“What is it?” LaMastra asked. “What do you see?”
Mike pointed. “The one on the right, that’s Karl Ruger.”
“Shit! You’re right.”
“The woman he’s holding, that’s Mrs. Wolfe—the mayor’s wife.”
Val had to clamp her hands over her mouth to keep from crying out. She pressed forward and stared, and even with the crazy movements and bad light she could make out the familiar lines of her friend’s face. “No . . . God, no!”
Mike’s voice was dead. “And the other woman, the one helping Ruger hold her . . . that’s my mom.”
LaMastra snapped his head around and gaped at Mike.
“Oh, Jesus, kid, I’m so sorry . . .”
Mike shook his head and then raised his eyes to look at both of them. “I’m only fourteen,” he said softly, and that said it all.
Val wrapped her arm around him and LaMastra put his hand awkwardly on the boy’s shoulder and in the midst of the horror they shared his grief. Mike closed his eyes and tried not to be completely crushed by everything; then he winced as LaMastra’s hand tightened painfully. He looked up and saw what had jolted the detective. In the clearing things had suddenly changed. The murderous white arms were no longer slaughtering the vampires, and things had become still.
More than two-thirds of the vampires had been butchered and their crushed and lifeless bodies littered the swamp; but there were still scores more of the creatures scattered around, their faces suffused with joy even though their bodies were drenched in the blood of their own kind. One by one the towering articulated arms slipped back into the swamp until only the one that had first emerged remained. As they watched the arm seemed to swell, first at its base and then expanding upward as it struggled toward a greater uniform thickness, taking on more mass as if matter was being pumped into it from below. The stalk slowly took on color, too, displaying a mottled appearance like the skin of a slug.
It stood hovering above the ground, the long fingers opening and closing spasmodically. With each outward flex the mouth in the center of the palm gaped with a snakelike tongue that flicked in and out.
Ruger and Lois were no longer standing idle at the edge of the clearing; they were moving slowly forward, dragging Sarah down to the edge of the swamp and dumping her unceremoniously in front of the stalk. Sarah had been unconscious before, but the nearness of such power must have roused her, because as the stalk drew close she shifted painfully on the ground and then slowly sat up. She was still dazed and seemed not to register the movement all around her. From where they were crouched, Val could see the exact moment when Sarah became aware, and it broke her heart.
Sarah must have heard something behind her and she turned slowly, blinking with confusion, then froze slack-jawed at the throng of wax-white figures clustered around her, their faces more terrifying than any Halloween mask.
Sarah scrambled away from the vampires as they advanced on her, but they did not attack her, did not even touch her; they just wanted to be closer to the thing that was waiting for her. Sarah kept backing, sliding on mud, half-sinking in the muck as she fought to escape, and then her shoulder thumped against an obstruction and she glanced briefly back, saw that it was a sapling, and turned quickly back to face the advancing throng. Then Sarah froze and a quizzical expression came over her face and she turned again and looked more closely at the tree trunk, letting her eyes travel up its length.
She saw the bloom at its crest, saw the long white petals, and frowned as the petals stretched wide and then clutched into a tight fist; and she watched in awful fascination as the petals opened again, turning toward her, revealing the whole hand.
The red mouth in the mottled palm hissed at her.
Sarah’s scream shattered the stillness as the hand reached for her.
“NO!” Mike leapt to his feet and before either Val or LaMastra could grab him he was gone, running wildly down the hill, screaming and shouting. Below, all of the creatures in the Hollow jerked around and stared at the small figure racing through the shadows toward them. A few of them even laughed when they saw his size. As he burst into the clearing he opened up with the shotgun and two of the vampires went spinning away into death. Seeing their companions fall, a few of the others jumped forward to make the kill, but the white arm lunged at them and smashed them into the mud and then swept around to knock the others around like ten-pins.
Lois gripped Ruger’s sleeve. “That’s Mike!” she hissed, her face showing confusion and some fear. No compassion, not even a flicker of it, touched her face.
“The dhampyr?” Ruger smiled, intrigued.
“We have to do something. If he’s killed, then the Man could be destroyed! The others, they’ll tear him to pieces.”
She took a step forward to try and intervene, but Ruger snagged a handful of her hair and jerked her back. She whirled on him, spitting with rage. Ruger gave her a bland smile.
“Think for a minute, you silly bitch.”
Lois slapped his hand away from her hair. “What are you talking about? We have to do something now.”
“Do we?” He grabbed her and pulled her close, whispering into her ear. “Let’s just watch and see what happens,
’cause either way we can come out of this higher up on the food chain.”
Her red-black eyes searched his for a moment, and then Lois’s full, red mouth blossomed into a smile as dark and as wicked as Ruger’s.
