The Cowboy and Vampire

The Cowboy and Vampire Page 33

The flight down the tunnel was harrowing and dark. Dad, claiming his heart was failing, brought up the rear just in case the explosion had failed to plug the hole. Tucker argued but was overruled, and he, Lizzie, and Sully followed the dogs through the darkness.

"Like being in the catacombs again," Tucker grumbled, straining to make his way as they ran. Alexandra had obviously made the trip a number of times and loped ahead, only to turn back to encourage them on, circling through the survivors in search of her master, then running forward again.

Tucker caught up to Lizzie and pulled her to a stop. "Listen," he panted, "don't you need a rest?"

She shook her head, watching nervously behind. "No, I'm fine."

"Are you sure?"

"Positive. I was exhausted earlier, a little sick, but I'm fine now."

"Really?"

"Really C'mon, I think I see the end."

He bent over and sucked air deep into his lungs, pushing Rex out of his face. "Maybe you just don't feel tired, even though inside you are and need a little rest."

"Okay, fine," she said, understanding at last. "We'll rest."

"If you really need to. But just for a minute," he wheezed.

"Somebody's coming," Sully snarled. The conflict had peeled back the effeminate mannerisms he had crafted over the last several hundred years so that all that remained was the essence of the survivor.

They swiveled their heads in unison to see a dark, misshapen figure carrying a sputtering torch making its way towards them. The tattered shadow was moaning and cursing and Tucker whistled a sigh of relief. "Just Dad. What the hell are you carrying on about?"

"My damn underwear's wet and I got sand in it."

"No sign of anyone?"

"Not yet."

"Good, 'cause we're almost out of here. Smell that?"

A cool breeze was drifting among them, rich with the smell of juniper and pine. In a matter of minutes, they came to the end, a rough-hewn square cut into the sandstone above and a splintered ladder leading to it. Tucker crawled up first, hand over hand, into the night air to see that it was safe. He found himself in the ruins of an ancient pueblo high up in the canyon, the one he had explored just a few days earlier. From this ledge, he could see the trees and hear the faint muddle of the spring down below.

"All clear," he whispered. "Come on up."

Lizzie was halfway there already and stretched her hand through. Her strength was ebbing quickly, due, she feared, to a lack of blood. Tucker helped her through and let her lean on him as he sat her down against the wall. Dad struggled up next and then Sully leaped up in a bound.

"I gotta get the dogs. Be right back." Tucker disappeared momentarily then struggled up with Alexandra. Sully lifted her from his arms and waited as he returned for Rex. Rex fought off his attempted assistance so that Tucker had to crawl up with the greatest of difficulty to deposit his dog unceremoniously on the hard floor.

Standing at the window, Tucker could see over the edge of the canyon and all the way to the compound and beyond. In between, the wreckage of the helicopters still guttered and smoked. He kicked at the spent cartridges littering the floor and smiled. "These were Lenny's," he said to no one in particular.

"Hope he's all right," Dad said.

"He's the one that set those whirly-birds alight. He must be okay."

Lizzie joined him. She regarded the ruined compound, the activity still visible there. "So many lives lost, all for me." She was almost numb with the knowledge of what had transpired.

"The alternative ain't so great. And I don't mean just for me. I mean for the whole world," said Tucker.

"He's right, honey," Sully said as he came to take her hand. "It has to end here. If Julius becomes keeper of the uncreation, I shudder to think what will happen next."

"Lazarus certainly believed so," Lizzie said.

"If memory serves, Lazarus wasn't all too keen on getting resurrected. Maybe this turned out to be sort of a blessing."

"It's nice to think something good came from his death."

"Now you have to take his place," Sully said.

"How could anyone ever take his place?" Lizzie was incredulous. "Don't be ridiculous."

"Yes," Julius said, stepping from the shadows of a ruined anteroom. "Don't be ridiculous, Sully," he said, his spirits high. "No one could ever replace me."

