A Matter of Taste

Chapter 14

When Angie came to her senses she was lying sprawled across the old man's bed, still physically in the grip of both of the vampires who had attacked her.

Their jaws had released their grip, one from her throat and one from her right thigh. But their four hands were still fastened on her arms and legs like handcuffs, like frozen claws, like the grip of long-dead skeletons. The sharp-boned fingers still wore their flesh, but the flesh of them now felt as cold and impersonal and stiff as plastic. On waking she could detect no signs of life in either of her assailants.

What she could feel—and see, and smell, almost to the exclusion of everything else—was blood.

Her own blood, cooling and sticky, seemed to be everywhere in the bed, and on the bodies lying in it. Angie's naked skin was smeared with the red stuff, as were the clothing and the waxen faces of her attackers.

Moving feebly at first, she tried to roll over in the bed, and was prevented by the clutch of those corpselike hands. Beginning to sob, she struggled more and more strongly to free herself from the bondage of those bony fingers. The men who held her did not move, and had she not known them to be vampires she would have been certain that they were dead.

Tugging at one alien finger after another, she straightened out enough of them to gain release. Breaking free at last, Angie staggered to her feet. The room was dim around her. All along the windows the curtains were still drawn shut, except for one side where a window still stood open narrowly, letting in a whiff of chilly dampness. Outside, full darkness had overtaken the city. Angie's gaze fell on the bedside clock. The time was only a little after five, which meant she couldn't have been unconscious long. A fifth of a mile away, just below the windows of this room, the evening rush hour would be approaching its peak.

Not until Angie had taken her first steps away from the bed did she realize that she was completely naked. Every piece of her clothing had been ripped off and lay about the room in shreds and little rags. Her attackers, both fully clothed, were still lying motionless upon the bed, their frozen claw hands stiffly clutching empty air, their faces smeared with blood. At the moment she could almost believe, she was at least able to hope, that both of them were dead. Certainly both of them were unconscious.

—and it was her own blood. Her own blood everywhere, although the bleeding had stopped now. In the first moments of full horror after she gained her feet, she had the impression that vast quantities must have been drawn from her body, enough to drown the whole room in gore, crimsoning sheets and carpets, smearing her skin and the clothing and faces of the creatures who had bitten her.

But she was still alive, and not too weak to move. Dizzily Angie put her hands up to her own throat. Yes, the stickiness felt freshest there, where one vampire's fangs had only recently released their grip. Another fresh wound, like a double pinprick, showed on her right thigh. In both places there was pain, sharp, awkward, and occasional; but it was bearable and therefore the least of her concerns right now. Worse was the fact that behind the pain and shock there still lay, lingering and insidious, remnants of an exquisite pleasure. Faintly her nerves still throbbed with an alien joy.

Beyond those sensations, something still persisted of the giddy drug-high Angie had been experiencing just before the attack. Dimly she understood that the potion administered by Uncle Matthew was still shielding her, to some extent, from what otherwise would have been the full extent of terror.

Dazedly, stumbling, she began to move toward the bathroom. There she could find water—thirst was suddenly very strong. There she could find a mirrorlike image of her own ravaged body that would let her begin to understand this disaster, this horror that had overtaken her. In a moment she was staring at her electronic reflection, pale to the lips underneath the smears of gore. In the next moment she was drinking hungrily from the faucet at the bathroom sink, then splashing water on her face, her throat, her breasts, her bitten leg. With a towel she wiped off as much bloodstain as she could.

Moving dazedly back into the bedroom, acting without a conscious plan, Angie groped in the closet for one of Uncle Matthew's robes, and put it on to cover her nakedness.

As she turned away from the closet, she saw movement on the bed. One of the vampires, the smaller one, was stirring, was pushing himself up slowly, first sitting, then sliding to his feet. His pale face still looked blind, looked dead. His figure moved uncertainly. It tottered and almost fell, groping outward with both arms like a blind man trying to achieve balance. The vampire showed no awareness of Angie's presence.

