Tale of the Dead Town (9 page)

“I have business with you,” D said plainly. “Could I speak to you in private?”

Struck perhaps by the Hunter’s chilling aura, the two deputies quickly got to their
feet, but the sheriff pushed them back down with hands the size of catcher’s mitts.
“Wait just a cotton-picking minute, boys. This here’s the law enforcement bureau.
We don’t take orders from no outsider. Least of all from a stinking Vampire Hunter.
You’re not going anywhere. You’ll sit right here with me and hear what he’s got to
say, you savvy? So, how’s that by you?” The last remark was aimed at D.

D nodded. “Doesn’t matter to me. I just have one question for you. When you were boarding
up the Knight house, did you see anything?”

“What do you mean by ‘anything’?” The sheriff laughed, showing a lot of yellow teeth.

“Were there any unusual items? Strange drugs, papers with formulas or equations? Special
creatures? Anything like that.”

The sheriff snorted loudly, “Of course there wasn’t a damn thing like that.”

“Then I have another question for you. Why did the Knight family leave town?”

“You might wanna ask the mayor that.”

“Did the whole town drive them away, or—”

“Or what?”

“Or were they glad to leave? Which was it?”

“You come here looking to start trouble, buster?!” Sheriff Hutton snarled. The two
deputies braced themselves for action. The sheriff started to rise from his oversized
chair. His rear was only about an inch out of the chair when he stopped dead in his
tracks. D was standing right in front of him. He was just standing there, an unearthly
aura radiating from every inch of his body. That alone kept not only the sheriff but
his two deputies as well from moving a muscle.

“Answer me straight,” said D.

“You—you gotta be fuckin’ kidding me,” the sheriff blustered, but his voice quivered
nevertheless.

“In that case, you leave me no choice.”

Raising his left hand, D pressed it against the sheriff’s forehead. The same vacuous
expression seen on a mental defective spread across the sheriff’s face. Eyes covered
with a semitransparent film and drool coursing from the corner of his mouth, the lawman
stared vacantly into space.

“Why did the family leave town?”

A reply wasn’t soon in coming. No doubt a battle was raging in the sheriff’s mind,
a battle between his own ego and D’s words. The only question was how it all would
end.

“That family . . . was doing freaky experiments . . . Don’t know all the particulars
. . . ” The words were clearly being torn from the sheriff. And it went without saying
the power of D’s left hand was to blame.

“You knew that, and still you did nothing?” the Hunter asked.

“Wanted to . . . but then . . . mayor stopped me.”

“The mayor?” D’s eyes shone. “Why would he do that?”

“Don’t know . . . But I had official orders . . . Wasn’t supposed to do anything .
. . about that family . . . ever . . . Seems the sheriff before me . . . had the same
orders.”

“How long had it been going on?”

“From way back . . . Roughly two hundred years . . . ”

According to what the mayor had said, that was right around the time the eerie stranger
had come on board.

“And their strange experiments had been going on all that time?”

“I . . . I wouldn’t know . . . ”

“Was the Knight family run out of town, or did they leave of their own accord?”

“They . . . ran away . . . ”

“Ran away?”

“Night before they run off . . . mayor gave me orders . . . I went to their house
. . . Knights were there . . . Arrested ’em on the spot . . . just like the mayor
told me to . . . Threw ’em . . . in jail . . . Daughter was with them, of course .
. . Mayor never did tell me . . . why we had to do that . . . Just said they’d committed
a serious offense . . . against the whole town . . . and that was all.”

“I see.”

The “offense,” then, was experiments the Knight family had been conducting for generations.
But what reason would the mayor—who’d always supported the Knights—have for ordering
their arrest? And what could they have told the mayor?

“How did Mr. and Mrs. Knight seem?”

“I don’t know . . . They weren’t scared . . . at all . . . The two of them . . . looked
to be giving some serious thought to something . . . What it was . . . I don’t know.”

“How did they get away?”

“The next day . . . I go for a look . . . and the cell wall . . . was melted away.
Mr. Knight was a chemist . . . Figure he had something hidden on him . . . Acid or
something . . . ”

“I’ll be seeing you again.” D’s hand came away from the sheriff.

It wasn’t until the hem of the Hunter’s black coat was well out the door that the
sheriff and his two men collapsed into their chairs as if utterly exhausted.

-

Dr. Tsurugi was waiting for D. “I realize you must be busy, but I’d really like for
you to come with me,” he said.

D nodded. “I said I would. Let’s go.”

The two of them set off for the hospital.

“Quiet town,” said D.

