Draculas: A Novel of Terror

As the long muscle fibers in his legs broke down and realigned themselves, Mortimer half- ran/half-stumbled through the hallway, coming upon a door that read LAUNDRY. He threw himself inside, rolling across the floor, crying out as every nerve in his body seemed to catch on fire.

But this wasn’t the pain of death.

It was the pain of rebirth.

Even as he writhed, Mortimer could feel his brand new teeth growing in.

Clay

HE was puffing by the time he reached the third floor landing. He knew he didn’t exercise as much as he should, but was he this out of shape? Or was it plain old fear stealing his wind and making his heart pound like this? Because with each flight he was realizing more and more what a stupid stunt this was. Should have listened to Shanna and waited. First thing they teach you is always wait for backup. But waiting hadn’t seemed an option. The situation in Blessed Crucifixion wasn’t just deteriorating, it had run off the edge of a cliff.

But he couldn’t back off now, couldn’t return to that parking lot with his tail between his legs. What would his daddy say? Well, he’d say what he always said: A Theel don’t back down, not from no one, not from nothin’—’specially from a commie.

Well, these things weren’t commies. They were worse. They were a disease. They had to be wiped out and—

A hiss and a silhouetted shape diving at him from the next flight.

Clay had the MM-1 held at ready. All he had to do was pull the trigger. Which he did. The kick was a helluva lot more than the nearly recoilless AA-12. A good thing, because it lifted the barrel. Instead of a center-of-mass hit, the double ought tore a hole in the dracula’s upper chest, flinging it back and taking a good chunk of its spine out through the exit wound.

It sprawled on the steps, gnashing its teeth, unable to move its legs and only enough nerve supply to its arms to twitch its talons. A head shot would finish it off, but Clay needed to conserve ammo.

Most of all, he had to save one round for himself, in case he got bit. No way he was ending up like these folks.

He left the dracula behind and continued up.

On the fourth-floor landing he peeked through the little window and saw…nothing. Absolutely nothing. Black as the inside of a coffin.

Shit. He hadn’t thought to bring a light. His Maglite was back in his cruiser in the sheriff’s parking lot. Wait…

He pulled out his cell phone. He’d charged it up for the weekend trip. He hit a button and the display lit. Wimpy illumination, but it would have to do. With the MM-1 in his right hand and the phone in his left, he pushed through into the darkness…

Which swallowed the feeble glow from his phone. He took a step forward and heard glass crunch under his shoe. One or more of the draculas had smashed all the battery-powered lights. He couldn’t see shit. He had no idea what was lying in wait.

Okay, new plan.

He backed into the stairwell again and pulled off his backpack. He pawed through his backup ammo for the MM-1 until he came to his one and only M583—a white star parachute flare. He removed the empty from the drum and inserted the flare. Problem solved.

He’d fire this baby down the hall. It would light up when it hit the far wall and give him forty seconds of 90,000 candlepower illumination to get the lay of the land.

Yeah.

He stepped back into the dark, raised the launcher, and thought he heard a noise. He hit a button on his phone and—

“Shit!”

A dracula, jaws agape, was four feet away and closing fast.

Clay pulled the trigger. The white star round hit the thing in the face, smashing through his teeth and into the back of his throat, lifting him off his feet. As he staggered back, the flare’s little twenty-inch parachute popped out of his mouth and opened. The four-second delay ran out and the flare lit, illuminating the inside of the dracula’s head like a paper lantern. Clay could see the brain boiling before the skull exploded.

The flare rolled free, revealing half a dozen draculas lying in wait. A trio of those leaped on their fallen comrade while the other three charged. Clay let the lead pair get close and put them both down with one round, then laid out the third with another. They weren’t dead, but they were disabled, and that was as good as being goners, because their buddies were already on them, chowing down.

Now what? Could he sneak by the others without wasting precious ammo? The flare glare revealed a sign next to the stairway door. A floor directory. He spotted the word Pediatrics. Shit, it was on Two. He was on the wrong damn floor.

He slipped back into the stairwell and headed down.

Shanna

SHE stood by Clay’s suburban, watching the dark, blocky mass of the hospital. A faint, faint glow lit some of the windows, probably backwash from the emergency lights in the hallways, but for the most part it looked dead and deserted. But looks were deceiving. She knew it crawled with—what had Jenny’s ex called them? Draculas. Right. Jenny and her ex were in there—still human, she hoped—and so was Clay.

She prayed for his safe return. Yes, she was going to break his heart when he did, but she wanted him back. Because somehow the world seemed a better place with Clay than without him.

Ten minutes ago the army had roared in and heavily-armed soldiers had piled out of their trucks. A large black trailer had followed the soldiers into the lot but had parked away toward the rear. The people who had emerged were civilians.

And then something scary: The army set up spotlights at the emergency entrance, around the main entrance, and at each stairwell exit. Then they’d positioned soldiers with flame throwers at each point. Looked like they’d been convinced it was contagious. She’d expected officialdom to scoff at the stories of what had gone on in the hospital, but she guessed the recording Clay had insisted on making had convinced them.

Well, she’d never said he was a dummy, just not on her wavelength.

Just then, to her right at the corner of the building, flames lit the night.

Screams echoed, died.

Her heart stumbled over a beat. That was the door she and Clay had used to escape, the door he’d re-entered. They wouldn’t have burned him by mistake, would they? No…those screams had had an unearthly quality. Had to be draculas trying to escape the building. Still…

Clay

On the way down, he passed the dracula he’d shot near the third-floor landing, still where he’d left him, still hissing and twitching its talons.

“Yo, Twitchy. How goes it?”

He passed him and continued down. As he approached the door to the second floor, he heard a raw buzzing coming from the far side. Almost sounded like—

The door blew open and the sound assaulted Clay. He almost fired at the shape plunging through when he recognized Randall and his chainsaw.

“Shit, Bolton! I almost—”

“Watch your mouth,” he said. “Got kids with me.”

And sure enough, four kids crowded into the stairwell behind him, followed by Jenny.

“Oh, Clay,” she said. “Am I glad to see you.”

Clay nodded. This was going to be easier than he thought.

Randall was staring at the MM-1. “Whoa. What’s that? Looks like a pregnant Tommy gun.”

“Let’s hope we can get out of here without using it. There’s an exit door just two flights down. Follow—”

A noise below, like a door slamming open, then a blast of firelight and hideous screams. Clay pelted down to the next landing and saw two flaming draculas writhing on the floor, screeching as they burned. Black, oily smoke rose, filling the stairwell. He hurried back up.

“What happened? What’s burning?”

“A couple of our friends.”

“What?” Jenny said. “How?”

“Don’t know, don’t want to find out. We need to find another way.”

“Another way where?”

“The roof. I saw a TV helicopter. I’ll call it down to pick us up.”

“No TV copter’s going to hold us,” Randall said.

“The kids, then. The kids, then us.”

“Yes!” Jenny said, grabbing Randall’s arm. “The roof. We’ll be safe up there till help comes.”

Clay didn’t necessarily agree with that, but the roof held their best chance.

Randall hesitated a second, then nodded. “Okay. I’ll lead. But…” He was staring at Clay. “You came back…to a place like this. Why? A man like you…why?”

A man like you? Clay was going to tell him to fuck off when he remembered. “Magnificent Seven, right?”

Randall’s mouth twisted as he nodded.

“Oh, don’t tell me,” Jenny said. “Tell me you’re not—”

“ ‘I’m afraid you’ve misjudged me,’ “ Clay said.

Randall did the pistol point. “Magnum Force.”

“I’m telling Shanna!”

Randall gave him an appraising look. “You said you’d be back and here you are. Either you’re as stupid as everybody says I am, or you’re some kinda guy.” He stuck out his hand.

Clay shook it. “The safe bet is stupid. Man, you look just like I feel.”

Randall barked a laugh as he started limping up the steps. “Aliens again. You’re all right, Deputy Dawg.” He turned back to the kids. “I’m gonna lead the way up. Everybody stay as close together as you can. Remember not to let go of the person in front of you.”

