They Thirst (54 page)

He grunted and came up with a line from "Sheer Luck." " 'Elementary, Dr. Batson. Deucedly clever, what?" Shit! This fucking storm's not going to stop. I've never seen so much sand without a bottle of Coppertone in my hand and a transistor radio beside the chair." He told himself to start taking shallower breaths, maybe then she could get more air that way. "That's where I'd like to be right now. The beach at Acapulco. How'd you like that?"

"It would be . . . very nice."

"Damn straight. That's what we'll do when we get towed in. We'll make reservations at the Royal Aztec . . ." He stopped speaking as the car shuddered again.

"You're the best of them all," Solange said. "No one was ever any better to me than you are. I will take care of you—if I can." Then she hugged herself close to him, and he held her very tightly. He kissed her forehead, tasting her honey-pepper flavor, then listening to the moaning winds. He was starting to strain his breath through his teeth.

And around the stranded car the wind whispered like the voice of a little girl in a dream Wes had had a couple of nights ago.
Come out. Come outside and play with me. Come out, come out . . . . . . or I'll come in . . .

Palatazin brought the Falcon to a halt. "Wait a minute," he said, staring up through the windshield; the wipers were turned to full-speed, the headlights on bright. "I thought I saw something." What he thought he'd seen was a huge, dark shape up there amidst the rocks and trees through a quick break in the swirling, amber clouds. Now there was nothing, just sand spinning against the glass.

"What was it?" Gayle leaned forward from the back seat. "The castle?"

"I'm not sure. I just saw it for a second before the clouds closed up. I couldn't tell very much except that it was big and way up on the mountain. It might've been a couple of miles from here, I don't know. Wait! There!" He pointed. The clouds had broken again, and for an instant they all could see it quite clearly, its high turrets standing against a darkening gold sky. From this distance it looked to Palatazin much like the ruins atop Mount Jaegar.
Yes,
he thought.
That's the place. That's where he's hiding.
At that height the vampire king would have an unobstructed panorama of L.A.; he could gloat as the lights went out in house after house. The castle looked as sturdy and impregnable as any fortress Palatazin had ever seen in the mountains of Hungary.
Seeing it was one thing,
he thought,
reaching it was quite another thing entirely.
The cold knot of tension that had formed in his stomach suddenly expanded, sending out chill tendrils into his arms and legs. He felt pitifully weak and frightened out of his wits.

"The wind's getting worse," Jo said in a tight, strained voice.

"Yes, I know." Sand had been spinning across the road for fifteen minutes now, and Palatazin could see piles of it collecting in pockets between rocks. Higher up the clouds tumbled over each other like great yellow dogs hearing the dinner whistle. They closed again, sealing off the Kronsteen castle. The Falcon's engine gave out a sudden wheeze and a tremble, and Palatazin revved it a couple of times. He looked at his watch and saw with horror that it was twenty minutes after five. With these thick clouds rolling in, darkness would fall within thirty minutes. The nagging thought that they would not make it to the castle in time now rang out in his brain like a clear clarion of warning. "We're going to have to turn back," he said finally.

There were no objections. Now the trick was finding a place to turn around. He drove on, conscious of the aged engine's sputtering. Suddenly a wall of wind came roaring through the scrub trees to the right, parting them like a comb through hair. It hit the car like a bulldozer, forcing it toward the rocky lip of the road. Palatazin fought for control. Jo screamed as the car shuddered to the left-hand shoulder and started to totter over the edge; she could see toy houses with their red roofs below and toy cars scattered on black and gold ribbons. Nothing moved down there for as far as she could see.

Palatazin slammed the gearshift into first and wrenched up the parking brake. The wind roared on, carrying wild, twisting coils of sand down into Hollywood. Very carefully Palatazin put the Falcon in reverse and backed away from the edge, slowly releasing the brake.

