Bad Moon Rising (38 page)

Upstairs Frank Ferro was probably dead, too; and down here in the center of it all—Malcolm Crow and Vince LaMastra. Alive. By some miracle, by a chance. Maybe by skill and luck, too. But alive amid all that death. They looked at each other, shaking their heads, unable to speak because how could human speech make any kind of sense of this? They should have been dead, but they had survived. They were alive.

Alive, but still trapped in Ubel Griswold’s house.

(1)

Vic’s Ford pickup bounced along the back road, through the tall stands of oaks and pines, his wheels crushing October leaves into fragments. He had a sulfur-tipped kitchen match between his teeth and he was grinning. On the radio Gretchen Wilson was telling him that she needed to get laid. Sunset was hours away, but that didn’t matter. Not to him, not to the Plan, and not to the
Man
.

Despite his earlier blues Vic felt pretty sporty and he couldn’t prevent nasty little smiles from popping onto his lips every few minutes as rolled through the forest toward the Man’s house.

At one point in the trip he stopped on the crest of the last large hill before the road dropped down into the valley beyond which was Dark Hollow. Vic took a sheet of onionskin from his shirt pocket, unfolded and smoothed it out, and then used a drop of spit to stick it to the dashboard. He consulted the row of numbers and checked them against the screen display on the laptop that lay on the front seat next to him. Most of his stuff was on timer, but the timers were inactive until he sent a master signal, which he did now by typing in a password and hitting Enter. The computer whirred for a moment and then returned a message: Completed. A clock appeared in a pop-up window and began counting down.

Vic took his cell phone from his shirt pocket and made the last call he would ever make on that phone. Even though the cellular relay tower would be the last to go because some of Ruger’s team needed their phones to coordinate troop movements, Vic had no one else to call. Lois was with
them
now. Vic didn’t have any friends left among the living.

It rang three times and then Ruger answered.

“You ready, Sport?” Vic asked.

“Yeah, as soon as your wife’s done blowing me.” Vic heard Lois burst out laughing in the background.

“Yeah, that joke never gets old, asshole,” Vic said. “The clock’s ticking.”

“Don’t worry,” Vic said, still chuckling, “we’re ready.”

Vic clicked off the phone, his good mood suddenly soured. His fist closed so tightly around the cell phone that his knuckles popped and the case cracked. “Yeah, well, enjoy it while you can, asshole,” he muttered, “’cause this town ain’t the only thing that’s going to die today.”

He cranked down the window and threw the phone into the weeds, then threw the truck back in gear and ground down the road toward the Man’s house.

(2)

Sarah Wolfe did not know her husband was awake though he’d been conscious for almost ten minutes now.

It had taken most of that time for him to realize where he was and what had happened. At first he had been frightened by the strangeness of it all: the intrusion of plastic tubing into his nostrils, the feeling of confinement around his limbs, the restraint of suspension straps, the pounding ache in his head, the small, alien beeps of machines. Then it came to him. He was in a hospital. He was hurt and he was in a hospital.

That realization began the process of looking inside to try and understand why he was in a hospital. Was it a car accident? A heart attack? Then…all at once the memories came to him like a computer coming online. Images flashed onto a movie screen in his head: the face he saw in the mirror, the face that had changed each day, become more horrific, more alien each day. The voice of his little sister, first on the phone, then beside him. In the elevator at the hospital. On the street, in the shadows of his office. In his own home. Mandy’s little bloodstained face, so sad, so frightened, but also so hard and angry. Her words, her desperate pleas for him to kill himself. Then Sarah’s face and Sarah’s pleas that he see a doctor, a psychiatrist. Sarah again, staring at him with pity as he stood amid the broken fragments of mirror in their bathroom. Sarah recoiling in horror as he began to change from man to animal.

He felt the horror surge up in him as he remembered that awful moment when the thing in the mirror had taken control of his own flesh, his very soul. He remembered feeling with the thing’s senses, thinking with its instincts, aching with its lusts, hungering with its passions. For those brief moments he had seen Sarah—his beloved Sarah—as prey. As
meat
.

