Bad Moon Rising

Chapter 48

(1)

They stopped at a point a hundred yards back from the cleared space around the swamp, squatting down behind a clump of wild rosebushes. Beyond was a sight out of Hell itself.

Hundreds of vampires writhed together in a perverse orgy of unbound passion and violent ecstasy, throwing themselves at each other, sometimes biting, sometimes kissing. They dragged each other to the ground and fed on the stolen blood in each other’s veins; they did unspeakable things to each other and enticed others to do the same or worse to them. It was a celebration of their strength, of their powers to do and take harm, of their supernatural endurance, of their vampire nature. If any human had been a part of that press or caught in those acts of fervent cruelty, he would have died within the first few moments,

LaMastra clutched at Crow’s sleeve. “There’s too many of them!”

“I know.” He nudged Mike. “Do you see Griswold? Has he risen yet?”

“No,” the boy answered in a tight whisper. “We still have a few minutes. I didn’t even think we’d be in time. It’ll happen soon, though. I can feel it.”

LaMastra made a noise. “What is it, a disturbance in the Force?”

“Vince,” Val said.

“Sorry.”

Crow closed his eyes and tried to picture the landscape as he remembered it during the day. “I have an idea,” he said and outlined it quickly. Val gasped, but she kept her comments in check.

“As plans go,” LaMastra sighed, “that really sucks.”

Mike said, “It’s the best we got.”

“Right.” Crow looked at Val. “I…don’t know what to…”

Her eyes glittered like polished onyx. “Say ‘I love you, Val Guthrie,’ and then get your ass in gear, Mr. Crow.”

He grinned. “I love you, Val Guthrie.”

“I love you, too.”

She turned away from him and focused her attention down on the writhing mass of undead bodies. Crow lingered for a moment longer, staring at her profile, then he rose, nodded to LaMastra and Mike. “Give me five minutes.”

“I don’t know if we have that much time.”

“Then give me what you can.”

Mike rose and walked the first few yards with him. “Crow,” he said quietly, “if I don’t get a chance later…I just wanted to say thanks.”

“For what?”

“For being there for me when no one else was. I mean before all this happened. You were always cool, you always treated me like a person, like I was worth something.”

“You are.”

“You were the only one who acted like I was. I’ll never forget it, man.” Awkwardly, he extended his hand. Smiling, Crow took it, but then pulled the boy close and gave him a hug.

Before he let him go, Crow whispered, “Iron Mike Sweeney, the Enemy of Evil.”

Then Crow turned away and melted into the shadows.

(2)

On the floor of the Hollow, Ruger and Lois were swaying together as they watched the bodies, moving as if to the pulsing of tribal drums, but the only music was made by the cries and screams and moans of the vampires. The level of agitation in the crowd was at a fever pitch and still it climbed higher with every moment, carving out new levels of passionate intensity. Ruger could hardly bear to just watch; his craving was so acute it was physically painful. Suddenly one scream rose higher than all the others. It was a shrill, piercing cry that stabbed upward from the press with such naked power that the revelers were shocked to an abrupt silence, and the scream exploded outward from the center of the press. Shock waves of force rolled outward, buffeting the bodies roughly backward.

Ruger crouched in a shocked silence, Sarah’s limp wrist momentarily forgotten in his grip. He looked at Lois, whose face was wild like animal excitement.

In the center of the crowd a space appeared occupied by only one of the vampires. Ruger frowned at the vampire, trying to understand what he was seeing. The creature in the center of the clearing was standing straight, his body stretched, his legs wide, feet arched so that only the tips of his shoes touched the muddy ground. What Ruger couldn’t understand was how the man was standing at all: the contact his toes made with the ground was only tenuous, and his body shook and trembled, but did not fall. The vampire’s head was thrown back in such a demonstration of total ecstasy that the corner of his mouth had begun to tear; his scream was constant and droplets of blood shot upward from his rupturing lungs, seeding the air above the Hollow with a fine red mist.

