Authors: Jonathan Maberry
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.
(1)
Val went out of the room to see what was going on. There was no sense or order to the melee in the halls. Some of the patients and staff were screaming; some crouched down against the base of the walls, arms wrapped around their heads like kids used to do during air raid drills in school. There were at least three people lying on the floor, either dead or unconscious, and no one seemed to notice or care.
Then the door to the fire stairs opened and a knot of figures dressed in Halloween costumes came creeping out. Immediately they split up and went in different directions, and as Val watched two of the figures leapt at a pair of elderly patients and tackled them to the floor. A nearby nurse screamed, and in the dim light cast by the emergency floods Val couldn’t exactly see what was happening, but she knew.
The screams changed then, transforming from shouts and shrieks of confusion and fear into true screams of pain and terror. More figures came out of the stairwell, and one of them turned in her direction. He was only a silhouette, framed by the weak lights in the stairway, but an icy fear reached into Val’s chest and closed its cold fingers around her heart. Her lips formed a word, a name, and even though she didn’t speak it aloud it soured her mouth like bile.
Ruger.
She wasn’t sure if he saw her, but just the possibility of it—and the reality of his presence here—made the unborn embryo in her womb scream in psychic terror. Val fled back into Weinstock’s room.
“He’s here!”
she gasped.
(2)
“Crow! Watch!”
Crow already saw the body lying in the street and wrenched the wheel hard over so the wheels missed the prone figure’s outstretched hand by inches. He skidded to a stop and threw it into Park. The rest of the street was choked with running people and burning debris. Every store along the street had lost its glass to the explosions, the windows yawning wide and black like gasping mouths. LaMastra reached for the door handle.
“What are you doing?” demanded Crow.
“I’m going to see if that person is…”
“No you’re not!” Crow reached past him and hammered down the door lock with his fist. “That person is dead. So’s that one over there. I can see more of them down the street—just look!”
LaMastra did look, seeing what he hadn’t taken in before. There were bodies everywhere. A few moved feebly, but most were clearly dead. People ran by in panic, sometimes pausing to pound on the car’s hood and try the door handles before fleeing into the night.
“Vince, I don’t know what’s happening, but I think it’s suicide to get out of the car before we get to the hospital. We have to get to Val.”
LaMastra stared out at the riot. He saw a white-faced creature leap from the top of a parked news van onto a running man. The two of them rolled over and over in the middle of the street, and then the vampire tore out the man’s throat in a geyser of blood.
“Jesus Christ!”
LaMastra cried.
Crow punched him in the arm, hard. “We can’t save them. We have to go!”
Crow put the car in Drive and stepped on the gas, but as he did so LaMastra cranked down the window and laid the barrel of the big shotgun across the frame; as the car passed, the cop fired and splashed the vampire against the side of the van.
“Drive!”
Crow drove.
A naked man staggered out into the middle of the street, his body bleeding from a dozen sets of small punctures. Four children ran after him, their laughing mouths bright with fresh blood. LaMastra shot two of them, but the others fled.
Crow had to weave in and out of the oncoming traffic, blaring his horn, flashing his brights. Cars and people buffeted him and one of his headlights went blind; but with LaMastra maintaining a nearly constant barrage even the panicking people started dodging out of the way. LaMastra fired his gun dry and rolled up the window while he reloaded. He fished Crow’s shotgun out of the duffel and as Crow threaded his way toward the hospital, LaMastra emptied both guns again and again.
“Christ!” he gasped, hastily reloading again. His shoulder ached from the kick of the two guns. “How many of these things are there?”
When they entered the parking lot they saw a pair of vampires holding the struggling body of a young woman in their arms. Her body was naked and crisscrossed with freely bleeding gashes. The vampires moved from victim to victim, first cutting their own skin to dribble their own blood into slack, dead mouths, and then dripping the woman’s blood into the same mouths. At once Crow and LaMastra understood not only the reason for the impossible numbers of the living dead but the overwhelming horror of the invasion. The sheer scope of it was impossible to grasp.
“Get those two bastards!” Crow bellowed as he gunned his engine and raced across the lot. Hearing the roar of the engine, the vampires dropped the woman’s corpse and turned snarling faces at the single headlight of the big Impala. LaMastra crammed his beefy head and shoulders out the window and his first shot took one of them off at the shoulders, but the other—seeing his comrade fall—fled into the darkness with incredible speed and agility. LaMastra fired and missed.
