They Thirst Part 15

"Father!" Rico said. "Don't . . .!"

But then Silvera started across the threshold, and something dark came flying into his face from the ceiling. He cried out, feeling a claw graze his cheek, and threw his hands up before his face. The thing tangled in his hair, then whirled off over his head like a swooping gray leaf. Silvera spun around to watch it hit the corridor ceiling with that m.u.f.fled thumping noise; it flew over Rico's head and disappeared into shadows at the far end of the hallway. Silvera was shaken, but he felt like exploding with nervous laughter. A pigeon, he thought. I was frightened by a single pigeon. He looked back into the apartment and immediately saw the broken window where the thing must've flown in, on the floor a broken bottle and knick-knacks spilled from a shelf that the pigeon had probably collided with. He went into the apartment, his hands shaking badly now-he wondered how he was going to keep Rico from seeing-and checked the bathroom. A mirror had been smashed, and Silvera stared at himself through a series of concentric cracks. Again he noted that the shower curtain was gone.

The"H'-* rod itself had been ripped out of the wall.

Across the hallway Rico was slowly pus.h.i.+ng open the door to Mrs. Santos's apartment. He stood at the threshold and called out her name, but of course there was no answer, and neither had he been expecting one. It was just that he wanted to hear a voice in this place, something human in this silent vault. He stepped into the apartment, his heartbeat racing. A sheen of sweat clung to his face. He walked across the room and looked into the small, darkened bedroom. It was sweltering, the air hanging in heavy layers. Rico saw that the sheets had been torn off the bed He felt the hair rise on the back of his neck suddenly and didn't know why. Quickly he left the bedroom and went back out to the hall.

Father Silvera had stepped into another room farther along the corridor. In this apartment he found an empty cradle with several spots of blood on the infant's pillow. When he stepped into the bedroom, he immediately froze. On the wall over the bare bed, written in blood, was ALL FOR THE MASTER. Newspapers were jammed over the single window, reducing the light to a pale, smoky haze.

Silvera ripped them away. The light immediately strengthened, and he opened the window for some fresh air.

And then something moved in the room-a bare whisper of a movement that made Silvera twist around from the window. But no one was there. The bedroom was empty. He listened, ignoring the increased muscle fibrillations that ran through his hands, making his fingers twitch like claws. Again that noise, somewhere close. A sliding cloth-on-cloth sound. He stared at the mattress. No sheets.

Where are they? he wondered. Did these people leave their homes and belongings, taking with them only sheets and cheap plastic shower curtains?

dead trees. The legs pushed frantically, and in another moment the two figures had squirmed back underneath the bed. They gave a couple of convulsive twitches and lay still.

Rico's face had gone almost as white as Joe Vega's. He turned and stumbled over his own feet trying to get out to the corridor. Silvera came out, walking unsteadily. "Let's get out of here, Father! Let's call the cops!" Rico pleaded.

"Did you look for Mrs. Santos?"

"Yeah. There's nothing in there. . . ."

"Were the sheets on the bed?"

Rico went cold. "Sheets? No. But Christ, Father, don't go back in there!" Silvera stepped into the apartment. He forced himself to look under the bed, but there was nothing there. He crossed the room to a closet, gripped the k.n.o.b, and opened it. At the bottom there was a pile of old newspapers and clothes. Silvera stared at it for a few seconds, then probed it with his foot. Something moved, s.h.i.+fting uneasily.

He slammed the door shut and hurried out to where Rico, his face a shade between white and green, waited. "All right," Silvera said. "Now we go for the police."

EIGHT.

Palatazin and Reece came out of an apartment building on Malabar Street in Boyle Heights trailed by an elderly black man with a gnarled walking stick. The man's name was Herbert Vaughan, he was a retired L.A. police officer, and he owned a light gray 72 Volkswagen Beetle with license plate 205 AVT.

"You know Captain Dexter?" he asked Palatazin when they'd reached the dark blue car with the munic.i.p.al tag parked in front of the building.

"Will Dexter? Yes sir, I did know him, but he retired about six years ago."

"Oh, Captain Dexter retired? He was a fine man, a real fine man. He could find this Roach fella for you if you got him out of retirement." The man's eyes snapped from Reece to Palatazin.

"I'm sure he could, Mr. Vaughan. He did a good job on the Chinatown killings back in 71."

"Uh-huh. Sure did. And I'll tell you what, Will Dexter could catch the Gravedigger, too. Could find that fella fast as you could say 'Jack Robinson.'"