“I guess it is, at that. The sheriff and mayor probably have a pretty easy time keeping
the peace. They don’t get strangers coming in and causing trouble. And the townsfolk
are all well-behaved types who follow the rules. Every so often someone gets a little
rough, but no one’s any rougher than the sheriff.”

A smile formed on D’s lips. “Except for you,” he said.

Dr. Tsurugi didn’t say anything, but he gave a great big grin. Quickly looking to
D again, he asked, “How long will you be in town?”

“If I was done, I could leave tomorrow.” And then, in a rare move for the Hunter,
he asked in return, “How about you?”

“Well, my contract is for a full year. But I suppose I’ll be getting off before then.”

“Wouldn’t it cause problems if their doctor were to leave town?”

“Nothing they couldn’t solve by finding another physician,” Dr. Tsurugi replied.

“Are you bored?”

“Don’t be ridiculous. You wouldn’t think it to look at me, but I studied a bit of
psychology. And from a psychological standpoint, you couldn’t find a more intriguing
place. By their very nature, towns on the Frontier must exercise rather rigid controls
in order to protect themselves from enemies without, but here they’ve taken it to
the furthest extreme. Where do you think this town is headed?”

D gave no reply.

“Actually, they wander the earth far and wide with no goal at all.”

“People down on the ground don’t have a goal, either. Humans, Nobility—all of creation
is that way,” D said.

“Yes, but in a village, people come in. In towns, people leave. Here, there’s neither.
Do you have any idea how much time and energy the people of this town invest to come
up with drugs that combat the problems caused by inbreeding? In my humble opinion,
the only folks in town in their right mind were the Knights.”

“Do you know anything about them?” the Hunter asked.

“Unfortunately, no.”

“I suppose this place might not suit you. You like traveling then, do you?”

The young physician nodded. It was a deep, hearty nod. His dark eyes sparkled. “Yes.
I’ve met all kinds of people. You might say I became a doctor because I like to travel.
The Frontier’s not completely hopeless. No matter what they’ve been dealt there, everybody’s
giving life all they’ve got. I bet the same is true for the remaining Nobility. And
I just want to help folks do that.”

Saying nothing, D continued walking. But in his eyes was something that looked incredibly
like a bit of warmth. The young physician failed to notice how his words had brought
about a minor miracle.

“You’re a dhampir, correct? Been traveling long?”

“A bit longer than you,” D replied

“I’ll be like you before too long,” the physician said in a fervent tone. “I suppose
I’ll get as experienced as you are. Along the way, I’ll learn how to ride and how
to use a sword.”

Though the young doctor’s words sounded almost like a challenge, D remained silent.

Presently, the pair arrived at the hospital. The nurse walked just ahead of them,
escorting them to the sickroom. Over the course of the ten feet or so they had to
go, the nurse nearly crashed into a table, almost put her hand through a window pane,
and had to be caught by the physician after tripping over the threshold . . . All
because she could do nothing but look at D.

Some pink discoloration remained on Lori’s skin. That was the extent of her injuries.
Apparently the plasters for drawing the radioisotopes from her body were no longer
necessary, as all her bandages had been removed. Now the girl was wearing blue pajamas
and sitting up in bed.

After a bit, Dr. Tsurugi took the memo pad in hand and wrote,
How are you feeling?
He handed it to her. He did so because D hadn’t bothered to say anything at all.

Scanning the note, Lori nodded. Fidgeting, she adjusted the collar of her pajamas
and tugged down the sleeves. She seemed embarrassed to have anyone see the marks her
radiation poisoning had left.

Mr. D came to see you
, the physician scribbled on the memo pad.
He wants you to get well soon
.

D picked up the pen. On seeing what he wrote on the memo, Dr. Tsurugi’s eyes bulged
out:
Why did your parents leave town?

“Wait just one minute,” the physician snarled. “This young lady’s still a patient
undergoing treatment. I didn’t bring you here for this. I wanted you to help bring
a little life back into her. Most patients need cheering up more than anything. Especially
a girl her age.”

“And I came here because I have questions,” D replied.

“I can’t believe your nerve. I never should’ve brought you here.”

“You can cheer her up any time. But my work won’t wait.”

The physician held his tongue.

D continued, “One of the Nobility has been created through means that are still unclear.
If that number is allowed to swell to a hundred, we’ll be powerless to stop them.
It’s my job to get rid of him. But if I had to take out every person in town, that’d
be a bit too much of a workload.”

“This is insane,” the physician said with a mournful sigh.

D turned to face Lori. Silently, he awaited her reply.

