They Thirst (72 page)

"NO!" Palatazin shouted. His vision seemed to be fogging over, the darkness creeping up on all sides to consume him.

"They're in your mind!" Tommy said sharply. "Don't listen to them!"

"Please," the female said and licked her lips with a black tongue. "Pretty please." One of the others feinted for Palatazin's arm, and Palatazin almost released the button. The can was getting hot in his hand, and he knew the propellant would only last a minute or so longer.

Suddenly Ratty stopped. "Hey? You hear that?" he demanded, his voice cracking with tension.

Palatazin tried to listen over the voices whispering in his head. The three vampires were getting bolder now, darting in toward the flame, and trying to knock it from his hand. "I hear it!" Tommy answered. "Dogs howling up there!" Palatazin tried to concentrate over the tauntings of the vampires, and immediately he could hear it too—a ghostly chorus of wails floating somewhere above them.

"We've got to find a way up!" he shouted, and then he heard the female whisper, "No you don't. You want to put that down and stay with us, don't you?" The flame sputtered once, twice. Now the tunnel seemed filled with the reek of burning aerosol and oily smoke. One of the other vampires lunged for Palatazin, but he thrust the weakening flame in an arc across the boy's face; the thing screamed shrilly and staggered back.

Ratty found a ladder and pulled himself up. When he pushed the cover aside, the merest hint of muddy brown light filtered down into the tunnel, but it seemed enough to keep the vampires away. They stood clustered together hissing like rattlers in the shadows, and Palatazin heard a silvery, sweet voice in his mind say, "We need you here with us. Please stay . . . please stay . .."

And for an instant he wanted to.

"We've got to go up here!" he shouted as the wind churned around him and of! down the tunnel with a faint whistling. The flame went out. Behind him, Tommy was just on his way up the ladder to Ratty waiting at the top. The vampires stood beyond the "limits of the light, but when Palatazin started up the ladder, one of them darted in and grabbed his ankle, trying to pull him back down. He kicked free and saw a pair of hideous fangs exposed in the thing's mouth as it tried to bite his ankle, then it screamed from exposure to the fractional light and scurried away. As Palatazin reached the top and squeezed through, he heard a distant, weakening whisper, "Don't go . . . don't go . . . don't. . ."

The storm thrashed around him, and now he heard the howling somewhere off to his left, terrible and shrill. The three of them moved forward, the wind about to throw them off balance from all directions. In another moment Palatazin saw a couple of houses that he thought he recognized, though he couldn't be sure. Then out of the gloom rose the familiar dead trees and the narrow road snaking up Outpost Drive.

"We're close enough!" he shouted to Ratty, shielding his face with his arm. "The castle's at the top of this road!"

"I'm scared shitless of the bloodsuckers, man," Ratty shouted back, "but I'm sure as hell not going back into that tunnel! You dig?"

Palatazin nodded. "You okay?" he asked Tommy.

"Okay!" the boy answered, keeping his hands cupped in front of his mouth and nose. He staggered, nearly knocked over by the wind's force.

"Then we go up!" Palatazin took the lead, with Ratty bringing up the rear. They linked hands, fighting upward. The wind was fierce, and Tommy fell a couple of times, almost being swept away before either Palatazin or Ratty could help him. They passed a low-slung vehicle that looked like a jeep but a little larger crashed against a tree on the left-hand side of the road. A little further ahead they came to the partly obscured carcasses of several dogs. There was howling all around them now, and Palatazin could feel eyes watching them from the overhang of rocks above the road. When he peered up through slitted eyes, he could just barely make out the shapes of dogs crouched there, crying into the storm. Several times a dog would leap out of the darkness to snap at their heels, then it would vanish just as quickly. One of them, a collie, bounded up behind Ratty and yanked at his leg, throwing him to the ground, then leaped away.