The revelers lay or stood or crouched or sat in postures of awe, their ears deafened by the shriek, their eyes filled with the glory of the event. They knew that this was some signal, the trumpet blast of something wonderful to come. The screaming went on and on, tearing apart the throat of the screamer, ripping loose the vocal chords, shattering the larynx. Blood ran in lines from the wide staring eyes of the revenant; blood dripped from both nostrils and from both ears; blood spurted from around each black fingernail and it flowed from his penis and anus and soaked his trousers, it filled his shoes and overflowed to drip onto the ground. The skin of his face seemed to ripple and roll and then blood burst from every pore, showering the supplicants, who surged forward to taste it as it fell. The screaming went higher and higher and then faded as the throat filled with blood. A fountain of gore erupted from the upturned mouth and shot upward with great force. The body continued to shake and tremble with ever greater agitation as the force within it built to critical mass—and then it exploded. The vampire’s body literally flew apart as if a stick of dynamite had detonated in its chest. Limbs and parts of limbs, bits of shredded flesh, indefinable chunks of viscera smashed like a grisly hail onto the vampires, and they gasped in shock and then screamed in exultant joy.

Ruger was the first to see what now occupied the center of the clearing; he was standing too far back to be blinded by the shower of blood and meat. He saw a tall white stalk like the trunk of a slender sapling rising out of the ground. It was splashed with blood and bile and other foul fluids from the center of the vampiric body it had impaled, and it swayed above the crowd. Gradually the revelers became aware of it. They turned to stare up at it, every pair of eyes becoming fixed and unblinking; each mouth gaped wide in unspoken cries of wonder.

The white stalk was slightly thicker than a human arm and jointed in a dozen places so that it could bend and twist in any direction, though at the moment it stood as tall and straight as pale bamboo. At the top of the stalk was a large bud which slowly blossomed to reveal five long petals. Each petal was a man-jointed finger tipped with a hard claw as shiny black as a beetle’s carapace. The fingers flexed wide to reveal a palm in the center of which gaped a hungry red mouth lined with dozens of needle-sharp teeth. One of the revenants took a tentative step toward the stalk and immediately the huge hand whipped around and closed with crushing force on the vampire’s face. Blood erupted between the multijointed fingers, but the vampire did not try to pull away. Instead he pushed forward to increase the contact with the hand and the hungry palm, helping the hand crush him and bleed him. The trapped vampire tore at his own flesh, opening dozens of cuts that bled freely, and the others around him flocked forward, feeding off him even as the hand drained him dry.

A second hand punched upward through the mud and closed around the throat of another vampire, lifting her wriggling into the air. The stalk of the arm twisted around her like an anaconda, crushing her bones and splattering everyone around her with her blood. She screamed and screamed until there was nothing left of her but pulverized bone in a shapeless envelope of desiccated skin. A third hand came up, and a fourth, and the slaughter began in earnest.

Ruger felt the pull, felt the need to throw himself into the press, felt the command deep in his mind that compelled him to die so that Griswold could live, but he stayed rooted to the ground at the edge of the clearing. Whether the power that held him there was some higher command by Griswold or his own powerful need to survive, he could not tell. Lois stood with him, and Ruger could see the look of naked hunger in her glazed eyes, saw drool hanging in streamers from her lips. Her grip on Sarah Wolfe was so tight that Ruger could hear the woman’s forearm bones grind together and then snap.

Up on the hill, Val, Mike and LaMastra watched the spectacle with minds frozen by horror. Even Mike, who had peered into the darkest parts of his dhampyr’s mind, had not seen this. In his astral wanderings during his brief detachment from life he had never foreseen such an alien horror. Yet he knew that this was part of the Ritual, part of the blood sacrifice that would open the doorway between death and life and allow Griswold to return.

“My…God!” LaMastra was clutching his shotgun to his chest as if it afforded some sacred protection. “What are those things?”

“They’re…that’s all part of him.” Mike wanted to close his eyes, to look away, but he could not.

“What are you talking about? There must be twenty of those things! What is he? An octopus?”

Mike shook his head. “There are images in my head. I can…almost see him. He’s still changing. He’s changing all the time. I don’t know what he is, but he’s coming now. He’s about to return.”

“I just hope he keeps doing what he’s doing. He’s butchering the whole lot of them.”

“No,” Mike said. “He won’t kill them all. He still needs an army. He just needs to get strong enough, and he’s almost there. I can feel it. But there’s one more thing he needs. Innocent blood. That means that down there is a human who—oh no!” His scanning eyes had fixed on the three figures standing by the edge of the clearing. Val looked to where Mike pointed with a trembling hand. “I thought she tried to save me,” he murmured wretchedly. “I thought she was different than the others.”

“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 laterally 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 reforming 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 caricatures. 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.