"We'll have to go up to find a place to turn," he heard himself say. His voice was dry and thin. "Neither one of you should've come. I was a fool to let you." He climbed further, looking for a cut in the trees or rocks that he could back the Falcon into. The storm was steadily worsening; another quarter-mile up the terrain was completely covered with blowing sand. It reminded him of the blizzards that had roared through Krajeck, particularly the storm that had been moaning outside the night his father had come home. A thought struck him like a blow to the temple,
Did the vampires have any measure of control over the weather? If they did, this freak sandstorm would be an effective way to immobilize the city's population. It would cut people off from each other, keep them confined to homes or offices. Planes wouldn't be flying, and the sea would be thrashed into a frenzy as well. And driving?
Palatazin realized they might not get down off this mountain alive. If the winds didn't take them crashing over the edge, if the sand didn't choke off the engine, if darkness didn't fall too soon . . . He could feel the castle crouched above them, perhaps less than a half-mile away along this twisting, sand-slick road.

Something huge and gray suddenly leaped up onto the hood, its snarling face pressed close to the glass. Gayle said "Jesus!" and Jo grasped Palatazin's arm. The thing looked more wolf than dog, but he could see the nail-studded collar and the tags around its neck. Its thick coat was full of sand, its eyes yellow and fierce. Over the sound of the wind, Palatazin could hear its low, menacing growls. The message was obvious. Palatazin saw other dogs slinking on the road ahead—a boxer, an Irish setter, a few mutts. They all shared the same glazed expressions of ferocity.
So,
he thought,
the vampire king has made sure his fortress is well protected. Even if we could reach the castle, we'd be mangled by these dogs when we got out of the car.
When Palatazin slowly drove on, the wolf-dog howled with rage and started scratching at the glass; it snapped repeatedly, as if trying to bite Palatazin's hands on the steering wheel. In another moment he saw a space on the right large enough to turn the Falcon around in. The wolf-dog stayed crouched on the hood, its baleful eyes glowering into Palatazin's until the car was turned back down the mountain. Then it leaped off and disappeared with the rest of the pack.

The Falcon chugged like a weary locomotive, winds buffeting it from all directions. Once the engine rattled and quit, and they were rolling down to Hollywood, but Palatazin kept trying the key and finally it caught again, wheezing like an old man with emphysema. He raced the darkness back toward Romaine Street, threading his way across Hollywood and Sunset Boulevards—both dotted with stranded cars—and finding some streets blocked by wrecks or dunes. The Falcon crossed a deserted Santa Monica Boulevard and made it about three more blocks before it staggered and stopped dead. Palatazin tried the engine several times, but now the battery was groaning. Sand filled the engine. They were stranded almost five blocks from the house, and night was falling fast.

The interior of the car was already stifling. "Can we run for it?" Gayle asked softly.

"I don't know. It's five blocks. Not so far maybe. Maybe
too
far." He looked at Jo and then quickly turned away. Sand was already covering the windshield, sealing them in. It was as if they were being buried alive. "It's a long way," he said finally.

"What about these other houses?" Gayle asked. "Can't we ask for shelter?"

"We could, yes. But do you see any lights? Any life? How do we know we won't be stepping into a nest of vampires? How do we know some other poor souls won't mistake us for vampires and try to kill us? My house is protected with the garlic and the crucifixes. These are just. . . waiting for invasion."

"So what do we do? Sit here and suffocate?"

. . . or suffocate out there?" Palatazin pointed out. "The wind will slow us down. You'll get more sand into your lungs than air, just like this car did. Just like all these other cars did. But no. We definitely
cannot
stay here. The vampires won't be hampered by the storm because they don't breathe. So . . ." He looked at Jo again and smiled weakly. "Shall we flip a coin?"

"Hell no!" Gayle said. "I'm not staying here!"

Jo shook her head. "We try to make it back."

"All right then."
Five blocks,
he thought.
God, what a distance!
He was going to have to leave the stakes, mallet, and holy water in the; trunk; there would be no way to carry them. No, he had to have the holy water at all costs. He took the keys out of the ignition and shrugged out of his coat, handing it to Jo. "Keep that up to your face," he told her. "Both of you, remember to breathe through your mouth with your teeth gritted. I'm going to get something out of the trunk. When I knock on your window, Jo, I want you to step out and grasp my hand. When you touch me, knock on Miss Clarke's window, and she'll take hold of your shoulder. Then we'll start to move. I doubt if we'll be able to see very far out there. If one of us loses the others, don't move from where you are. Just keep shouting and cover your face with your hands. Okay?"

