999_ Twenty-Nine Original Tales of Horror and Suspense - Al Sarrantonio [78]
For this book, he has produced something I very much wanted—a traditional vampire story.
“The Holy Father says there are no such things as vampires,” Sister Bernadette Gileen said.
Sister Carole Hanarty glanced up from the pile of chemistry tests on her lap—tests she might never be able to return to her sophomore students—and watched Bernadette as she drove through town, working the shift on the old Datsun like a long-haul trucker. Her dear friend and fellow Sister of Mercy was thin, almost painfully so, with large blue eyes and short red hair showing around the white band of her wimple. As she peered through the windshield, the light of the setting sun ruddied the clear, smooth skin of her round face.
“If His Holiness said it, then we must believe it,” Sister Carole said. “But we haven’t heard anything from him in so long. I hope …”
Bernadette turned toward her, eyes wide with alarm.
“Oh, you wouldn’t be thinking anything’s happened to His Holiness now, would you, Carole?” she said, the lilt of her native Ireland elbowing its way into her voice. “They wouldn’t dare!”
Carole was momentarily at a loss as to what to say, so she gazed out the side window at the budding trees sliding past. The sidewalks of this little Jersey Shore town were empty, and hardly any other cars on the road. She and Bernadette had had to try three grocery stores before finding one with anything to sell. Between the hoarders and delayed or canceled shipments, food was getting scarce.
Everybody sensed it. How did that saying go? By pricking in my thumbs, something wicked this way comes …
Or something like that.
She rubbed her cold hands together and thought about Bernadette, younger than she by five years—only twenty-six—with such a good mind, such a clear thinker in so many ways. But her faith was almost childlike.
She’d come to the convent at St. Anthony’s two years ago, and the two of them had established instant rapport. They shared so much. Not just a common Irish heritage, but a certain isolation as well. Carole’s parents had died years ago, and Bernadette’s were back on the Old Sod. So they became sisters in a sense that went beyond their sisterhood in the order. Carole was the big sister, Bernadette the little one. They prayed together, laughed together, walked together. They took over the convent kitchen and did all the food shopping together. Carole could only hope that she had enriched Bernadette’s life half as much as the younger woman had enriched hers.
Bernadette was such an innocent. She seemed to assume that since the Pope was infallible when he spoke on matters of faith or morals he somehow must be invincible too.
Carole hadn’t told Bernadette, but she’d decided not to believe the Pope on the matter of the undead. After all, their existence was not a matter of faith or morals. Either they existed or they didn’t. And all the news out of Eastern Europe last fall had left little doubt that vampires were real.
And that they were on the march.
Somehow they had got themselves organized. Not only did they exist, but more of them had been hiding in Eastern Europe than even the most superstitious peasant could have imagined. And when the communist bloc crumbled, when all the former client states and Russia were in disarray, grabbing for land, slaughtering in the name of nation and race and religion, the vampires took advantage of the power vacuum and struck.
They struck high, they struck low, and before the rest of the world could react, they controlled all Eastern Europe.
If they had merely killed, they might have been containable. But because each kill was a conversion, their numbers increased in a geometric progression. Sister Carole understood geometric progressions better than most. Hadn’t she spent years demonstrating