Even from the other side of the clearing, Ruger could see the man’s face clearly. “Crow,” he murmured. “That sneaky son of a bitch.” His voice held a trace of admiration and there was even a smile on his colorless lips.

Lois shrank back from the advancing wall of flames. Fire and smoke rose into the night and leapt from tree to tree. The steady night breeze and the dryness of the autumn plants and bushes stoked the fires into an inferno in just seconds. The white articulated arm whipped back and forth, shying away from the fire, and finally slithered back down into the mud of the swamp, safe from the flames. Sarah Wolfe lay over the spot where the arm had vanished, and her body shook and trembled with the palsy of shock.

Ruger ground his jagged teeth together and his smile of appreciation metamorphosed into a more predatory grin.

Lois clutched Ruger’s arm. “Come on, baby, let’s get out of here.”

“Oh, hell no!” snapped Ruger. “I want him so bad I can already taste it.”

Lois gave the fire a fearful look and then stared over to where Griswold’s arm had vanished into the mire. “To hell with this,” she said, and instantly turned and ran toward the only gap left in the towering ring of fire.

“Bitch!” Ruger called after her, but he wasn’t crushed by it. They were predators and predators did what they had to do to survive. Afterward he’d find her, and if he did horrible things to her to make her pay for running out, he knew it would only make her hotter for him.

Mike dodged a lunge by a vampire that had once been his gym teacher, Mr. Klinger. He spun away from a second grab and whirled in a slashing turn like a helicopter’s blades, and the top of Klinger’s head leapt a foot into the air. Others came at him and he cut and cut and cut. It was not pretty swordplay. It wasn’t something from the samurai movies Crow watched; it wasn’t dynamic like those Blade movies, or acrobatic like Buffy. It was raw and savage hack and slash, subpar for any martial arts class, but it had all the power of his fury and the speed that comes from need; and it was a weapon in the hands of a dhampyr, and that counted for a lot. Like the garlic in the guns, a weapon in the hands of a creature such as Mike delivered fatal cuts every time. It would have been very useful for him to know that, to understand that he did not need to be as precise with his cuts, but there was no way he could have known. Even the Bone Man didn’t know that, not that he could tell him if he did.

Mike cut and killed as if he had been born to it; his face was a mask of strife, his soul was lost in the total acceptance that this was what he was put on earth to do. And if he died doing it…then so what? There would be no one left alive to mourn his death. To some degree he’d always known that, but to die this way would at least mean something.

Then, in one of those moments that seemed designed by a God who is as perverse as he is vicious, Mike turned around, sword raised—and his mother stood not eight feet away. She was more beautiful than he’d ever seen her, pale and intense, smiling without any of the cowed or drunken shame that he’d always seen in her eyes. For a crazy moment, seeing her so alive, so in command of herself, lifted Mike’s heart, but that gladness was fractured at the core and as soon as his mother smiled her wicked smile, he felt his hopes shatter in his chest.

“Mom…” he said, holding the sword in one hand and starting to reach for her with his other.

For a moment—and maybe it was Mike’s breaking heart that played a trick on him, or maybe there was a single thread of humanity still sewn through the twisted fabric of what Lois Wingate had become—the ugliness of his mother’s smile wavered and the hungry light in her eyes dimmed. She started to say something…then stopped herself, her smile fading, and without attempting any attack she backed away from him and fled into the flickering black-and-yellow shadows.

He needed to stand there and deal with the grief; he needed to repaint his understanding of the world so that it matched this reality—but there were more vampires to fight, more killing to do, and so he turned away from the hole in his life where she had been and kept cutting.

Val struggled to her feet and aimed her shotgun at the nearest vampire, who dodged and then rushed her as she pumped in the next round. She aimed at the last moment and pulled the trigger. The hollow click was lost beneath the tumult, but Val felt the weight of it chunk down on her heart. The vampire bowled her over and they went down together. She tried to jam her forearm under its jaw, but it was far too strong, and inch by inch the snapping fangs came closer to her throat. The stink of the garlic slowed the monster, but its desire was murder, not feeding, so he began clawing at her throat with his nails. Abruptly he stopped and blood splashed Val’s face. Spitting the foulness of it out of her mouth, she shoved at the body and it fell away. The grinning head fell to one side and the body to the other.