The kids stayed behind Randall and Jenny stayed behind the kids. Clay brought up the rear.

“You’re not staring at Jenny’s butt are you?” Randall called from above.

Well, when not checking behind him, yeah, he was. Nice butt. Not going to tell Randall, though.

“Would if I could, but this smoke…”

The draculas below had stopped screeching—at least Clay couldn’t hear them over Randall’s idling chainsaw—but apparently they continued to burn. Foul, stinking smoke thickened in the stairwell.

“I think I’m going to throw up,” one of the boys said.

“Hang in there,” Jenny told him. “Soon we’ll have all the fresh air we need.”

As Randall reached the third-floor landing, the door burst open and a dracula leaped through and ran straight into Randall’s blade. The children screamed in panic and turned. They would have all tumbled head over heels down the stairs had Jenny and Clay not been there to catch them.

Randall gunned the saw and cut right though the thing’s head. It crumpled in the doorway, keeping it from closing.

“Don’t look!” Jenny said as she ushered the kids by.

Clay said, “And don’t worry about Twitchy up near the next landing. He’s harmless.”

He’d paused at the door to kick the dead dracula back through so he could close it, when he thought he heard a very human scream from somewhere down the hall.

He froze and listened. With Randall’s chainsaw buzzing he couldn’t be sure—

There! Again. No doubt now.

He looked up the stairs at Jenny’s butt. The way it swayed as it retreated reminded him how badly he really wanted to get back to Shanna and—

A third scream.

Shit!

“Hey, Bolton,” he called. “I think someone’s in trouble here. I’m gonna take a look.”

Jenny turned and stared at him. “Really?”

“Yeah. What floor is this?”

“OB.”

“Like babies and stuff?”

“Exactly like babies and stuff.”

Double shit.

“See you upstairs. When you get up there, call KREZ and say Deputy Clay Theel wants them to land their copter on the roof. You’ve got sick kids that need evacuating.”

“What if they won’t?”

“A news station passing up the chance to be heroes and make news instead of just reporting it? What do you think?”

“Will do. But you be careful.”

“Careful is my middle name.”

Actually, Clay’s middle name was Rambo, but tonight he’d make it Careful. Rambo…sheesh. His daddy loved that movie, but he hoped Shanna never found out.

“Hey, Bolton,” he called. “Any shots left in that Taurus?”

Randall was out of sight but his words echoed back. “Used them all.”

“Good man. Keep my baby safe.”

“Um, I had to leave it.”

“What?” Clay couldn’t believe this. “You left Alice?”

“Alice?”

“My Taurus!”

“Well, it was empty and—”

“Alice is a Taurus Raging Bull four-fifty-four Casull, the most powerful handgun in the world—”

“And would blow your head clean off…I know. But it—she would’ve made a lousy club. Sorry.”

Sorry? Sorry didn’t cut it. Alice was—

Another scream from down the hall. Damn. Okay, he’d worry about his baby later.

He quickly reloaded the MM-1, making sure each of the twelve chambers in the cylinder had a live round, then headed down the hall.

Randall

“WE need to change this up,” Randall said, stopping and looking back at Jenny. “Can you take the lead? I’ll make sure they don’t hit us from the rear.”

Jenny looked a bit confused, but nodded. “Sure. Why?”

“I’m not so good with stairs right now. I don’t want to fall and crush anybody.”

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah, yeah, I’m fine. Just a little dizzy. If I fall, it’ll be better if I’m in the back.”

“All right.” Jenny appeared concerned as Randall stepped out of the way and let her get in front, but she said nothing else. They resumed their ascent. Randall felt like he was slowing them down and almost told them to leave him and go on ahead…but, no, it was better to move at his slow pace if he could help keep them safe.

They’d all be fine.

Happy endings for all.

As far as Randall was concerned, if you couldn’t defend four boys from a dracula invasion with a roaring chainsaw, then you didn’t deserve to carry a roaring chainsaw, right? He’d get them and Jenny to the roof, no problem. Then they’d all get rescued, drop the kids off at a fun water slide, get his leg patched up, and hurry back to Jenny’s place. A quick stop at the kitchen for a couple of cold beverages, and then they’d stampede into her bedroom. She’d have to be on top because of his injuries, but he could live with the bottom position until he healed up. They’d get remarried, take their honeymoon on a luxury cruise through Alaska, and have a daughter who looked just like Tina, who would go on to live a long, healthy life.

An excellent plan.

He knew it wasn’t really going to happen like that. Hell, ten seconds after they flew off in that helicopter, Jenny might say “Oh, sorry, Randall, but you can’t expect me to honor something I said while we were in the midst of a dracula attack. I can’t be with you.” Then she’d use a big word that she knew he didn’t understand, laugh about his injured leg (legs now, goddamn it), and rush off for a Clay/Jenny/Shanna threeway.

Jesus. What was wrong with him?

He knew exactly what was wrong. Right now, almost every part of his body hurt, but what concerned him most wasn’t the parts that hurt, it was the part that tingled.

A mild, unpleasant tingle, like that moment after you’d had a filling when the Novocain was just starting to wear off.

A tingle right under his teeth.

Shit.

Why the hell had he bit the clown? What kind of stupid idiot would do a thing like that? He’d saved the woman he loved, was probably going to save a bunch of kids, and he might have irreparably fucked it up by getting caught up in the heat of battle.

Or not. They didn’t know how this dracula stuff worked. They couldn’t. Not this quick. Blood might not have anything to do with it. There could be some fuckin’ sorcerer in the basement, waving his Harry Potter wand and creating these things. And he’d washed his mouth out with rubbing alcohol.

He wasn’t necessarily screwed.

Jenny glanced back at him.

He smiled. See? No dracula teeth.

He was fine. The tingling meant nothing. Could be anything. It wasn’t even that bad. He could barely feel it unless he concentrated. No way was he going to get this far, go through this much crap, and ruin his happy ending. Randall Bolton was going to be a hero, a muscle-bound lumberjack taking out dozens of monsters with his trusty chainsaw, not the asshole who turned into one of them.

Or the asshole who suspected that something was happening and didn’t tell anyone.

“Jenny…?”

She stopped. “Yes?”

“No, keep moving. We’ll talk while we walk.” His mouth had gone dry. “Jenny, I…I really shouldn’t have bit that clown.”

“Oh, God.”

“No, no, no, don’t panic. I’m not…I haven’t…I think I’m fine. None of the other draculas are as big as me, and it would take longer to affect me even if I were…I think you were right, swishing around that rubbing alcohol helped, but I just…I didn’t want to not say anything, in case, but I swear I feel fine.”

They passed the next landing. At least there were no draculas in the stairwell. That was something.

Almost there.

Almost to the magical helicopter that would whisk them away from all this.

“I just want you to know, I’m not gonna be dumb about this if anything happens,” Randall said, hoping that the kids didn’t pick up on what they were talking about. “I’ll never hurt you. I promise.”

“I know.”

He was just overreacting. He posed no danger to anybody but the draculas. Hell, he was going to get Jenny and the kids out of danger, not put them in—

No.

No!

He wanted to scream as one of his bottom teeth fell out.

Clay

HE came to an intersection and stopped, unsure of whether to keep going straight ahead, or take the hall to the right. A cry of pain to the right—a man’s voice—firmed up the decision. He made the turn and increased his pace to a trot. At the end of the hall he came upon half a dozen draculas pounding and clawing at a door, slamming themselves against it. That could mean only one thing: live humans on the other side.

As Clay raised the launcher, he heard a loud CRACK! and saw the doors start to swing inward. No time to lose and he had to make every shot count. The buckshot rounds turned the MM-1 from a grenade launcher into a super-size sawed-off shotgun. He didn’t even want to guess at the gauge of something that fired a 40mm shell—two, maybe? No matter. Sawed-offs were great at close range, crap at long range because the cone of shot spread so rapidly.