There was the memory of how he had torn control back from the thing, back to himself, and the utter horror of knowing that this control was a weak and fragile thing; holding it was like holding an oiled snake. Then there was the memory of the bedroom window, of glass and cold morning air and the pavement leaping up at him. After that it was just darkness and darker dreams.

He lay there in the bed, feeling his body, trying to understand why he was still alive. Why hadn’t the fall killed him? More important, why did he not feel like he had even taken that fall? His head hurt, sure, but nothing else did. He searched his nerve endings, trying to feel for muscles and shattered bones under the two forearm casts, but his limbs felt strong and whole. His skin itched in some places, and felt tight in others, but nothing hurt besides his head. How had he not been hurt? How had he not been killed, not have been at least crippled?

Terry slowly opened his eyes. The room was bright with fluorescent light, though the daylight from outside seemed weak. Sarah sat in an armchair reading a copy of the
Pine Deep Evening Standard and Times
. It was the early edition. Terry was amazed that he could read the print on the paper from what seemed to be at least twelve feet away. He stared at the blocks of black print and realized that he could read every single word as if the newspaper were only inches away. He could not see Sarah’s face behind the paper, but he could smell her perfume. It seemed strong, far too strong, as if she’d bathed in it. Her sweat seemed strong, too. Terry frowned.

Outside in the hallway someone chewed noisily on the plastic cap of a pen. The sound was crashingly loud and it annoyed him, but worse were the grunts of someone defecating in a bathroom farther down the hall. It smelled, too.

Fear wrestled with wonder as he realized that he could hear everything, smell everything. Not just strong odors, but subtle ones, distinct and sorted in his nostrils, identified and labeled by some strange new part of his brain. As much as the strangeness of it terrified him, the
naturalness
of it felt so deliciously right.

He turned his head toward the wall and there was Mandy. Terry almost screamed, but he didn’t. For some reason he did not want Sarah to know he was awake. Mandy stood there in her tattered green dress, with her wan face streaked with dark lacerations and bright blood.

“I know you tried,” she said sadly. “I know you tried to do the right thing. But you waited too long.”

Terry did not say a word.

“Now it’s all too late.” She looked over to the window beyond which purple-black clouds poised like fists above the skyline of the town. “It’s going to be awful, Terry. So awful. I tried to help, but I messed it all up and now they’re going to win. I’m sorry, Terry.”

Terry did not trust himself to speak. He didn’t know who “they” were, and he didn’t much care. He was tired of ghosts and their cryptic messages, tired of madness and possession and curses. All he cared about was Sarah, and he knew that he would never be able to touch her again.

Mandy moved closer to him. “I love you, Terry. I never wanted to hurt you, you know that, don’t you?” She searched his face for a long time, but he never let her see his feelings, and she slumped with an even greater sadness. “He’s taken everything from us, Terry. And even though he’s won, he won’t let it end, won’t let it be over for us.” She touched his face and he flinched. “There are so many ghosts in this place, Terry. We’re lonely, and we can’t rest. Not while he lives, and he’ll live forever.”

Tears fell like rain from her blue eyes. “I thought God would save us. I thought that’s why I was able to come back, because God wanted me to help you stop the curse. That was stupid.” Her voice was crushingly bitter. “What does God care?”

Terry felt a tear form in the corner of his own eye.

Mandy seemed paler, less substantial as if she was fading away like morning mist. “I know that you don’t want to do this, Terry, but you won’t be able to help yourself. You’re a monster now, Terry.
His
monster. He owns you, Terry, and he’ll make you do terrible things. It’s not your fault. No one is strong enough to stand up to him. I wanted to help, but I can’t even do that anymore. There’s not enough of me left.” She bent forward and kissed him. “I love you, Terry,” she said again and then faded completely from his sight.

Terry almost cried out as she vanished. The single tear rolled down across his cheek. Sarah rustled the newspaper as she opened to a new page. Outside the room the world ticked another second toward the Red Wave; inside his body Terry could feel the beast clawing to be unloosed.

