I Am Legend and Other Stories Page 2

  Chapter Two

  THE ALARM WENT OFF at five-thirty and Robert Neville reached out a numbed arm in the morning gloom and pushed in the stop.

  He reached for his cigarettes and lit one, then sat up. After a few moments he got up and walked into the dark living room and opened the peephole door.

  Outside, on the lawn, the dark figures stood like silent soldiers on duty. As he watched, some of them started moving away, and he heard them muttering discontentedly among themselves. Another night was ended.

  He went back to the bedroom, switched on the light, and dressed. As he was pulling on his shirt, he heard Ben Cortman cry out, “Come out, Neville!”

  And that was all. After that, they all went away weaker, he knew, than when they had come. Unless they had attacked one of their own. They did that often. There was no union among them. Their need was their only motivation.

  After dressing, Neville sat down on his bed with a grunt and penciled his list for the day:

  Lathe at Sears

  Water

  Check generator

  Doweling (?)

  Usual

  Breakfast was hasty: a glass of orange juice, a slice of toast, and two cups of coffee. He finished it quickly, wishing he had the patience to eat slowly.

  After breakfast he threw the paper plate and cup into the trash box and brushed his teeth. At least I have one good habit, he consoled himself.

  The first thing he did when he went outside was look at the sky. It was clear, virtually cloudless. He could go, out today. Good.

  As he crossed the porch, his shoe kicked some pieces of the mirror. Well, the damn thing broke just as I thought it would, he thought. He’d clean it up later.

  One of the bodies was sprawled on the sidewalk; the other one was half concealed in the shrubbery. They were both women. They were almost always women.

  He unlocked the garage door and backed his Willys station wagon into the early-morning crispness. Then he got out and pulled down the back gate. He put on heavy gloves and walked over to the woman on the sidewalk.

  There was certainly nothing attractive about them in the daylight, he thought, as he dragged them across the lawn and threw them up on the canvas tarpaulin. There wasn’t a drop left in them; both women were the color of fish out of water. He raised the gate and fastened it.

  He went around the lawn then, picking up stones and bricks and putting them into a cloth sack. He put the sack in the station wagon and then took off his gloves. He went inside the house, washed his hands, and made lunch: two sandwiches, a few cookies, and a thermos of hot coffee.

  When that was done, he went into the bedroom and got his bag of stakes. He slung this across his back and buckled on the holster that held his mallet. Then he went out of the house, locking the front door behind him.

  He wouldn’t bother searching for Ben Cortman that morning; there were too many other things to do. For a second, he thought about the soundproofing job he’d resolved to do on the house. Well, the hell with it, he thought. I’ll do it tomorrow or some cloudy day.

  He got into the station wagon and checked his list. “Lathe at Sears”; that was first. After he dumped the bodies, of course.

  He started the car and backed quickly into the street and headed for Compton Boulevard. There he turned right and headed east. On both sides of him the houses stood silent, and against the curbs cars were parked, empty and dead.

  Robert Neville’s eyes shifted down for a moment to the fuel gauge. There was still a half tank, but he might as well stop on Western Avenue and fill it. There was no point in using any of the gasoline stored in the garage until he had to.

  He pulled into the silent station and braked. He got a barrel of gasoline and siphoned it into his tank until the pale amber fluid came gushing out of the tank opening and ran down onto the cement.

  He checked the oil, water, battery water, and tires. Everything was in good condition. It usually was, because he took special care of the car. If it ever broke down so that he couldn’t get back to the house by sunset…

  Well, there was no point in even worrying about that. If it ever happened, that was the end.

  Now he continued up Compton Boulevard past the tall oil derricks, through Compton, through all the silent streets. There was no one to be seen anywhere.

  But Robert Neville knew where they were.

  The fire was always burning. As the car drew closer, he pulled on his gloves and gas mask and watched through the eyepieces the sooty pall of smoke hovering above the earth. The entire field had been excavated into one gigantic pit, that was in June 1975.