Memories flickered in Lori’s mind. This was the same question the shadowy figure had
put to her the night before. No one cared about her at all. Her parents’ experiments
were the only thing on anyone’s mind. Choking the rage that’d risen to her throat
back down again, Lori raised her face. The Hunter’s visage greeted her. Cold and veiled
in an unearthly aura, his dashing countenance seemed sad nonetheless. The anger vanished
from Lori’s heart. Putting her left hand over her right so the scars on the back of
it couldn’t be seen, Lori slowly scratched away with the pen.

I don’t know
.
On our last night in town, as I was walking past the lab, I heard my father tell my
mother, “This is going to change the world.”
Right after that, the two of them headed out somewhere, and while I was sleeping the
law came and hauled us off to jail.

“Change it how, I wonder?” Dr. Tsurugi mused. Not saying a word, D looked over his
shoulder. Over to the next room. The operating room. The room that had a corpse strapped
to the table. The physician’s complexion turned the color of clay. “You couldn’t possibly
mean—”

“I don’t know,” D said. “But you’d best leave.”

“What on earth do you mean?”

“You’re better off not knowing.”

“You must be joking, after all I’ve gone through.” Dr. Tsurugi added petulantly, “Need
I remind you that I was the one who destroyed the vampire last night?”

“I’ll see you later.”

“But, I—” The physician was about to say something, but he bit his lip. Indignant,
he left Lori’s sickroom.

D’s right hand went into action.
Aside from your family, who went into the lab the most?

After pausing for a moment, Lori wrote,
Mayor Ming.

-

-

I

-

The following incident took place shortly before D visited the hospital. Taking advantage
of her employer’s departure for a town meeting, the mayor’s maid Nell snuck into the
garden. Checking to see that no one else was around, she called out, “Ben!” Her muscular
paramour from the cleaners didn’t answer. Knitting her brow dubiously, Nell headed
over to the base of the massive peach tree that always served as the site of their
trysts.

“Boo!” Ben shouted, suddenly poking his head out from behind the tree.

“Oh, Ben, don’t scare me like that!” Though relief spread through her heart, an odd
sense of incongruity started to gnaw at Nell. Ben didn’t quite seem like himself.
Sure, his face and his build were the same as ever, but there was something strange
about him. Was that an annoying little smirk on his lips?

“What’s wrong, Nell? Do I have something stuck on my face or something?” he asked.
He sounded just like Ben, too.

Nell shook her head. “It’s nothing.”

“Oh, really? Then how about a kiss?”

And with that he took Nell in his arms before she could resist and his lips met hers.
For a few seconds the two of them stood fused together like a lone pillar by their
firm embrace, but soon the strength fled Ben’s body. Limp as a wet noodle, he quickly
collapsed among the roots of the tree.

Sparing not a glance to the lover who’d so suddenly lost consciousness, Nell scanned
her surroundings. Her countenance remained as sensuous as ever, but there was something
inexplicably strange about her expression.

“When I saw the young buck here slipping into the mayor’s backyard, I had a hunch
about what he was up to—and it paid off,” Nell said, adding, “I should give this little
lady a piece of my mind for screwing around while she’s on the clock. Of course, it
made my job that much easier, so I’ll let it go this time. Lover boy’s gonna be out
for a while—I’m gonna have to borrow your body, missy.”

And then, after dragging her boyfriend’s limp form into the cover of the bushes, Nell
reclaimed her prim demeanor and returned to the house with a light gait.

On entering the house, Nell quickly locked each and every door. She stood in the middle
of the living room with a pensive expression that suggested she was lost in deep thought
or grim recollection. But soon she opened her eyes and gave a satisfied nod. “Oh,
I see now—there’s still another vamp around. And where they’re covering this up and
making like the girl’s not better yet . . . That’d be a D plan, I bet,” she laughed.

While the voice was Nell’s, the manner was unmistakably that of Pluto VIII. But the
real question was, what did he hope to accomplish by inhabiting her boyfriend, then
leaping from him to her and rifling through her memories?

“Nothing at all out of the ordinary around the house, she thinks. Hold everything—she’s
been told not to go into the cellar without asking permission. Bingo! Then I say we
go have us a permission-free peek.”

Walking softly so Laura wouldn’t hear her from the bedroom where she remained in hiding,
Nell headed for the cellar door with a shameless grin. It wasn’t locked. Pushing the
door open, she found a wooden staircase that sank down into the darkness.

Muttering, “Eww, creepy,” with unabashed interest, Nell gathered up the hem of her
long skirt and slowly stepped into the dark.

Power lines and hot water pipes coming all the way from the industrial sector ran
the length and breadth of the ceiling. From the center of the cellar, with its walls
lined with wooden crates and jugs of fuel, Nell surveyed her surroundings with a deeply
suspicious gaze.