"The Gravedigger?" Reece said. "Who's that, Mr. Vaughan?"

"Don't you boys keep up with anything anymore?" He cracked his stick impatiently down on the sidewalk. "It was in the Tattler this morning! The Gravedigger! That fella who's been going' through cemeteries and makin' off with the caskets! Ha!

That kind of s.h.i.+t didn't go on when I was on the force, I'm here to tell you!"

"The Tattler?" Palatazin said softly. "This morning?"

"Son, have you got wax in your ears? That's what I said. What kind of accent have you got? Italian?"

"Hungarian. Thank you for talking with us, Mr. Vaughan." Palatazin went around the car and slid in under the steering wheel. Reece climbed in, but Mr. Vaughan shuffled forward and gripped the door handle before Reece could close it. "You get Cap Dexter out of retirement, you hear? He'll find the Roach for you, and he'll put that Gravedigger in the nut house, where he belongs!"

"Thank you, Mr. Vaughan," Reece said, and gently closed the door. As they drove away Palatazin glanced in the rearview mirror and saw the old man leaning on his cane, watching them drive out of sight.

"Who's next?" Reece asked.

Palatazin checked his list. "A. Mehta, 4517-D, Arizona Avenue in East L.A. That's a white Volks with the plate 253 BTA. I hope the other men are having better luck than we are." He waited for a light to change and then turned right on Whittier Boulevard. He'd gone almost a block when an ambulance screamed up from behind. Immediately he swerved to the curb; the ambulance, white and orange lights flas.h.i.+ng, careened through traffic and on out of sight.

"Gravedigger," Reece said quietly, and smiled. "Christ! This city's full of nuts, isn't it? If it's not Roach, it's the Gravedigger, and if not him, it'll always be someone else tomorrow."

"Remind me to find a Tattler on the way in. I'd like to read that story."

"I didn't think you were a fan of that rag."

"I'm not. But Mr. Vaughan's right-we have to keep up with things, don't we?" In the distance he heard the shriek of another siren. He could look down the side streets off Whittier Boulevard and see a smoky haze hanging in the afternoon sunlight between buildings that looked like bombed-out hulks. He didn't often come into the poor black and Spanish sections of Boyle Heights, East L.A., and Belvedere Gardens. There were detectives, though, who'd been trained especially in dealing with the barrio population, and in many instances riot situations had been defused by a detective or a beat officer who'd been accepted into the barrio's fold. All others were estranos, strangers not to be trusted.

Reece glanced over at Palatazin, then back to the street. "Any particular reason you wanted to hit the street yourself on this one, captain? You could just as easily have handled it from the office."

"No, I wanted to get out of there for a while. I'm getting fat and lazy sitting around telling other people what to do. That's the trouble with promotions, Sully. You're rewarded for what you do best by being shoved upstairs to let younger men do the legwork. Of course, if what you do best is the legwork, then . . . well..." He shrugged. What he did not say was that he was becoming fearful of his own office, of the shadows and shapes he was beginning to think he saw within those four walls.

At the next intersection a third ambulance shrieked across, heading south.

"Wonder what's going on?" Reece said.

Their radio, which had been humming with codes and locations all across the city, suddenly came to urgent life. The dispatcher's voice sounded loud in the closed vehicle-"All cars vicinity of Caliente and Dos Terros streets, East Los Angeles, see the senior officer at 1212 Dos Terros." The message was repeated, and then voices from various cars confirming.

"That sounds hot," Reece said. He motioned toward the next street sign.

"Caliente's coming up."

Palatazin's heartbeat quickened. A black and white roared past them, siren wailing, and turned left on Caliente with a screech of tires. "Let's see what's going on," Palatazin said. He swerved through traffic and raced after the prowl car as Reece hit the siren and clamped the flas.h.i.+ng Magneto light to the car's top.

For a few minutes they wound through an area of narrow, potholed streets and crumbling tenements, until they came to a street that was already being cordoned off by a couple of uniformed officers. The prowl car was permitted to sweep on through. Palatazin applied the brakes and showed them his badge.

"What's happening?" he asked one of the cops.

"No one's certain yet, captain," the officer said. "They're bringing a lot of , corpses out of that building over there, but. . . well, you'll have to see for yourself, sir."

"Who's senior officer?"

"Sergeant Teal. I believe he's inside."