  Neville parked the car and jumped out, anxious to get the job over with quickly. Throwing the catch and jerking down the rear gate, he pulled out one of the bodies and dragged it to the edge of the pit. There he stood it on its feet and shoved.

  The body bumped and rolled down the steep incline until it settled on the great pile of smoldering ashes at the bottom.

  Robert Neville drew in harsh breaths as he hurried back to the station wagon. He always felt as though he were strangling when he was here, even though he had the gas mask on.

  Now he dragged the second body to the brink of the pit and pushed it over. Then, after tossing the sack, of rocks down, he hurried back to the car and sped away.

  After he’d driven a half mile, he skinned off the mask and gloves and tossed them into the back. His mouth opened and he drew in deep lungfuls of fresh air. He took the flask from the glove compartment and took a long drink of burning whisky. Then he lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply. Sometimes he had to go to the burning pit every day for weeks at a time, and it always made him sick.

  Somewhere down there was Kathy.

  On the way to Inglewood he stopped at a market to get some bottled water. As he entered the silent store, the smell of rotted food filled his nostrils. Quickly he pushed a metal wagon up and down the silent, dust-thick aisles, the heavy smell of decay setting his teeth on edge, making him breathe through his mouth.

  He found the water bottles in back, and also found a door opening on a flight of stairs. After putting all the bottles into the wagon, he went up the stairs. The owner of the market might be up there; he might as well get started.

  There were two of them. In the living room, lying on a couch, was a woman about thirty years old, wearing a red housecoat. Her chest rose and fell slowly as she lay there, eyes closed, her hands clasped over her stomach.

  Robert Neville’s hands fumbled on the stake and mallet. It was always hard, when they were alive; especially with women. He could feel that senseless demand returning again, tightening his muscles. He forced it down. It was insane, there was no rational argument for it.

  She made no sound except for a sudden, hoarse intake of breath. As he walked into the bedroom, he could hear a sound like the sound of water running. Well, what else can I do? he asked himself, for he still had to convince himself he was doing the right thing.

  He stood in the bedroom doorway, staring at the small bed by the window, his throat moving, breath shuddering in his chest. Then, driven on, he walked to the side of the bed and looked down at her.

  Why do they all look like Kathy to me? he thought, drawing out the second stake with shaking hands.

  Driving slowly to Sears, he tried to forget by wondering why it was that only wooden stakes should work.

  He frowned as he drove along the empty boulevard, the only sound the muted growling of the motor in his car. It seemed fantastic that it had taken him five months to start wondering about it.

  Which brought another question to mind. How was it that he always managed to hit the heart? It had to be the heart; Dr. Busch had said so. Yet he, Neville, had no anatomical knowledge.

  His brow furrowed. It irritated him that he should have gone through this hideous process so long without stopping once to question it.

  He shook, his head. No, I should think it over carefully, he thought, I should collect all the questions before I try to answer them. Thin
gs should be done the right way, the scientific way.

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, he thought, shades of old Fritz. That had been his father’s name. Neville had loathed his father and fought the acquisition of his father’s logic and mechanical facility every inch of the way. His father had died denying the vampire violently to the last.

  At Sears he got the lathe, loaded it into the station wagon, then searched the store.

  There were five of them in the basement, hiding in various shadowed places. One of them Neville found inside a display freezer. When he saw the man lying there in this enamel coffin, he had to laugh; it seemed such a funny place to hide.

  Later, he thought of what a humorless world it was when he could find amusement in such a thing.

  About two o’clock he parked and ate his lunch. Everything seemed to taste of garlic.

  And that set him wondering about the effect garlic had on them. It must have been the smell that chased them off, but why?

  They were strange, the facts about them: their staying inside by day, their avoidance of garlic, their death by stake, their reputed fear of crosses, their supposed dread of mirrors.