“Well, nothing out of the ordinary here,” said the maid. “Now, then, what was the
focus of Miss Nell’s suspicions . . . ” Her eyes, now charged with an eerie gleam,
crept along the walls, floor, and ceiling in rapid succession. Before long, they stopped
again at her own feet. Coarsely muttering, “Damn, I just don’t get it,” Nell folded
her arms in deliberation. “Any way you slice it, it’s just a plain old cellar.”

Her eyes began to creep all over the place again, but this time they were infused
with an even more tenacious glint. “If I were hiding a switch in the cellar, I’d put
it somewhere no one could find it, I reckon.”

And, saying that, Nell headed to a corner stacked with empty boxes. “No, I wouldn’t—I’d
do the exact opposite. The best place a person can hide is in a crowd. And if you
had a switch you didn’t want anyone to notice, you’d put it where anyone could see
it.”

Swishing the hem of her skirt, Nell headed over to the control box high on the wall.
“As our Miss Nell recalls, she heard strange voices and the creak of gears around
here. Meaning . . .” Her sharp eyes stared at a row of nearly a dozen levers. “Maybe
it’s this one, the least grimy of the lot . . . ” Grabbing one in the middle of the
row, Nell gave it a twist to the right. With a harsh creaking, just as the maid recalled,
there was the sound of gears meshing.

“Whoa!”

As Nell cried out, her body swung about in a circle. To be more precise, she was turned
completely around when the spot she was standing on pivoted away easily and revealed
a circular hole. A wooden ladder stretched down into a darkness far deeper than the
gloom of the cellar.

“So, this must be what made our Miss Nell so suspicious. Don’t worry, dear. Uncle
Pluto will find the answers for you now,” she chortled.

Eyes glittering wildly, Nell went over to the ladder. Checking that no one else was
around, she headed down into the new, lower cellar. The ladder was sturdy enough,
but the smoothness of the rungs clearly suggested someone had been making frequent
use of it for decades now. Fifty rungs down, she reached the bottom.

“Let’s see. A switch, a switch . . .” Groping in the dark, her hand soon struck a
wall. Finding a small switch, she flicked it on.

A feeble light swelled in the darkness. There lay an area so vast it almost seemed
as if the whole town would fit inside it. In the very center of that chamber rested
a lone box of an unmistakable nature. Though its surface was free of ornamentation,
it was clearly a coffin.

Anxiously muttering, “It’s still morning,” to herself, Nell started walking toward
the coffin. “Hard to believe the mayor of all people would be keeping a monster in
his cellar.”

As she reached for the coffin’s lid without hesitating, someone grabbed Nell by the
hair. She started to scream, but, before she could finish, her neck was slashed wide
open. Bright blood splashed across the floor.

And, at that very instant, there was a most bizarre incident in another part of town.
A short while earlier, a carpenter had discovered a squat man sleeping in the woods.
Or at least he’d decided the man was sleeping after checking him for a pulse, but,
by the time several other townsfolk and the people from the law enforcement bureau
had arrived, his opinion had changed. He now believed it to be a corpse. After all,
while the man’s heart was still beating, he wasn’t breathing at all. When it became
known the body was that of the outsider who’d accompanied the gorgeous Vampire Hunter,
the site was surrounded by a squawking throng.

“Why on earth—?”

“Went and killed himself. Must’ve wanted to get even with us for not making him feel
welcome in town.”

“And I keep telling you even though I seen him mixing it up with the locals in my
saloon, he just didn’t seem the type to do himself in.”

“Heart’s beating but he ain’t breathing none,” one of the onlookers noted. “What good
can come of that, I ask you?”

“Good question,” said someone from the law enforcement bureau. “At any rate, we’ll
have to put him out of his misery, right?”

“Right you are,” said one of the townsfolk with a nod. “Good riddance, I say. Finish
him off!”

“Will do,” one of the lawmen said. Drawing an enormous automatic handgun from his
holster, he pointed it at Pluto VIII’s head. The surrounding mob hustled back out
of range. And then, just as the public servant was about to pull the trigger, the
man leapt up, fresh as a daisy. With a startled cry, the lawman flinched away.

“You damn idiots! I ain’t on display here!” the squat sleeper bellowed. Looking around
contemptuously and seeing how the crowd of townsfolk watched him from a safe distance,
he spat, “You people are pathetic. You don’t have the faintest clue what kind of crazy
shit your trusty leader keeps for a pet, but you’ll stand around and watch someone
who collapsed in the street get their brains blown out.”

Needless to say, the foul-tempered man was Pluto VIII, having returned to his own
body the instant his host Nell was slain.

