PINECONES

by David Wellington

David Wellington is the author of the zombie novels Monster Island, Monster Nation, and Monster Planet, and the vampire novels 13 Bullets, 99 Coffins, Vampire Zero, and 23 Hours. A werewolf novel, Frostbite, is due out in October.

Wellington says that for him, vampires have always been the ultimate predator. “We have no predators in our human world anymore—the only people who are ever attacked by bears or tigers are people who are doing stupid things to start with,” he said. “But for a lot of human history we were prey animals. It’s why we got so smart and so adaptable as a species, to survive in a hostile world. The vampire is the metaphor for what that must have been like, when there was something out there in the dark, stronger, faster, and far more deadly than you were. Something that only wanted to destroy you. So many modern vampire writers seem to miss this point, that vampire are supposed to be a threat, an enemy.”

“Pinecones” is the story of the first American vampire—at the very beginning, at the Roanoke Colony, before Jamestown, before the Puritans, before the colonists even thought of themselves as Americans.

When I took my son Isaac away from the colony on Roanoke Island it was fear that drove me, & I freely admit it. I wished to save his life & my own. That is all.

In the year of our lord 1587 we came to this haunted place thinking God & Walter Raleigh would follow where good Christians first tread. We did not think to stop at Roanoke, but put in only to bring rescue & succor to the fifteen lonely men Richard Grenville had left there. We expected to find cheery faces, bright with the first white company they’d had in many a month. Instead we found the fortress of Roanoke abandoned. The men were gone, slaughtered by Americans surely, & only the bones of one man remaining, & those brining in a barrel as if to preserve them for a proper burial. This we provided & then returned to our ships. We would for the mainland of Virginia well to the south, where good land had been sighted, & there to become planters & farmers & wealthy gentlemen all.

Yet it was that the Navigator of our little fleet, one Simon Fernandez, refused to sail one league farther, for he must make for England at once or risk the storm season in the midst of the Ocean. Our entreaties & offers of shares in the Corporation were rebuffed & without ships we must make our colony on Roanoke, or swim for home.

All was well at first & our little community was blessed with a child, Virginia Dare, the first English child born in all the New World. It was only afterward the killing began, when September was shedding her radiant bounty of leaves upon the Earth, & the nights were already drawing long.

It was George Howe who died the first, while crabbing in Albemarle Sound. We found of him his nets & his kerchief & nothing else. When his body appeared at the shore of the island, returned to us by Leviathan, it was pale & bloodless but we thought nothing of it. Americans had butchered him, we believed, or else he had drowned.

When Patience Goode was found below an oak tree on Hatterask, her favor as pale & drawn as a good wax candle, there were murmurs. Governor White spoke with each man alone & when he came to me he asked if I’d grown jealous & wroth, for my wife was taken on the voyage by a Fever, & I was known to be lonesome. I spat at his feet & told him I was an Englishman, & no killer of women, & he said he believed me. The very next morning little Benjamin Holcombe was found in his bed, his neck torn & in some places broken, & his blood drained.

It was then we begged John White to return home, & fetch aid for our defense, a Company of soldiers to protect us from the Americans. His face grew sharp & he repeated the warnings of the blackguard Fernandez, that the storm season was upon us. Yet he went, for we were fearful, & in truth we knew it was too late already. Some claimed they saw signs of a wreck when the tide came in that very day, boards & sailcloth floating on the oily tide. For myself I saw nothing, & wished our Governor God’s Speed.

The next day Robbie Caithness, the Scotch carpenter who had signed on with the Corporation only after we were well asea, knocked on my door as if he were pounding to get into Heaven on the Day of Judgment. His face was pale as death when I answered & in troth he lived but moments longer. His clothing was bloody but his skin was white as a new made shirt. “Ye bownes onlie we fownd,” he said to me, before God took him.

The bones in the barrel, he meant, & I knew it. The next day I took Isaac, my son, & I told him we would leave the Colony & make a new establishment of our own elsewhere.

“Whut doth ye wright thir, son?” I asked when I found Isaac carving on a tree, one hour later only. I had been gathering up my nets & my gun, & as much food as we two could carry. I had set Issac to choosing our clothes & finding a tarpalling we might make into make-shift shelter during our journey. Instead I found him playing at wood-carving: CRO, he carved. He had made the letters tall & deep, so all could see them. I stopped him at once but it was his second effort, for on a post of the fort already he had written it out in full, our destination: CROATOAN. For such was the name of the Island where I thought to take my refuge. I clouted him on the ear but could not explain why. He begged of me why we should go alone, & why I wished none other of the Colony to follow, & I could tell him nothing.

We took a short boat out in the mists of day’s first dawning, & paddled softly across the Sound, & walked inland, through the trees, all that day. There were Americans about, I was sure of it, yet I feared them less than the bones of a dead man set to brine in an oaken barrel.

Of the Colony at Roanoke, & what my friends & partners did after, I can not add more.

It was a fortnight afore we found good water & a place to make a home. We had been unassailed & for once I rested easy, thinking the Lord had provided. We made of our tarpalling a lean-to, a canvas roof under which to sleep, & Isaac built a good fire, for he was a fine boy & clever, if only ten years old. We ate a rabbit that I shot & prepared ourselves to sleep, & rise in the morning, & begin to construct a house fitting for two such gentlemen of Virginia as we.

I sent Isaac into the tent to say his prayers & lay himself down, while I poured out water on the fire & watched it steam. It hissed & spat & a half-burnt log cracked with a loud report, as of a gun firing, & I laughed so that Isaac would hear me & be not afraid.

It was then in the darkness between the trees, which were not well lit by the dying fire, that I was sure I spied some movement.

“Speeke up, that I shuld heere ye praye, lad,” I called, thinking it was some simple animal, & would be frightened by man’s speech.

“Our father whiche art in heuen, halowed be thy name,” Isaac said, raising his voice to me & to the Father of us all. The motion in the woods stopped at once, & I was eased. It were some dumb animal surely, that was driven off by Christian prayers. “Let thy kingdome cum unto us. Thy wyll be fulfylled as well in erthe, as it is in heuen,” Isaac said, & I thought to calm him, for he sounded afeared. Yet even as I turned to say somewhat, I saw red eyes, two of them, no more than one dozen yards from me, betwixt the trees. I turned to ice, & sat stock still, & did not move. The eyes blinked, lazily. Was it a wolf? Was it a bear, one of those titans of the forest that dwarf our English breed? The eyes were of a height above the ground that I thought it was no wolf.

“& lede vs nat in to temtacyon. But delyuer vs from euyll. So be it.” As the words stopped & Isaac fell silent I felt a cold draught flood through the clearing, as if winter had come on at once.

The red eyes took one step closer to me.

I sought for something, some weapon, & for a missile I found pine cones only, which lay all about in good supply. I thurst forward my arm & cast the pine cone at the eyes. They disappeared at once. Yet in a moment I saw them again, this time a step to my right.

I grasped another pine cone, & threw it with all my strength, directly at the eyes. They blinked but this time they did not move. They took a step closer, in fact.

I slung one last missile & saw it fly through the dark air, & kept my eyes upon it. & thus I saw when a hand the color of bleached linen caught the cone in mid-flight. Caught it, & threw it back.

“Isaac,” I shouted, “Isaac, sonne, saye ye praier againe,” but already, I knew it was too late for us.