They nodded.

He started to open the door and then stopped. The car vibrated with the force of the wind. He got the trunk key in position so he wouldn't waste precious seconds fumbling. "All right," he said. "I'm going." He sat there for a few more seconds, then he stepped out of the car.

A blast of oven-hot wind seemed to suck him out. He got the door closed and pulled himself along the side of the car, his lower face tucked into the crook of his left arm. He couldn't even take a fraction of a breath without sucking in sand. A crosscurrent of wind hit him behind the knees, knocking him to the ground. He began to crawl, his face flayed raw. He pulled himself around to the trunk, got the key in, and twisted. The trunk shot open. He found the cloth-wrapped vial and used the cloth to shield his mouth and nose, putting the vial in his back pocket. Then he struggled around to the other side of the car. The wind and sand nearly dragged him down.

When he rapped on the glass, Jo stepped out and almost fell, crying out as their hands slipped. When she was ready, she knocked on the glass behind her and Gayle came out. She grasped Jo's shoulder like a vise. The short human chain started off. being whipped and shoved along the street. In another moment Palatazin felt Jo's hand grinding his fingers together, and he knew she couldn't get a breath. "NOT FAR!" he shouted, instantly choking. She nodded, her slitted eyes weak and glazed. All he could see of Gayle was a faint dark shape.

Jo fell. As he helped her to her feet, dark motes spun before his eyes, and he knew they were all slowly suffocating to death. They weren't going to make it; there were still three blocks to go. "COME ON!" he shouted and pulled them toward the gray shapes on the right-hand side of the street. The shapes slowly materialized into wood-framed, two-storied houses not much different in design from his own. They were all terribly dark, and Palatazin was afraid of what they might be holding. He tripped over something that lay on the sidewalk, half-covered with sand. It was the corpse of a young man, a bullet hole in his cheek. Palatazin stared dumbly at the body for a few seconds and felt the hot waspish buzz pass his face before he heard a muffled
crack!
He looked up in time to see the orange flash of the second shot fired from an upstairs window in the house that stood before him. The corpse at his feet shuddered. A man's voice rose to a frenzied wail, "Get away, ye heathen things of Satan! God Almighty shall strike you DEAD! And DEAD! And DEAD!" Palatazin pulled Jo after him, running toward the next house. The front door, its paint scoured down to the bare wood, was closed but unlocked. Palatazin plunged inside as the madman's shrieking turned into a sob of anguish.

When Gayle was through the door, Palatazin slammed it shut and bolted it. The air within the house was stale and heavy, but at least there were no torturing winds here. His face and hands felt raw, and he could see that Gayle's eyes were terribly bloodshot. Jo was gagging; she still held onto his coat, and sand was slithering off of it to the floor. He helped Jo over to a chair and wiped the beads of cold sweat off her face with his cloth. Her eyes were dark and vacant; she didn't seem to know where she was. "Jo?" he said. "We're all right now. We're safe." She began to cry very softly. Through the wind's howl Palatazin could hear the madman's scream. ". . . show yourselves! I know you're hiding in there, ye foul Satan spawn!" He began to sing in a high, croaking voice, "Shall we gather at the riiiiiiver, the beautiful, the beautiful rii-iiiiiver . . . ?"

Palatazin shut him out. Now he was wondering if they were alone in this house. The idea of being locked in here with another armed maniac filled him like sour wine. He was glad to have the reassuring weight of the .38 in its shoulder-holster, though from the size of the bullet hole in that corpse's face the man next door had to have a high-velocity rifle.

Gayle had the same idea at the same time. "What if we're not alone here?" she whispered.

"Anyone home?" he called out. There was no answer. Palatazin took his gun out of its holster and released the safety. He walked through the neatly furnished living room and into a short hallway where a flight of stairs led up to the second floor. "Anyone here?" he said, watching for the slightest movement. "We won't hurt you! We just wanted to get out of the storm!" He waited another moment, but there was still no reply. He put his gun away and went back to the living room. "I think we're alone," he told Gayle. "Maybe they got out before the storm hit."