identification on the body. Venneman knew he should go back and check the corpse for anything else, but he also knew he couldn't force himself up there again. That was beyond him both physically and emotionally.
So let's assume he has no other ID on him, Venneman thought. How long will it take before the police determine who he is and start looking for someone using his credit cards?
That was impossible for Venneman to estimate. The person who found the body might just happen to be someone who had known the man. In that case, the watch for someone using the victim's credit cards would begin immediately. Or the man might have been from out of town, just passing through, and it might take weeks before he was identified.
Safest to assume the minimum time, Venneman decided.
He checked the time. It was just after ten p.m. Say eight hours at least, he thought. Might be time enough, especially if there's a late-night or early-morning flight leaving soon. Once I'm in a rental car in Denver, I'll switch to cash and it won't matter.
During the drive to the airport and the flight to Denver, such calculations kept Venneman's mind off the dead man and his attempt to suck blood from the wound in his neck. He was less successful at trying not to remember Hapgood and his own reaction to the vampire. He wasn't ashamed of feeling fear. But he couldn't rid himself of a memory of the arousal that had mingled with the terror.
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