“How…how—?”
Crow pointed with the shotgun at the twisted, broken corpse. “Don’t you pay attention? The kid had teeth like a rattlesnake.”
LaMastra turned and looked down. The kid was in a broken sprawl, his mouth open. The fangs hadn’t yet completely retracted into the gums.
“I…didn’t. I was looking down the stairs, man—”
“Save it. We have bigger fish to fry.” Crow said. “Just reload and let’s go find Val.”
Chapter 43
1
They crept up the outside of the building like roaches, scuttling up along the brickwork in the dark, silent, patient, fired by hunger and purpose. Five of them went up—the lightest of the pack, the ones with the strongest fingernails, the ones who could dig into the cement between the bricks. Four more waited below, smiling up through the firelit darkness.
When the climbers paused at one window, one of the watchers below cupped his hands around his mouth and softly called, “Next one up.”
The five climbers looked up to the big window fifteen feet above them. There was a boom and a flash. A gunshot. Another, and another.
The climbers grinned and as one they reached up for the next brick, and the next.
2
LaMastra led the way up the stairs, whipping the shotgun barrel around every corner, whispering “Clear!” at each bend. The tower was littered with debris as if it belonged in a town where there had been strife and warfare for months rather than hours. Torn clothing, nameless junk, broken glass, and blood. In smears and splashes it was everywhere. The copper stink of it was making them sick; the higher they climbed the fresher and stronger the smell.
They were both sweating heavily and breathing like marathon runners. The gunshots still seemed to echo in their eardrums, and their shoulders were swollen and bruised from the recoiling guns, but need and fear and rage kept them going.
The fourth floor door was ajar, blocked from closing by an empty shoe. LaMastra shifted over and crouched, aiming through the opening. He nodded to Crow, who carefully opened the door. They could see the nursing station forty feet down the hall. There were bodies on the floor, but nothing moved in their line of sight. Crow stepped out first with LaMastra covering him, and moved over to the station. A nurse was sprawled on the counter, her throat torn out. Farther back in the large cubicle was a man in surgical scrubs. He had a bullet hole in his forehead.
Crow leaned closer and whispered, “That’s the nurse who helped stitch up Saul, and this guy here’s Gaither Carby. Local farmer. His son Tyler’s a friend of Mike’s.”
“Val?” whispered LaMastra.
“Don’t know.”
There were still sounds around the corner, down near Weinstock’s room. A whimpering cry, a pleading voice, and laughter.
They looked at each other, nodded, and just as they started to make their play a voice bellowed out: “Freeze! Police!”
They spun around and Officer Eddie Oswald, his uniform torn, his limbs streaked with blood, stood wide-legged in the fire tower doorway holding his pistol in a two-hand grip.
3
Jim O’Rear rushed into the Scream Queen tent just in time to see Debbie Rochon run by, screaming. When he saw what was chasing her he almost screamed himself.
There were two of them after her, both of them big, both of them with bloody mouths. The inside of the tent was a madhouse. People fought together on the ground, their thrashing legs kicking over the folding chairs. One of Crow’s pals, Dave Kramer, was using an overturned table to block the attackers long enough for some of the patrons to crawl out from under the skirts of the tent. In the middle of all this, some of the tourists stood looking at colors in the air no one else could see; one was sitting cross-legged on the stage pushing candy corn into his drooling mouth as his eyes jumped and rolled; a few had completely freaked out and were yipping like dogs and batting away at invisible attackers. At least a dozen of the customers were slumped in death, their throats torn to red tatters, their eyes seeing nothing at all.
None of it made sense. It was insane.
There was a cop there, but he was not trying to stop the carnage. Instead he was bending Brinke over a table, pushing her chin up to expose the tender flesh of her throat.
“Leave her alone!” O’Rear snatched up a folding chair and crashed it down on Golub’s back. The big cop fell to his knees, releasing the actress, who slid from the table, gasping.
Instantly the cop turned, hissing and showing his teeth to O’Rear.
“Holy shit!” O’Rear staggered back, horror and disbelief twisting his face.
Golub was laughing as he got to his feet. “This is going to be fun—”
O’Rear kicked him in the balls as hard as he could. It dropped Golub, supernatural or not, back down to his knees.
“You bastard!” Brinke snatched her pen off the signing table and rammed the point into Golub’s neck.