“Leave it!” Crow yelled as he pulled around to the ER entrance. The car rounded the corner and burst into the main section of the parking lot. There were more bodies, and more vampires laboring at their task of increasing Griswold’s army. Crow stamped down on the accelerator and rammed the closest one who almost—but not quite—managed to leap out of the way. The vampire thumped across the hood and landed behind the car, but he was up again in a moment and running after them, spitting with fury. LaMastra leaned out the window and blew his legs off.
Crow squealed to a stop a dozen yards from the hospital entrance and they gaped at the carnage. There were bodies everywhere, lying twisted and dead, littering the opening and strewn about in the lobby.
“Everyone’s dead,” he said, gagging on it.
But as they watched, the bodies began to rise.
“Oh, shit!”
The corpses stirred and rolled over, jerking back into a new and terrible wakefulness. There were at least twenty of them, and as they rose some of them wandered off into the hospital, but many of them turned toward the front door, staring past the single remaining headlight of Crow’s car.
“This is not good,” said LaMastra as he hurried to reload.
There was a thud and the whole car shook as something heavy landed on the roof. Crow could see white fingers hooked around the edge of the door. He drew his Beretta and put two slugs up through the roof. A white body fell past his window.
Crow made a low, feral noise, his lip curling. He said, “Hold on to your ass!”
LaMastra stared in horror as Crow began gunning the engine. “Oh…no, don’t even think about it!”
“This ain’t the blues anymore, partner, this is rock and roll!” Crow slammed the car into drive and kicked down on the accelerator. Missy shot forward, the hot engine ready for the challenge, and with a howling cry of rage, Crow plowed into—and through—the big double doors, tearing metal and glass and slamming into the crowd of newly risen vampires.
(3)
“Are you sure it was him?” Weinstock demanded. The shock of what Val had seen was worse than the agony in his arm. He was dressed in pajamas and the dress shoes he had worn down to the morgue. The others pushed the chairs and the bedside table in front of the door.
Val didn’t answer; instead she yanked open the big clothes closet and started pulling out the duffel bags of weapons that Crow and Ferro had left behind. Sweat was pouring down her face despite the cold air blowing in through the window and her hands shook visibly as she passed the bags to Mike, who laid them on the bed.
“Jonatha, Newt…can either of you use a gun?” Val asked as she ripped the zippers down. She and Mike emptied the contents fast and sloppy.
“Not well,” Jonatha said dubiously, “but I know how to pull a trigger.”
Newt shook his head. “Somebody will have to show me.”
“Learn fast.” Val handed each of them a 9mm pistol and half a dozen magazines.
“I can shoot,” Weinstock said. “One hand still works.”
Val gave him a pistol. “Saul, get dressed fast. Newt, help him. You’ll need pockets for ammo.” She began stuffing her own pockets with shotgun shells and 9mm mags. Her eyes were fever bright as she looked at Mike.
“Let me have a gun,” Mike said. “I used a shotgun once. I went skeet shooting with my friend Brandon.”
“Take it.”
“And…can I have one of Crow’s swords?”
Despite her haste, Val hesitated and gave him a searching look.
“He’s been teaching me how—”
“I know. That doesn’t mean you’re good enough.”
“Doesn’t mean I’m not, either.”
They held that stare for a moment, then Val gave him just a flicker of a smile. She looked down at the weapons and grabbed more shells. “Take whatever you want. Crow took his good sword with him, and he told me that he was going to coat the blade with garlic oil.”
Mike shook his head. “I don’t have to worry about that.”
Her gaze flicked up again. “What do you…oh.”
The
dhampyr
’s eyes were like torches. “I just hope I have some superpowers after all.”
Right then a heavy fist began pounding on the door.
Val stiffened and turned. The pounding was so hard it shook the heavy institutional door in its metal frame. A wave of sickness twisted in Val’s stomach.
“Come owww-owwt!” someone called in a singsong. There were screams outside, but even through that they could hear the snickering laugh of whoever was beating on the door. “Come owwwwwww-owt!”
Val snatched a pistol off the bed and took a step toward the door.
“No, Val—don’t!” Newton cried. He was holding Weinstock’s pants and the doctor had a leg poised to step into them.
“Shut up,” Val snarled, and it wasn’t clear if she was talking to Newton or the monster outside. Then she racked the slide and put four rounds through the center of the door.
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.