Sully responded first, his near-animal-like reflexes driving him into a defensive crouch and then hurling himself at Julius faster than the human eye could follow. Even faster, Julius caught him with his fists in midair and threw him, like Satan from heaven, out the window and into the open space of the canyon. Sully disappeared with a scream, a rattle of stones, and a distant thud.

"Son of a bitch," Dad grimaced, drawing his pistol. Julius swatted it away with a casual gesture that broke the bones of his gun hand like Styrofoam. Dad howled in pain and Julius drove a stiffened finger through the flesh of his chest, the force of it driving Dad back into the wall where he slid down with a groan.

"Dad, goddamnit," Tucker screamed. He fired the shotgun from his hip, both barrels discharging simultaneously with a deafening roar. The wooden stakes streaked out, but Julius stepped to the side like a ghost, snatching one from the air. He twirled it around his fingertips with a flourish, then balanced it in his palm.

"Goodness," he said to Lizzie, "simply being near you makes me feel a thousand years younger."

He hurled the wooden missile and it plunged deep into Tucker's shoulder. His mouth dropped open as the shock grabbed him, collapsing beside Dad, who drew him close and pressed his good hand over the wound, the butt end of the stake poking out from between his bloody fingers.

"Tell you what," Julius said, seizing Lizzie around the waist, "let's leave the boys alone for a while. We've got some catching up to do... daughter." He leaped out the window, holding her tight, and sprang out of sight, dropping into the ruins below.

In the quiet left in their absence, Dad pulled Tucker closer to his shoulder. "This is bad, isn't it?" he said, his face pale from the pain.

"Real bad."

"At least he hasn't killed us."

"Yet."

He pulled Tucker's hand aside to examine the wound. "Hurt?"

"Yep," he grimaced.

"Reckon you'll pass out?"

"If I do, how'm I gonna save Lizzie?"

"I don't know. Got any ideas?"

"Naw How 'bout you?"

"Yeah. I should've stayed home," he said, cradling his broken wrist.

Tucker straightened his legs. His voice was strained. "Too late for that."

Dad nodded. "S'pose Sully's dead?"

"No more'n usual."

He regarded the stake for a moment. "Think we should pull that out?"

"I'd probably bleed to death."

"We gotta do something 'sides just sit here."

"Even healthy the two of us, we ain't much of a match for super-Vamp." Rex crawled up to lick cautiously at Tucker's bloody hand. Tucker pushed him away absently "And you sure weren't much help, you idiot dog. I shoulda got a cat."

Dad petted Rex on the head. "Don't be an asshole. Wasn't nothing he could do."

"He could've bit him."

"Hell, we couldn't even shoot him."

"Whose side you on?"

"Lizzie's."

At that, Tucker sighed. "I best get down there." He stood unsteadily and Dad pulled himself up alongside. Leaning together, they made for the front ladder.

"You hear something?"

"Just the wind."

"I must be losing my mind," Tucker said. "I could have swore I heard voices."

Lizzie leaned on her hands and knees, her long hair hanging down almost to the floor of the moon-drenched pueblo several levels below where the battle had taken place. The roof was long ago claimed by the wind and weather, and the night sky served as a backdrop for Julius, who paced around her in a frenetic circle.

"So, tonight it ends. And here, of all places. Most amusing." He stopped in midstride to gaze blankly at the walls. "If all these centuries have taught me anything it's that fate does indeed control our lives, more so than most can imagine." His pacing continued. "Many, many years ago, I had a young lady, also of the blood, and through her I had hoped to gain the power of the uncreation. I might have if Lazarus had not interfered. To make a long story short, he killed his own daughter." His face was manic and twisted. "The guilt destroyed him. He has grieved ever since. Came to this desolate place and never left."

He gestured at the pictographs. "His arrival so terrified the natives. They left their homes and farms by the thousands. One of the

'mysteries' that has bothered your historians ever since. And now we are at the crossroads again, and this time, in his backyard.