Val looked up in stunned surprise and saw Mike standing over her, his sword blade trembling from the tension in his hands. He kicked her shotgun toward her and stood over her as she hastily reloaded. A vampire staggered drunkenly toward Mike, the look of fear and confusion on the creature’s pale face tightening into abject terror as he saw the long blood-smeared blade move in a silvery flash. Mike kicked aside the sagging corpse, his face hard and his eyes as cold and sharp as the razor edge of the sword.

Val rose behind him and looked around for Crow. She saw him chasing a trio of vampires with jets of gasoline. Then a shadowy figure slipped up behind Crow, and Val screamed, “RUGER!”

She began running, but a dozen vampires swarmed at her and Mike and suddenly all she could think about was fighting and killing.

Crow heard Val’s cry just as he felt someone behind him. He whirled around to bring the sprayer up, but Ruger was already too close. He caught Crow’s hand, ripped the plastic pistol grip out of his grasp, then backhanded Crow so hard and fast that it was just a blur. Crow spun down to the ground, the torch flying away, and his shotgun slipped from his shoulder.

“Come on, Kwai Chang,” Ruger taunted, “let’s try for round three here.”

Crow shrugged out of the tank straps. He made a play for his holstered pistol, but Ruger kicked it out of his hand and then short-kicked him under the chin so hard it turned the firelight around him to sparkling party lights. Hard hands caught Crow under the armpits and he felt himself pulled roughly to his feet. Through pinholes in his dancing vision he saw Ruger’s leering face, heard his whispering voice.

“I can’t even begin to tell you how much I’m gonna enjoy this.” Ruger licked his lips and grinned.

“Fuck you,” Crow said and kneed him in the crotch, then thumbed him in the throat. That wiped the leer off the killer’s face and Crow iced that cake by hitting him in the face with a hard two-handed shove that sent him stumbling backward. Crow made a dive for his shotgun, which was lying in the dirt, but Ruger beat him to it; he shouldered Crow out of the way, snatching up the weapon, took the shotgun in both hands, and with a grunt of effort bent the barrel to a crooked forty-degree angle. He tossed the ruined weapon to Crow. “Go ahead, asshole, shoot me.”

This time Crow wasted no time on banter. He dropped the useless gun as he pivoted and kicked Ruger in the knee as hard as he could, the crack of bones audible even through the surrounding noise. Ruger cursed and dropped to his good knee. That gave Crow time to reach for his sword and he whipped it out in a fast draw that beat anything he’d ever managed, but Ruger grabbed the shotgun up and parried the blade. The man’s speed was unbelievable, faster by far than when they had first fought in Val’s front yard—and he was plenty fast then—and even faster than Ruger had been when they’d battled it out at the hospital. Both times Crow had tried to kill Ruger; both times he thought he’d succeeded. Now he was up against a Ruger who was pure monster and at the top of his powers. Crow watched in horror as Ruger rose to his feet, no trace of pain on his face; Crow could hear the bones snapping back into place in the killer’s leg.

“Yeah, kickbox a vampire—that’s clever,” Ruger said and swung the shotgun like a cudgel, and though Crow was able to bring the sword up in time to parry it, Ruger was only using the attack as a ruse to step in close. He clamped one icy hand around Crow’s sword wrist and with the other he punched him in the stomach hard enough to knock all the air out of the world. Crow managed to turn enough to deflect most of the force, but what connected was still like a bullet in the gut. Crow felt something tear inside. There wasn’t enough air to scream and Crow sank down to his knees.

Ruger bent down and leered at him. “Ooo—where’s all the fancy kung-fu moves now, dickhead?”

Ruger raised his fist to punch again and hesitated as the ground beneath them suddenly trembled with the rumbling thunder of an earthquake. Crow stared stupidly down, trying to decide whether it was really happening or if he was going into some kind of convulsion. The tremor passed and Ruger’s smile returned as he reached down and once more jerked Crow to his feet, slapped him twice across the mouth, and then pulled him close.

“You know what I’m going to do, asshole? I’m going to break your arms and legs and while you’re lying there in the mud I’m going to strip that broke-nose bitch of yours and take her in every hole she’s got. Right in front of you. I’m going to split her open and make you watch it. Maybe I’ll let all my boys here pull a train on her, ass-hump her until she’s begging me to kill her and screaming at you for being a cowardly, ineffectual little small-town piece of shit. Then, when we’ve used her all up—I’m going to turn her. Ohhh, yeah, baby. I’m going to turn that prissy bitch into one of my sluts. Then I think I’ll let you two have a nice reunion.”