So he stepped up behind the draculas, squared off around six feet from their clustered backs as they began to push the doors in against whatever was barricaded on the far side, and fired high. The first shot put four of them down, totally ruining the heads of two and carving good chunks out of two more. He angled a little to the right and fired again, splattering the brains of two more, then pulled his Glock from the small of his back. He had three backup magazines of .40 cal hollowpoints for the pistol, so might as well use that for coup-de-grâce duty. He double-tapped the skulls of the two draculas that were down but still kicking, then stepped into a new corner of hell.

The first thing he saw was a guy in a clerical collar on his back on the floor holding off a mini-dracula in a party dress.

Aw, no. A kid.

It got worse. Approaching the minister and the mini was another female dracula, this one full grown, but it had a baby dracula chewing through her stomach like the creature in Alien. Looked like some human-kangaroo mutant with her baby in a pouch. Clay stood frozen in horror. He’d seen some awful things today, but this…this…he had no words for this.

He shook himself. What to do? The minister’s most immediate problem was the girl-dracula. Couldn’t use the MM-1without taking out the minister too, but he still had his Glock in hand, so—

The momma-dracula solved the problem for everyone, grabbing the girl-dracula by both sides of her head and ripping her off the minister. The girl-dracula screeched in rage but only for an instant. The screech was replaced by a sickening crunch of bone as the momma-dracula gave her head a full one-eighty twist. Then another. Girl-dracula’s head faced front again but her jaws had gone slack and her eyes were rolled up in her head. Then momma-dracula bit her throat. As blood squirted, she pressed girl-dracula against her ruptured belly where baby-dracula began to suck.

Clay couldn’t take any more. He pulled the trigger twice and blew all three to pieces.

He shuddered, feeling sick. He’d just killed a little girl, a new mother, and her—what?—nursing baby.

He shook it off. No, they weren’t people anymore. They’d become things. He’d done them a favor.

So how come he felt so rotten?

Clay was stepping forward to help the minister when he caught a flash of movement to his right. Another female dracula, this one in a nurse’s uniform, was charging him. As Clay swiveled the MM-1 and fired, he heard the minister yell, “Carla, no!”

Carla stumbled a step but kept coming, her head intact, but her face a pincushion mass of darts.

“Crap!”

He’d mistakenly loaded a Beehive round into the launcher. He’d been taking one along to Denver as a novelty. It fired a swarm of forty-some steel flechettes. Beehives weren’t used much because of their low stopping power, which was being demonstrated right now as the dracula lunged at him. Clay ducked to the side and she went right by, talons raking empty air. The flechettes hadn’t stopped her, but multiple darts in her eyes had blinded her. He waited till she wheeled around, then blew her away.

He helped the bloodied minister to his feet.

“You okay, padre?”

“I think so.” He couldn’t seem to take his eyes off what was left of momma-dracula. “Poor Brittany.”

Clay was doing a slow turn, looking for more surprises.

“Let’s get you out of here.”

“No—my wife and baby!”

Clay glanced at the momma-dracula, then away. “Oh, God, I…I…”

“Oh, they’re fine.” His face fell. “Well, not really. Stacie lost a lot of blood after delivery. She’s getting transfused now and—”

“Now?”

“Yes.”

“Can she walk?”

“Maybe. I don’t know. Why?”

Clay pointed back the way he came in. “Because those doors aren’t stopping anything anymore.”

As if to prove the point, a dracula came around the corner, saw them, and charged. It looked like it was going for the dead draculas, but Clay let it get within six feet, then blew its head off anyway.

The only good dracula…

The minister looked both repulsed and impressed. “That makes it look so easy. Almost doesn’t seem fair.”

“Like my daddy likes to say, ‘If you find yourself in a fair fight, you obviously didn’t plan right.’ Besides, ‘fair’ is a matter of opinion, depending on what side you’re on. These things here probably think it’s unfair you’ve got all this blood running around inside you and won’t share it. Anyway, it’s not safe here. We need to get your wife to the roof.”

“Roof?” The minister shook his head. “Gosh, I don’t know…”

“Good chance a copter will be doing pick-ups. Women and children first.”

Sudden resolve solidified his expression. “Really? Then we’ve got to get her up there.”

Clay followed him into a room where a pale young woman—so pale she faded into the sheets—lay in bed with a blood pack dripping into her arm.

Clay shook his head. No way this gal was walking up to the roof. He glanced at the minister. Kind of scrawny.

“She’ll need to be carried, padre.”

“We can get a gurney and—”

“The elevators are out and a gurney will never make the turns in the stairwells. I’ll carry her. You take the baby and my Glock—”

“No! I couldn’t!”

“Jesus! Another one!” He sounded like Shanna.

“Please don’t take the Lord’s name in—”

“Jesus could have used a Glock. Wouldn’t have wound up with see-through hands and feet if he’d had one.”

“Please, deputy…”

“All right, all right. Here’s what we’re gonna do…”

“All set?”

The minister nodded. Clay had learned his name was Adam, his wife was Stacie, and their screaming newborn—swathed in a baby blanket and cradled in the crook of Clay’s left arm—was Daniella. As per Clay’s instructions, Adam had stuffed her ears with cotton. Clay knew his own ears would never be the same after today, might as well give the kid’s a break. While Adam had stuffed cotton, Clay had stuffed rounds into the MM-1’s cylinder. He was just about out of ammo. Only two buckshot rounds as backup for the dozen in the cylinder. He had the two H-E rounds but they had no practical use.

Stacie groaned from her place on Adam’s back, but didn’t open her eyes.

They’d transferred Stacie to a gurney, hanging her blood bag from an IV pole and leaving her blood-soaked mattress behind. They rolled her to the stairwell door where Adam tried to carry her in his arms, but her dead weight was too much for his left arm. He’d messed it up going for the blood. But still he insisted on carrying her, so Clay helped get her onto his back and wrapped adhesive tape around them to hold her in place.

So, Adam stood ready with his elbows hooked under the backs of Stacie’s knees. Clay, with Daniella in his left arm, the MM-1 in his right, and the tab atop the blood bag clamped between his teeth, led the way up. As long as he stayed higher than Stacie, gravity would keep the blood running into her arm.

“Stay close, padre,” he said through his clenched teeth and over the baby’s wails. “We’ve got four flights to go and then we’re home free.”

The baby had to be hungry—no one left on the OB floor to feed it, and she sure wasn’t going to get much from her mother. He just hoped its cries didn’t attract any draculas. Spraying double-ought shot in a stairwell was a last resort.

He heard a door squeak open below, turned and looked over Adam’s head. A dracula leaped through the doorway onto the landing below, followed by another. They’d heard Daniella.

“Shit!”

Keeping Daniella in his left arm, he gripped the barrel of the launcher with his left hand and used his right to take the blood pouch from between his teeth and shove it between Stacie’s chest and Adam’s back. Then he pressed against the railing to let Adam pass.

“Keep on going. Move your ass. I’ll slow them down.”

“But Daniella—!”

“I’ve got her. You’ve got all you can handle. Just keep moving!”

The minister lacked the wind to say much else, so he kept on a-trudgin’. As soon as he was past, Clay clutched the MM-1 by its rear pistol grip and dangled it over the railing. A heavy sucker—especially with a full cylinder—designed for two-handed use. It kicked and all of its weight was forward of the trigger—hence the second pistol grip on the front end of the stock. Clay had only one free hand. He had strong wrists, but not strong enough to fire the launcher one-handed—unless he was firing it downward.

“Hey, ugly!” he shouted to the lead dracula as it spotted him and rushed up the flight below.

It looked up, its face not twelve inches from the muzzle of the launcher.

“Say hello to my leetle fren’.”

Clay fired, splattering its head all over its torso and the stairs with virtually no shot scatter. The second leaped upon it and began feasting. Clay didn’t want to leave it there, because he heard more coming, so he started shouting at the top of his voice, and when the second looked up, it got the same as its buddy.

