Read Vampirus (Book 1) for Free Online

His face was greasy with sweat as he put an ear to her chest. There was only a hollow silence inside.
    “ She’s dead.”
    “ She don’t look dead,” Alger said, his voice barely coming. “Shouldn’t she…blacken-up or go purple or something? Swell up? Isn’t that what’s supposed to happen?”
    Yes, that ’s what was supposed to happen, Luke knew.
    Her belly was firmly rounded, but other than that he saw no signs of death. No lividity. No rigor. Nothing. The heat was on and the house was warm, but he smelled no putrefaction at all. Her face was uniformly white and bloodless, save for the smear of red at her lips and the hint of blush at her cheeks. It made no earthly sense.
    “ Looks like she could wake up any time,” Alger said.
    A fly revived by the heat walked across her cheek. It instinctively knew death. A dozen more buzzed at the window.
    Her eyes were closed so Luke pinched one lid between thumb and forefinger and drew it back like a window shade. He gasped. The eye was blank, white, and almost gelid-looking, the pupil nothing but a speck of black like soot. He pulled his fingers away, but the lid remained open. He had seen the eyes of the dead many times and never had they looked like that.
    “ Well?” Alger said. “You gonna tell me that’s normal?”
    Luke ignored him, staring down at her, darkness filling him and wrapping itself around his throat until he could barely breathe. His rational mind was having trouble with this, it was swimming upstream against a colossal superstitious dread that he could not necessarily put a name to. He only knew that it was active, ancient, and frightened.
    It was late afternoon and the sun would be down within the hour. Already the shadows were thick in the room, tangling up like snakes, sliding out of crevices and sunless corners. That corrupt smell was suddenly stronger, unpleasantly pervasive. There was a dark sweetness to it that made him want to gag.
    That inhuman eye seemed to be staring at him.
    “ Let’s get out of here,” he said. “It’ll be dark soon.”
    Which suggested things and he knew it. But even so, he would not allow his rational brain to connect with that ancient inner sense of impending doom where phantoms wheeled , as if it might contaminate his good sense, foul his thinking brain, or give his fear a name.
    They were almost out the bedroom door when there was a thump behind them. In the silent house, they both jumped. Linda’s left hand had shifted. It had fallen from her waist and bumped against the wall where it lay unmoving.
    They got the hell out.
    Outside, Luke felt marginally better…at least until he saw the shadowy façades of all those houses waiting there.
    They cut down Cherry Hill Road to where it intersected with 12 th Street and then cut off 12 th onto Post Lane, which brought them back to 13 th Street the long way. It was the scenic route. He wanted nothing better than to get home, but he needed to take a drive, needed to see some people out and about so he could shake the feeling that Wakefield was slowly becoming a cemetery. He saw some lights coming on in houses. One car idling in a driveway. That was it until they got far down Post to where it joined Springfield. There was a tanker truck parked right in the middle of the road. No flashers on, nothing. Springfield cut up to Sewer Street, which bordered the train yards where the warehouses and freight garages were. The truck must have been heading that way when it died.
    As they got up alongside it, they hopped out and saw the cab door on the driver’s side was wide open. There was no one inside. Just the empty cab, keys still in the ignition. The battery was dead.
    “ Must’ve had some kind of mechanical problem,” Luke said, snowflakes powdering his face. “Maybe the driver was sick and wandered off. Maybe.”
    Alger looked unconvinced. “Sure. That must be it.”
    They got back in the pickup and drove over to 13 th . Stepping out into the gathering storm, they