Crow’s mouth was filled with blood and he gagged on it. All Crow could do was hock up the blood in his mouth and spit it at Ruger. The garlic was all but gone, but there was just enough to make Ruger wince and cough.

“Yo! Asshole!”

Ruger looked toward the sound and right into the swing of the stock of LaMastra’s shotgun. It caught him across the mouth and the vampire’s face seemed to disintegrate as he whirled down to the ground. Crow sagged, too, but LaMastra caught him with one hand and kept him up.

“Come on, man, we got to fall back and regroup.” LaMastra’s face was crisscrossed with scratches and cuts, his clothes were torn, and he looked nearly spent. “Gotta find some space to reload. I’m dry.”

Crow felt the ground firming under him and he started to say something, but then something punched him in the stomach again. It was impossible with LaMastra standing face-to-face with him just inches away, but Crow looked down and when he saw what it was the whole world twisted sideways into madness. It was a fist. A fist covered with blood that steamed like soup, a fist wrapped in coils of purple intestine and red strings of muscle fiber, a fist that seemed to have sprouted like magic from LaMastra’s stomach. Crow looked slowly up from that fist to LaMastra’s face. The detective seemed confused; he frowned, gave Crow a weary half-smile, and then coughed up a dark pint of blood onto Crow’s chest. The detective’s big body sagged down and Crow saw Ruger standing close behind him, smiling. Always smiling.

With a grunt, Ruger yanked his fist out of LaMastra’s body and let the big man slump all the way to the ground. Ruger raised his fist to his mouth and licked off some of the blood.

“VINCE!” Crow screamed as he tried to hold on to LaMastra, tried to keep the life in the young man by sheer force of will, by sheer need, but the lights in LaMastra’s eyes flickered like candles. He stared into Crow’s eyes, and his mouth formed a single word.

“No—” Then more dark blood bubbled onto LaMastra’s lips and poured out of his mouth and the flood of it extinguished the fragile light in his eyes. Crow held his friend in his arms and looked up in despair to where Ruger stood above them.

“And now it’s your turn,” Ruger whispered and took a single step forward.

Instantly a thunderbolt flashed across the flame-torn darkness and struck Ruger in the side, barreling him over, and he went down in a fighting, hissing ball with something monstrously huge and immensely powerful. The impact knocked Crow back a few steps and he stared in shock as the two bodies came to rest against a heap of sword-slashed and fire-burned corpses.

Ruger was pinned under something that was bigger and far stronger—something whose body was packed with knotted cords of muscle and whose hide rippled with a pelt of coarse red hair. Four vampires—survivors of Ruger’s elite guard—rushed in and tackled the thing and it went down as Ruger scrambled out from underneath. He rose to his feet, visibly shaken and slashed to the bone in a dozen places, but even as Crow watched the wounds began to close, the skin knit.

One of the other vampires was less fortunate, or perhaps less powerful, and he flopped onto his back with a head that was connected by a few grisly strands of meat. A second vampire catapulted back with a smashed skull. The creature just shook off the other two as it rose into a fighting crouch, facing Ruger. Instantly they began stalking one another, circling, snarling. The thing that had attacked Ruger was gigantic as it rose onto its hind legs, and even with its hunched back and misshapen legs it towered above Ruger. It had large piercing yellow eyes with catlike slits, and tall fur-covered ears that rose straight to tufted points high above the sloping skull. It had a long lupine muzzle that was wrinkled back to reveal spit-flecked teeth as sharp as spikes. The thing stood there, its chest heaving with predatory lust, its daggerlike claws rending the air. Crow stared at it and his mind nearly toppled into a shocked faint.

It was a werewolf.

For an insane moment he thought he was seeing Ubel Griswold reborn, and an atavistic terror threatened to tear the guts out of him. He reeled backward from it, but the creature’s whole attention was focused on Ruger.

A dozen more of Ruger’s guards circled the monster, but the creature didn’t wait for them to attack—it lunged at them and Crow flinched back as blood and torn chunks of meat showered him.