Daniella had probably increased her screaming, but Clay couldn’t hear her over the ringing in his ears. He carried her halfway up the next flight and shouted for more draculas. He’d leave a combination buffet and obstacle course all the way to the roof.

Adam

“MOVE, Padre!” the man named Clayton screamed, and Adam was moving—moving as fast as he possibly could, one step at a time, his wife strapped to his back with several rolls of adhesive tape. He sweated buckets, his legs cramping, and two flights of stairs still to go, warm blood—Stacie-blood—sluicing down the back of his legs.

The deputy fired that freakishly huge gun again, the noise so loud it jogged his fillings, and when his hearing faded back in he heard the deputy screaming, “Come on! Come on! Come and get it, fucker! Come on! I don’t got all day! Come on!”

Boom!

“Come on, you bastard! Yeah, you! You want some of this? You got it!”

Boom!

They rounded another landing and at the top of the next flight, he saw a door with a sign above it glowing under the emergency light—HELIPAD.

It gave him a burst of energy, small to be sure, but enough to push him those last fifteen steps, the deputy firing behind him and screaming to go, and then Adam buried his shoulder into the door and burst out into a cool, dark night.

Made it fifteen feet before crumbling to the concrete.

He’d lost Stacie’s blood bag on the ascent.

A man with a chainsaw stood with a woman and four kids on the far side of the helipad, and they were waving their arms toward a sea of headlights, spotlights, flashlights, ambulance light bars on a steady burn, highway patrol cruisers sending out a manic frenzy of blues and reds. Every law enforcement and first response agency in the Four Corners had to be out there.

He reached back and began ripping the tape from his shoulders as Clayton broke through the door and then spun around and kicked it shut.

“Bolton!” he screamed. “Get your ass over here!”

Adam watched the man with the chainsaw limp quickly back across the helipad, the woman in tow.

When they reached Clayton, the woman took Adam’s swaddled little girl out of his arms.

“Incoming,” Clayton said.

“How many?”

“More than we can handle.”

Adam ripped off the last bit of tape and eased Stacie onto the concrete. She shivered under her hospital gown and the insides of her legs were streaked with blood.

So, so much of it.

Adam had brought his backpack along, carrying it on the front of his chest. He unzipped it and grabbed another unit of O-positive, plugged Stacie’s IV line into the bottom, then held it up so the blood ran down into her veins.

“Baby?” he said. “Can you hear me?”

Stacie’s eyes opened.

Barely.

Slits.

“Where’s Daniella?” she asked.

Adam glanced back toward the door, saw the woman who held his child hurrying over. She knelt beside them.

“That’s our baby girl,” Adam said.

“She’s beautiful. I’m Jenny.”

“I’m Adam. This is Stacie, my wife.”

Even in the lowlight, he saw the concern darken Jenny’s face.

“Here, would you take her?” She handed the sleeping infant—its neurological system shut down from all the mayhem—to Adam.

“Hi, Stacie, I’m a nurse. My name’s Jenny.”

Adam heard the sound of metal clanging nearby, saw Clayton and the man he’d called Bolton kicking one of the huge air conditioning units mounted to the roof.

Jenny took Stacie’s wrist and held it for a moment.

“Postpartem hemorrhage?”

“That’s what Nurse Herrick called it.”

Jenny looked down at the blood still pooling on the cement between Stacie’s legs.

“She’s bleeding again,” Jenny said. “Had they stopped it before?”

“I think so.”

“Can I hold my baby?” Stacie whispered.

“Sure, sweetie.” Adam laid their daughter in the crook of Stacie’s arm.

Jenny said, “Could I speak with you for a moment, Adam?”

“What about this bag?”

“It’s okay. You can put it down.”

He laid the blood bag on the concrete and followed Jenny for a few feet toward the edge of the roof. Clayton and Bolton were struggling to push an air conditioning unit that was bigger than a refrigerator in front of the door to the hospital.

Jenny stopped and took both of Adam’s hands and said, “I am so sorry, but I’m afraid your wife isn’t going to make it.”

Like someone had shovel-punched him in the gut.

Jenny continued, “It probably jarred the clots loose when you carried her up from the birth unit.”

Adam felt a rush of emotion coming on.

Fought against it.

“How long does she have?”

Jenny just shook her head. “Go be with her.”

Adam turned away from her, stared down at his wife lying on the helipad, stroking Daniella’s head with her fingers. He had never been more scared, including the previous hour.

He walked back over to his family, sat down beside his wife.

“She’s beautiful,” Stacie said.

“She looks like you. Your eyes for sure.”

Clayton and Bolton were muscling another unit toward the door, metal scraping against concrete. Thought he could hear inhuman screaming echoing from inside the hospital.

He laid his hand against his wife’s forehead—cool and sweaty.

Closed his eyes. Prayed harder than he’d ever prayed in his life.

“I’m so cold, Adam.”

He started unbuttoning his black shirt.

“I hope you won’t lose your faith over this.”

He wondered if she meant her death, if she knew it was imminent, or everything else.

“Of course not,” he said, wondering if he was lying to her.

Stacie looked down into the face of her daughter, and as Adam pulled his arms out of his shirtsleeves and laid it across Stacie’s chest, she said, “You’ll tell her about me?”

“Stacie, stop, you’re gonna be—”

“I know what’s happening,” she said.

He could barely get the words out. “Every day, darling. Every day. I love you, Stacie. I love you so much.” Tears streamed down his face.

Her eyes were going glassy, filling slowly with a kind of stunned emptiness.

“Stacie! Do you hear me?”

She turned her head, and stared up into his eyes, one last and fading beat of lucidity.

“I know you love me, Adam,” she whispered. “You know I love you?”

He nodded.

“I’m scared, Adam.”

He laid down beside his wife as the demons started beating against the door, their faces turned toward each other, staring into Stacie’s eyes as the life inside them drained away.

Jenny

JENNY turned away from the dying woman and her newborn. Yet another tragedy in a night filled with them.

She pushed her emotions back, maintaining the guise of a professional, and looked for Randall. He and Clay had finished barricading the door and now Randall stood alone, staring off into the sea of blinking, flashing emergency lights. Jenny walked over and stood next to him, slipping her hand into his, welcoming the familiarity of his calluses.

“Do you think we’ll be rescued?” she asked.

A silly question, because there was no way he could know, any more than she did. But Jenny wasn’t seeking an answer. She just wanted to hear his voice.

“I’ll make sure you and the kids get safe, Jenny.”

His voice was cracking, and he looked away from her.

“Randall? What’s wrong?”

He coughed and covered his mouth, but not before something fell from his lips and bounced onto the tar-papered roof.

A tooth.

“Oh, Randall…”

He stared at her, his eyes hooded, his pupils already starting to enlarge.

“I won’t hurt you,” he said. “I won’t hurt you or the kids. I’ll…I’ll throw myself off the building before I let that happen.”

He tried a pathetic smile, and more of his teeth dropped out. Jenny watched, revolted, as new ones breached the gums and began to grow in.

Clay was walking over.

“Randall, I need your help guarding the barricade…holy fuck!”

Clay raised his weapon, pointing it at her husband’s head.

Without thinking, Jenny stepped between the men.

“No!”

“Get out of the way, Jenny! He’s—”

“He’s my husband! You’re not going to kill him, Clayton Theel!”

Randall made a grunting sound, then doubled over and dropped to his knees. Jenny shoved Clay’s gun away, and crouched next to Randall, keeping her arm around his shoulders.

“Jenny, you need to step away from the dracula.”

“I know Randall. He won’t hurt me. Will you, Randall?”

Randall violently shook his head. “Won’t…hurt…no one. I…can…fight it.”

Clay reached for Jenny, grabbing her arm, tugging her away. A millisecond later, Randall was on his feet, getting inside Clay’s aim and grabbing the deputy by the throat.

