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

with her shelf at the damned thing, hitting it again and again; the blows from the inch-thick plank sounded dully on the creature’s skull, heavy and hollow on its back.

      The thing turned around, showing a red ruin of a face, all torn by John’s spear. Fumblingly, but still capable of terrible quickness, it caught her by the left wrist. Her club almost fell from her right hand as it began to drag her back toward the bedrooms.

      John returned to the attack. The fight moved down the hallway. Two sets of lungs were laboring, gasping for the air to drive exhausted muscles into new exertions. But Angie could not break the terrible grip that threatened to crush her wrist. With her free hand she still held her oaken board, and swung it, jabbed with it, when she could.

      Now she could see into Uncle Matthew’s bedroom once again. See that the taller vampire, who had been lying inertly on the bed, was now stirring, trying to get to his feet.

      The mouth of its more active colleague opened, the creature drew in breath and uttered a cry for help. John jabbed his broken spear into its groin. The vampire beleaguered in the hallway gasped again, and giggled air out through its bloodstained mouth. The lips were bleeding, and some of the teeth were broken from the last time that Angie had hit it with the bookshelf plank.

      Angie managed to wrench her left wrist free. She drew back her weapon now and swung two-handed, hitting the enemy again, with all her strength.

      But now its colleague came lurching, staggering quickly out of the bedroom and into the hall. In desperation John grappled with it, tripped it with a wrestler’s move and knocked it down. Still its hands flailed at him numbly. The poison it had drunk from Angie’s veins would not allow it to get a grip or maintain balance.

      The body of the shorter vampire dripped and oozed with its own blood, more driven from its veins every time John struck it with his splintered spear. Seeming to ignore his blows, it moved again toward Angie, to catch up with her as she retreated toward the living room once more. The one on the floor was crawling after her too, and the eyes of both vampires were locked on her. Both of them made odd, drugged sounds, like the sounds Uncle Matthew had made when he was trying to wake up.

      Gripping her shelf with both hands once again, she swung and hit her standing opponent a blow, glancing from its shoulder to the side of its head, that would have broken the thickest bones of a breathing man. And then she drew back her weapon and swung and struck it yet again, upon its warding elbow. And then the shelf was knocked out of her grip.

      The vampire who had fallen in the hallway was clawing itself erect again, leaning against the wall, unable to advance as yet.

      John had come from behind the active one to grapple with it for the second, third, or fourth time. This time John tried to strangle it from behind, pulling the shaft of his broken spear hard back against its throat. Trying to cut off its breath was a useless effort, and in a moment John was once more thrown aside.

      This time he reacted differently. Crying out something, words she could not distinguish, he went scrambling past Angie, running back toward the living room.

      Clear in John’s mind was a vision of the other, unbroken spear, still on the wall. In his hectic passage he stumbled against the machine the enemy breathers had used to break in the apartment door. He fell, picked himself up, and with a desperate lunge at last got his hands on the remaining spear.

      Running back down the hallway, newly armed, he heard a scream from Angie. She was between two standing monsters now. John could see the drooling mouth of the farthest enemy, open as if it meant to drive its broken fangs into her flesh again.

      John skewered the nearer enemy from the rear with the new spear, the point going in just below the ribs on the right side, at the proper angle to nail a kidney. The creature screamed, a hideous, bellowing noise. It fell back. Angie came crawling past it, getting behind John, getting away. Inhuman noises came from her mouth too.

      By now the second vampire was lurching into action.

      John thrust his weapon into its body. The point hit bone, was turned away from vital organs. The second spear failed to do fatal damage before it was caught in a fumbling grip of inhuman strength and broken, like the first.

      The fight lurched and bounced out into the living room. Angie had picked up a light wooden chair, and out here she had room to swing it.

      Eventually a turning point was passed, in some way that John was not aware of when it happened. A time arrived when both of his opponents were on the floor, and he was crouching over them, soaked in their blood, stabbing and stabbing with wearied arms, sinking a sharply splintered spear shaft again and again into their flesh. Angie, swaying with weakness, still hovered beside him in a blood-soaked robe, clubbing at the enemy with one wooden weapon after another. The struggle had ceased to be a fight, it had become a slaughter, a process of finishing off the wounded.

      The deadly dangerous wounded. Both vampires were incredibly strong, even in the half-dead state brought on by the poison, and incredibly hard to kill. Their bodies gave forth ugly sounds, meaty and yet drumlike, when beaten with a solid wooden club. With each new injury they howled again, the sounds a blend of rage and terror, like some mockery of Angie’s own cries when they had seized her. They bled, as if their reservoirs were inexhaustible, their bright-red vampire blood.

      The limbs of even a dying vampire, flailing about without coordination, still could deal powerful blows, and John and Angie