Carnival (33 page)

Nabo squalled and kicked on the floor, the dust rising from his childish temper tantrum.

Frenchy looked at Martin. “He's mortal,” Martin explained. “That's his punishment for failing here. All those who survived are now mortal. Doomed to spend the rest of their lives here on earth as mortal beings. He gave it away by having Kelson hiding in here, waiting to kill me—because Nabo knew he couldn't do it—and by insisting upon me killing him. He'd rather die than have to spend eternity as a mortal. He probably can't kill himself. His ... master would not permit it.”

“It'll probably never come to trial, Martin,” Frenchy warned him.

“Probably not. But Nabo will be confined to a mental institution for the rest of his life. Forever locked down in a place for the hopelessly criminally insane. A far worse fate than death.”

Nabo lay on the floor and cussed.

The sounds of what appeared to be a hundred sirens drifted to them.

“I called for backup,” Mayfield explained. “And for the attorney general to be helicoptered in.” He jerked his thumb toward the midway. “I have never seen so many dead people in all my life.”

“How disgusting!” Nabo said. “How humiliating!”

“Halp!” a woman's voice squalled through the now-silent midway. “Halp me!”

“Dolly Darling,” Nabo explained. “She can't get out of her chair.”

“Doomed to be a freak forever,” Jeanne said. “Serves her right.”

“I have never been so humiliated in all my lives,” Nabo ranted.

“Cuff him, Gene,” Mayfield ordered.

“And be sure you read him his rights,” Frenchy added.

“Halp!” Dolly squalled. “Halpl”

Frenchy was with the state police. Audie and Nicole with them. The kids were asleep. Holland, Nebraska was literally crawling with officialdom.

Martin sat on his front porch. He could not recall ever being so tired.

His daughter sat in the porch swing, glaring at him. “You're stuck with me and I'm stuck with you,” she said sourly.

“That's right, honey.”

“I hate you!” She bluntly told her father. “And you just wait. I'll find a way to once more become what I was before.”

“No doubt you will try. And you might make it. But until that time, you are going to be a perfect lady. The pride and joy of the Holland family.”

“We'll see about that.”

* * *

Audie stood over the still breathing body of Binkie. He lifted his walkie-talkie and called for an EMT.

“I'm scared,” Binkie whispered.

“You ought to be.” He looked at the boy's crushed legs. Someone had put pressure bandages on the wounds, easing the bleeding to only a thin ooze.

“Nicole walked up to Audie. ”Highway Patrol found Joe Carrol beaten to death in his bedroom. Billie Watson was found wandering around in the grasslands. Naked. Out of her head.”

“Any sign of Balo, JoJo or the Dog Man?”

“Nothing. One carnie said the Dog Man just vanished into thin air with the animals. Audie? You got to see this, man. Come on.”

She led him to the wax museum. “Brace yourself,” she warned him, pushing back the canvas.

Audie hissed in shock. Unlike the Crazy House, the inside of the wax museum was clean and new-looking. But it was the wax creatures that trapped his attention.

The dead had been transformed, to forever stand—he hoped—as exhibits. Alicia was there. Mike Hanson. Lyle Steele. Matt Horton. Missy. Kelson. Gary Tressalt. Eddie. They were immovable statues. Except for their eyes, which followed the city cop and the deputy as they walked around the dimly lit room. Audie's flesh seemed to crawl, as if maggots were sliming about on his skin.

Audie swallowed hard and walked back outside, to stand in the warm welcome light of God's day. “What do we tell the investigators, Nicole?”

“Frenchy's taking care of that. She said the attorney general is going to call it a riot and nothing more.

“I figured a cover-up.”

“What else could they do?”

“They're ... we're ... somebody's going to have to dispose of those ... wax things.”

“If they can,” Nicole said grimly.

* * *

“You can't do this to me!” Linda squalled at her father.

“Bend over the end of the bed, kid,” he told her, a leather belt in his hand.

She cut her evil eyes, her lips grinning at him.

Martin backhanded her, jerked her up, and bent her over the end of the bed. He began applying the leather to her denim-clad bottom.

“Aren't you going to tell me that this hurts you more than it does me?” she wailed.

“No indeed, girl. I'm taking a great deal of satisfaction from this. I'm going to blister your butt until you can heat your own bathwater just by sitting in it. And then we're going to church, baby.”

“Church!” she shrieked. “No way!”

“Church,” Martin said grimly. “To pray for your lost soul. And to pray for me—since I'm obviously going to have to put up with you for only God knows how long.”

* * *

Karl Steele lay whimpering, gritting his fanged snout against the pain in his foot. Since animals do not have the ability to cry as humans, Karl could only whine and whimper.

