The next scream they heard was inhuman.
And Val Guthrie smiled.
4
Even though his guts were turning to gutter water, BK stood his ground as his attacker rushed him. Three times he’d nailed this psycho son of a bitch with crippling blows to the head and throat. Three times the attacker just shrugged them off. BK was not a spiritual guy, and he didn’t much believe in the boogeyman, but he wasn’t an idiot either. Something was way off the sanity radar here and whether he wanted to believe it or not he had to accept the fact that this guy was not acting human. No, he corrected himself in the microsecond between the time the guy sprang and when he leapt, not acting human, this weird-ass motherfucker was not human.
Belief and acceptance are sometimes very different concepts.
The teenager jumped from too far away and yet still covered the distance between them—and the impossible reality of that nearly got BK killed—but BK was a fighter and he’d been in hundreds of scrapes from schoolyard scuffles to extreme martial arts bouts to back-alley knife fights. His conscious rational mind was not always allowed to be in the driver’s seat; reflexes and gross motor skills are better for the battlefield.
As the attacker slammed into him, BK shifted slightly to one side, accepted the grab with one of his own, pivoted, and let the killer’s mass and momentum do all the work. The pounce turned into a pirouette and then the killer was falling with BK’s bulk on top of him. They hit the ground hard and fast, with BK’s muscle and mass driving downward to smash the attacker’s bones with the impact. BK didn’t stop there, didn’t even pause; as soon as his hands were free of the need to steer the attacker’s body, he let go of the teenager’s trunk, grabbed him by the chin and the hair, and then threw himself into a tight roll through the air. BK’s bulk, plus the twisting grip, created a savage torque that more than just snapped the neck—it wrenched the killer’s head around more than two hundred degrees.
The attacker went limp in an instant.
BK rolled all the way to his feet but froze in a crouch, staring at what he had just fought, and what he had just done.
“Oh my God…” He dropped to his knees, gagging at the taste of the bile in his throat. The moment was unreal; he could feel his pulse pounding like a muffled surf in his ears.
He heard screams off to his right and rose and he turned. A woman ran out of the cornfields, her blouse torn and bloody, and two men chased her. Both of them were as pale-faced as the teenager he’d just killed. The woman reached the Haunted House and got inside, slamming the door; immediately her pursuers began hammering their fists on the door. It buckled and splintered and they tore the flimsy wood away and went inside. There were more screams.
BK was running with no awareness of having wanted or intended to. He pelted across the lot, noting with strange detachment that many tourists were milling around, some of them singing and others dancing in the unstructured way mental patients will. They all looked stoned. He recorded that, but couldn’t deal with it now.
He reached the Haunted House just as one of the pursuers came hurtling back out through the doorway with a short length of broken wood rammed up under his chin, his shirt-front glistening with blood. The man fell flat on his back and didn’t move, so BK vaulted his body and dashed inside. Billy had gone in there.
Just inside he saw the young woman huddled in a corner by a bandstand that had instruments but no musicians—they weren’t scheduled to play until eight that night and it was just turning six now. There were bodies on the floor. One was a younger teenager whose throat had clearly been torn out; the other was a red-haired woman dressed in a den mother’s uniform. Her mouth was smeared with blood and there was a drumstick jammed into the socket of her right eye.
On the far side of the bandstand the second of the two pursuers was locked in a mutual stranglehold with Billy Christmas, and they rolled over and over, their feet kicking out to send guitars and high hats crashing to the floor. Billy’s face was streaked with blood and his shoulder was slashed from the deltoid to the elbow.
BK rushed over and grabbed the attacker by the hair and hauled backward with all his weight, pulling him away from Billy, whose face had started to turn purple. BK kicked the man in the back of the calf, dropping him to his knees, then grabbed hair and chin and, standing wide-legged, he wrenched the man’s head over and up. The vertebrae popped like a drumroll, and BK let the body flop to the ground.
Billy was already climbing painfully to his feet, eyes dancing with shock, and yet he was smiling the weirdest smile BK had ever seen.
“You okay?” BK asked.
“Dude,” he gasped, the blood on his face mingling with sweat and tears, “I killed a v—vam—” He couldn’t quite get the word to fit into his mouth.
“What the hell is going on here?”
Billy rubbed his hands across his face. “I tried to, you know, stake him through the heart.” He shook his head. “Sternum’s a bitch.” He coughed, spit blood onto the floor, wiped his mouth with his uninjured arm. “Eye socket,” he said, nodding emphatically, “works.” He dropped to his knees and threw up.