(3)

“Come on, come
on
,” she muttered into the phone, urging Crow to pick up. It rang once and then went right to voice mail. “Shit, still no signal!”

Over the last couple of hours Mike had told them the whole story as he knew it. The whole story, including the parts with Tow-Truck Eddie—which none of them could explain.

“Eddie’s a religious nut,” Weinstock observed, “but even Crow always said he was a stand-up guy. He’s about the last person on earth I’d pick as someone likely to side with Ruger.”

“He’s not,” Mike said. “Not exactly. The Bone Man told me that for years now Griswold has been talking to him in his thoughts. Maybe it’s a kind of telepathy, but Griswold has been pretending to be the voice of God, and he’s basically brainwashed the guy into thinking I’m the Antichrist. He calls me the Beast.”

“Beast of the Apocalypse, sure,” agreed Jonatha. “That makes a kind of twisted sense. Think about it—if this tow-truck guy is really a devout believer, then he is, by that definition, neither corrupt nor evil. That means that if he were to kill Mike then it would have the opposite effect of, say, Vic or Ruger killing him.”

Newton looked from her to Mike. “Which is what?”

She shrugged. “Mike would just be dead. None of the qualities he has as a
dhampyr
would be infused into the local landscape.”

Weinstock grunted. “So…he’s a sick, twisted, murderous bastard but a
good guy
sick, twisted and murderous bastard?”

“More or less, yes.” She held up an emphatic finger. “That doesn’t make him any less dangerous. If he’s been this badly brainwashed, then he’s on a par with a suicide bomber…a total fanatic.”

Val made an ugly sound and they all looked at her. “I don’t care if he’s Saint Jude reborn—if he comes near Mike again I’ll kill him.”

No one doubted her.

“Try calling Crow again,” Newton suggested after a moment. “And maybe those cops, too.”

Crow’s phone went right to voice mail again, so she tried LaMastra’s cell and got the same thing; but when she called Ferro’s phone it rang six times before going to voice mail. A signal, but no response.

“This is bad,” Mike said.

“You know that,” Weinstock asked, “or are you guessing?”

“Some of both, I guess. The Bone Man told me that Griswold was going to do something today. Something called the Red Wave.”

Newton turned away from the window where he’d been watching the storm clouds thicken and darken. Even though it was only three o’clock it was as gloomy as twilight outside. “Which is what exactly?”

“I’m not sure. He wasn’t sure, either. All we know is that Vic and Ruger have been working hard to make as many vampires as possible so that the Red Wave will work, and that whatever it is will be bad. Really bad.”

Val cut a look at Weinstock. “The Festival?”

“Has to be…damn it!”

“And it’s supposed to happen tonight?” Jonatha asked.

“Yeah, but I don’t know what it’ll be or when it’ll start.” He put his head in his hands. “It’s so frustrating to know some things in so much detail and not other things. I feel like I’m trying to put a puzzle together and I don’t know if I have all the pieces or even if the pieces are part of the same puzzle.”

“I have to go and warn Crow. If he’s walking into a trap…” The hunting hawk look was back on her face even though her eyes were bright with terror. She looked at Newton, expecting him to say something, perhaps offer to guide her to Dark Hollow, but he blanched and even backed up a step.

“I…can’t…” he said.

“Val,” Weinstock said, “no, we could never get out there and find him. Not in time. We have to do something to stop the Festival. If Ruger and his goons show up tonight, it could be a slaughter. Everyone’s going to be in costume…Ruger could walk right up to someone and no one would know who he was until it was too late.”

(1)

“Dear God!” gasped Crow as he climbed to his feet. Tears streaked his cheeks, but not just from the cordite. “Dear sweet Jesus God.”

Beside him, LaMastra was furiously reloading his shotgun, flicking frequent nervous glances around at the shadows as he worked. The vampires were sprawled like dolls knocked off a shelf by an earthquake, their white faces strangely empty of malevolence. Kneeling, Crow peered in wonder at the face of Jimmy Castle.

