One pierced hand flopped out, scrabbling feebly toward the light. He tried to find his feet, tried to recall how they worked, and after long minutes of trying managed to kick weakly backward against the door. He managed to shove himself six inches forward, six inches farther toward the yard. He tried again, and this time his fingers closed around a thick piece of debris from the fallen porch. He pulled with all his strength and slid another five inches forward. He coughed again and blood began streaming from his nose. The light flickered off and on and the point of burning pain in the back of his head became white hot again.
Ferro laid his face down on the floor and tried to remember how to pray. He knew he should be able to remember. But it was so hard to think.
When the thin black man in the dirty suit came walked out of the woods, Ferro looked up, hope flaring in his chest, but then the insight of the dying told him who this man was—this young man in cheap funeral clothes, with a nappy old-fashioned Afro and a blues guitar.
The man sat down on the porch rail, swinging the guitar around in front of him. He had a kindly face, though his eyes were like dusty marbles.
“You can see me, can’t you?” the man said.
Ferro couldn’t find his voice. He tried to nod, but even that was so hard.
“Yeah, you can see me. And I think you know who I am. Something tells me you do.” He picked out a couple of notes on his guitar. “Listen, my brother, ’cause time is short. There’s someone coming out here who you’re not gonna want to meet, but he’ll be here just the same. He’s the peckerwood son of a bitch did this to you, and he’s the one laid the traps for your friends.” He bent closer. “I hope you can understand me, man, ’cause if you do, then you got one last chance to stick it to the Man.”
3
The sight of Jimmy Castle standing there jerked Crow sideways into an unreal world where nothing made sense. If he had seen Ruger he could probably have dealt with it…but Castle was dead and buried. He and Weinstock had opened his coffin, had seen his putrefying corpse, had confirmed that Castle was dead. He could not be here.
Castle tossed the flashlight over his shoulder, where it struck the wall and clattered to the ground, the lens cracked but the bulb still lit.
Even though he was still bundled up in the carpet, LaMastra nonetheless made a gagging sound, which is when the spoiled-meat stink of Castle registered in Crow’s stalled brain. It was as rancid as the leavings in the corner of a bear’s den.
“Man, the look on your face is priceless,” Castle said, laughing. “Almost as bad as when you and Saul Weinstock opened my casket. You both looked like you swallowed frogs.”
“You…were dead!”
“I’m still dead, asshole. I’m a fucking vampire. You think sleeping in a coffin for a few days was gonna bother me? Nels and I—we thought it was a gas. Fooled your ass.”
“But you were all…”
“All what? De-com-posed?” He made each syllable sound like a separate word. “Yeah, well, we can do all sorts of things and regenerating is part of the luxury package. Soon as I chomp down on you and your butt-buddy I’ll be right as rain.”
Castle shook his head and laughed. Other voices laughed, too. Behind them…near them, around them in the dark. Crow turned slowly to see other white faces emerge from the shadows. Crow saw Nels Cowan, and he had a flash of memories of their days together as policemen. The thickset man had always been funny, quick-witted, thoroughly in love with his wife and kids, and just crooked enough to accept free dinners at the Scarecrow Diner and a Christmas bottle of Jim Beam from the owner of Friendly Spirits. Now, dressed in the torn and filthy black suit he’d been buried in, he shambled through the shadows, drool hanging pendulously from his bloodless lips. This was the Nels Cowan of Weinstock’s video, but worse—purpled by expanding gasses, visibly rotting.
LaMastra finally punched and wrestled his way out of the carpet and flopped around onto his hands and knees. He stared upward in furious indignation and instantly the look of fury on his face changed to one of stark terror. LaMastra screamed.
Without warning Jimmy Castle grabbed the front of LaMastra’s Kevlar vest and jerked him off the floor and pulled him toward his grinning mouth, teeth gleaming like yellow knives. He held the big detective as easily as if he were a little child. LaMastra punched and squirmed, but Castle was far too strong. The vampire bent forward and ran a colorless tongue along the bloody seepage along the line of stitches on LaMastra’s jaw; a moan of deep, almost sexual pleasure escaped Castle’s throat. His eyes were totally black and as he pulled LaMastra even closer his jaws opened impossibly wide. Castle took one handful of the detective’s hair and jerked his head to one side, exposing his throat.
