A Matter Of Taste by Fred Saberhagen (best reads .TXT) 📗

us. Now you’re not going to have any fun. Pain instead. Pain such as you’ve never—”

      Joe gritted his teeth and shot the vampire twice, aiming as best he could for a button on her blouse that lay just between her breasts.

      He imagined that he could see how one of the lead-cored wooden slugs nicked the little button before it went on to tear splintering into the exotic bone and flesh behind it. The double impact lifted the solid body of the woman from her feet and hurled her back. Her gray-eyed, attractive face registering a look of intense surprise, she fell onto the rumpled bed.

      Joe took a step forward, revolver ready. He stood for a long moment in the bathroom doorway, watching the sprawled body beginning to undergo grotesque alterations.

      The young woman, the breather, from the living room, was standing in the bedroom doorway looking in. “What is it? I heard— ” Then she stopped, staring at the bed.

      Her paralyzed pause gave Joe time to reach her before she could turn and run. He grabbed her by the arms and shoulders, and she tried to bite him. He slugged her ruthlessly, revolver barrel across the back of the head.

      In another moment he was dragging the stunned breather into a closet, closing the door, and bringing a chair to wedge it shut.

      Then he looked back at the bed. In much less than a minute, the true death had overtaken Lila. Her face was shriveling, collapsing on the collapsing skull behind it, like a time-lapse sequence of a Halloween pumpkin in decay. The well-dressed woman’s corpse was diminishing rapidly in size, and now even as Joe watched, it disappeared completely. Last to go was the clothing, but at last it went, and then everything, everything that had been directly attached to the form, was gone. He’d seen it happen that way before, to one of them, but even so Joe’s hands were shaking and a fresh wave of nausea passed over him.

      Moving quickly back into the bathroom, he looked once more at the woman suspended above the tub. With the fingers of his left hand he rolled back an eyelid and touched the ball beneath. No doubt about it now, she was as dead as anyone he’d ever seen.

      Wasting not a second, but moving with extreme care, Joe moved to the front door of the apartment. He eased it open, then, revolver still in hand, held ready under his folded topcoat, he tiptoed out into the corridor, closing the door softly behind him.

      He took the opposite direction from the one by which he’d been brought here. He wasn’t going to try to take the rest of them, not now, not alone; that would be crazy. At least two of them were on the maintenance floor upstairs, and he had only four shots left. Even in daylight two vampires together were at least one too many. He wouldn’t have tried to take one if he’d been given any choice about it.

      Walking briskly, he came to another bank of elevators almost immediately, just around a corner. When he got to a phone, he could leave an anonymous tip for the police, have them check out Valentine’s apartment. But he wasn’t sure that would be a good idea. Elizabeth Wiswell was dead now and couldn’t be helped. Better not have cops swarming around the building until the old man had died or had recovered enough to face them.

      A couple of innocent breathers, talking loudly, joined him, waiting for an elevator. He stood waiting as quietly as he could, neither facing them directly nor making a point of turning his face away. He was still holding the pistol ready under his folded topcoat.

      He was going down to street level, not back to the old man’s apartment; if the people trapped there were going to have a chance, someone was going to have to help them from the outside.

Chapter Seven

      The digging, and the nightingale’s song, went on above my head. Presently, as I continued to struggle my way toward full consciousness, I could hear with great distinctness the harsh scraping of some iron tool, a shovel doubtless, upon the wooden barrier only a handbreadth above my face. A dusting of powdery earth, along with a few small insects, came sifting down through the cracks between boards. Already, after no more than a mere two years or so in the grave, my coffin was beginning to shrink and warp and fall asunder, even if I was not.

      Having reached that stage of vampirish revival in which the mind begins to be competently active, even though the body as yet remains all but completely paralyzed, I considered drawing in a lungful of dusty air and frightening away the intruder with a bellow. Now I could tell that but a single person labored to unearth me. I decided to make no noise. A face-to-face welcome would be more appropriate.

      The digging stopped, eventually, to be replaced by a futile tugging, directed first at the head of my container, then the foot. I could hear the intruder gasping with the effort, but neither end could be lifted very far. Evidently to drag my coffin up out of the shallow pit that had once been a secret grave was going to be beyond the lone invader’s strength. Instead, there came a new tool-noise. My coffin lid was going to be pried off.

      Being already somewhat warped and rotted, as I have mentioned, it came loose readily enough, but only one plank at a time.

      Suddenly there was moonlight on my face, reflected and unpainful sunlight in my eyes, enough to make a bright halo of the digger’s hair.

      I could see at once that my uninvited guest was a woman, young and lithe. Strong, from the way she handled her tools, though not very large; and I could tell by her clothing, garbed as she was in the traditional dress of her people, that she was a gypsy. Bright earrings, forged I am sure