The pizza delivery guy looked at the EMT and together they sprinting across the parking lot toward her. The nurse lingered by the door, but screamed for all of them to get inside. She tried not to look at the small, slack limbs that hung from the bundle of bloody rags the woman clutched to her chest.
The two men braced her and each took an arm to hurry her along. A flaming shoe slapped down in front of them. “Christ,” growled the EMT.
“My baby’s hurt!” wept the woman as they hustled her along. The nurse came out to meet them, making shushing noises to soothe her, reaching out for the baby. The woman screamed and huddled over the baby, shielding it from the nurse’s touch.
“Get the door,” ordered the nurse, and the pizza delivery guy ran forward to pull open the heavy door. The emergency power did not extend to the hydraulic doors.
The woman stopped outside, jerking back, her face suddenly frightened and suspicious. “No! You’ll hurt my baby!”
“No, no,” the nurse quickly assured her. “We’re going to help you. We’re going to help your…baby. Come on, sweetheart.”
“That’s right, Miss,” said the EMT, trying to urge her on. Still the woman hesitated, clearly afraid of the yawning doorway.
“My baby?”
“There are doctors in here,” said the nurse. “They’ll take care of your baby. They’ll fix you both up good as new.” The lie burned like acid on her tongue.
The woman turned and looked at the nurse, her eyes almost blank except for haunted shadows. “Doctors?”
“Yes, Sweetheart. Very good doctors. The best. Now come on in so we can help you.”
“Come inside,” the pizza guy called, half watching her and half watching the seemingly endless fall of flaming debris.
Reluctantly, the woman began moving again, letting the driver and the nurse guide her inside. They crossed the threshold and left the danger of the falling debris behind. There were other people milling around in the ER entrance now, including a young resident from Pakistan who was already moving toward them with a look of deep concern on his face. The woman stopped just inside the entrance and slowly lowered her arms. The tattered blanket fell from her hands onto the floor, and a limp form flopped out into the light. The nurse and the driver stared. The pizza delivery guy and the resident stared. All of them wore identical frowns of surprise and confusion.
On the hospital floor lay an ordinary child’s doll, with a plastic smiling face and soft rubber arms and legs. The driver was the first to lift his eyes from the doll to the bloodstained woman. She was no longer staring wide-eyed with shock. She was smiling. Her smile was wide and white and impossible.
Lois Wingate threw back her head and laughed as behind her the doors were yanked open by powerful hands. All of the vampires who had been hiding in the shadows behind parked cars in the lot now came howling into the hospital to share in the fun. They swarmed past Lois. Last of all came Karl Ruger, twirling Lois’s tiara on a long white finger.
“Now that was just plain mean,” he said with a grin.
Lois flew into his arms and their kisses tasted of blood.
8
Vic stumbled away from the open door of the pickup toward the weak lights that spilled through the glass doors of the Emergency Room entrance. Twice he tripped and fell. A thin whimpering cry bubbled from his lips as he tottered toward the doors, one hand pressing a greasy rag against the melted skin of his face and the other batting at invisible nothings that he believed flew around him. He was deep in shock and his shoulders twitched every few steps.
He pulled the door open, screaming in effort and pain, oblivious to the carnage around him. The vampires looked at him but did not dare approach. They knew who he was, and even if he was burned and out of his mind with pain, not one of them dared to attack him.
At times during the nightmare drive from Griswold’s house to the hospital Vic thought that his skin was still on fire—it felt like it was still blazing—and he beat at his skin. But that only made the pain worse. He wept and mumbled and cried out for the Man to help him, but the darkness in his head was silent except for the roar of open flame.
Inside the hospital he reeled and lurched toward the ER. He didn’t know if any doctors would still be alive or not. He didn’t care. There would be morphine.
All the way to the hospital he kept calling the Man, using that old mind connection to try and reach him…but it was like shouting into a well. The Man didn’t answer, didn’t say a word.
The silence burned him far worse than the damage to his skin and he had to will himself not to sob. It wasn’t right…it wasn’t fair. None of this was fair.
The right side of his face looked normal, but the left was a horror show. If a waxwork dummy had been worked over with a blowtorch, the effect would have been about the same. Skin sagged in melted folds, drooping over one eye, hanging loosely from the bone on withered strings of damaged muscle. His left eye was not blind, but all he could see was a milky whiteness shot with threads of scarlet. Most of his black hair had burned away to reveal a worm-white scalp splotched here and there with lurid red marks. His clothes had burned, too, but they had kept his body from the worst of it. He had rolled around in the tall grass near the house to extinguish the burning jacket and jeans before the flames could do crippling damage to his body, but his face was ruined. His hands were puffed with leaking blisters from swatting at the flames.