Palatazin knew they'd be within sight of the castle in
a
few minutes. He was certain some of the vampires—if not all—were already awake. Soon the castle would be crawling with them, as would the city below. The backpack full of stakes weighed heavily on him, and ants of fear scurried in his stomach. He hoped he could catch some of the vampires still in their caskets, particularly the king, although logically he might be among the first to awaken. Theirs was still the element of surprise, though, and that was vitally important. This was what the army would call a suicide mission, Palatazin told himself. Getting there is not the difficult part of it; coming back safely is. But he'd known that all along and accepted it just as he was certain his father had accepted the fact before him. It was the boy he was sorry for.

When the castle loomed up before them, Palatazin stopped in his tracks and whispered, "My God, help us!" He looked from towers to parapets to battlements, and he could see the tangled barbed-wire at the top of the protective walls. "How do we get inside
that?"
Panic boiled in his stomach. Had they come all this way to be stopped at the castle's walls of this monument to an eccentric horror film star?
No!
Palatazin told himself.
We can't go back now!
They neared it, the force of wind and sand abating somewhat. Palatazin looked to the huge front gate and could see a few iron-jawed traps clamped together on the sand-heaped drive. Another driveway split off from the main one and circled around the right side of the castle.

Suddenly Tommy jerked his arm. He looked over his shoulder and saw Ratty running for the safety of the line of dead, shriveled trees several yards away. Tommy pulled at him and motioned upward, his face a pale, fearful mask. Palatazin turned and looked up. A man stood on a high balcony, staring off into the night; his face was turned toward L.A., which the vampire army was now devastating. Palatazin ran for the trees and crouched down between Tommy and Ratty. The man on the parapet swept his gaze across the horizon, then seemed to stare right at their hiding place. It was hard to tell because of the distance, but Palatazin thought that it might be Walter Benefield up there. The man looked away and lifted his hand to his mouth once, then again. The howling faded and stopped. Then the man disappeared, and Palatazin grasped a breath.

"Almost cooked our asses," Ratty said, his voice shaking. "Truth in a teacup!"

In another few minutes a couple of dogs came running past their hiding-place, following the cobblestoned drive around the other side of the castle. They were followed by others, some of them snarling and fighting. The pack seemed scattered and confused, but within it Palatazin saw several dogs who looked as large as panthers. A couple of the mammoth ones stopped and turned toward the trees, showing their teeth in low, menacing growls, but then they ran on, vanishing around the curve of the rough-stoned wall. Ratty cringed, but Palatazin thought the dogs had ceased to care about them. He thought they were hurrying to be fed. And that meant there was another way through that wall to the castle. A service entrance, perhaps? He tried to remember back to his brief association with the Kronsteen murder case. He recalled reading Lieutenant Summerford's outline on how the killers had gotten in. There was something about a service entrance, yes. A service entrance, a gate, and . . . a wine cellar.

"Let's find out where those dogs are going," Palatazin said to Tommy when most of them had passed. When Ratty scowled, Palatazin said, "You can stay here if you like."

"Yeah, man. I can dig that. Old Ratty'll just burrow himself in right here and lay low like he did in Nam." He started scooping out great handfuls of dirt and sand at the trunk of a gnarled tree. When Palatazin and Tommy left the tree-line, Ratty looked up. "Git some!" he said and returned to his work.

They hurried up the drive, moving close along to the massive wall. Palatazin heard the dogs up ahead, a melee of whining and barking. Then there was another noise— machinery, clattering gears and chains. The barking started to die down. Tommy ran on ahead and saw the dogs scurrying in where the driveway turned under a stone arch and into the castle's rear courtyard. The gate, an iron-barred, medieval contraption that was opened and lowered by a chain and pulley, had been hoisted open just enough for the dogs to get through.

"Hurry, you bastards!" he heard a man shout. "Come on! Inside!"

Tommy squeezed himself against the wall, his heart pounding. When the dogs were all inside, the chain clicked through gears, and the iron gate was slowly lowered to the ground. Tommy waited another moment before sliding over to the gate. He peered in; there were a few U-Haul vans parked in the courtyard along with a bright yellow John Deere bulldozer and a black Lincoln Continental. The castle rose up as abruptly as a black-walled mesa. At its base Tommy saw that the man—short and squat with cropped dark hair—had thrown back a thick-looking wooden door recessed into the stone; the dogs were scrambling over each other in their haste to get through. A couple of them snarled and snapped at the man, who lifted a wicked-looking wooden staff and whacked it into their midst. "Get down there!" he shouted. "Bastards!" When the dogs were gone, he stepped down into the opening and the door closed behind him.