Palatazin nodded and drove through. People were cl.u.s.tered around the stairs of a tenement in the middle of the block, and the police were trying to push them back behind sawhorse cordons. Four prowl cars were parked at different angles in the street with their lights spinning, and there were two ambulances parked close to the stairs. Palatazin whipped the car to the opposite curb and jumped out. Reece followed him across the street, and when they reached the stairway, they saw two white-uniformed ambulance attendants bringing down a stretcher with a woman's body on it. The white sheet pulled up to her chin matched the color of her flesh. From where he stood Palatazin caught a brief glimpse of those eyes , staring through the closed lids. A s.h.i.+ver of horror went through the crowd of onlookers. The body began writhing in the sheet, the face contorting hideously, but no sound came from its mouth. The body was loaded into one of the waiting ambulances.

"I thought these were supposed to be corpses," Reece said, watching the ambulance wheel away. "G.o.d, what was wrong with that woman's eyes?" Palatazin was already moving up the stairs. He flashed his badge at the officer at the door. "Where's Sergeant Teal?"

"Third floor, captain."

He started to ascend the stairway, but suddenly his attention was caught by a small yellow form shoved in a corner of the entrance hall. It was a dead dog. The teeth were bared; there was a bullet hole in the skull. Palatazin climbed the stairs, stepping aside as another stretcher was brought down, the pallid "corpse" twitching beneath the sheet. The hair rose on the back of his neck as he sensed the cold waves radiated by this thing. The dead eyes grazed his own. He turned away from it, bile raging in his stomach, and continued upward.

In a third-floor apartment Palatazin found Sergeant Teal-a large, curly-haired man with the physique of an ex-UCLA linebacker. He was talking to two Chicanes -an older man wearing a starched priest's collar and a boy whose eyes looked dazed and sick. Palatazin approached Teal and showed his badge. "Sergeant Teal?

What's the situation here?"

The other man motioned Palatazin away from the two Chicanos. Palatazin's shoes crunched over bits of gla.s.s. He looked down to see the remnants of a broken mirror. Yes, he thought, suddenly calm and resolute. Yes. They've been here.

"Those two over there, Father Ramon Silvera and Rico Esteban, found the first bodies. So far we've pulled thirty-nine of them out of closets and from under beds. They were all rolled up in shower curtains, rugs, and sheets. Thirty-nine of them." Teal's clear blue eyes were full of sick confusion. He lowered his voice. "You're going to think this is crazy, captain, but . . ."

"Go on."

"Well, I don't know whether to cla.s.sify these bodies as corpses or not. Oh sure, they move a little bit, but it all seems to be muscle reflex, like some trick of rigor mortis. The h.e.l.l of it is ... the bodies don't have heartbeats or pulse rates. I mean . . . technically they're dead, aren't they?" Palatazin closed his eyes for a few seconds, his hand coming up to his forehead.

"Sir?" Teal said. "They are dead, aren't they?"

"Any wounds on the bodies?"

"I've just looked closely at a couple of them. I saw some cuts and bruises. That's about it."

"No," Palatazin said quietly. Another stretcher pa.s.sed the door. "That's not all."

"Sir?"

"Nothing. I'm thinking out loud. Where are the bodies being taken?"

"Uh . . ." He looked down at a notepad in his hand. "Mercy Hospital in Monterey Park. That's the nearest, and they've got the facilities to handle this mess."

He paused for a few seconds, watching Palatazin's face. "What's wrong with these people, captain? Could it be ... like ... a disease or something?"

"If you think that, Teal, keep it to yourself. We don't want the neighborhood panicking worse than it probably has already. Did Mercy send a doctor over?"

"Yes sir. Dr. Delgado. She's upstairs right now."

"Okay, fine. Will you give me a few minutes alone with these two?" He motioned toward the priest and the boy across the room. Teal nodded and went out, closing the door behind him. Palatazin kicked at the shards of gla.s.s, glanced quickly around the apartment, and then returned his gaze to the priest, who seemed to be in better shape than the boy. Except for one thing-his hands were trembling, clenching and unclenching. A nervous reaction? Palatazin wondered. Or something else? He introduced himself to the two men. "Sergeant Teal tells me you two found the first bodies. What time was that?"

"About one-thirty," the priest said. "We've told all this to the other officers."

"Yes, yes, I know." Palatazin waved a hand at him to quiet his objections. He walked past them and peered into the dim bedroom, noting the newspapers covering the windows. There was another shattered mirror in the bathroom. He came back out. "What do you think happened here, Father?" he asked the priest. Silvera narrowed his eyes; the slight quaver in the policeman's voice put him on edge. "I have no idea. Rico and I came looking for Mrs. Santos, who lives...

lived on the fifth floor. We found the building just as it is now."