  Take that last, now. According to legend, they were invisible in mirrors, but he knew that was untrue. As untrue as the belief that they transformed themselves into bats. That was a superstition that logic, plus observation had easily disposed of. It was equally foolish to believe that they could transform themselves into wolves. Without a doubt there were vampire dogs; he had seen and heard them outside his house at night. But they were only dogs.

  Robert Neville compressed his lips suddenly. Forget it, he told himself; you’re not ready, yet. The time would come when he’d take a crack at it, detail for detail, but the time wasn’t now. There were enough things to worry about now.

  After lunch, he went from house to house and used up all his stakes. He had forty-seven stakes.

  Chapter Three

  “THE STRENGTH OF THE vampire is that no one will believe in him.”

  Thank you, Dr. Van Helsing, he thought, putting down his copy Of “Dracula.” He sat staring moodily at the bookcase, listening to Brahms’ second piano concerto, a whisky sour in his right hand, a cigarette between his lips.

  It was true. The book was a hodgepodge of superstitions and soap-opera clichés, but that line was true; no one had believed in them, and how could they fight something they didn’t even believe in?

  That was what the situation had been. Something black and of the night had come crawling out of the Middle Ages. Something with no framework or credulity, something that had been consigned, fact and figure, to the pages of imaginative literature. Vampires were passé; Summers’ idylls or Stoker’s melodramatics or a brief inclusion in the Britannica or grist for the pulp writer’s mill or raw material for the B-film factories. A tenuous legend passed from century to century.

  Well, it was true.

  He took a sip from his drink and closed his eyes as the cold liquid trickled down his throat and warmed his stomach. True, he thought, but no one ever got the chance to know it. Oh, they knew it was something, but it couldn’t be that-not that. That was imagination, that was superstition, there was no such thing as that.

  And, before science had caught up with the legend, the legend had swallowed science and everything.

  He hadn't found any doweling that day. He hadn’t checked the generator. He hadn’t cleaned up the pieces of mirror. He hadn’t eaten supper; he’d lost his appetite. That wasn’t hard. He lost it most of the time. He couldn’t do the things he’d done all afternoon and then come home to a hearty meal. Not even after five months.

  He thought of the eleven-no, the twelve children that afternoon, and he finished his drink in two swallows.

  He blinked and the room wavered a little before him. You’re getting blotto, Father, he told himself. So what? he returned. Has anyone more right?

  He tossed the book across the room. Begone, Van Helsing and Mina and Jonathan and blood-eyed Count and all! All figments, all driveling extrapolations on a somber theme.

  A coughing chuckle emptied itself from his throat. Outside, Ben Cortman called for him to come out. Be right out, Benny, he thought. Soon as I get my tuxedo on.

  He shuddered and gritted his teeth edges together. Be right out. Well; why not? Why not go out? It was a sure way to be free of them.

  Be one of them.

  He chuckled at the simplicity of it, then shoved himself up and walked crookedly to the bar. Why not? His mind plodded on. Why go through all this complexity when a flung open door and a few steps would end it all?

  For the life of him, he didn’t know. There was, of course, the faint possibility that others like him existed somewhere, trying to go on, hoping that someday they would be among their own kind again. But how could he ever find them if they weren’t within a day’s drive of his house?

  He shrugged and poured more whisky in the glass; he’d given up the use of jiggers months ago. Garlic on the windows, and nets over the hothouse and burn t he bodies and cart the rocks away and, fraction of an inch by fraction of an inch, reduce their unholy numbers. Why kid himself? He’d never find anyone else.

  His body dropped down heavily on the chair. Here we are, kiddies, sitting like a bug in a rug, snugly, surrounded by a battalion of blood-suckers who wish no more than to sip freely of my bonded, 100-proof hemoglobin. Have a drink, men, this one’s really on me.

  His face twisted into an expression of raw, unqualified hatred. Bastards! I’ll kill every, mother’s son of you before I’ll give in! His right hand closed like a clamp and the glass shattered in his grip.

  He looked down, dull-eyed, at the fragments on the floor, at the jagged piece of glass still in his hand, at the whisky-diluted blood dripping off his palm.