“If I…lose…control…kill me. But…until then…fuck…off.”

Randall released Clay, who immediately pointed the gun at him again. Once more, Jenny interceded, protecting Randall with her body.

Clay stuck out his jaw. “My girl, Shanna. She said if we find that Moorecook guy, we might be able to find a cure. His blood could have a vaccine, or antibodies, or something.”

Randall cried out as his teeth tore through his cheeks. Then came an ear-splitting sound of screeching metal.

“They’re here!” one of the boys screamed.

Jenny looked at the roof entrance, hoping she’d see cops and the military and rescue workers flooding in. But it wasn’t the good guys. It was the draculas, pushing open the door, the air conditioning units scraping across the roof.

Randall pulled her tightly against him.

She felt his hot breath on her cheek, his warm, bloody drool dripping onto her neck.

“I…love…you…” her husband whispered.

Then he picked up his chainsaw and limped toward the oncoming horde.

Stacie

IT was like someone dimming the lights from inside her head.

No pain, but so dizzy.

She could still sense her daughter lying asleep in the crook of her arm, though she couldn’t feel a thing.

There was noise all around her, but Adam—sweet, wonderful Adam—his voice cut through, lips pressed against her ear.

“I will extend peace to her like a river.”

Thinking, I cannot be dying. This is not happening. I’m a mother now.

“And the wealth of nations like a flooding stream.”

Please God, undo this.

“You will nurse and be carried on her arm and dandled on her knee.”

There’s so much I want to experience.

“As a mother comforts her child, so will I comfort you; and you will be comforted.”

Nothing to do but latch onto his voice as the darkness flooded in and unconsciousness loomed like both the heartbreaking end and the answer to so many questions.

“When you see this your heart will rejoice and you will flourish like grass. Peace like a river, Stacie. Peace to you. I love you Stacie.”

His voice fading.

“I love you Stacie.”

She could feel herself slipping, and she didn’t fight it anymore.

“Always, Stacie.”

Randall

RANDALL admitted, often with pride, that he could be one of the most stubborn bastards to walk the planet. He’d always been that way, and even though his stubbornness hadn’t always helped life to work out in his favor, it was deep inside of him and he’d figured it would never change.

But at some point you had to accept that things weren’t going to happen the way you wanted, no matter how desperately you stuck to the plan.

At some point you had to accept that you were doomed.

Randall did not accept his fate as he rushed onto the roof with Jenny and the kids.

Did not accept his fate as he and Jenny encouraged the children to scream as loudly as they possibly could, jump up, wave their arms, do anything they could to attract attention.

Did not accept his fate as he and Clay dragged the air conditioning units to create a barricade against the draculas.

Hell, he didn’t even accept his fate when Clay had a big-ass gun on him. He’d be fine. He’d recover. He was a lot stronger than the other people who’d transformed. He was a goddamn lumberjack!

Even as he vowed to throw himself off the roof if needed, he knew it was an unnecessary promise. He’d never hurt anyone. Not a chance. No way.

But when the pain began, he knew he was fucked.

It seemed like tonight had been nothing except pain, but not like this. Nothing could compare to this. It was as if every single tooth in his mouth was simultaneously attacked by a sadistic Nazi dentist, drilling deep into the nerves, not simply without Novocain but with drugs to enhance his senses, pain so incredible that he thought he might finally take that next step and go completely insane.

His new teeth burst through his gums and then through his cheeks in a shower of blood, flesh, and bone. One of his old teeth, a molar, went down his throat. As the gore spilled out of his face, he saw the barricade fall away, the draculas coming through the doorway, pouring out onto the roof.

This was it.

Randall Bolton’s final scene.

Maybe he could fight whatever homicidal impulses struck the other draculas, but he wasn’t coming back. Wasn’t going to grow old with Jenny. Wasn’t going to have the last laugh on the other lumberjacks, or even get a slap on the back for a job well done. He couldn’t even help get the kids on the helicopter if they successfully got one to come over here—they’d just scream and run away from him.

This was the end of Randall’s life, and he was leaving this world as a monster.

And so there was only one way for him to go out with his head held high: kill as many other monsters as he possibly could.

They could take away his humanity, but not his fucking chainsaw.

He pulled the cord, relishing the sound of the motor. There was a whole forest of trees in front of him, and he was going to cut down every last one of them.

He swung the chainsaw blade, hitting the first dracula so hard that it felt more like knocking its head off than slicing it off. In the same arc, his chainsaw dug a deep bloody line along the chest of the dracula next to it. The return swing finished off that dracula and two more.

He couldn’t shout anything coherent, not with his face so mutilated, but he let out a primal scream, screaming out a lifetime’s worth of rage and sorrow all at once. The draculas parted beneath his whirring blade, some of them ripping into his flesh before they died, some not getting the satisfaction.

There was so much blood spraying at him that he could practically gargle with it.

Arms fell away like branches.

A dracula stumbled forward and fell upon him, its teeth tearing into his side. Randall didn’t even feel it. He twisted the blade around and drove it deep into the dracula’s skull in a spray of brain and bone chips.

No need to tell himself to focus.

A dracula’s jaws clamped down upon his left hand, biting off all of his fingers except his thumb, but it didn’t matter. That wasn’t the hand with the chainsaw.

Did he have talons instead of fingers now? He’d barely noticed.

Another dracula and its head parted ways. How many had he killed so far? He couldn’t even estimate.

A squirt of blood shot directly into his good eye.

So he was mostly blind. So what? Didn’t matter.

The chainsaw stalled for a split-second, right in the middle of a dracula’s torso, but he yanked it out and the blade started whirring again.

Blood dripped from his hair, his ears, his chin.

Bloodbloodblood…

He shook off whatever urge had suddenly come over him. He wasn’t going to drink any of that shit.

There were dismembered bodies piled around him.

Literally piled.

He almost lost his balance, but stayed upright.

He wasn’t going down just yet.

Not while there were still monsters around.

Adam

LIKE a YouTube clip from hell.

Demons fighting to squeeze through the partially open door, and Randall—now one of them himself—wielding a giant chainsaw and slashing at everything in sight—legs, limbs, heads, guts strewn across the helipad—and a pang of fear now cutting through Adam’s grief.

He clutched Daniella to his chest and backed away from Stacie’s body as one of those things stalked him in full scrubs with a surgical power drill, revving the tiny motor.

It stopped suddenly, attention drawn to Adam’s wife and the pool of blood she lay in.

When it fell to the ground and started hungrily licking it up, something came unhinged in Adam and he ran, six steps covered in no time, and kicked the former surgeon squarely in the face.

The monster tumbled back, but quickly righted itself, jumped to its feet, and charged. Adam held Daniella in his right arm, his left raised to fend off the attack.

The demon sank its teeth into Adam’s forearm, and just as he felt those fangs slicing into muscle, a chainsaw screamed and Adam watched Randall bring the blade straight down on the top of the demon’s skull, the smell of friction between bone and chain filling the air with an acrid stench, the motor straining, and then the saw broke through and Randall brought the spinning chain through brain, face, neck, between shoulders blades, stomach, until the saw emerged from the crotch and the demon-surgeon stood staring at Adam, massively confused as it separated like a peanut butter and jelly sandwich slowly pulled apart, two halves falling away from each other to the concrete, leaving Randall, or whatever he had become, to face Adam.

He looked every bit as horrific as the others, perhaps more so holding that chainsaw drenched in blood and sinew.

A great wind was kicking up.

Its eyes narrowed, and for a moment, Adam’s heart stopped, but Randall only pointed the blade of his chainsaw toward the news helicopter whose skids were five feet from touching down on the big, white H in the center of the helipad.

Randall screeched something unintelligible through his fangs, then turned and ran back toward the door as another pair of demons climbed through, the lumberjack’s chainsaw singing like the cry of an angry God.

Clay

JENNY stood beside him, the kids clustered around them, all watching the running lights of the silhouetted KREZ copter easing down toward the helipad. Its strobe was almost blinding. He leaned toward her and cupped a hand around her ear.