Castle suddenly gagged and staggered, his grip going from rock hard to weak in the space of a second; LaMastra sagged down to his knees and Castle reeled back, pawing at his own mouth, spitting and hissing like a snake.
Crow stared in shock and confusion. Around him the other vampires sent up a howl of anger and confusion. Then Crow got it. The word sprang right into his head.
Garlic! All three of them had smeared it on their throats! The realization was like a shot of adrenaline to Crow and as he watched Castle retch in disgust and pain he felt sense and control flood back into him. He twisted sideways and dove for the shotgun. Encumbered by the sword strapped across his back, his tumble was awkward, but he rolled away and came up with the weapon in his hands.
Despite his pain, Castle sneered at him. “I’m going to rip your goddamn heart out!”
Crow raised his shotgun and pointed it at Castle’s heart. Around him all the waxy white faces turned toward him, and all the hungry mouths laughed.
“Go ahead and shoot, asshole!” Castle jeered. “Take your best shot ’cause then I’m going to tear your eyes out and drink from the sockets.”
“Blow me,” Crow said, and fired.
The blast caught Jimmy Castle in the chest, plucked him off the ground, and threw him ten feet backward. He slammed into Nels Cowan and they both went down. Cowan was up again in an instant, laughing at the joke, reaching down to pull Castle up, sharing the prank Castle had just played on the stupid human with the gun. But Castle’s hand was limp in his grasp and Cowan stared down, still not getting it. Castle lay in a ragdoll sprawl, arms and legs twisted, head thrown back in surprise, his chest a bloody pit of mush.
Crow jacked another round, the sound as distinct as any insult or challenge that’s ever been. Cowan’s snarl started as a whimper of fear, but instantly intensified into a predator’s hunting shriek as he turned and lunged forward at Crow.
The first shot tore away Cowan’s left shoulder and sent his arm spinning back into the shadows trailing a line of blood. For a moment Cowan froze there in a posture of attack, weight on his toes, one arm still reaching, but his face was blank with shock, his mouth agape. Crow’s second round caught him in the throat and Cowan’s body fell straight backward while his head struck the ceiling joist and then landed with a smashed-melon crunch on the ground.
The gunshot echoes boomed like thunder from every wall and then died into a breathless nothing, freezing them all in a monstrous tableau. But just for a second. Then the other vampires swarmed toward Crow from three sides of the cellar. Crow spun, jacking another round, but immediately there was a titanic bang as LaMastra—finally jarred from his shocked stupor—brought up the heavy Roadblocker and opened fire.
One of the vampires went down with a hole as large as a basketball punched wetly through his stomach; the recoil drove LaMastra back against Crow, and from then on there they stood, back to back, shotguns firing, impacts making them collide, the garlic-soaked pellets filling the room as the pale creatures, driven past fear by hunger and hate, rushed at them. Everywhere they looked there were white faces and clawed hands and black eyes and red mouths.
LaMastra fired his gun dry, but Crow kept shooting his, screaming all the while, jacking round after round into the breech, jerking the trigger, feeling the kick and hearing the concussion and jacking in the next round, and the next, until suddenly the gun clicked and nothing happened. Crow pumped it again. Click. Pump. Click. Pump. Click. Doing it, over and over again, screaming and dry-firing and pumping and staring into the blackness of shock and death.
And then Vince LaMastra tore the gun from his hands and belted Crow across the face. “Crow!” LaMastra shouted, “STOP IT!”
Instantly Crow sagged to his knees, panting like a dog, mouth working to form words but unable to make any come.
“Crow!” said LaMastra again, this time with less force. “It’s over. Crow, man…it’s over.”
Slowly, very slowly, Crow came back from that black place to which his mind had fled, back to the shadows of the cellar and to the musty carpet on which he lay, and back to himself. He looked around…and everywhere there was death. White bodies lay sprawled in improbable heaps, mouths thrown wide, eyes open or closed, hands splayed, flesh torn but bloodless. Dead. All of them. Dead.
Jimmy Castle. Dead. Nels Cowan. Dead. By the boiler, that was Carl Jacobsen, who owned a small farm down by the reservoir. Carl, with five kids at home. Dead. Over by the stairs, wasn’t that Mitzie Grant who had just graduated from nursing school? Dead. The others were strangers. Dead. All dead.
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.
Chapter 36
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.