"Benefield," Palatazin whispered, peering over Tommy's head. "My God!" He stepped forward and curled his hands around the bars, trying to shake the gate; it wouldn't budge. "This is where the killers got inside years ago," he murmured. "But how?" He seemed to recall something in Summerford's report about Kronsteen's murderers being small men, possibly teenagers thin enough to . . . He bent down, scooping away double handfuls of sand from the bottom of the gate. His heart leapt. This was where the killers had dug eleven years ago; the earth had never been replaced. There was room for someone very thin to crawl under. He looked at Tommy, and the boy understood.

Even Tommy, minus his jacket, sucking in his diaphragm, had trouble. He crawled and contorted his small body, and once he thought he was stuck, but then at last he was under and standing on the other side. He stepped over to the chain that hung down from a couple of iron pulleys along the wall and pulled. His shoulder muscles cracked, and the gate only rose a couple of feet before he had to let it down again. The next time he tried harder, and he discovered that the chain was just like a big
Venetian blind cord; by pulling it at an angle he could lock the chain in the lower pulley and hold the gate steady. He got the gate up four feet and could lift it no further. Palatazin slipped under, and together they hurried past the bulldozer and U-Haul trucks to the door Benefield had entered.

It was latched from the inside, but three hard blows from Palatazin's hammer was enough to break the lock. He shoved the door open. They faced a long flight of stone stairs that disappeared into inky depths. They started down, feeling their way along cold, wet stone walls veined with cracks. Rats squealed from their holes and skittered underfoot. Palatazin could hear the barking of the dogs very far below them. Other corridors branched off from the stairway, some of them sealed off by iron bars like the gate Tommy had crawled under. Palatazin was afraid there might be traps in those corridors—more iron-jawed leg-breakers, guns rigged up to doorknobs, a scattering of poison-soaked nails,
a central stone that might pivot and shatter their ankles—so he thought it best to follow the path the dogs had taken. "Do you have any idea where this goes?" he whispered to Tommy.

"I think the wine cellar in the lower basement. Orlon Kronsteen had about a million bottles down there."

"The vampires won't sleep on the level where the dogs are kept," Palatazin said. "They might wake up with an arm or a leg chewed off. What's on the upper basement?"

"Just big rooms."

"That's probably where some of the caskets are." The noise of the dogs was much louder now. "I expect we won't catch many of them sleeping, though."

They heard the muffled sound of blows. "Get back!" Benefield shouted. "I'll knock your ribs in!" A dog growled fiercely; there was another blow and a yelp.

The stairs ended at a closed door. Beyond it, Palatazin knew, lay the wine cellar and the dogs, Benefield and his wooden staff. He didn't think Benefield had become a vampire yet, not if the king was using him as a human servant. But did Benefield have a gun or knife as well as that staff? Palatazin pushed against the door; it creaked open a few inches. He saw a series of large rooms that seemed full of empty-shelved wine racks. A flashlight was set on one of the shelves, its beam playing over a frenzy of snarling, leaping dogs. Then Benefield stepped into view, cracking his staff on the floor to keep the dogs back while he tossed bits of raw meat at them from a leather pouch he had slung under his shoulder. A German shepherd rushed in, trying to steal a piece of bloody meat out of his hand before he threw it. Benefield shouted "GET BACK!" and cracked the animal across the head with his weapon. It yelped and staggered, and others scrambled over its body. "I'd fix you if I had the dust!" Benefield said quietly and chuckled. In the dim light his eyes were black holes in a pale skull. "Oh, yeah, if I had the dust, I'd spray it in your faces and fix you all real good. Get back, there! Here, you shit!" He was standing with his back to the door, about fifteen feet away.

Palatazin steeled himself and came through the door into the chamber, raising, the hammer.