Mike fired his shotgun empty and the ground was littered with the dead. A huge figure rushed at him and Mike realized with horror that it was Chief Bernhardt, his grossly fat body moving with inhuman speed, his mouth rimmed with fangs. Mike swung the empty shotgun like a club, but the chief caught it and jerked it fiercely out of Mike’s hands. The chief grinned, tossed the shotgun away, and then reached for Mike as the vampire next to him was smashed aside by the reaching white hand. With a snarl Mike reached over his shoulder—just as he had seen himself do in dreams a hundred times—and whipped the katana from its scabbard; there was a contrail of silver in the night air and Bernhardt staggered back, his beefy hands pawing at the red gash that was sliced inches deep into his mammoth belly. Mike stepped to one side and brought the sword down at a new angle and the chief ’s bald head went tumbling to the ground.
Another vampire rushed him and Mike turned sharply on the balls of his feet and stepped to one side as he slashed lat-erally across the vampire’s middle. The creature folded in half and crumpled to the mud. Mike turned again, raising his sword to a high guard position as the many-jointed white arm snaked by. Mike slashed at it, but it moved too fast and all he accomplished was a long shallow surface cut. The white arm slithered back into the mud so fast that it seemed to simply vanish, only to reappear yards away, where it knocked down a vampire who was rushing at Mike’s blind side.
Mike turned again and instantly two figures slammed into him, bearing him down to the ground and knocking the sword out of his grip.
LaMastra and Val were nearly at the clearing when they saw Mike fall; LaMastra opened up with the Roadblocker to cut a path through the crowd.
“Mike!” Val yelled as she blasted her way into the crowd at LaMastra’s right. The shotgun jumped in her hands and with each blast her sore shoulder and injured eye socket throbbed. One vampire seemed to rise up out of nowhere and grabbed the shotgun, yanking the barrel hard enough to pull Val forward off balance, but the pull jerked her finger that much harder against the trigger and the blast killed the attacker and another vampire behind him.
It was LaMastra who noticed first that they had a slight—
ever so slight—advantage. They did not need to shoot to kill.
Their bullets and shells were laced with garlic and it was like firing poison into their opponents. Any wound was fatal, even if a single pellet lodged in the undead flesh; so he stopped trying to aim and just kept firing. The problem was, there were more vampires then they had ammunition, and there seemed to be no chance at all of reloading.
Two vampires rushed at Val, and she was shocked to see that they were both young teenage girls wearing the bloodstained remnants of Halloween costumes: one was Elvira with fake cleavage showing through her skintight black dress, and the other was Dorothy from Oz. Val hesitated, but only for a moment, and then she bit down on her horror and fired. Elvira’s artificial bosom blossomed with blood and she did a neat pirouette, falling across Dorothy’s feet, but Dorothy hopped over her and turned her evasion into a diving attack.
Val managed to sidestep, and as she twisted she brought the folded metal stock of the shotgun around in a bone-smashing blow to the girl’s jaw. The shock of the impact sent darts of pain through the bones in Val’s forearms and she almost dropped the gun. Dorothy shook off the blow and the bones in her face were re-forming even as she rose and rushed again at Val. Val fired from point-blank range and Dorothy’s face vanished.
Something hit Val hard between the shoulder blades and she staggered and went down, turning as she fell. Marge, the red-haired waitress from the town diner, stood over her, still in her waitress whites but splashed with blood and mud.
Marge reached for Val, knocking aside the barrel of the shotgun so that the blast went up into the night sky, and reached for Val with clutching fingers.
LaMastra stepped forward and knocked the waitress away with a vicious kick to the ribs and then shot her as she turned on him. Immediately three pairs of hands seized him from behind and LaMastra was yanked backward into a screaming, hissing tangle of monsters.
Then the whole swamp seemed to explode with light and heat. Instantly flames shot up all around the clearing, casting the battling figures into sharply etched white-and-black car-icatures. The vampires scattered away from the blaze, fleeing toward the safety of the hillside, and then screamed as the flames chased them up the slopes. Everywhere they went, every direction they turned in, new fires appeared. A dozen of them were caught in the first wave and became shrieking torches that ran madly around the clearing, igniting trees and bushes and other vampires.
By the edge of the clearing, safe under a stand of diseased pines, Ruger and Lois watched the battle. They were the only ones who saw and understood what was happening. They saw the figure that ran along the perimeter of the clearing with a burning cloth-wrapped stick in one hand and the nozzle of some kind of sprayer in the other. The tank of the sprayer jiggled and sloshed on the man’s back, and the smell of gasoline was thick in the air. As the man ran he sprayed everything with gasoline and touched the torch as he passed. Fires sprang up behind him. Some of the fires raced quickly up the hill, evidence that he had left a trail behind him.