“He doesn’t have any fangs,” he said softly. LaMastra looked up from his shotgun. “They must have gone away after he died. Anyone finds these bodies it’ll just look like we murdered them all.”

“I don’t care,” LaMastra said, and Crow turned and gave him a sharper look. The big man’s eyes were twitching and jumping, and he had a nervous tic that made it look like he kept trying to smile.

Christ,
thought Crow,
don’t wig out on me now.
But then LaMastra’s eyes hardened. “Hey…reload, damn it! Get your head out of your ass.”

“Right, sorry…” He dug in his pockets for shells.

Slotting the last shell into his shotgun, LaMastra said, “We have to get out of this place.” He picked up the fallen Maglite. His own flash had shattered when they fell through the floor, but Crow’s sturdy little flash was still working. LaMastra held it above him as they began to explore the cellar.

Crow looked around at the walls, trying not to look at the bodies. “These old farmhouses usually have a yard entrance to the cellar. I saw one outside, but it was chained shut just like the front door.”

“Good call,” said LaMastra. “So let’s find it, blow the lock, and get the hell out of here.”

“Works for me.”

The cellar was a thirty-by-eighty-foot oblong with a seven-foot-high unfinished ceiling and a badly poured concrete floor. Five doors were set into the walls, ostensibly leading to storerooms. A set of rickety wooden stairs bisected the basement, but they ignored them—upstairs held nothing but traps and frustration.

“The cellar door has to be behind one of these,” Crow said.

“Shit.”

The awareness of what could be behind any one of those doors was daunting and they were both sweating badly despite the deep cold of the room. The fact that there was no sound other than what they made and no movement other than their own was no comfort. The basement had a sneaky, crouching, waiting feel to it.

None of the cellar doors had locks, though they were all closed. Three of the doors were hinged to open out; the others opened in. Before they approached them they shone the light on the ceiling and all around the frames, looking for trip wires, but they could see nothing.

“Vince…I’ll grab the handle and pull, you get ready to shoot anything that so much as twitches, okay?”

LaMastra wiped sweat from his face on a hunched shoulder and nodded. He set himself and aimed the shotgun at the center of the first door. Licking his lips, Crow reached out for the handle, took a breath, and then turned the knob and pulled the handle as he stepped back to yank the door open.

LaMastra almost fired just from sheer nerves, but Crow shined the light inside and they were looking at a filthy but empty toilet stall.

Neither sighed in relief; there were still four to go. They moved eight feet to their right and stopped before one of the two doors that opened inward.

“I’ll kick it,” LaMastra said and gave it such a massive stamp that the door crashed inward and off its hinges and fell flat, sending up clouds of dust. They sprang into the room and instantly LaMastra saw a figure lunging at him with the same speed and aggression. He fired without thinking and there was a boom and the sharp crash of shattering glass.

“Nice shooting, Tex,” Crow said. “You just killed a mirror.”

“Shit.”

The room was cluttered with old chairs, wardrobes, tables, and boxes of bric-a-brac. “Nothing,” Crow concluded. “Just Griswold’s old junk.”

They exited and crossed the cellar to the far end where the last three small rooms were.

“Your turn,” LaMastra said, shifting to a flanking position, gun ready. Crow nodded and braced himself for the kick, but just as he raised his leg the door was whipped open and children poured out of the shadows, laughing insanely and reaching for them with black-taloned hands.

(2)

Vic saw the three ATVs and immediately jammed on his brakes, bringing the pickup to a screeching stop. Dust plumed up from his tires and panic leapt up in his chest.

The Man’s in danger!
The thought was like a hot wire in his brain.

He was out of the truck and running, low and fast, making maximum use of the tall grass, toward the house, his Luger in his hand, eyes cutting back and forth across the field for signs of movement. He couldn’t see anyone, but just one glance at the house told him there was trouble. One of the plywood sheets was down, exposing the red brick he’d laid.

As he drew closer he could see that the front door was open.

“Shit!” he hissed, then changed his angle of approach so that he came at the house obliquely. It had to be Crow—they used ATVs at that stupid Hayride—but who was with him?