Pulling the skirts of the robe close to her legs, Angie sidled toward the bedroom door, which stood half open, showing part of the hallway beyond.

Whether the pale-faced thing was able to see her or not, it suddenly knew that she was in the room. Perhaps it heard her movement. Eyes turning uncertainly toward her, feet shuffling unsteadily, it was just barely quick enough to block her path, before she could dash past it to escape the bedroom.

Rage exploded in Angie's abused mind, and simultaneously in her muscles. Screaming, this time more in rage than fear, she charged with shoulder and elbow straight into the unsteady thing, broke its balance and sent it sprawling.

Dashing past it, eluding hands that swept toward her ankles, she fled the room. A second later, in the bedroom hallway, she collided with a figure that blocked her path. An eternal moment passed before she realized that this was John. John was shouting at her, and gripping in both hands an object Angie could dimly recognize as one of the wooden spears that had decorated the living-room wall.

Disentangling himself from Angie, he stepped aside and thrust hard and desperately with the spear at the thing that had followed her out of the bedroom. She turned to see the vampire struggling on the impaling lance, pale face contorted, pale claws outspread and wrenching at the wood. The point of the spear had caught only grazingly in the vampire's ribs, and with an anguished grunt it seized the shaft. A moment later it had torn the weapon from John's hands and broken it in two.

Wood was what it took to hurt them, always wood. Angie had absorbed that lesson swiftly. Running into the living room, with frantic hands she swept bric-a-brac from a wall-mounted shelf, then grabbed from its supporting brackets the oaken weight and length of the shelf itself.

Turning quickly, she swung her weapon awkwardly, beating the pale-faced vampire across the forehead as it came running after her. At almost the same instant John came at it from behind and stabbed it with the broken lance.

It staggered but did not fall. It turned on John.

"Angie—honey—Angie—" Calling her name as if he couldn't see her, John drew back what was left of his spear and tried again. The splintered end tore flesh from his opponent's face before a powerful arm once more knocked it away.

John renewed the attack, calling to Angie meanwhile. His voice sounded inarticulate and almost crazy.

Angie uttered strange noises and strange words. She stepped forward, pounding away with her shelf at the damned thing, hitting it again and again; the blows from the inch-thick plank sounded dully on the creature's skull, heavy and hollow on its back.

The thing turned around, showing a red ruin of a face, all torn by John's spear. Fumblingly, but still capable of terrible quickness, it caught her by the left wrist. Her club almost fell from her right hand as it began to drag her back toward the bedrooms.

John returned to the attack. The fight moved down the hallway. Two sets of lungs were laboring, gasping for the air to drive exhausted muscles into new exertions. But Angie could not break the terrible grip that threatened to crush her wrist. With her free hand she still held her oaken board, and swung it, jabbed with it, when she could

Now she could see into Uncle Matthew's bedroom once again. See that the taller vampire, who had been lying inertly on the bed, was now stirring, trying to get to his feet.

The mouth of its more active colleague opened, the creature drew in breath and uttered a cry for help. John jabbed his broken spear into its groin. The vampire beleaguered in the hallway gasped again, and giggled about through its bloodstained mouth. The lips were bleeding, and some of the teeth were broken from the last time that Angie had hit it with the bookshelf plank.

Angie managed to wrench her left wrist free. She drew back her weapon now and swung two-handed, hitting the enemy again, with all her strength.

But now its colleague came lurching, staggering quickly out of the bedroom and into the hall. In desperation John grappled with it, tripped it with a wrestler's move and knocked it down. Still its hands flailed at him numbly. The poison it had drunk from Angie's veins would not allow it to get a grip or maintain balance.

The body of the shorter vampire dripped and oozed with its own blood, more driven from its veins every time John struck it with his splintered spear. Seeming to ignore his blows, it moved again toward Angie, to catch up with her as she retreated toward the living room once more. The one on the floor was crawling after her too, and the eyes of both vampires were locked on her. Both of them made odd, drugged sounds, like the sounds Uncle Matthew had made when he was trying to wake up.