Pity you're not his real daughter."

"He was a good Vampire," she said, brushing her hair back and rocking back onto her heels, "a good man."

"He was weak. Pathetic. He should have long ago killed you, when you were just a baby."

She shook her head, jaw set in grim determination. "He did what he had to do."

"As did I. Including the rape of your silly little mother. If it had not been for Lazarus' continual interference, I would have killed her at your birth and raised you myself. Just think, Elita and I would have been Mummy and Daddy to you." Julius laughed then bowed deeply. He saw that her eyes had narrowed. "Ah, yes, your traitorous little friend Elita. No doubt she is exterminated by now. I gave her to my men, as an after-work cocktail, so to speak. When they are done, she is to be staked for the sunrise. I shall feed on her after I drain the life-blood from your cowboy and his father." He snapped his fingers. "Wait, wait. Perhaps I shall turn them as well, so I can make the killing last that much longer. I will be omnipotent."

"You will have no power to turn a human. I will not give you my blood," Lizzie said.

"I will take it."

"If it doesn't come tonight?"

He stroked his chin in mock thoughtfulness. "Now that would be problematic. I suppose the timetables are somewhat nebulous for this sort of thing... I've got it! Perhaps a vigorous fuck would coax it out." He paused for effect and leered.

"You are out of your mind. I'm your daughter, for God's sake."

He swooped close and clamped her chin in his palm, wrenching her head sharply up to meet his gaze. "I have had a hundred daughters in my life. Let me be the first to tell you, after the first dozen, the charm wears off. They look the same, feel the same, fuck the same, bleed the same as any other woman I happen to need. Do not for a second imagine I harbor any shred of paternal devotion toward you."

With a shriek, she lunged to her feet, tearing herself free from his grasp. "The only thing I can't imagine is why my mother ever let you touch her."

His eyes flared briefly, a mixture of amusement and surprise. "Because she was weak. Like you." He smiled mockingly. "I can't even remember her name."

Lizzie exploded into him with a roar, her balled fists striking him in the chest and driving him back into the stone wall with such force the foundations shook. His mouth hung open as he struggled to regain his balance.

"Her name was Constance, asshole." She lashed out again, the force of her rage fracturing the bones of his cheek.

"You little bitch," he roared, throwing her off and across the narrow confines. She struck the wall and like a rubber ball, bounced back into him. He folded over, then twisted out of reach, striking a blow as he did. He stared at her, both of them breathing hard. "You have become powerful."

Grimly, she nodded.

"The time is close at hand. Give me what I want and you live, you and your cowboy I offer my protection. In the coming age of chaos, you will be spared."

She wiped a trickle of blood from the corner of her mouth with the back of her hand. "I don't think so. I think it ends here. And I think you're scared."

He smiled. "I think you are so very, very young and quite ignorant. You cannot defeat me." He moved closer toward Lizzie, backing her into a dark corner of the pueblo ruins.

Tucker and Dad were letting themselves down the face of the cliff ruins slowly and methodically hand over hand. The dogs watched them from above, whining and barking and then disappearing from view, only to return and stare longingly down. The going was torturous and the two men paused at the next level.

"It's gonna be light soon," Dad said.

Tucker was staring out into the desert, his eyes glazed with pain.

After a few more seconds and no answer, he said again, "Gonna be light soon."

Still no answer and he shook Tucker by the shoulder. "You okay, boy?"

Tucker started to laugh, deep heartfelt laughter that shook his frame and seemed so foreign originating from that source of pain and exhaustion.

"Tucker, you gone delirious?"

All those many weeks of trauma and loss now spilled out of Lizzie as they fought like no other beings from the hand of God had ever fought. Her rage influenced gravity itself, releasing its rules so that she floated here and there, always just out of reach. Julius was striking madly, rarely hitting her at all, while she inflicted tremendous damage on him.

"No," he screamed, "I deserve the power."