His rear paw was caught in a small animal trap.

His metamorphosis was complete. He no longer in any way resembled a human. He was a dog.

Karl whimpered against the pain. And then he began doing what he—when he was in human form—had caused other animals to do, many times. It was the only thing he could do to regain his freedom.

He began chewing off the trapped leg.

Christmas. Holland, Nebraska.

The sightseers and morbidly curious had stopped coming to rubberneck at the town and the remaining inhabitants.

After the riots.

Martin and Frenchy had been married for a week. They sat in the den before a crackling fire. Mark was in his room, studying. Linda was in her room, doing only God knew what.

And Satan.

Frenchy had resigned her state police commission a day before they were married.

The town was looking around for a couple of new doctors.

Janet and the kids had moved away.

The police had tried to destroy the wax statues. They would not burn. Nothing could burn them. They tried blowing them up. A big bang and lots of smoke was all that was accomplished by that. The statues were finally stored in a concrete block building with no windows and a steel door. Just outside of town. The carnival had been dismantled and stored. Just outside of town.

Dick Mason had purchased the old Bar-S ranch. Renamed it the Flying-M.

Jeanne and Don were planning to be married in the spring.

Nicole and Audie were married shortly after the incident. The incident at Holland was how the official report read.

Nabo was confined at a state mental institution for the criminally insane.

Dolly Darling and a few more had joined other carnivals. They would be touring the nation come spring.

Frenchy stirred beside Martin as a strange but now familiar chanting came from Linda's room.

And they knew that in other homes around the town, other kids would be picking up the same chanting, and other parents would be wondering what to do.

“I know what I should do,” Martin said, putting his arm around Frenchy's shoulders. “But I can't just walk up to her and kill her. I just can't do it, Frenchy.”

“I know.”

“While you were wrapping up the reports on the ... incident, I tried to have her committed. She was calm and quite lucid. The psychiatrists said she was as sane as anyone else. I had no choice; I had to bring her back home with me.”

The chanting picked up in tone and volume.

Martin stood up and tossed another log on the fire.

And in the concrete block house, Alicia opened her eyes and smiled as the sounds of her daughter's chanting finally reached her.

They'd flown north from Central and South America, appearing one day in the southern wetlands of the U.S. like ominous ink stains in the twilight sky. With each sunset, more appeared, first hundreds then thousands. Massing into a great black cloud of terror, the vampire bats were beating their wings in time with the panicked heartbeats in the towns below.

No one knew how to stop them as they fell onto their prey like dark, deadly shadows. But someone had to find a way. Because somewhere in the night, they had become a threat to more than wild animals and livestock. Somewhere in the night madness took hold as these vampire bats developed a taste for human blood.

And the feasting had only just begun.

The pull of the moon is strong
evoking emotions that have remained dormant
for centuries.
But when the moon sends its blood call
who can resist?
Only those not born with the unseen mark.

From the
Writings of the Undead

He was being chased. Same old dream. He knew it
was a dream. Scared the crap out of him anyway.
"No!" he shouted, and the shout woke him. He
opened his eyes, sitting up in bed. "Damnit!" he said,
swinging his legs off the bed and planting his feet on
the cool floor.

His dogs came rushing into the bedroom, nails
clicking on the tile. Skipper sat on the floor by his
bed and June hopped up on the bed. Johnny named
the dog June because that's the month he found her,
or she found him-whatever. He'd rescued Skipper
from the local pound just hours before he was to have
been put to sleep. Both of them were part husky, part
chow, and the rest was mutt.

June licked him on the side of the face and he petted
her. "It's all right," Johnny assured the dog. "It's
OK." He looked at the luminous numbers on the
clock. Five o'clock. Time to get up anyway.

He pulled on jeans and moccasins and let the dogs
out for their morning toilet and run around the fenced
five acres that sat in the middle of his one hundred acres-also fenced, but not as securely as the "compound," as he called it.

He did not turn on any lights until he reached the
kitchen. He didn't have to. He knew where every
piece of furniture was located. If a chair was three
inches left or right or forward or backward of center,
he'd know it. He also knew where every gun in the
house was located.

He made coffee, and when it was brewed he filled
a mug and walked out to the screened-in front porch
and sat down. It was then he noticed that the dogs
were sitting together, close to the screen door, their
husky-marked faces looking skyward. June whined
and Johnny opened the screen door and let them in.
They came in quickly, almost knocking him down in
their haste.