Crow being here could be very bad or very damn good, especially if he was actually inside. Vic had rigged the place pretty well last time he was here. He crabbed sideways from where he was squatting and tried to get a clearer look at the front of the house. The pile of debris from the fallen porch roof hid most of his view of the door.

He heard a sound and froze, listened. Heard it again. A kind of moan. Definitely human. By now he knew the sounds the Dead Heads made and the Fangers didn’t moan. Vic rose to three-quarters of his height, just enough to see over the pile of debris. What he saw made him smile.

There was a man lying on the porch at the top of the steps. Even from where Vic stood he could see that the man was covered in blood. Vic felt a flush of pride at knowing that at least one of his little booby traps had worked. Still cautious, he moved closer, though he knew that if a man that badly injured had been left to lie there and bleed, then his companions were in no position to help.

Vic didn’t understand what he was seeing at first, because the wounded man had a landscaper’s insecticide sprayer on his back, but then he got a whiff of gasoline and he understood. His smile faded slightly. The presence of the gas confirmed the fact that these intruders understood something of the nature of the problem. Not good, he thought, but at least the problem appeared to be contained for the moment.

He stood over the bloody man and admired the effects of his little booby trap. The nails of the trapdoor had caught him good; one had even punched right through his skull. Vic nodded in satisfaction at that. It had taken a lot of hard work to rig that trap; nice to know it had worked as planned.

He climbed onto the porch and pushed on the front door, but the panel was as solid as a rock. Good. Crow and whoever else came with him were probably trapped inside.

He turned looked down again at the corpse. The man had obviously crawled out of the vestibule, trailing blood and piss and gasoline all the way, leaving a slimy trail like a slug. Blood was still mostly wet. Vic figured the guy hadn’t been dead long.

Even with all the blood Vic recognized the dead man. Frank Ferro, the black cop from Philly who’d been hunting Ruger. Vic chuckled. Well, this wasn’t the first spook he’d killed over the years. He saw a bulge in the man’s rear pants pocket and was reaching for the wallet when the dead man moaned.

Startled, Vic jerked his hand back and brought up the pistol. The man reached out one feeble hand and fumbled at the edge of the top step, closed his fingers around it, and then tried to pull himself forward. Vic was impressed. Hole in the back of his head and the son of a bitch was still trying. He took a wooden kitchen match from his shirt pocket and put it between his teeth.

“Howdy, partner,” Vic said. “Having a little trouble there?”

The bleeding man slowly turned his head. His eyes were half-closed and crusted with blood, but Vic could see one brown eye come slowly into focus as stare at him. The man struggled to speak, and managed it only marginally. “H…help…”

Vic laughed. “Yeah, I’ll get right on that.” He lowered his pistol. “Christ, you are one sorry-looking nigger. That hole in your head’s gotta hurt.”

“Help…me…”

“Nope, can’t do that. Tell you what, why don’t you tell me what the hell you’re doing here. Or should I guess?” He bent close and sniffed. “Doing a little vampire hunting, are we?”

Ferro’s eye gave a slow blink. “You…you’re part…of it.”

“Yeah, you could say that, but don’t worry, I don’t bite. Even if I did I wouldn’t bite dark meat. Eww.” He sat down on a broken porch beam. “No, I’m what those boys call the Foreman. If you know about the Fang Gang, then you probably know about the
Man
, about Ubel Griswold. Yeah, I can see it on your face that you know. Well, I’m his right hand, you see. He’s always said so.”

“Why?” Ferro croaked. His voice was almost nonexistent.

For a moment Vic’s eyes shone with a different kind of light. “For reasons you would never understand, not if you lived a million freaking years.” He glanced at the house. “Your friends are probably dead, you know. No one’s coming to help you. I planned for everything.”

“Kiss…my ass…” Ferro breathed.

“Suit yourself.” He stood up and walked down off the porch and went over to examine the ATVs. “Wow, you guys brought a lot of nice toys. Too bad you’re all shitheads.”