Val and Mike stood with their backs to a wall of flame. She fired her guns dry time and again, and while she reloaded Mike fought with the sword. Twice they felt the ground under them rumble, but there was no sign of Griswold. Even the articulated limbs had receded into the mud. Some of the vampires screamed at one another to kill the woman, but not the boy, and that gave Val and Mike a bit of an edge. When Mike rushed the attackers, they scuttled back, learning from the death of their fellows about the danger of being near this boy.

“I’m nearly out,” Val whispered to Mike as she slapped her last magazine into her pistol. Mike nodded, too exhausted to speak. The sword, which had been so light in his hands before, now felt as heavy as a sledgehammer. He looked around for Crow and LaMastra, but they were somewhere on the other side of the clearing, behind pillars of flame, if they were even still alive.

“I’m sorry, Val,” Mike said, and he fumbled one hand toward her. For just a moment their hands met and held, and Val gave a fierce squeeze.

“Hold on, honey,” she said, and then there was more killing to do as a fresh wave of vampires rushed them.

The werewolf slashed at his face and Ruger dodged back a little too late. He dabbed at the furrows torn on his chin. He sneered at the werewolf. “Well, well, if it isn’t the Man’s lapdog.”

The beast growled low in its throat.

“I thought you were supposed to be on our side. Guess the Man was wrong about that.” Ruger ran his fingers along the gash that was already nearly healed. He sniffed his fingers, smelled blood, and licked off the taste. “Mmm. Yummy.” Ruger glanced across the clearing to where Sarah lay sprawled, then he cocked his head at the beast. “Ah. I know why you’re so pissed. The Man really was wrong about you. You don’t want to share at all. You want her all for yourself. Bad doggie. No rawhide chew toys for you tonight.” He looked at Sarah again. “It’s a shame she’s already dead.” The beast’s head snapped around toward Sarah and it sniffed the air as if trying to smell the exhalations of her breath.

Instantly Ruger attacked, slamming into the monster with all of his inhuman strength and speed. The creature was larger and stronger, but Ruger was faster and far more cunning. He drove the werewolf back and down and then scrambled on top, straddling the beast’s barrel chest and pinning its arms with his knees. Ruger’s fists began their favorite game—smashing, pulping, destroying—and his speed was blinding. Blood danced up from torn flesh; the crack of bones sounded like gunshots. The werewolf howled in agony and surprise.

Snarling with fury, the beast twisted its hands on its powerful forearms and forced them up behind Ruger, then dragged those claws sharply downward from shoulder blades to waistline. Ruger howled in agony and threw himself away, trailing blood. The werewolf gave him no chance and dove at him, landing claws-first into the vampire’s chest and knocking him down. But as Ruger fell he snatched the pistol from his belt, the one he had taken from Crow; he dug the barrel into the monster’s gut and fired two shots.

The werewolf was lifted off him and pitched over onto its back, gasping in terrible pain. They were not fatal wounds, but the werewolf was momentarily helpless. Its metabolism could repair almost any amount of damage, but not with the miraculous speed of the vampire.

Ruger got back to his feet and stood over the beast. His body was a mass of long slashes, but they were healing quickly and the pain was inconsequential to him. His clothes glistened with blood that looked black in the firelight. He stared down at the beast, watching it struggle against its own pain and damage, and he grinned in triumph.

“So much for Lassie Come Home,” he said. “So much for the big dramatic entrance. Stupid shit.” He kicked the werewolf, and the creature made a feeble swipe at him, but Ruger easily evaded the claws.

He aimed the pistol at the werewolf’s skull. “Let’s see how much this hurts.”

There was a flash of silver and then the pistol and the hand that held it went flying off into the night. They landed in a burning patch of dry grass and the dead flesh instantly caught fire. Ruger stared at the stump of his right wrist, at the blood that jetted from it, seemingly unable to comprehend what had just happened. He turned slowly, his mouth working in soundless shock.

Crow stood on wide, trembling legs, his sword in his hands. Firelight glimmered on the garlic-coated edge of the weapon. Crow’s face was a mass of blood and dirt, his lips trembled with shock, but his eyes were infernos hotter than the fires that raged around him. “You’re a piece of shit, Ruger,” Crow wheezed. “You were a piece of shit when you were alive, and you’re a piece of shit now.”

Ruger’s face changed from shock to fury in the space of a heartbeat. Howling in uncontainable frenzy, he leapt forward and before Crow could raise the sword for another blow, Ruger used his bleeding stump to batter the weapon aside. There was a sharp metallic crack! and ten inches of the sword went spinning into the smoking shadows, the reflective edges striking sparks in the air. Crow staggered back as Ruger swung again and he could feel the cold force of the blow slice the air an inch from his chin.