Her attack slackened and she settled to the ground, her body heaving from the exertion. "You deserve exactly what fate has given you, an empty existence." The adrenaline began to wane and a familiar nausea returned and with it, a weakness. Her body sagged and Julius sensed it.

His face twisted into a ferocious grin that glittered like a scimitar in the half light. Lizzie paled and backed into the wall. "All this fun must have worn you out." He approached with difficulty. "Enough talk. Enough sermons. Enough life. Time for you to give your blood to me. All of it." He tore a rotten rung from an ancient ladder, crumbling the end into a dull point he tested against his fingertip. "Crude, but it will do." He moved toward her, the stake raised.

Exhaustion gripped her muscles, but she fought it and leaped over him toward the open roof. Julius flung the weathered stake like a javelin and it soared straight toward her back.

There was a roar and a flash and the stake shattered in midflight, the splinters raining down around Julius. He spun in anger and in the doorway, he saw Tucker leaning on Dad for support, his Casull smoking in his hand.

"Nice shot," Dad said.

"Will you never go away?" Julius ranted, his eyes wild.

"I like to see a job through," Tucker said weakly.

"This time, I promise, you will." He lunged toward them in a near-blind rage.

"Tucker," Lizzie shouted, jumping in between them.

"Careful, darling," Tucker whispered, shakily hoisting the pistol up in an attempt to back Julius down. "A woman in your condition ought not to be jumping around so."

"What condition might that be, doomed cowboy?" Julius snarled, already imagining Tucker's sunburned throat under his hands.

"Pregnant," Tucker answered.

The word hit the air like the crack of a whip, freezing Julius a step away from the two men and Lizzie a half step behind him. The night loomed over them in silence. In the distance, the barking of the dogs carried down on soft winds. Lizzie's eyes flared.

"What?"

"You're pregnant."

"You mean, we're pregnant."

"Yeah. We're pregnant. That night in the barn, I reckon, or down in the catacombs. All this last two weeks, you've been feeling peaked, kind of nauseous, must have been morning sickness... or in your case, night sickness. And you been hungry all the time, and more'n a little cranky."

She brushed past a now-frozen Julius as if he no longer existed and took Tucker by the arm. "How could you know this?"

"That's the crazy part. Them voices told me. All of a sudden they just filled my head up and told me."

"Impossible. It is biologically impossible for an Adamite to mate with a Vampire," Julius snapped, trying to remaster the situation.

"This is ridiculous, a ploy to stall for time." He glanced out the window at the light beginning to emerge from the east. "Even dawn will not save you."

"I ain't bluffing. Use them fancy Vampire senses of yours to listen."

Julius bent his head in concentration and reached out with his mind. The voices flashed through his thoughts, the mocking laughter deafening. "A child will be born, a child will be born," they chanted and he covered his ears with his hands as if that might block it out. He dropped to his knees, screaming in anguish at what had come to pass.

Lizzie closed her eyes and traveled far inside herself, also in search of the voices, but what she found instead was a tiny heartbeat, muffled but steady, and for an instant she was turned inside out and the heartbeat was her own in the womb of the universe. Suns rose and set and flared throughout her as the tiny heart drove the whole vast mechanism along. In less than a second, a second that stretched from the beginning of time to the end and doubled back along the way, she too, knew the truth.

There was life inside her, life that bridged the world of the living and the world of the undead. The power of the uncreation had found a vessel. It was contained in a holy grail forged of flesh and eternal love and radiant joy spilled from her.

"You're right," she whispered to Tucker, who smiled through his pain.

"Idiots," Julius raved. "Idiot couplings of idiots to beget idiots. A chance fuck between idiots is not going to thwart my plans." He drove his fist into his palm. "I will kill you all for the sheer pleasure of it." Foam flecked his lips and sprayed the air. "I don't care anymore. I can wait. I've waited all this time, another seven hundred years is nothing to me." He took a menacing step forward, eyes glittering and outstretched hands trembling with murderous passion.