“Soon as it touches down, we get these kids on board. You too.”

She gave him an uncertain glance. In the strobe flashes she looked devastated.

He added. “Randall will want that.”

Still no reply. Jenny turned back to the carnage and the thing that was once her husband, and Clay saw the pain strip her soul bare.

She couldn’t stay. Whatever love or loyalty she felt, Randall was gone, and she’d be gone too if she stayed.

“I won’t leave him, Clay.”

He stared at Randall, who had somehow found the strength to single-handedly wipe out at least ten draculas. But he was nearly dead himself.

“Jenny…”

“I’m not letting him die alone!” she screamed.

Clay noticed a change in the tone of the copter’s engine and looked around. The skids hovered about a foot off the helipad, but instead of continuing to lower, they’d begun to rise.

What?

Clay saw the woman in the open bay pointing to Randall, who was putting the saw to one final dracula. The pilot was looking that way too as he throttled up to leave.

No fucking way.

Clay charged forward and jumped onto the skid, tilting the copter. The woman scuttled back as the pilot looked around. The bay was lit by an overhead fixture. Clay leaned into the light. He didn’t have to fake a fierce expression—his teeth were already bared in rage—as he gave the pilot a good look down the bore of the MM-1. He pointed toward the roof.

“Down or you’re dead!”

He knew the pilot couldn’t hear him so he spoke slowly and carefully, giving him ample opportunity to read his lips.

The copter resumed its descent.

When it hit the deck, Clay motioned the kids forward, ducking and squinting against the wash from the blades, Jenny led them up in a bunch. The strobe gave their approach an old-time movie look. Together they hauled the children up and in, one at a time, until all were aboard. Then he motioned to Jenny to follow but she shook her head. He was tempted to grab her and toss her in but spotted Adam approaching with the baby in his arms.

Aw shit. Adam was bleeding.

Randall

A headless dracula dropped in front of him, adding to the pool of blood, and Randall realized that there was nothing left to kill. As if sensing this, the chainsaw gave one last sputter and died.

A helicopter landed on the roof.

Rescue.

But not for him.

Bloodblood…

He gestured to the helicopter with his dead chainsaw, then staggered toward the door. More draculas would be coming through it. He’d kill them. Saw them up even without the chainsaw running.

When he reached the door, his legs finally gave out and he collapsed.

He sat there, chainsaw on his lap, trying to blink the blood out of his eye, too exhausted to use his hands to wipe it away.

He couldn’t stay human in his mind for much longer, but he didn’t need to. He didn’t have long to live as a monster or a man.

If he could just stick around long enough to see Jenny and the kids fly off to safety, he’d shake hands with God and call it even.

But Jenny didn’t get into the helicopter.

Instead, she began to walk his way.

All Randall could think about was the day she left him, and how his one wish—the one thing that kept him sober and sane—was that one day she might come back to him.

Her timing was ironical. Not only was he dying, but he was a dracula, and she was putting herself in danger instead of getting the hell out of there.

But at that moment, when she reached down for him with tears in her eyes, Randall Bolton was the happiest guy on the planet.

Adam

HIS mind raced as he headed toward the helicopter, shielding Daniella from the wind-blasting rotors. He hadn’t steeled himself to look at his arm. It hurt badly, and he thought he felt the evaporative cooling of blood on his skin, but maybe, maybe, please God—maybe he was imagining it.

He glanced down, saw the shimmer of blood on his left forearm with every flash of the KREZ helicopter’s LED strobe.

The fangs had punctured skin.

God, no!

Why?

He looked over toward the door to the hospital. Randall sat alone with his chainsaw amid a battlefield of gore. Nothing trying to come through the doors at the moment. Just a few dismembered demons squirming on the concrete.

Couldn’t be sure, but Randall looked injured.

By the time he reached Clayton, he knew what he had to do, knew there was no other choice. Randall seemed to be controlling his will in the face of the infection, but what if he couldn’t? What if Adam harmed his own daughter?

Adam sidled up to Clayton, who’d just loaded the last child onto the helicopter.

Clayton looked at him, at his arm.

“You get bit?”

Adam nodded.

“Shit.”

“I’ve been praying that I’ll be protected from any—”

“Keep praying all you want, preacher, but you will be a full-blown fucking land shark in T-minus ten minutes.”

Adam tried to fight back the tears, not wanting to cry in front of this lawman, but he couldn’t help it.

“Is there room?” Adam yelled in Clayton’s ear.

Clayton’s brow furrowed. “For your daughter, absolutely.”

“What about…?”

“You know I can’t let you off this helipad.”

Adam nodded. He looked down at his daughter, tugged back the blanket that shielded her face. Somehow, she still slept. Adam, crying so hard he couldn’t see, spoke into her ear, “May the Lord bless you and keep you and make His face to shine upon you and grant you peace. Your daddy loves you, Daniella, and he always will.”

“It’s time!” Clayton yelled.

Adam handed his child to a young woman in the helicopter wearing a pair of headphones, who was already extending her arms to his baby.

He passed Daniella to her, yelled, “Her name is Daniella!”

“What?” the reporter yelled.

Adam stepped up onto the skid, yelled into her ear as she lifted the headphone. “This is my daughter! Her name is Daniella Murray! Her mother’s dead, and I will be soon! Please take care of her!”

The woman nodded and Adam felt a hand drag him back from the helicopter—Clayton’s—and then Clayton signaled to the pilot and the rotors wound up and the skids eased off the helipad.

Adam stood watching in disbelief as it flew his daughter away from him into the night.

She’s safe now. These demons can’t touch her.

That piece of news was the only thing in the world keeping him from sprinting toward the edge of the roof and taking a swan dive into the parking lot.

Randall—now a bloody mess, was on his side, surrounded by the monsters he’d slaughtered. Adam watched the nurse, Jenny, go to his side.

Then he looked at Clayton, something roiling inside of him. Anger. Fear. Confusion. All wrapped up in a single emotion with a clear objective—kill.

“I want your gun,” Adam said.

“What?”

“Your gun. Show me how to shoot it. I’m going back into the hospital to kill as many of these things as possible.”

Clayton nodded, his eyes twinkling. “You hold that thought, padre, but I may have a better one.”

“What?” Adam said.

“If you’re gonna go down fighting, let’s make it really count.”

“How?”

“You still got all that blood in your backpack?”

“Yes.”

“Run and get it, and meet me over by the door.”

Jenny

SHE knelt next to her husband’s torn, bleeding body as the helicopter flew away. There was little left of him that was recognizable. She gripped his hand, feeling his talons gently wrap around her fingers.

“You did it, Randall,” she whispered. The tears were running down her face, and her shoulders shook from sobs. “You saved us.”

He blinked, tried to say something. All that came out was a low growl. Jenny cast her eyes down his body, looking at all the tears and gouges. He wasn’t bleeding as badly as before. Either he was almost out of blood, or…

Healing. These creatures had accelerated healing powers.

“Bite me,” she told her husband.

His eyes got wide.

“Take my blood, Randall. It’ll revive you.”

She pressed her wrist to his teeth. It would turn her into a dracula as well, but that was okay. They would be together. Maybe Clay was right, and they could find Moorecook and a cure. Jenny closed her eyes, waiting for the pain.

She felt his breath on her arm, but the bite didn’t come.

Instead there was only the faintest brush of what remained of her husband’s lips.

A kiss.

“Please, Randall. It’s the only way.”

Randall gripped Jenny’s arms—

—and shoved her backward.

Jenny fell onto her ass.

“Damn it, Randall!” she yelled. “Stop being so goddamn stubborn!”

She crawled back to him, figuring if she crammed her hand down his mouth she could force him to bite down. But as she brought her fingers to his mouth, Randall caught her wrist. His eyes were glassy.

“Nuuuhhh,” he said, shaking his head.

