And they had all looked better. To the very last, they had wounds that she had inflicted on them. Fatal wounds in some cases, disfiguring in others. According to Jason, they would heal given enough time.
Todd, a big jock she’d taken downstairs, reached out and grabbed a man in a Dracula outfit by his arm and hauled him closer, his mouth opening wide to bite down on the screaming icon’s neck. Several of the patrons standing nearest the incident tried to scramble away from the carnage with only moderate success.
The rest of the vampires moved into the room, grabbing indiscriminately. Maggie stepped back, drawing Ben with her.
Ben looked on, almost mesmerized. “Maggie, what the hell?”
“We have to leave, Ben. Right now. I think Jason let his vampires out of their cages.”
People were reaching full panic now, and pushing toward the far side of the bar out of desperation. One of them almost knocked Ben down and she shoved the man without thinking, as shocked as anyone else when he went airborne and slammed into three others trying to escape. Ben watched with wide eyes.
“Run, Ben!” She pushed a few more out of the way as the vampires came further into the bar, grabbing and biting like rabid dogs. One of them reached for her and she turned to stare it in the eyes. It was the birthday boy from the frat house. He didn’t recognize her, he was just hungry.
She stared into his eyes and he looked at her with absolute terror, backing away and hissing mindlessly. That was unexpected, but a good thing just the same.
Somebody got fed up with watching people get chewed on and broke a pool cue over the head of one of the frat boys. The good thing about mob rules was that a lot of people tended to follow the leader. That was also the bad thing.
Several of the people in the room tried to fight back. All they got for their troubles was a little more pain and a lot more bloodshed. The man with the pool cue struck Doug Clark across the back of his head. Clark turned on him fast and hit him so hard that his head exploded. The vampire’s fist went clean through the skull and into the wall behind him. Another man tried the pool-cue trick and wound up with both of his arms broken before he was killed.
A third got a little craftier and threw vodka on the dead thing coming his way. The vampire didn’t take the crowd into consideration, or the decorative candles that were still burning on several tables. He stumbled back into a person who shoved him sideways into a table, where he promptly caught fire.
Maggie lifted Ben completely off the ground and pushed. Ben worked better as a battering ram than she would have expected. People were knocked left and right and down to the ground as she pushed through the people in her way.
Somebody broke under her foot. She didn’t have time to think about it. The fire ran across the spilled vodka and caused even more panic. She hit the back door and the fire alarm went off. Maggie ran while Ben made an interesting array of sounds.
Right after they exited, one of the vampires grabbed and pulled the door shut. They didn’t wait around to see if anyone else got out alive.
II
The night had gone completely insane.
Boyd and Holdstedter walked through the fog at a fast jog, listening for the sounds of people dying. Most of what was going on seemed to be silence.
“You see where we are?”
“Yeah, the Cliff Walk.” Danny wasn’t throwing banter. He was all business. That was maybe the worst part.
“I’m seeing blood and I’m seeing candy bags. What I am not seeing is bodies.”
“This is fucked up, Richie.”
He scanned the area carefully. Not a single body to be found and not a person on the street, but there was enough scattered candy to keep a small army of kids hyperactive for a month.
“You ever see kids leave their candy behind?”
“Not without a good fuckin’ reason.”
They heard the footsteps coming down the street. They couldn’t help but hear them; the only other sound was the distant sigh of the waves.
The steps started slowly and then increased. Not one person, but several. Grown men in black costumes were coming at them. Maybe a few women, too, it was hard to tell.
“You’re fuckin’ kidding me, right? Do these assholes actually have blood on their faces?”
“Matter of fact, Danny Boy, they do.”
They spared one quick look at each other and then started shooting.
Boyd tried it by the book for the first three rounds. He shot one of the creeps in the shoulder and then in the elbow and then in the other shoulder. He saw the bullets connect, saw them punch through the meat and send spray flying from the perp’s back. When the guy kept coming, he changed the rules. The fourth shot blew out the freak’s kneecap. He fell down wailing and crying and then started to get back up. His one leg was useless and both arms were flopping around a bit. He switched targets and aimed for the legs again. Two shots and another one was down.
The third one got all
Exorcist
on him and rose into the air, screaming like a monkey on crack cocaine. That one just kept coming, making all sorts of barking noises every time another bullet went through him.
Seventeen bullets, including the one in the chamber, and he unloaded most of them into the sick fuck coming down at him. “Fucken die when I kill you, you stupid bitch!” It didn’t listen. “Danny! Shotgun!”
Danny was standing off to the side, methodically blowing heads open. He didn’t play by the rules. He knew why, of course. One or more of these sick bastards had killed at least one little boy, and if the blood was a good sign, maybe a whole lot more of them.
Danny aimed, fired, and moved on; leaving the first one he shot at without much of a head. The second one almost got away. The bullet blasted into his throat, but he kept coming. Danny took out his left eye with the third bullet.
Before he could aim at his fourth target, Boyd was calling for the shotgun. Rather than handing it over, his partner pulled the sort of stunt that gave Boyd an occasional nightmare and took aim about a foot in front of the moving target. The flying nun turned his head to see what was pointing his way, and Danny pulled the trigger even as Boyd was dropping backward toward the ground. If he’d kept standing, there was a good chance he would have lost his nose at the very least. The thing’s head vanished in a wet cloud of black and red.
Danny turned back and fired again, hitting one of the things in the nuts. It kept coming, and that scared Boyd more than anything else he’d seen.
He drew the next weapon from the four he had strapped to his body. This one was the type that made Dirty Harry Callahan famous. It was filled with glazer bullets and did lovely things to the targets. Glazers are filled with pellets suspended in gel: so it was sort of like putting the barrel of the shotgun into the target and then pulling the trigger. One of the things that was getting far too close to Danny took the first shot and was cut in half.