"I guess you don't understand love very well," Lizzie said.

He spun, snarling. "Love is a just a word. It isn't real. Death is real. Power is real."

Tucker cocked the pistol and Dad helped steady his arm. "Hate to disappoint you, but my boy ain't growing up without a dad."

"How do you know it's a boy?" Lizzie asked.

"I just know it is."

"I think its a girl," she countered.

"A girl would be fine."

"If it is, I hope she don't look nothing like you," Dad said.

Julius snarled. "Shut up, all of you. None of you are going to live past the sunrise."

"I hear congratulations are in order," Lenny said as he hoisted himself into the room. He was tattered and bloody, and most of his hair was scorched away, but he looked very much alive, a shiny assault rifle cradled in his arms. "Never thought I'd see the day, Tucker."

"Me either," Tucker assented.

Julius backed a step away, his odds suddenly decreasing. "Your guns cannot kill me."

"Naw, but they can slow you down a bit."

"I could kill you," Elita said, dropping down to the sand behind him.

"Elita," Lizzie said incredulously, "how..."

She sniffed disdainfully. "Men are pretty much the same, no matter how long they have lived. All blinded by their desires. Not much of a challenge really" She pulled a cigarette from the tatters of her clothes and scratched a match to life.

"You ain't really going to smoke that around Lizzie, are you? She's pregnant, you know," quipped Tucker.

"Sorry, just a habit."

"You'd better get over it if you plan on being my boy's godmother."

She smiled in spite of herself and stubbed the cigarette out. "Girl," she said under her breath.

Julius sneered, his rage barely contained. "None of you shall live. The only question is who I shall start with?"

"Start with me," Lizzie said. Her eyes burned with a terrible certainty. She left Elita by the wall and stood before him.

"Gladly," he said.

As he took a step forward, she found the light and reached inside his mind. Confused, he stepped away The force of her will battered into his thoughts and his power, his vitality siphoned away. He staggered. "No, impossible." Her thoughts surrounded him, hammered at his soul.

"I could turn you off like a light switch," she whispered. "Love is not a word. Love is growing inside me, and you couldn't stop it now if you tried."

Julius spun away and pushed past Tucker. "I've never been a gracious loser," he said. "I will be back. Your offspring will be mine, as will the uncreation. You cannot hide. And I dare say, many of you will not be alive to witness it." He sprang through the open roof and was gone, his sinister laughter echoing behind him.

"Reckon we should have tried stopping him," Dad said directly.

"I was out of ammo," Lenny said, sitting down. "And I can't see clearly just yet. Got too close to the explosions."

Elita slid down the wall and hugged her knees. "Truth be known, there's not much fight left in me. If not for Lizzie, he would have killed us all."

"Probably," Tucker said. "I'm just glad he's gone." He looked around at the tiny hint of pink on the distant horizon. "Y'all better find some shade, gonna be morning soon." Tucker took Lizzie by the hand and gave it a squeeze. "A father," he said, shaking his head slowly. "Funny how things work out sometimes."

She smiled. "Sure is."

"I don't want to raise my boy in New York City."

"It's our girl, and I agree." She stared out at the lightening day.

"Ain't no room at my place for all of you," Dad said.

"What's poor Rex gonna think?" Tucker asked. Lizzie and Tucker looked quietly at each other and then he let go of her hand.

"You ain't quite finished, are you?"

"How much time before the sun comes up?"

He looked at Lenny's wristwatch. "About an hour."

"He threatened our child."

"I know."

"I think I'm ready for my first kill."

His mouth dropped open. "But, honey, you ain't got time."

"It won't take long. I can sense him. I can sense everything." She looked at Elita who was closely following their conversation.

"Do I have your blessing?"

"I will not mourn for him," said Elita, "if that is what you mean."

Before the words had time to settle in the air, Lizzie was gone. Moments later, a cry reverberated through the canyon. They all held their breath as it echoed, then slowly was lost to the wind that always seems to accompany first light.