Konrath, J.A. - DRACULAS (A Novel of Terror)

That’s not a handkerchief.

The next thing he yanked from his pocket was a human spleen.

The spleen was attached to a kidney.

The kidney was attached to a gall bladder.

Then a lung. A bladder. A descending colon. And something that might have been a trachea.

Jenny was speechless. Not only because this horrible perversion was being presented to her and the kids. But because of the effort that went into it. Benny the Clown had taken the time to tie all of these unconnected parts together.

Finally, with flourish, he ended the ghoulish display by tugging out the last organ. A human heart.

Then the bastard actually bowed.

“You sick son of a bitch!” Jenny screamed. “Get the hell away from us!”

But Benny the Clown didn’t go anywhere. He continued to stare at them, as if expecting a round of applause.

Jenny turned away, hugging the children. “Don’t look at him, kids. We don’t have to worry about him. He’s just a big bully, trying to scare you. He doesn’t even have any teeth. He can’t hurt us. The big loser can’t even get in.”

Then Jenny heard a sound that chilled her to the very core.

A sound that was both familiar, and totally out of place.

BRRRR-RRRR-RRRRR-RRRREEEEEEEEEE!

The starting and revving of a chainsaw.

The blade poked through the aluminum door like a finger through a wet tissue.

The children screamed. So did Jenny. She screamed for their lives, and hers, and for Randall’s, because she knew it was her husband’s chainsaw, and he never would have let Benny the Clown take it, which meant he wasn’t going to save her because he was dead.

As Benny the Clown cut the door off its hinges and stepped into the storage closet, Jenny’s biggest regret was that she hadn’t gotten to tell Randall how much she loved him.

Randall

HE hated to admit it, but Randall felt a lot better after his encounter with Clay. The new gun helped. But, really, the guy wasn’t a complete dickhead after all. Oh, he was still a dickhead, but perhaps a smaller one than Randall had originally thought.

Randall turned a corner. The emergency lighting in the corridor wasn’t nearly bright enough to give him a full view of what was happening, but he could see blood all over the floor, and two draculas on their hands and knees, greedily slurping it up.

Two draculas. He had four bullets. If Clay’s advice about making sure that loved ones weren’t behind what you wanted to kill was correct, then Randall could line up his shot carefully and take them both out with a single bullet.

Then again, they seemed really distracted by the blood. And there was a lot of it.

Maybe he could just walk on by. Save a bullet for when he desperately needed it…or at least for when Jenny could see him shoot it.

He kept the gun extended in front of him and picked up his pace as much as he could. The draculas continued slurping up the blood. Hard to believe that Randall was so concerned with the blow to his own dignity when these things—human beings who probably would’ve had a good chuckle at his injury just hours ago—writhed on the floor like animals. Disgusting. Pathetic.

He quickly stepped past them. They didn’t look up from their meal.

How much blood did they need ? If you tightened the muscles in your arm just right, you could get a mosquito stuck as it was sucking your blood, and the little bastard could keep drinking and drinking until it popped. He’d love to see one of these draculas pop.

Wow, he’d done it. Walked right by the distracted draculas.

If not for the absolute shitstorm of misery he’d gone through tonight, he’d almost think that the rest of this was going to be easy.

Okay, his mind had more or less returned to where it needed to be to get himself back to Jenny and the other kids. He’d be fine now. Nothing but redemption from this point forward.

He continued down the dark hallway, still ready with the gun.

More blood on the floor. Better not slip on it.

There was some sort of commotion behind a closed door. Randall didn’t open it. He kept moving forward.

He tried to focus on the layout of the hospital. He was a floor above pediatrics, but distance-wise, he hadn’t really gone that far. If there was another stairwell close by (or an elevator, if by any chance they were still working, which they probably weren’t) he’d be in good shape.

A dracula burst through a swinging door, less than ten feet in front of him. He had a pasty complexion and too much gel in his hair. The dracula saw Randall and immediately charged, arms outstretched.

For a split second Randall considered conserving his bullets, but the stupidity level of being ripped apart while holding a handgun was more than he was willing to commit to, so he pulled the trigger. The top half of the dracula’s head virtually exploded. The creature kept running forward for a moment, as if the message that it was dead hadn’t quite reached its legs, and then it collapsed to the floor.

Clay Theel was a man who knew his guns. And that kick felt good .

Randall continued down the hallway, his confidence further boosted. He moved quickly, probably fucking up his numb leg beyond repair, but for right now he didn’t care. There were a lot of shadows, lots of places where something with claws could hide and jump out at him. Though Randall couldn’t pretend that he wasn’t scared, nothing was going to stop him.

Another dracula stepped into view at the end of the hallway. Looked like a teenage girl. She wore a hospital gown, had long blond hair, and much less blood on her than most of the other creatures he’d encountered. Randall imagined that she was rather adorable in her previous life. Not so much now.

She rushed him. He aimed for a spot right between her eyes and pulled the trigger.

His aim wasn’t spot-on, but he got her in the neck. It burst in all directions, her head flopped backward, and she tumbled to the floor just like the other one.

Half of his bullets gone. Damn. Randall needed to pick up the pace.

He reached the end of the hallway. Left or right? Both looked equally spooky. He was pretty sure pediatrics was to the right, so hopefully there’d be a staircase close…

He laughed out loud. There was. Right there. Finally some good luck.

Randall opened the door to the stairwell carefully, half-expecting dozens of draculas to tumble out and make him look dumb for having believed that he was having some good luck. But the stairwell seemed clear.

He sat and scooted down the stairs on his butt. It wasn’t comfortable or dignified, but it got the job done.

When he reached the bottom, he heard some screams.

And a sound that was…familiar. Couldn’t be, though.

As he pulled open the door at the bottom of the steps, the noise became much louder. Thought he had to be imagining this, because it sounded a hell of a lot like a chainsaw.

He stepped into the hallway. Definitely a chainsaw. How in the world…?

Randall walked down the hallway. Yes! This looked familiar! Now he knew exactly where he was! He was getting closer and closer to the sound of the chainsaw, and hoped that it was being put to good use on one or more of those monsters.

There it was. Pediatrics.

He pushed through the door, and the first thing he saw was that goddamn, motherfucking, toothless, unfunny son of a bitch clown holding his chainsaw.

His chainsaw!

This was blasphemy! Fucking blasphemy! You could dunk a cross in a pool of urine while environmentalists burned the American flag and Randall would not have been more outraged than he was at the sight of Benny the Clown holding his precious chainsaw. The grease-painted fuckhead didn’t even know how to hold it properly.