The cop howled and swung a heavy backhanded blow at her that sent her flying over the table. O’Rear cursed and kicked Golub in the throat with the heavy toe of his Timberlands. It only slowed Golub for a few seconds, but it was long enough for O’Rear to reach down and grab the cop’s sidearm. He racked the slide and put two in the side of his head.
Golub went down and stayed down.
O’Rear spun around, searching for Debbie. She had a folding chair in her hands and was trying to beat back the football players, but her blows did nothing more than slow them down. O’Rear settled into a shooter’s stance and shot them both in the back. They barely noticed. He raised the pistol, corrected his aim, and put the next four rounds in their heads. They dropped like rocks.
“Headshots,” O’Rear breathed. “Freaking headshots…”
He helped Brinke, who was more scared than hurt, to her feet, and they hurried over to Debbie. There were more of the football players in the tent, and Kramer was throwing chairs at them, hoping for a lucky shot. O’Rear fired as he ran and brought down three more, but it took the rest of the magazine to do it. Kramer grabbed Debbie and pulled her toward O’Rear.
“I’m out!” O’Rear threw the gun in the face of the next closest vampire and the four of them made a dash for the exit. A dozen others followed, but there was nothing more they could do for the people inside except stay alive long enough to get help.
4
The Pine Deep library looked like the old church it had once been. Narrow, with arched gables and a tall bell tower, it sat like an echo of the last century, parked between a New Age candle shop and a computer store.
When the killing began there were forty people in the main room, most of them kids who were listening to spooky stories read by local actor Keith Strunk. When the big explosion hit, Strunk was telling them how the clever creature F. F. Manny Thing escaped from a snorgle-beast. Then the lights went out and the windows blew inward.
Strunk did his best to keep the kids from panicking, but everyone was screaming, some in terror, some in pain. Two little girls, Helena and Rebekah, were seated in the corner with a black-and-white dog named Lady. Before anything happened Lady stood up and the hair along her spine rose as stiff and straight as a brush. He looked toward the front door and started growling very quietly. The girls dragged the dog into the corner to try and quiet her, and that saved their lives, because after the windows blew in, they came in, hungry and vicious.
The screams became much worse. Worse terror, deeper pain.
“Come on!” Rebekah yelled and grabbed Helena’s hand and they bolted for a door set into the corner near them; Lady backed up with them, barking at the snarling things that moved through the room.
Helena pulled the door open and they ducked inside, pulling Lady with them. Rebekah slammed the door and shot the bolt and for a terrifying minute they stood there at the top of the cellar stairs, listening to sounds. Dreadful sounds. Wet and awful.
When they heard something bump against the door, something that sounded like an elbow or a knee but with a limp, sliding quality, they ran down into the darkness of the basement, trying not to scream, trying not to cry.
When the library had bought the old church property most of the inside of the building had been renovated, but not the basement. Used for storing books and old furniture, it was a warren of stacks of boxes and bags, but even in the dark the girls knew every inch of it. They’d played hide-and-seek here, had invented games of being archaeologists in ancient tombs—and in this they weren’t far off the mark. Beneath the floor of the backmost closet, under a layer of concrete poured by accident during an earlier renovation when the church passed from Baptist to Methodist hands in the 1970s, the centuries-old crypts had been inadvertently hidden. Now that room contained disused file cabinets filled with paperwork no one could even identify. That’s where the little girls went with their dog. They ran in there, stifling their sobs, trying not to think about what was happening upstairs to their friends.
Helena, the taller and stronger of the two, slammed the door and began pushing at the filing cabinets. She was seven and a half and her little body was tough, but not tough enough—not until Rebekah realized what she was doing and threw her weight into it. Between them it was just enough, and the first cabinet slid twenty inches and thudded against the door. They found another and pushed that, and another. It took them fifteen minutes, and all the time the sounds of mayhem continued from above, and Lady kept growling.
When there was nothing else they could push in front of the door, the two girls sank down with their backs to one cabinet, holding each other, and they both broke down into helpless, hopeless sobs.
Much later, when the newspapers were telling the story of what happened in Pine Deep on the night that became known worldwide as “Hellnight,” there would be a number of articles written about two little girls and their dog who hid among the dead and as a result got to live.
5
“Val! I heard shots,” Mike said. “Listen.”
“Crow!”
They crowded as close to the door as the barricade would allow, Mike and Val pressing against Jonatha and Newton, with Weinstock behind them. Huddled together they could each feel the trembles rippling through each other.