As soon as Vic’s back was turned Ferro used all of his strength to shift position, tucking one hand under his body and straining with the other to reach his fallen pistol that lay among the rubble.

Vic finished examining the bikes and climbed back up onto the porch, saw Ferro’s reach, and plucked the pistol out of reach. “Nice try, Bojangles,” he said with a grin and kicked Ferro in the ribs.

Ferro’s body constricted into a ball; his cry of pain instantly turned into a string of wet coughs that misted the floorboards with red.

Vic chewed on his match, smiling with real pleasure as he watched Ferro die moment by moment; but that smile was immediately wiped off his face by the distinctive sound of a shotgun blast.

He leapt to his feet, pistol in a two-hand grip, head cocked to listen. The sound had come from inside. He was sure of it, but from
where
inside? After almost a full minute he heard another shotgun blast, and another. There was a barrage of blasts, and now he knew that they had to be coming from beneath the house. In the cellar. It worried him that there were so many shots.
They
should have been able to rip the intruders to shreds after the first shot, but the blasts went on. And there were pistol shots, too. Then silence. He waited it out and there were no more sounds from beneath the house.

It worried him that it had taken
them
so long to bring down two men, but he had no doubt that it was now a feeding frenzy in there. He relaxed slowly, lowering the pistol.

“Serves ’em right, the dumb shits.” He turned back to Ferro, who was trying to use the side of a clenched fist to raise himself off the floor. “You guys should have stayed out of the Man’s business, you know that? You think I put in thirty frigging years of hard work to have that jackass Crow and a dumb-shit nigger like you just muck things up? You can’t be that stupid, even for a jig.” He gave Ferro another vicious kick.

Ferro felt his ribs explode. Breathing became suddenly impossible as the fragments of shattered ribs tore gashes in his lungs. Ferro could feel himself beginning to drown as his lungs filled with blood.

But he felt his mouth twisting upward into a savage smile as he looked down at the object he held, the small bright blue thing he’d managed to claw out of his pants pocket while Vic was rooting through the duffel bags on the ATVs.

Vic kicked him once more, and the lights of the world began going out in Frank Ferro’s mind. He could not feel the blows any more. He was drowning in the blood that clogged his throat. He wanted to say something: a prayer, a curse, anything. He wanted to mock the man who was killing him, to tell him that he was not going to kill anyone ever again; but there was just not enough life left in him to do it. All he had left was the strength to roll back the striker-wheel with the pad of his thumb. The motion pressed the lighter’s tiny valve and the spark ignited into a small blue flame.

Poised in midkick Vic looked down in overwhelming horror as Frank Ferro plunged the lighter down into the pool of garlic oil, blood, urine, and high-octane gasoline.

(3)

Crow fired the shotgun even as he stumbled backward, shouting a warning to LaMastra, but the sergeant was already in trouble as two slender forms leapt at him and bore him down. There were a dozen of the children. The oldest were twins who looked to be around twelve or thirteen, and the youngest, Crow saw to his absolute horror, was a baby who crawled as quickly as a scuttling beetle, its angelic face split to reveal only two needle-sharp fangs protruding from otherwise smooth gums. The sight of the children almost froze Crow and LaMastra into fatal immobility, but their fingers were already on their triggers and as the creatures swarmed at them they fired out of reflex. After that it was easier to shoot, their hands working in mechanical independence from their stunned minds.

Crow’s first shot caught a little girl in the chest and she just flew apart into red rags. The sight of her just exploding like that nearly drove him mad. It was too horrible, too impossible a thing to be allowed. As the shotgun pellets tore her apart it was as if the blast ripped open the fabric of all reality and everything from here on would be nightmares and insanity.

Then another creature lunged at him—a Chinese boy of about ten, who dodged the falling body parts and leapt at Crow, hissing like a rat. Crow barely had time to work the pump and so fired the blast an inch away from the child’s throat. The decapitated head spun away into shadows, but the body kept falling forward to strike Crow’s chest; as it collapsed down in death the monster’s talons slashed down the front of Crow’s trousers, opening two deep gashes.