Gripping her shelf with both hands once again, she swung and hit her standing opponent a blow, glancing from its shoulder to the side of its head, that would have broken the thickest bones of a breathing man. And then she drew back her weapon and swung and struck it yet again, upon its warding elbow. And then the shelf was knocked out of her grip.

The vampire who had fallen in the hallway was clawing itself erect again, leaning against the wall, unable to advance as yet.

John had come from behind the active one to grapple with it for the second, third, or fourth time. This time John tried to strangle it from behind, pulling the shaft of his broken spear hard back against its throat. Trying to cut off its breath was a useless effort, and in a moment John was once more thrown aside.

This time he reacted differently. Crying out something, words she could not distinguish, he went scrambling past Angie, running back toward the living room.

Clear in John's mind was a vision of the other, unbroken spear, still on the wall. In his hectic passage he stumbled against the machine the enemy breathers had used to break in the apartment door. He fell, picked himself up, and with a desperate lunge at last got his hands on the remaining spear.

Running back down the hallway, newly armed, he heard a scream from Angie. She was between two standing monsters now. John could see the drooling mouth of the farthest enemy, open as if it meant to drive its broken fangs into her flesh again.

John skewered the nearer enemy from the rear with the new spear, the point going in just below the ribs on the right side, at the proper angle to nail a kidney. The creature screamed, a hideous, bellowing noise. It fell back. Angie came crawling past it, getting behind John, getting away. Inhuman noises came from her mouth too.

By now the second vampire was lurching into action.

John thrust his weapon into its body. The point hit bone, was turned away from vital organs. The second spear failed to do fatal damage before it was caught in a fumbling grip of inhuman strength and broken, like the first.

The fight lurched and bounced out into the living room. Angie had picked up a light wooden chair, and out here she had room to swing it.

Eventually a turning point was passed, in some way that John was not aware of when it happened. A time arrived when both of his opponents were on the floor, and he was crouching over them, soaked in their blood, stabbing and stabbing with wearied arms, sinking a sharply splintered spear shaft again and again into their flesh. Angie, swaying with weakness, still hovered beside him in a blood-soaked robe, clubbing at the enemy with one wooden weapon after another. The struggle had ceased to be a fight, it had become a slaughter, a process of finishing off the wounded.

The deadly dangerous wounded. Both vampires were incredibly strong, even in the half-dead state brought on by the poison, and incredibly hard to kill. Their bodies gave forth ugly sounds, meaty and yet drumlike, when beaten with a solid wooden club. With each new injury they howled again, the sounds a blend of rage and terror, like some mockery of Angie's own cries when they had seized her. They bled, as if their reservoirs were inexhaustible, their bright-red vampire blood.

The limbs of even a dying vampire, flailing about without coordination, still could deal powerful blows, and John and Angie were each knocked once more off their feet.

And then, at last, the ghastly things were dead.

There could be no mistake. Angie, with John at her side, watched the corpse of the last one dissolve in mist, mist that curled away across the floor, pushed back by the dank breeze still drifting in through the open window.

The victors both slumped in exhaustion. Angie fell into a chair, in an exhausted near faint, as soon as the fight was won. Under the fresh stains of vampire blood, her face was hideously pale.

John slowly sank down beside her.

The whole apartment, or every part of it that they could see, was a ruin of bloodstained carpets, broken and disordered furniture.

There was a sound from the direction of the front door. The door after being broken in had been propped back into place by the invaders, then pushed halfway aside again by John in his hasty return.

Too late Angie and John reacted, stumbling to their feet.

Someone was stepping in through the space that John had made. A man whom Angie could not recognize at first. The man gaped at John and Angie for a moment in astonishment, then drew a pistol and aimed it at them.

With his free hand, working behind him, he started tugging the broken door back into a more completely closed position. And now Angie could recognize the breather who had come with Kaiser on his first visit.

"Sorry for not knocking," Mr. Stewart said, and smiled. "The door was open."