"Hey, gang. What's the matter with you two?"
This was not like them. Early April in Northeast Louisiana
and cool for this time of year. The dogs usually
liked to stay outside until the sun came up. Not this
morning.

Then Johnny heard the sound. A curious sound. Sort
of like the fluttering of many wings. It grew louder and
louder. Then silence. He looked around for the dogs.
They had vanished. He looked into the den. June was
under the coffee table and Skipper was clean out of
sight. Probably under the kitchen table. That's where he
usually headed whenever a thunderstorm came roaring
in. And in this part of Louisiana, thunder-bumpers occurred
with depressing regularity.

"Something sure scared you two," Johnny said.
Then he returned to his chair on the porch and drank
his coffee.

Johnny lived about fifty miles southeast of Monroe, and about thirty-five miles north and slightly
west of Natchez, Mississippi, not too far from the
Tensas River. He lived in the great big fat middle of
nowhere, and that's the way he liked it.

He was not from this part of the country, but when
he retired from the military he'd had no desire at all
to return to his roots. There was nothing there for
him. He'd run away from home at fourteen, lied
about his age and joined the Army at fifteen, and
stayed in the service for twenty six years, retiring a
full Bird Colonel. While in the service he'd gotten
his GSA and then earned a Master's degree. He was
a Mustang: an officer who'd risen from the ranks.
Twenty of those twenty-six years he'd spent in one
form of intelligence or the other. He'd worked for
ASA, CIA, DIA, NSA, and a dozen other intelligence-gathering organizations all over the world.
Johnny MacBride was not his real name. He hadn't
used his real name in so many years, at times he had
trouble remembering what it was.

His Army records listed him as forty-four years
old. He was actually forty-one. His personality
profile stated that he was a loner. That was an understatement.
His psychological down-training (CRIPCivilian
Reindoctrination Program) was a failure. It
wasn't that Johnny didn't like people-he just didn't
trust many of them. He didn't trust them because
most civilians did not have the vaguest idea what
they would do in any given situation. Johnny knew
exactly
what he would do in any situation. Johnny
did not think like most people. He was not hotheaded;
few successful intelligence operatives are.
Like most intelligence officers, Johnny would think
things through, plan carefully, and then react. There are people buried 1111 over the world who had the misfortune
to confront a skilled and trained spook. But in
many cases, their demise usually came months or
even years after the confrontation. Many people misinterpret
caution for cowardice. That quite often
proves to be a fatal mistake ... somewhere down the
line. Spooks have long memories, and they are very,
very vindictive.

Johnny was finishing his second cup of coffee before
the dogs once more ventured out onto the porch.
He petted them both and they calmed down.

Except for the dogs, Johnny lived al(?ne. He had
never been married. He'd never had time for marriage.
He didn't think he'd ever been in love. He'd
been in heat lots of time, but come the dawn, the heat
had always cooled.

Johnny MacBride was neither handsome nor badlooking.
He was six feet tall with brown hair and
dark green eyes. His heritage was Scotch-Irish and
Scandinavian. He was in very good physical condition,
maintaining a strict regime of physical conditioning.
He wasn't a fanatic on the subject of
exercise; he simply worked out at least an hour every
day and had done so for years.

Johnny showered and shaved then checked his larder
to see if he needed to go into town for anything.
He was low on a number of things so he decided to
drive into town and buy groceries and pick up his
_mail-it was a weekly outing for him.

Johnny owned two vehicles, a new Ford pickup
truck, FI50 series, with four-wheel drive, and a '65
Ford Mustang that he had spent years lovingly restoring
to near mint condition. He'd take the pickup since he wanted to buy some lumber in addition to
the groceries.

Standing by the gate that led to the garage, he
looked back at his house. When he'd bought this land
some ten years back, he had a crew come in from out
of town to build the home to his specifications. At
first glance, it looked like an ordinary home. It
wasn't. It was a fort. The home was three feet off the
ground, built on huge pilings. The outside was cypress;
between the cypress and the inside paneling
was concrete blocks filled with sand. The windows
were bulletproof. The home was a quarter of a mile
from a parish road, the drive leading to the home a
deliberately twisting one so any vehicle approaching
could not raise any speed to ram the gates.

This was not paranoia on Johnny's part. A dozen
terrorist groups around the world had offered thousands
and thousands of dollars to anyone who could
bring back Johnny's head in a sack. Only one
group–so far–had learned of Johnny's new local~
and they'd sent a team in to take him out about six
months back, just a few months after Johnny had
moved in. A week after the attempted assassination,
four bodies had been found floating in the Tensas
River down in Catahoula Parish. They could not be
identified because they had neither heads nor hands.

