Bentley Little - The Summoning

The door was locked, and the mayor tried desperately to turn the small piece of metal that would throw the deadbolt, but his sweaty fingers slipped on the catch.

And then a huge freezing hand grabbed the top of his head, palming it like a basketball, and turned him around. He was staring into the most ancient and evil eyes he had ever seen, and then his head was being bent, his neck exposed.

He felt himself die, and it was not at all the way he'd thought it would be. There was no floating sense of peace, no drifting off into a pleasant sleep. There was the sharp shocking pain of skin being ripped open, blood gushin out, the vampire biting harder, clamping down, teeth tearing through veins into muscle. Then he felt a sudd et slashing agony that jerked his entire body, burnin! through his innards like acid. Spasms of torment rippinl simultaneously through individual parts of his body that had never before experienced sense: spleen, appendi liver. He would have doubled over from the power full wrenching cramps, but the vampire was still holding hit up. He felt his bowel and bladder muscles give way, but nothing came out, and he knew that all of the fluids in his body were being vacuumed out through his neck.

His last coherent thought was uncharacteristically un. selfish: I hope they cremate my body. I hope they don't let me come back.

It wasn't just chilly, it was downright cold, and Janine wished she'd brought a jacket. Her breath escaped from between her lips in visible puffs of white, and she rocked her hands under her armpits for warmth as she hurried across the open area between the buildings. It was quiet tonight: no fighting cats, no howling dogs, no cawing birds, not even the whisk like scuttling of nocturnal bugs and lizards. No natural noises at all. There was only the muffled rhythmic sound of machinery the dishwashers in the kitchen, the heaters on the roof--and, from the rooms, occasional human voices and the fake, flat sounds of television.

She didn't like walking alone across the ranch, not since Terry Clifford's murder, but it was the beginning of the off-season, she was pulling double duty, and she knew that if she balked or complained, her hours would be cut. Or worse. Hollis seemed to be on a rampage, punishing anyone who even appeared to believe in the existence of vampires.

Vampires.

She looked toward the flat boxlike structure at the north end of the ranch. The stables.

She walked faster.

And the lights went out.

They went off first in the main building, then around the pool, then in the guest lodges. The recessed bulbs along the pathway faded away into nothing. She was un able to see even the path beneath her feet, and was forced to slow down, staying on track only by the feel of the concrete walk. She wanted to run, but she was afraid she would trip and fall, and she definitely didn't want that to happen.

She swallowed hard, forced herself to walk slowly for ward, one step at a time, though a feeling of panic was growing within her. Something was wrong. The ranch's backup generators weren't kicking in the way they were supposed to. The lights weren't coming back on.

She stepped on something. Something hard and brittle that cracked beneath her boot and felt like neither rock nor branch. She stopped, crouched down, looked.

It was a jackrabbit.

A jackrabbit that had been drained of blood.

Oh, God. She stood, wishing suddenly that she hadn't lost the piece of jade Sue had given her, wishing that she hadn't been too embarrassed to tell Sue she'd lost the jade and wanted another. But the time for wishing was past. The vampire was here.

She heard shouting from somewhere. It sounded as though it was coming from her left, from one of the guest lodges, but she couldn't be sure.

The darkness seemed to do something to the acoustics, to warp the directional capabilities of her hearing. She ran to her right, breaking away from the path and speeding through the sand towed the nearest building, navigating by instinct. The laundry room was in here. Assuming the vampire wasn't in the laundry room--and why would he be with so much fresh meat elsewhere?--she could lock herself inside and wait it out until morning. The laundry room's door and walls were especially thick, to muffle the sounds of the washing machines, and there were no windows. It was probably the safest place in the whole ranch.

Her right sank into the sand, and she slip[ nearly twisting her ankle, before quickly righting her" Her heart was pounding crazily, and she wondered if vampire could hear it. She thought, absurdly, that sound of a beating heart was probably like a dinner to a vampire, calling him, like an amplified tom-ton his head.

She ran faster.

She finally reached the building's double side do yanking open the left door and running inside.

Ramon and Jose were lying in the hall, outside the dry room.

It was dark in the hallway, but there was a flashli lying between the sprawled corpses on the floor, the shining through cracked glass onto a portion of Ram hand and Jose's shoulder.

Flashlight?

Her mouth felt dry. They had to have gotten the light out after the blackout hit. That was three mini ago, four at the most.

Which meant that the vampire was probably still in building.

She ran over, picked up the flashlight. She shone beam down the hallway. To the left, to the right. The way was empty. She saw no other bodies. And no yarn[

She ran. Her boots echoed on the wood floor. ' sound was loud in the stillness, would alert anyone--anything --in the building to the fact that she was here, but there was nothing she could do about it, and she forced legs to pump harder. The door at the other end of hall opened onto the parking lot. If she could make it of here, she could run straight to her car, take off and She reached the door, shoved it open.

And the vampire was right in front of her.

She stopped, nearly fell, but she grabbed onto the side of the closing door and only by luck regained her balance. The vampire was bending over a boy lying dead or unconscious on the sidewalk next to the parking lot.

He did not look like a vampire. He looked like a zombie, movie zombie, one of those poorly made up zombies from Night of the Living Dead. If she had seen this in a fright flick, she would have laughed. But the fact that the vampire in real life was not a sophisticated special effect but a B-movie monster with a bad makeup job was somehow much more frightening than anything else could have been,

The vampire bent over the boy. His head did not touch the child's neck but hovered about an inch above. She saw the boy's bodily fluids sucked up, vacuumed into the monster's mouth, a sickening mixture of red and green and brown and yellow that was simultaneously thick and thin, a torrent of combined liquids that spewed forth from the neck as the body visibly withered.

She'd been standing in the doorway for no more than three seconds, but the intensity of the scene before her was so great that every aspect of it was burned permanently onto her memory. She let go of the door, and the vampire looked up. She saw lust in those black-ringed zombie eyes .... She thought of the fetus inside her.

Her baby.

The monster grinned.

She broke, ran screaming toward the parking lot. There were other people screaming now: women, children, and most frighteningly, men.

There was not just one vampire, she thought. There were many. An army of the undead. They were here, and they were hungry, and they were taking over.

She turned and looked over her shoulder, but the vampire was not following. He had found another victim.

Ahead, she saw Sally Mae crying, leaning despairingly against the hood of a pickup truck, ShOt running out from her nose and over her lips.

Sally Mae did not seem to know where she was or what was happening, and her eyes registered no recognition as they looked into Janine's.