It was over in roughly thirty seconds. He hadn’t actually been timing it.
Danny was looking down at the remains with that weird-ass look he got whenever he was ready to shoot something. Danny was a good-looking guy, but sometimes he could be a cold bastard. Not that Boyd was complaining.
“Well. That was different.” Boyd looked at the things on the ground. Not a one of them looked much like it was planning on getting up and attacking.
“No, Richie,” Danny pointed with his pistol, and Boyd looked to where the first one he’d been using as a clay pigeon was still moving around. “That’s different.”
Danny walked closer to the pasty thing and looked at its face. It lunged and tried to bite him. He stepped back. “You notice anything weird here, Richie?”
Boyd laughed. “You mean aside from everything?”
“Well, yeah, but this is really weird.”
“What?”
“Ain’t a damn one of them that’s dead.”
“My ass.”
“No, really, look.”
Boyd looked. Danny was right. Even the ones with most of their heads gone were still twitching, still trying to do something. “That’s just fucked up.”
“Yeah. What do we do with them?” As Danny asked, the one that had been Boyd’s first target tried for his leg again. Danny aimed the shotgun and pressed it into the thing’s back before pulling the trigger.
“Wanna tell me how it is that you’re firing a shotgun one-handed and not getting your hand blown off for your troubles?”
Danny smiled. “I work out.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“I didn’t know jacking off built muscles like that.”
“You learn something new every day, Richie.” He shrugged. “So . . . Soulis?”
“Yeah, I’m thinking it’s about time we talked with that boy.”
“Backup?”
“From where?”
“Just checking. You never know.”
“We could call O’Neill.”
“Think he’d show?”
“Probably. He’s a cop first and a bitch second.”
“True enough.”
They walked toward the dark stone house they had visited before. “We going in like gentlemen?”
“When the fuck were you ever a gentleman?”
“That’s what the ladies call me, Richie.”
“Your momma doesn’t count as a lady.”
“Oh, then it hasn’t happened yet. Never mind.”
They knocked nice and polite but didn’t get an answer.
“Richie, I want to kill the bad man.”
“No bad man here, Danny. We’re gonna have to look for him.”
“That sucks.”
III
The police were definitely staying busy. Every time they turned around there was another report of a violent crime, and most of those were calls about murders.
Someone must have slipped something into the water when no one was looking, because either there were a lot of false alarms, or the murder victims were getting up and walking away.
At least that was the way it seemed to be going until Alan Coswell saw the guy taking the bodies from one crime scene. He was driving up to what was supposed to be another massacre and for a change of pace, he saw corpses. There were five people inside the 7-Eleven and every last one of them was dead. It looked like they’d been slapped around and dragged across half of the store in the process, too.
He called it in and asked for backup. Whatever the hell was going on, he didn’t much like the idea of trying to handle it by himself. Maybe he was being a little weak-kneed today, but he’d seen what had been done to that sick fuck Freemont, and he didn’t feel any special desire to get himself ripped limb from limb. Looking at the carnage inside the store convinced him that whoever had done it was exactly the sort who could scatter Freemont across the map.
As Coswell was stepping out of the car, he saw the man. He seemed to come out of nowhere, to just appear all of a sudden, walking out of the shadows.
Coswell froze, more than merely startled by the appearance. He was scared. Something about the guy just gave off an air of menace. Everything about him was dark: dark hair, dark clothes, dark eyes, and a dark demeanor. This was not a man he wanted to play with.
He knew it for certain when the man in question picked up the first body and laid it over his arm. The corpse had to weigh somewhere near two hundred pounds, and the man carried the bulk like he was holding a small purse.
I’m supposed to go in there and stop him. I know that, but I don’t want to.
Why?
Because any man that can swing that much on one arm is going to knock my head off my shoulders if I try to stop him.
And there was the gun to consider, of course. The man didn’t look armed.
The man doesn’t look like he can pick up a corpse and swing it like a baseball bat, either.
As if to prove his point that guns didn’t automatically make everything superspecial, the dark-haired stranger lifted a second body and started to carry them away from the crime scene.
“Screw this acting-like-a-pussy shit.”
Coswell climbed out of the squad car after calling one more time for backup and pulled his pistol at the same time.
“Stop where you are.” He did his best to sound like he was in control of the situation. The man looked his way and let a very tiny smile curl the edges of his mouth before he kept going.
“Mister! Are you crazy? I said stop where you are. Now!” He’d been holding his firearm to the side of his body but now lifted it and got into a proper firing stance.
The fucker kept going. “One more step and I’ll be forced to restrain you.”
Tall, dark, and creepy looked his way and took two more steps. Coswell fired a warning shot five feet ahead of him. The bullet hit the brick wall, rebounded, and passed through the body in the man’s grip.
He dropped the body and looked at Coswell. “Was that entirely necessary?”
So he could speak after all. “I told you to stop moving, and I meant it.”
“Well, here I am. What seems to be the problem?”
“Murder? Bodysnatching?”
“Oh, I didn’t murder anyone.” He was smiling again. The sick fuck was having a good time with all of this. “I’m just moving the bodies.”
“Well, that’s called tampering with a crime scene. It’s against the law.”
“You just fired at an unarmed man. What? You don’t have handcuffs?”
“Put down the bodies and get against the damned wall, smartass.”
The man dropped the other body unceremoniously to the ground. It flopped down like a rag doll. He crossed his arms and leaned against the wall. There was blood all over his sweater and the dark jeans he was wearing.
“What’s your name, mister?”
“Jason Soulis.”
“Why were you taking the bodies from a crime scene?”
“I wanted them.”
Coswell was starting to get the idea that the man was teasing him and he didn’t much like the notion. “Turn, face the wall, and place your hands above your head.”