And then Jenny fell apart. Great, wracking sobs shook her body. She’d spent her entire professional career being strong in the face of death. Compartmentalizing grief. Priding herself on being practical rather than emotional.

But this was more than she could bear.

“You son of a bitch,” she sobbed. “You can’t die. Please, please, please don’t die.”

Randall reached up, held her hands. A monster’s hands, but they still had the calluses.

Still had the warmth.

They held each other, for the last time.

“Remember the first day we met?” Jenny said, her face a veil of tears. “You came into the ER, your arm all swollen, and you asked me out on a date while you were getting your X-ray. You had a broken arm, but you were still flirting with me. I thought you were so brave.”

She touched a part of his face that wasn’t all ripped up.

“And you are,” she said, smiling through her tears. “You’re the bravest, sweetest man I’ve ever met. I was so wrong to leave you. I wish we could start all over. I wish I could erase all of that time we were apart, and instead fill it up with all the good memories we missed out on. But I never stopped loving you. Never. Being your wife was the best thing I’ve ever done in my life.”

Jenny leaned over and kissed his forehead.

“I love you, Randall Bolton.”

She continued to hold his hands long after he’d stopped holding hers.

Clay

CLAY and Adam hurried through the dimly-lit slaughterhouse that had once been the happiest floor in the hospital.

“To make this work,” Clay said, “we need a good-size room.”

“There’s an education center where they have Lamaze classes and lectures on infant care. It’s right over here.”

He followed Adam to a rectangular room that ran twenty feet by thirty. Multicolored lights flashed against the outside windows. Clay stepped to them and glanced down at the parking lot. He thought he could pick out troop lorries among the vehicles and milling people. Either the army or the National Guard had arrived. Good. They’d keep Shanna safe.

Couldn’t think about her now…

He turned back to the room. It had windows onto the hallway as well. Good thing, because the hall had the emergency lights. None of those in here.

In the lowlight he picked out rows of folding chairs—a bonus.

“Perfect. Now I need the blood—lots of it.”

“You’re in luck,” Adam said. He pulled open the backpack, revealing dozens of units. “All types.”

Clay had been thinking about killing a couple of draculas for their blood, but this was easier, safer. Despite the gravity of the situation, he couldn’t help smiling. “You’re a regular Boy Scout, aren’t you.”

“I made Eagle.”

“Well, you sure are prepared.”

“I’m not prepared to turn into one of those things.” He held up his bloody arm. “You said you could solve that problem and make it count—really count.”

Clay fished one of the two 40mm M433 grenades out of his backpack. A couple of days ago someone had emailed him about carting an old wrecked car out into the wilds during the gun show and shooting the shit out of it. He’d figured on administering the coup de grâce with these babies. But now he had a better use. He handed it to Adam.

“This is a high explosive grenade. It’s got a kill radius of fifteen feet. That means a thirty-foot circle of death. I don’t know if that’ll apply to the draculas since they’re so damn hard to kill, but two will definitely do the job.”

Adam was nodding. “I see where you’re going. If we can fill this room with them, and set off both rounds, we may be able to turn the tide.”

Clay looked at him. “What do you mean, ‘we,’ kemosabe? This is going to be your show, padre, your Alamo.”

“But—”

“You’re gonna die, padre. And real soon. You can die here as a man and meet your maker without a mouth full of fangs, or you can die as a dracula when I blow your head off at the first sign of change. Take your pick.”

Adam’s face had turned a light shade of green. “As a man, of course.”

“Good for you. And what better way to go out than taking a bunch of draculas with you? But that’s only going to happen if I can modify these rounds.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, they’ve got a minimum arming range of forty-five feet.”

“Sorry?”

“They’re designed not to detonate until they’re like forty-five to ninety feet from the launcher. I need to hack the arming mechanism if this is going to work.”

“You can do that?”

“Pretty sure…”

Clay’s gut clenched at the prospect. He’d modified the buckshot rounds, changing the gauge of the shot and such, but the H-E grenades were lots more complicated. He hadn’t ventured into one of them yet. No point in letting Adam in on that. He had enough on his plate.

“Okay,” he said. “While I do my tinkering, I want you to stack all these chairs in a circle in the center of the room, but leave enough space for you in the middle.”

“Why?”

“Coupla reasons. I’ll explain later, because we don’t have a lot of time and it won’t matter if I can’t arm the grenades. So circle those chairs, then get every drop of blood you can find and pour it around them like a moat. But you’ve got to keep the door closed as you do that. When those draculas smell blood they’re like sharks in a feeding frenzy. Let’s get to work.”

Clay left him there and went in search of a quiet cubbyhole to work on his H-E grenades, hoping he could pull this off without turning himself into Bolognese sauce.

Jenny

SHE was sitting there, exhausted, devastated, clutching her husband’s lifeless hand, when she heard the whine of propellers.

Jenny glanced up, thinking the TV helicopter had returned.

But it hadn’t.

This was something different.

Adam

HE battled with his conscience as he unpacked the transfusion bags in the lecture room.

Suicide was a sin. The bible said so. The Lord gave each of us life and only He could take it away. Suicide was self-murder, and “no murderer has eternal life abiding in him.” The meaning was pretty clear: no eternal life meant banishment for all eternity from the presence of God. Adam didn’t believe in the old-school Lake of Fire, but he did believe in hell.

The inner debate continued as he closed the door and began arranging the chairs as Clay had instructed.

But wouldn’t it be worse to allow himself to become a foul, murderous abomination? To kill indiscriminately and, far worse, turn others into similar abominations? Wouldn’t that earn him hell just as quickly?

With the chairs circled in a double stack, he began creating the “moat,” slicing open the transfusion bags with the scalpel, and dumping their contents around the chairs.

You weren’t allowed to take your own life, but you were certainly allowed to sacrifice it for your fellow man. And woman too, of course. John 15:13 said it all: Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. Was any act more noble?

That was what he wished for himself.

He was feeling funny and didn’t know if it was the smell of the blood or the first symptoms of something worse. He was just squeezing the contents from the last bag when Deputy Theel slipped quickly through the door. He didn’t look so hot himself.

“Something wrong?”

Clayton shook his head. “Had a couple of bad moments there, but I’m still in one piece.” He shook his head. “Man, it stinks in here.”

Adam had been thinking that same thing for a while, but now it didn’t smell so bad.

Dear Lord, was he starting to change?

“Let’s not waste any time,” he told the deputy. “What do I do?”

“First thing is you put yourself in the middle of those chairs.”

As Adam squeezed between two double-stacked pairs, he said, “Care to tell me about the chairs now?”

“They’re gonna make excellent shrapnel.”

Adam’s knees softened but didn’t give way.

The deputy stepped over the blood moat and handed one of the high-explosive grenades through the chairs.

“This one goes on the floor. Do not drop it—it’s armed. You’re right handed, so—”

“How do you know that?”

“Habit. Always know a guy’s handedness. Put it by your right foot.”

Adam complied. “Now what?”

The deputy hesitated, started to hand his grenade launcher through the chair maze, then pulled it back. He cradled it, hugged it, actually kissed it, then handed it through.

“You have no idea what it took to find one of these, and what it cost me when I finally did.”

Adam took it but didn’t know what to do with it. His confusion must have shown.

“See the pistol grip there?” the deputy said. “Hold it by that but keep your finger outside the trigger guard. Do not touch that trigger till you’re ready to squeeze it.”

Adam did as instructed.

“Good. Now, lower the launcher until the muzzle’s pointing at the floor.”

He did.

“Position the muzzle directly over the round on the floor.”

Again, Adam complied.

“Okay. Now, you’re ready.”

“Ready for what?”

“I’m going to open the door and run like hell. The draculas are going to catch this stink and come in like sharks. They’re going to start lapping up the blood. They’re going to start fighting with each other, which will bring more. Eventually they’re going to run out of blood and notice you. That’s when you pull the trigger. You’ve got one H-E round in the chamber and the other on the floor. The former will hit the latter and they’ll both explode.”

