When he saw Jack Crow striding across the courthouse square - coming to get him - Felix turned and bent his head to light a cigarette and hide his screaming fear.
Crow was wearing full-length chain mail that covered everything from the soles of his boots to the top of his head with just the oval for his face left exposed. Around his waist was a thick black utility belt. Across his chest was a great white cross.
He does look like a crusader, thought Felix. Even if the chain mail was some high-tech plastic instead of steel and even if the cross was an electric halogen spotlight.
A crusader... I've got to get away from this man.
He had actually started to turn and walk away, when he remembered. He had taken the money. He had signed up. He was in.
They had him.
And all those periodic nightmares throughout his young life, thirty years of them, wrapped tight around his brain.
There had been no pattern to their details. Always a different setting and always a different enemy. But the endings were identical. Too many of them coming at him too fast, overwhelming him, besieging him in some claustrophobic no-exit room or with his back to some crumbling cliff or steaming quicksand or...
Or whatever. No way out. Too much evil. Coming too fast.
He would awake screaming with the feel of evil still ripping at his throat. And he would stay up all night drinking and trembling and trying to convince himself it was only a dream.
But he had always known better somehow. Always.
And now he looked down at his own little crusader outfit and he knew the dream had come to him at last and he knew he was going to die and he had never known such utter paralyzing terror.
He had thought he could handle it. It was his time, so what? Everybody dies, right? Right? Be cool. Stoic. That's a good word.
Stoic for shit.
He turned back to face Crow, who stopped a step away and stood and eyed him carefully.
"All set?" he asked.
Felix just stared. What the hell does he expect me to say?
Crow read the look, nodded, dropped his eyes. Then he turned and looked across the street at the shuttered building that was their target.
"Okay," said Crow, still eyeing the building, "we'll be going in in a few minutes."
He paused a moment, then looked Felix in the eye. "Right?"
Felix wanted to spit. Instead he sighed and nodded.
Crow strode over to where Joplin and Cat stood talking to the chief of police and some others on the courthouse steps.
The courthouse steps.
Not even a hundred yards, thought Felix. More like seventy. Or fifty.
And he turned around and around, sweeping over the empty setting where only a handful of people, most of them uniformed, remained inside the police cordon. The shops were all closed up. There was no traffic on the streets. And it was quiet.
And none of that mattered. This place still looked just like what it had always been: the safest place in the world.
Felix had spent most of his life in cities. But he had been brought up in a place just like this one and he knew what it was. It was the place the small-town world came together to buy and sell and laugh and joke and record deeds and vote and pay fines and see each other again today just like the days before and the days to come and it was safe, dammit! Safe! Maybe boring and maybe (certainly) provincial and maybe a lot of other things. But safe is what it was first.
Felix stared at the flagpole atop the courthouse building. As a boy he had been taught to walk toward that if he got lost from his parents while shopping. Taught to go there and go to the front steps and sit down and wait and not cry - don't worry - Mother and Daddy would soon come to find him and "you'll be safe there, son."
During the last three nights at least six people had been slaughtered there in full view of the police, dragged screaming and pleading into the only abandoned building by hulking drooling ghouls. Usually the monsters howled when the worthless bullets and shotgun pellets slammed into them. Sometimes they didn't. But they never stopped, except to turn and hiss, their new yellow-gray fangs glistening red in the squad cars' whirling lights.
The only policemen to go in there after them were still in there.
Felix finished his cigarette and dropped the butt onto the sidewalk and flattened it with a chain-mailed boot and then stood there bent over and staring until the last mote of glowing coal went out.
He sat in the motorhome, at the little table in the motorhome, a cigarette burning in the ashtray next to his chain-mailed elbow, an untouched plastic glass of ice tea next to that, while Cat, also in chain mail, paced clinking back and forth amid the weapons, speaking with his hands and trying to...
Trying to what? Felix wondered idly, as if from a great distance, suddenly realizing that he had been so preoccupied with his own sense of dread and impending doom that he had not really been listening at all. He had nodded a few times when that felt polite, but he could not imagine, quite frankly, what Cat could possibly have to say that mattered. Except...
Except to say they had decided to call it off.
Felix drew out of his horror just far enough to find if that was it.
It wasn't. It was... Well, now, Felix wasn't absolutely sure what it was. But it seemed that Cat was trying to convince him that vampires were real so he wouldn't be shocked or something when he saw them. Something about the difference between knowing something was so in your mind and feeling it was so in your gut.