“You took my hand!” Ruger cried in wonder. “You took my fucking hand!”

Crow swung the broken sword at him, and this time Ruger jumped back, evading the cut easily. He laughed as Crow slashed again and again, the jagged stump of the katana cutting nothing but smoke and air. Crow lumbered forward doggedly, slashing, cutting, hacking, but each time Ruger lunged backward, and each time the blade missed.

Then something happened that Crow was never able to adequately explain. Ruger took another step backward as Crow lunged in once more, but this time Ruger’s evasion jerked up short as if he’d hit an invisible wall, so when Crow’s blade came slashing it caught Ruger across the middle. A deep red line, like an impossibly wide mouth, yawned in Ruger’s chest and more blood splashed into the air. Ruger looked down at his right leg, and Crow found himself looking, too.

Ruger had backed up to where Vince LaMastra’s corpse lay sprawled in a lake of blood. Ruger’s retreating foot had brushed against the sergeant’s dead, slack hand—and that hand had closed around the ankle. The fingers were clamped as tight as a steel shackle.

It was impossible, of course. LaMastra was dead, and there was no power left in his limbs; he was dead, and his dead brain could not have sent the signal to clutch or to hold. Ruger’s face was knotted in confusion, and as he gradually raised his eyes to meet Crow’s, there was fear in those dark eyes as well.

“I killed you twice, you miserable prick,” Crow said in a hoarse voice that sounded like Ruger’s own graveyard whisper. “This time, stay dead!” The broken sword rose and fell with all of the dwindling strength in Crow’s battered body. It caught Ruger on the side of the neck and chopped downward into the chest and sliced Karl Ruger’s black heart in half.

Ruger stared at him in disbelief for a long time.

Then he fell. The fierce predatory light in Ruger’s eyes that had burned so brightly for so long, a light that had shone on so much death and destruction, went dark forever.

Crow stood there, unable to grasp the reality of what he had just done. After all of this, Ruger was actually, finally gone. It hit him as hard as Ruger’s punch and for a moment the enormity of it made him dizzy. The invincible, unbeatable Karl Ruger was gone. Really gone this time, but would anyone ever really know? He looked around, expecting to see death rushing at him, but for the moment he stood alone over Ruger’s corpse.

Then he looked down at LaMastra’s hand and for the briefest moment there was a shimmer in the air that seemed to rise from the dead man’s back, and then LaMastra’s fingers relaxed open and were still.

Forty feet away the werewolf was struggling to get to a kneeling position, blood streaming from its wounds; near him, Sarah lay on the ground and shook with palsy. Her face was gashed and bleeding badly and blood dripped onto the mud at her knees. The werewolf began crawling slowly toward her, making low plaintive sounds in its throat. It left a pattern of gore behind it like the trail of a slug.

Crow’s mind could not handle the thought of the werewolf. There was something about it that he did not want to understand even though he did understand, so he turned away. He picked up the Roadblocker and patted LaMastra down for the last of his ammunition, then Crow hastily reloaded and went to find Val and Mike.

There were far fewer vampires now. The smoke from the fires was so thick it was hard to see. Crow skirted brush fires and he killed anything that got in his way, though each time he fired the big gun it made his gut hurt. Something was definitely wrong in there. He could taste blood in his throat. Then he heard three pistol shots and angled in that direction, blundering through the smoke.

And there was Val, with Mike beside her.

Around them were mountains of the dead. The last remaining vampires yielded and fled as Crow came screaming into the clearing. Crow staggered toward Val and she cried out his name and ran to him, wrapping her arms around him, weeping and saying his name over and over again as they both collapsed down to their knees.

Mike Sweeney stood above them, searching the smoke for movement, his body crisscrossed with cuts, his face a red and nearly unrecognizable mask. Then he also slumped to his knees, looked blankly at Val and Crow, and fell forward onto the bloody hands that still held the sword. His face was bright with fever and his eyes stared at nothing.

“Ruger’s dead,” Crow whispered as he showered Val’s matted hair with dozens of quick, light kisses. “But he killed Vince.”

“Oh, God…” Val huddled against him. “Is it over?” she asked.

He kissed her lips. “I think so,” he murmured.

Beneath them the ground exploded.