The local sheriff had opined that, "Somebody sure
had a grudge against their ass."

Just a few hundred yards after pulling out onto the
blacktop parish road, Johnny stopped and parked on
the shoulder, putting on his emergency flashers and
walked across the road to a ditch. He stood looking
down at what was left of a cow. The poor beast had
what appeared to be slash marks all over its hide. He turned at the sounds of an approaching car and when
he saw it was a Louisiana state trooper, he waved the
driver to a halt.

The trooper rolled down the window and asked,
"Trouble, sir?"

"Dead cow in the ditch," Johnny replied. "But I
never saw anything quite like the markings on the
body."

The trooper clicked on his rotating lights and
parked. He got out and looked at the cow. "Damn!"
he said. "I'm with you, mister. Looks like ... hell, I
don't know
what
it looks like." The trooper took a
deep breath and instantly regretted it. "What's that
smell?"

"It's sort of like ammonia, isn't it?"

''Yeah. Sort of."

Johnny walked into the dry ditch and squatted
down by the carcass, looking closely at the markings
on the hide. The carcass seemed to be shrunken. And
now that he was close, he could see that there were
hundreds of those strange markings all over the animal's
body.

"That's a funny-looking cow," the trooper remarked.
"Something's wrong with it. It looks like ...
it's been shrunk."

Then Johnny knew what was wrong. "Shit!" he
said.

"What's wrong?"

"No blood. This animal's been drained of blood."

"Say
what
?"

"Take a look for yourself."

The trooper looked, and looked again. "Jesus
Christ. I think you're right." He reached out to touch the carcass with a finger and Johnny's voice stopped
him.

"Put a glove on."

The trooper cut eyes to him. "Why?"

"Because you've cut your finger and if you touch
that cut to this carcass, you run the risk of rabies."

The trooper jerked his hand back. "
Rabies!
Why
do you say that?"

"Because I know what, or who, did this."

"Would you like to share that information with
me?"

Johnny did and the trooper blinked a couple of
times. "You're sure?"

"Ninety-nine percent certain. But I never heard of
them this far north."

"Hell, they're all over the United States, aren't
they?"

"Not this kind."

"Are you deliberately trying to spook me?"

Johnny smiled.

"You find this funny?"

"Only your choice of words, trooper." He stood up
and the trooper stood with him.

"I know who you are now," the trooper said.
"You're the guy who bought the old Perkins place."

"That's right." Johnny extended his hand. "Johnny
MacBride."

The trooper shook hands. "Mark Hayden. I have to
call this in, but I don't want to use the radio. Too
damn many scanners around and something like this
could cause a panic."

"You're sure right about that. My place is right
down the road. You want to use the phone there?"

"I'd appreciate it."

"Follow me."

On the short drive back to his house, Johnny appraised
the trooper. About thirty or so, he figured,
and competent. Very competent. The trooper had old
eyes for one so young. Like my own, Johnny
thought. He had noticed the tag on the front bumper
of the trooper's car. SWAT. Good man to know,
Johnny summed up.

The commander of the troop, Captain Alden, was
not impressed. "Bats, huh? Bats killed a cow. A
whole cow?"

"It's sort of hard to just kill part of a cow, Captain,"
Mark said.

"Don't get cute, Hayden. This day is starting off
crappy enough without you and your jokes. Put this
... what's-his-name on the horn."

Mark held the phone out and Johnny took it.
"Johnny MacBride here."

"You some sort of expert on bats, Mr. Bride."

"That's
Mac
Bride, Captain."

"Sorry."

"I'm no expert, Captain. But I've spent a lot of
time in countries where these types of bats call home.
I've been in their caves and know what they smell
like. And I've seen what they can do.''

"And you're convinced this was ... wait a minute.
Wait a minute. Back up here, Mr. MacBride. You
said, 'These types of bats,' right?"

"That's right."

"Just plain ol' ordinary bats, right?"

"No."

Mark Hayden was staring at Johnny, a curious expression
on his face. He had taken out a package of chewing tobacco and was just about to drop a load in
his mouth.

"No?" Captain Alden said.

"That's right. These are not the ordinary, very beneficial
to humankind bats, Captain. These bats, if I'm
right, are very dangerous. They can carry rabies and
bubonic plague. Just to name a couple of disasters."

"Do they have a name, Mr. MacBride?:"

"Yes. I did some research on them some years
back. If I'm pronouncing it right, they're called Diphylla
Ecaudata."

Trooper Hayden was chomping away contentedly.

Johnny said, "They're better known as the Hairy-Legged
Vampire Bat."

Trooper Hayden swallowed his chewing tobacco.