Or something. It sounded to Felix like the standard lecture to new recruits and that was okay by him. As long as he was sitting in this motorhome getting a lecture he wasn't stepping into that building across the street. He wasn't in danger. He wasn't fighting monsters or being ripped apart by their fangs, which Felix had no trouble whatsoever believing in from his brain to his gut to his trembling fingers raising a cigarette to his lips.
So he just watched Cat pacing and talking and he looked about the trailer at the simple little meaningless items he might never see again after an hour, a bottle of scotch with the label torn, a fast-food carry-out sack, a cheap ballpoint pen with its cap all chewed up poking out of a rent in the carpet under the driver's seat, and he stared at these things, reveled in these things, rather than think about what was about to happen.
Anything but that.
I-don't-want-to-die-here he mouthed silently without realizing it.
About then Cat wrapped up his agitated presentation with a rousing clap of his hands.
"Okay?" he asked Felix excitedly.
Felix, who had no notion what the question was about, looked the other man in the eye.
"Okay," he replied dully.
Carl Joplin opened the outer door of the motorhome and stuck his head inside.
"Father Adam's ready," he said.
Cat nodded to him. "Okay," he said.
Carl nodded in return and disappeared again, closing the door behind him.
Felix looked questioningly at Cat.
"Mass," Cat explained.
Felix nodded. "Oh."
Felix believed.
He knelt in the courthouse parking lot with the others while Adam, high-mass robes covering his own chain mail, conducted the service and he believed.
In God. In Jesus. In the vampires waiting across the road. In 'most everything around him. He believed the police standing over there in that little group were not going to help them. He believed the crew standing beside their ambulance were not going to save him. He believed this was all a trap, as Jack Crow had told him.
He believed he was going to die.
He even believed in their gear. He figured the chain mail would slow 'em down. A little. And be believed Holy Blessed silver bullets might slow 'em down. A little. And when Carl had ringed the buildings with his little detectors and turned them on, Felix believed the instant clanging alarm was, in fact, caused by the presence of vampires within the building. He believed his radio headset would enable Carl Joplin to hear his death shrieks.
He even believed in the Plan. At least, that it was a good Plan. And he turned his unseeing eyes away from the young priest and focused once more on the electric winch with its huge spool of cable and decided once again that Jack had had an inspired idea here.
Forbidden by the city powers to destroy a downtown building with explosives, which is what he would have preferred, Jack Crow had given up on the idea of trying to kill the goons while they were in the building itself. Too dark in there. Too many teeth. Too much to go wrong too fast.
No. Jack's plan was to get them outside, where the sunlight would do the work, and that's where the winch came in. Jack was going to fire that massive crossbow through a ghoul's chest, wait a second for the barbs to get lodged tight, then holler on the radio for Carl Joplin to start the winch pulling that long cable attached to the crossbow bolt, and with it the ghoul, right through the front doors of the building into the sunlight to burn.
Then Adam was to grab the cable and bring it back inside to attach it to another one of Jack's bolts. It was Cat's job to keep the monsters off Jack in the meantime. Felix was supposed to back up Cat.
Felix believed it was a good Plan.
He didn't believe it was going to work.
And he caught himself mouthing those words again.
Then the mass was over. They stood. It was time.
"Rock and roll!" barked Jack fiercely.
Felix stared at him. Then he took his position beside the others. He took several deep breaths, heard the others do the same. There was a brief distraction when some new cop type, a young redheaded man wearing a different kind of uniform, appeared beside the other cops and began arguing loudly with them.
Too late, thought Felix. Nothing that could be said or argued or written out or screamed was going to stop this thing.
Jack gave the signal and the four men stepped through the doorway into the dark.
Cooler in here, he thought before the stench hit him and he thought God - my God, what is that awful... Oh my God is that them? Is that the vampires? And he started to reach down and turn on the halogen cross so he could see, see what was making that awful smell, but then he remembered they weren't supposed to turn on their crosses because that would drive the monsters back and they wanted them coming, coming at them, for chrissakes, and Felix thought of that idea and wondered if Jack Crow was completely and totally insane - Let's get the hell out of here!
And then the lanterns came on beside him, one in Jack's hand and one in Adam's. Jack moved off to the right to place his and Felix heard his hard voice calmly instructing the priest to place his lantern farther to the left to give a wider range of view and everything seemed to be whizzing around Felix, his ears thumping and throbbing with his pulse and the slightest sound amplified in that cavernous dusty cement floor with the walls all torn out before remodeling and only the fifty-year-old support posts left spaced every dozen paces like a checkerboard and... Oh, yes! There in the dust in front of him he saw the sliding footprints going this way and that and crossing back over one another.
Oh, yeah. Somebody's been walking around in here. A lot of somebodies. A lot of somethings...