Thirty feet inside the ER he tripped over a kid’s rag doll and went down in a sprawl, cracking his chin against the marble floor. He bellowed for help, unable to work out the mechanics of how to get back to his feet. His bladder let go and Vic Wingate lay sprawled in his own piss, his face a Picasso mask, wheezing air in and out through a seared throat.
And Vic Wingate started to cry.
9
They all heard the screams change from shock to terror to pain. Val ran out into the hall with Mike behind her just as the door to the fire stairs opened and half a dozen white-faced vampires came dashing out, laughing and yelling like frat boys on rush night.
10
Terry could feel everything that was happening to him. He was acutely aware of the shift in body temperature as his system jumped into a whole new dimension of cellular activity. His respiration quickened and his pupils dilated as hormones were pumped furiously into his system. In his brain new glands formed and old ones faded away; his heart hammered with tremendous force, sending his blood coursing through his veins to carry strange new chemical mixtures to organs and bones. His entire nervous system was like a supercomputer running a massively complex program and redesigning itself as it functioned, expanding its memory, discarding useless files, accessing new and bizarre data.
Terry could feel his body shifting, altering as mass was reassigned. His bones became heavier to support muscle tissue that had thickened and grown more dense. His skin tingled as new hair follicles formed and began sending stiff red shoots through the flesh. His jaw ached horribly as the configuration of his teeth changed; his molars shifted forward to allow the growth of strong new carnassial teeth, and the incisors and canines became decidedly more pronounced. Externally his face looked no different. If Sarah had been looking at him instead of out in the hallway trying to get answers about the noise and confusion, she would not yet have seen anything beyond the last of the fading bruises that marked his face, but inside Terry, nothing was the same.
When the first explosions rocked the hospital, Terry’s mind registered them but did not focus. His window faced east and only rattled as the shock waves hit, and Terry’s reforming senses did not register any immediate threat. He remained submerged in his internal world of physical change, but Sarah had leapt to her feet and gone rushing into the hallway. She was out there for a long time, and when the changes in Terry’s body began to affect his surface anatomy, he was distantly glad that she was not in the room. There was just enough of him left to care.
When the windows on the other side of the hospital blew inward, the changes were starting to accelerate. His window only shuddered in its frame and its dark surface reflected the chameleon changes taking place on the bed.
Outside, Sarah, the staff, and scores of patients choked the hallway. Every third person had a cell phone and people were shouting into them as if it would do some good. Rumors buzzed back and forth like agitated flies. There were screams and yells, and the sound of bodies colliding in the poorly lit halls.
A nurse started yelling for everyone to go back to their rooms, for visitors to help get their family members back to their beds, while down the hall a doctor was yelling for everyone to get out of their rooms and away from the windows. Suddenly terrified for Terry, Sarah began to fight her way through the darkness toward his room. The whole hospital shook as blast after blast rocked the town. People staggered into her, and twice she tripped and fell in the darkness. Just as she reached for the handle to his door there was a tremendous shattering crash from inside and she screamed and shoved her shoulder against the inrush of wind. She fought her way inside and then stopped, hand to her mouth to stifle a scream.
The window was an empty hole through while the night air blew with stinging coldness. Shredded curtains whipped and danced in the breeze. On the bed the blankets were torn to ribbons, and the IV stand lay on the floor in a puddle of solution.
Sarah stood in the doorway and screamed again.
The room was empty. Terry was gone.
11
The Bone Man stood on the roof of the hospital and watched the town burn. His guitar hung from his limp right hand and his left palm was pressed to his chest as if his heart could actually beat. It felt like it was breaking nonetheless.
Two floors below he could feel the thing that had been Mike Sweeney, could feel the energies surging and flowing in him like tidal waters. Above him the cloudy sky was dense with thousands of circling crows. Down there in the streets he saw the thing that had been Terry Wolfe racing through the flickering shadows. Out beyond the edge of town, down in the Hollow, he could feel that other thing twisting and writhing in the muddy darkness. This is what that poet must have meant, he mused, when he wrote about a beast slouching to town to be born.