-

Shortly after D watched Lori write the mayor’s name, the Hunter left the hospital.
Dr. Tsurugi requested that he stay and talk with the girl a while longer, but D replied
that business came first. Stepping out the door, D was surrounded by three figures.
Sheriff Hutton and two deputies—the very same people he’d gone to see at the law enforcement
bureau earlier. All of them were wearing gun belts.

“Figured you’d be here, creep,” the sheriff snarled, rocket launcher in one hand.
The other two held shotguns at the ready.

Seeing their weapons leveled at his heart, D asked, “You have some business with me?”
His tone was languid. He was standing in full sunlight. For a creature like a dhampir,
descending in part from the Nobility, the conditions couldn’t be worse for doing battle.

“You wanna know if we got business? What did you think, we came here to take you out
for a drink?” said one of the deputies. “For a freakin’ outsider, you got some nerve.
I don’t care if you’re a dhampir or whatever the hell you are—you’re out of line.
We’re gonna give you a nice, long lesson in what happens when you threaten the sheriff
in this town.”

“I’ve got a full day tomorrow before my time’s up. Can’t this wait until then?”

“Are you nuts?! We let a little bastard like you take care of our trouble here, and
me and my boys won’t look like we’re worth our pay no more.” Gouts of flame seemed
to shoot from Sheriff Hutton’s eyes. His rocket launcher was set to discharge all
its chambers in a single shot. He had only to push the button, and seven pencil missiles
would blast the beautiful Hunter into unrecognizable scraps.

Seeing that a fight was unavoidable, D asked softly, “Are we going to do this here?”

“Now, that’s what I like to hear. I’m impressed you ain’t trying to make a run for
it. Of course, we’re still gonna make you pay for coming off so damn tough,” the older
of the two deputies muttered, swinging the end of his shotgun to indicate an alley
that was dark even by daylight.

Meeting the flames of hatred focused on him like a blowtorch with his ever-frosty
demeanor, D asked, “Ready to make your move?”

“You first.”

Each standing ten feet away, the two deputies braced their shotguns. They’d taken
up positions they calculated to be well beyond the reach of D’s longsword. No matter
what move he might try to make, their shotguns should prove faster than his sword.
Their guns already had the first shell in the chamber. The tension was rising by the
second.

A lone invader ivy bush grew from the ground by D’s feet. Because it had an amazing
knack for propagation, exterminating this weed was of the utmost importance, but efforts
toward that end never went well. Every time someone thought they had it beat, it would
put forth a new shoot within three days, if even part of its fine root structure remained,
and it took less than three weeks for it to reach maturity. Though it had no blossoms,
it displayed the greatest determination to live and had spread everywhere from the
colder regions to the greener belts. D’s right hand reached for one of its branches.
It was a graceful movement that kept the tense lawmen from putting any more pressure
on their trigger fingers. Effortlessly snapping the plant off at its root, D waved
it at the men like a great green wad of cotton candy. “Come on.”

“You got it!” they shouted, squeezing the triggers with the brute strength their delight
lent them. With the gravest of roars, each weapon released three dozen pellets—seventy-two
balls of shot loosed in a sheath of flame at D’s chest. One can’t help but wonder
if the two men saw the flash of green that seemed to sweep the hot lead away a split
second before it was due to strike. Tiny lead balls plunked down on the crushed stone
road, and the two deputies felt the chill of the blade sinking into their skulls.
Surely neither of them would’ve believed he could use the invader ivy leaves and branches
to knock the flying buckshot out of the air.

Still brandishing his bloodstained sword, D said to the rocket-launcher-packing giant,
“Come on.”

The giant trembled. The murderous implement under his arm had become a mere chunk
of iron that offered no security at all. What guarantee did he have that a man who
could knock buckshot out of the air with a branch couldn’t turn his own missiles back
on him? Imagining himself caught in a burning white flash that would reduce him to
bloody chunks sailing through the air, the sheriff grew pale.

“How about it?” the Hunter said. “You’ve already got your weapon out.”

Hutton had no choice but to go through with it. But no matter what weapon he had,
he didn’t think it would save him from the Hunter’s sword. The sheriff felt the Grim
Reaper brushing the nape of his neck.

At that moment, Dr. Tsurugi came running into the alley in great haste. Instantly
realizing what was going on, he stepped between the two of them and turned to D. “Please,
just stop,” the physician said. “There’s been entirely too much killing already. If
you kill the sheriff, then you really will have to leave here. Even the mayor couldn’t
do anything about it.”

D’s hand went into action, easily shoving the physician aside. The fight had already
begun, and D’s sword had been drawn. It wouldn’t be going back in its sheath until
it’d tasted the blood of all who made themselves his foe.