  Wouldn’t they like to get some of it, though? he thought. He started up with a furious lurch and almost opened the door so he could wave the hand in their faces and hear them howl.

  Then he closed his eyes and a shudder ran through his body. Wise up, buddy, he thought. Go bandage your goddamn hand.

  He stumbled into the bathroom and washed his hand carefully, gasping as he daubed iodine into the sliced-open flesh. Then he bandaged it clumsily, his broad chest rising and falling with jerky movements, sweat dripping from his forehead. I need a cigarette, he thought.

  In the living room again, he changed Brahms for Bernstein and lit a cigarette. What will I do if I ever run out of coffin nails? he wondered, looking at the cigarette’s blue trailing smoke. Well, there wasn’t much chance of that. He had about a thousand cartons in the closet of Kathy’s-He clenched his teeth together. In the closet of the larder, the larder, the larder.

  Kathy’s room.

  He sat staring with dead eyes at the mural while "The Age of Anxiety” pulsed in his ears. Age of anxiety, he mused. You thought you had anxiety, Lenny boy. Lenny and Benny; you two should meet. Composer, meet corpse. Mamma, when I grow up I wanna be a wampir like Dada.

  Why, bless you, boo, of course you shall.

  The whisky gurgled into the glass. He grimaced a little at the pain in his hand and shifted the bottle to his left hand.

  He sat down and sipped. Let the jagged edge of sobriety be now dulled, he thought. Let the crumby balance of clear vision be expunged, but post haste. I hate ‘em.

  Gradually the room shifted on its gyroscopic center and wove and undulated about his chair. A pleasant haze, fuzzy at the edges, took over sight. He looked at the glass, at the record player. He let his head flop from side to side. Outside, they prowled and muttered and waited.

  Pore vampires, he thought, pore little cusses, pussyfootin’ round my house, so thirsty, so all forlorn.

  A thought. He raised a forefinger that wavered before his eyes.

  Friends, I come before you to discuss the vampire; a minority element if there ever was one, and there was one.

  But to concision: I will sketch out the basis for my thesis, which thesis is this: Vampires are prejudiced against…


  The keynote of minority prejudice is this: They are loathed because they are feared. Thus…

  He made himself a drink. A long one.

  At one time, the Dark and Middle Ages, to be succinct, the vampire’s power was great, the fear of him tremendous. He was anathema and still remains anathema. Society hates him without ration.

  But are his needs any more shocking than the needs of other animals and men? Are his deeds more outrageous than the deeds of the parent who drained the spirit from his child? The vampire may foster quickened heartbeats and levitated hair. But is he worse than the parent who gave to society a neurotic child who became a politician? Is he worse than the manufacturer who set up belated foundations with the money he made by handing bombs and guns to suicidal nationalists? Is he worse than the distiller who gave bastardized grain juice to stultify further the brains of those who, sober, were incapable of a progressive thought? (Nay, I apologize for this calumny; I nip the brew that feeds me.) Is he worse, then, than the publisher who filled ubiquitous racks with lust and death wishes? Really, now, search your soul; lovie-is the vampire so bad?

  All he does is drink blood.

  Why, then, this unkind prejudice, this thoughtless bias? Why cannot the vampire live where he chooses? Why must he seek out hiding places where none can find him out? Why do you wish him destroyed? Ah, see, you have turned the poor guileless innocent into a haunted animal. He has no means of support, no measures for proper education, he has not then, voting franchise. No wonder he is compelled to seek out a predatory nocturnal existence;

  Robert Neville grunted a surly grunt. Sure, sure, he thought, but would you let your sister marry one?

  He shrugged. You got me there, buddy, you got me there.

  The music ended. The needle scratched back and forth in the black grooves. He sat there, feeling a chill creeping up his legs. That’s what was wrong with drinking too much. You became immune to drunken delights. There was no solace in liquor. Before you got happy, you collapsed. Already the room was straightening out, the sounds outside were starting to nibble at his eardrums…