"I want to get out of here," Rico said quietly. "I can't stand being in this place anymore."

"A little longer, okay?" Palatazin said. He looked back to Silvera. "You saw the bodies. Tell me. Are they dead or alive?"

"Dead," Rico said.

Silvera took a while longer in answering. "I don't know," he said finally. "No heartbeat, no pulse . . . and yet they move . . . Sergeant Teal tells me thirty-nine bodies have been found. How many people O lived in this building?"

"Sixty or seventy, at least."

"But not all of the apartments were occupied?"

Jt Silvera shook his head.

"All right. Thank you." Palatazin turned and started for the door, but Silvera's voice stopped him. "What's happened to these people, officer? What kind of thing did this to them?"

He almost answered, almost said the terrible word, but fear gripped his throat and squeezed it. He left the room without another word and stood outside clutching at the stairway railing like a man on a heaving s.h.i.+p in a world that had suddenly tilted crazily on its axis and begun to spin backward in time. He was only dimly aware of someone-no, two people-coming along the corridor toward him. When he looked up, he saw that it was Teal and a middle-aged Chicano woman with haggard circles under her eyes. "Captain?" Teal said. "This is Dr. Delgado."

The woman extended her hand, and Palatazin shook it. Another body was carried past them through the corridor, and Palatazin cringed at the sight of those staring eyes. "Captain, to be perfectly honest with you, I don't know what in the name of G.o.d we have here," Dr. Delgado said in a soft, weary voice.

"These are not corpses technically, yet there are no outward signs of life; no rigor mortis is setting in, and no fluids are collecting in the intestines or extremities. I p.r.i.c.ked the finger of one of them, and do you know what came out?

Absolutely nothing. The body was drained dry. I don't know about the others, but that body was totally bloodless. And yet when the ambulance attendants were strapping it to a stretcher, the body-what should've been a corpse-moved."

"Jesus!" Teal said, his eyes icy blue circles.

"As I say, I don't know what we have. I may not want to know, but that's my profession. One of my colleagues at Mercy, Dr. Steiner, is on his way over right now. Possibly he can help . . ."

"Nothing can help," Palatazin said suddenly, and realized it was all about to pour out, all of it like bile flowing up from the secret pit of terror, and he was going to be unable to stop it. He clenched his teeth, his eyes widening, but the torrent of words forced them apart. "It's too late, nothing can help. We've got to ... got to leave all of them inside here and burn this building to the ground right now before the sun goes down! Then we've got to scatter .

scatter the ashes and pour holy water on the ruins!" He looked from Teal to Delgado and back again-they were too shocked to speak. The priest and the boy were standing in the doorway of that room, watching him, as was a uniformed officer farther along the corridor who stood staring at Palatazin in amazement.

"What are you all looking at?" Palatazin shrieked, and felt something give way, like timbers exposed too long to vicious weather. "You've seen the bodies!

You've seen what they can do! They can sweep through a whole building in less than one night! What will they do soon to whole streets? Neighborhoods?" He trembled, and a voice within him roared "STOP," but he couldn't stop, he had no power now over the words tumbling from his mouth. Cold beads of sweat had popped up on his face, and the only sound in the entire building was his voice. "We can burn this building to the ground and kill some of them, because when these . . .

when these wake up they're going to be thirsty, too!" He looked at Dr. Delgado, the raging fear in his eyes completely exposed. "You can't take them to Mercy Hospital! You can't let them get out into the streets!" Someone gripped his shoulder. He spun around, panting.

Sully, his expression grave, said quietly, "Captain, come on with me. Let's get some fresh air, okay?"

"LEAVE ME ALONE!" He jerked free and shoved Sully away. His gaze fell upon the priest. "You! You of all people should realize the evil that's creeping up on this city! G.o.d in heaven, can't you feel it in here? Tell them not to let these things wake up tonight!"

Silvera glanced quickly at Teal and then back to the police captain. He felt he was on the verge of madness himself, split between a shudder and a scream. Of course he felt the evil; it was everywhere in this place, like viscous mist, but what was this man saying?

"Father," Palatazin said, and in his voice there was now something of a terrified nine-year-old boy. "Please don't let the vampir loose on the streets!

Tell them we have to burn the bodies!"