“Note to self,” BK said softly while he stood over his friend.
5
Crow and LaMastra stood amid the carnage in the entrance hall to the ER. Everywhere around them was death. There had been over a dozen vampires—newly risen—in the hospital entrance; now there were only corpses. The air was thick with a gunpowder stink and the two of them were nearly deaf from the gunfire.
Crow covered LaMastra while the big detective reloaded both of his guns, and then did his own as LaMastra’s Roadblocker tracked up and down the hall. Crow bent into the car and fished out his katana and slung it across his back.
“Once we find your lady and the others,” LaMastra said, “we’ll need new wheels.”
Crow nodded. His car was a smoking wreck. “I saw Sarah Wolfe’s Hummer out in the lot. If we can find the keys—”
“I can hotwire anything with wheels,” LaMastra said. “Benefits of an inner-city education.”
“Good to know.” Crow took out his last bottle of garlic oil and smeared half of it on his throat and wrists before handing it to LaMastra. As an afterthought he licked some off his wrist so the taste would be in his mouth. “You ready?”
“No. You?”
“No,” Crow said. “Let’s go. Elevator’ll be out. Stairs are over there.”
“What now?” LaMastra asked. “We seem to be alone for the moment.”
The lobby led to a hall that ran the whole length of the building, and they followed it as fast as good sense would allow, Crow walking point, LaMastra back-walking to cover their asses. The hall broke to their left in three places, toward the ER triage rooms, to the main bank of elevators a hundred feet farther along, and then jagged off into the labs and X-ray department. They saw nothing moving at all. There were corpses everywhere, but they didn’t know if they were truly dead, waiting to rise, or shamming it as part of some kind of trap. If anything had so much as moved they’d have blasted it to red slush.
“Well, we have two choices, as I see it,” LaMastra said quietly as they came to the fire tower.
“They being?”
“Val and the others are either upstairs in Weinstock’s room or down in the morgue. She’s your fiancée, so you pick.”
“Shit. What would your choice be?”
Crow took a few paces down the hall and looked briefly into the triage rooms. There was a dead nurse on the floor of the waiting room and a few corpses slumped into the chairs, but no one else. “My first guess would be the morgue. It has the strongest door and that’s where we left all the ammunition and the rest of the garlic. Given a choice of where to make a stand, I’d hole up there.”
LaMastra pursed his lips. “Given a choice. Look around…this all happened fast. You think Val had time to go down there?”
Crow felt his stomach lurch. “No.”
“Then we go up.” They moved to the first stairwell. LaMastra said, “Okay, the same game plan? If it’s pale and we don’t like the way it looks, shoot it?”
“What if we shoot a patient by mistake?”
LaMastra’s face was wooden. “If we live through this we’ll light a candle.”
They fanned out and flanked the doorway to the fire stairs. To both of them it seemed as if their whole lives consisted of going through doors with fear and violence playing tug-of-war in their hearts.
The fire door had a heavy crash bar and Crow raised his leg and pressed his right foot on the steel bar. They did not have to worry about booby traps now, but an ambush was a real possibility. With a quick glance at LaMastra, Crow gave the door a powerful kick and it flew inward, and they rushed through, Crow aiming straight and then up, LaMastra aiming straight then low, but the stairwell was empty. The dim emergency lights flickered and the two men listened to the rasp of their own breathing magnified by the acoustics of the stairwell. They started climbing, moving as quietly as they could. There were bloody handprints smeared along the walls, very fresh, droplets worming their way down to the floor. Crow led the way, taking each step with great caution, eyes barely blinking despite the stinging sweat that trickled down from his forehead. He was moving on the razor edge of awareness, his senses tuned and focused, ready for anything. And yet, he was still surprised when Karl Ruger stepped out from around the corner.
They jerked to a halt and brought their guns up fast, barrels pointing at the killer, but Ruger just grinned at them and tickled his black talons along the slender, unmarked throat of the young child he held in front of him.
Behind Ruger, and below them on the steps, there came the whispering footsteps of vampires hurrying to close the trap.
The killer smiled. “Trick or treat,” he said softly.
Chapter 42
1
Vic Wingate sat on a plastic chair with his back to a cool concrete wall, a wet towel against his face and morphine dancing in his eyes. On the floor in front of him was a dead nurse with her throat ripped away. She had given him the towel and told him to wait, and she’d smiled at him like he was a real person, not a circus sideshow freak. Not the Incredible Melting Man. She had been nice. Now she was dead. As dead as everyone else in the waiting room.