“Oh, God!”

“Yeah, God. If He’s paying attention at all, this will express mail you straight to Him. You won’t feel a thing, padre, but you’ll reduce every dracula you’ve managed to lure in here to meat confetti. That’s what I call a blaze of glory.”

“Yes. Glory. ‘Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.’“

“Yeah, there’s that,” the deputy said, shaking his head as he stared at his weapon. “But how about, ‘Greater love hath no man than giving up his MM-1 for his friends?’“

Adam felt his muscles beginning to cramp.

“I think you’d better go.”

The deputy looked at him, then nodded. “Gotcha.”

He pulled a pistol from the small of his back, stepped to the door, and yanked it open.

“Don’t let me down, padre.”

“That would mean letting myself down, letting God down.”

The deputy smiled and nodded again. “You’ll do fine, padre. We’ve all got it coming. You just happen to know when.”

And then he ducked out, leaving the door open behind him.

It didn’t take long.

The deputy had been uncannily accurate in his description.

They came like a school of sharks. First the scouts. He spotted them through the windows onto the hall, dark shapes weaving through the shadows, popping into view when they passed through a pool of light.

One darted through the door and dropped to the floor with a screech. Two more followed, then a dozen, then a dozen more, pushing, shoving, fighting for a place at the blood buffet. Their struggles spread them further and further around Adam’s chair barricade until they completely encircled him.

The sight of the huddled, struggling shapes, limned by the light from the hall and the flashes from the parking lot, chilled his blood. But the sounds were worse. Adam couldn’t see the blood moat, but the frenzied lapping, the hissing and screeching made his gorge rise.

And then two of them got into a fight, tearing at each other. Others joined the fray in a cannibalistic orgy that drew even more of their kind to the room.

But worst of all for Adam…the room no longer smelled bad.

In fact, the aroma was almost…mouth watering.

No, wait…that wasn’t water in his mouth. It tasted like blood. It tasted good. And something else there. Three, no, four hard lumps. He knew what they were: teeth. He’d seen Nurse Herrick’s teeth fall out before she became…

God help me, it’s happening!

He spit them out and moved his finger from alongside the trigger guard and curled it around the trigger.

How long to wait? To maximize his impact, he had to delay until the room couldn’t hold any more draculas, but not so long into the change that he couldn’t—or wouldn’t—pull the trigger.

He had to hold out in memory of Stacie, who had sacrificed everything for Daniella. And especially for Daniella. She had to live. She’d grow up without her mother and father. They’d miss her first steps, her first day at school, her wedding day…but at least she’d grow up. His parents or Stacie’s parents, or maybe all four together would raise Daniella, and he prayed they’d tell her that her folks loved her so much that they gave their lives for her.

So hold off…hold off as long as—

The creatures decided for him. When the smell of the fresh blood he’d spit out with his teeth reached them, they froze. Then slowly, almost as one, they turned toward him, noticing him for the first time.

“I forgive you,” he told them. “You’re not responsible. You didn’t want to be what you’ve become, and I am going to relieve you—us—of this hideous affliction.”

Oddly, instead of a passage from the bible, the last lines of A Tale of Two Cities came to mind. He didn’t remember them exactly, but he did his best: “Listen to me and believe this,” he said to them. “It’s a far, far better thing I do, than I have ever done; it’s a far, far better rest we go to, than we have ever known.”

With a chorus of shrieks and hisses, they leaped at him as one.

Adam pulled the trigger.

Clay

HE ducked into the report room—a landlocked cubicle just off the OB nursing station, where one shift briefed the next on the floor’s patients and their status. He’d been tempted to head straight for the stairs but didn’t know how many draculas he’d run into along the way. Once they caught the scent of that blood, they’d come swarming from all directions. He had north of fifty .40 caliber rounds for the Glock, but knew from his first foray into the ER that it took a good three hits to put down a dracula. One on one, that was okay, but if he got swarmed he’d go down.

He closed the door and plunged into perfect darkness.

Didn’t know if his hacks on the H-E rounds had been successful. No way to test them.

So he locked the door, found a chair, and waited.

Soon he heard movement outside—feet scraping the floor as they passed. Someone rattled the doorknob. A dracula had probably smelled him—no surprise since he was pretty much covered in dried blood. He raised the Glock, ready to fire if the creature somehow managed to break in, but it moved off. The smell of the fresh blood in the education room had to be more enticing.

Okay, Part A of the plan was working—the draculas were taking the bait. Part B depended on two factors: the hacks and the padre. Clay was pretty sure about the hacks. He’d rotated the firing pin in each round to line up with the detonator. Any impact would—should—set them off.

Adam was a bigger unknown. Pulling that trigger would take a certain level of intestinal fortitude. He didn’t know if a noncombatant and officer in the God Squad like the padre had it in him. Just have to wait and—

The explosion shook the walls and floor, practically knocking Clay off his seat. Even through the locked door, the compression wave from the blast popped his ears.

Sorry for doubting you, padre.

Via con Dios.

He waited half a minute, then unlocked the door and stepped out. He’d expected smoke but instead felt a cool, clean breeze. Outside air?

He looked left and saw that windows on the far side of the building, opposite the explosion, had been blown out. He made his way through the rubble to the education room—or rather where it had been. The hallway wall and windows had been blown out. Everything in sight was coated with gore. The outer windows and wall were gone as well. He could look out at the night and see the flashing lights in the parking lot.

The parking lot…that was where he wanted to be. With Shanna.

He saw the TV copter idling in a clear corner of the lot. Great. The kids were safe.

But he heard another copter—a much heavier engine noise than the KREZ bird—though he couldn’t see it. Sounded like it was directly over the hospital. Another pickup? Jenny was the only one left up there.

But would she go? Maybe, maybe not. Women were crazy sometimes.

He headed for the stairs. He’d get up there and force her onto the bird—even if he had to sling her over his shoulder and carry her aboard. She felt she owed it to Randall to stay with him, but that was the last thing her ex would have wanted. Last thing Clay wanted too. She was a good nurse and good people. Not enough of those around.

Randall…man, he’d misjudged him big time. But then, he’d known only the drunk Randall. The sober one was one helluva stand-up guy. Come to think of it, he’d underestimated the padre as well. Hazard of the job, he supposed. As a cop he saw too much of the worst side of people. After a while he couldn’t help but start expecting it.

In the stairwell, he made it up one flight before stumbling to an abrupt halt. He wasn’t going any farther. The flights above were packed with draculas.

Earlier, when he and Adam had made their way down, they’d had to climb over the pile of dead draculas Randall had sliced up. It had been a tight squeeze. Now the surviving draculas were feasting on their brothers, fighting each other for a place at the table. Probably what it had looked like on the way to the roof that last day at the US embassy in Saigon.

He started back down, hoping Jenny got some sense into her head and boarded the chopper. She could return to Randall later, after the army or National Guard or whatever mopped up the surviving draculas.

Jenny

SHE stared up into the night sky at the helicopter. But it wasn’t the one from the TV station. This one was dark, with guns mounted on the front and sides.

Military.

Jenny waved her hands over her head, but the aircraft gave no indication that it noticed her. It continued to hover, not making any attempt to land.

Then the building shook and Jenny heard an explosion from the lower floors. One of Clay’s toys? Or had the cavalry finally arrived?

Shanna

SHE was pacing back and forth by Clay’s Suburban, praying for his safe return, when she noticed movement on the ground, not too far from her. She looked closer and saw one of the supposedly dead state troopers moving—one of the pair Clay hadn’t shot.

Oh, God. As it lifted its head and looked her way, glow from the army headlights glinted off rows of long sharp teeth.

“Hey!” she called. “Hey, somebody! We’ve got trouble over here! Hey!”

Nobody seemed to hear her. The noise from truck motors revving, soldiers shouting to each other, giving and taking orders, swallowed her cries.

“Hey!” she called, raising her voice to its limit. “A little help over here.”

She backed up a few steps, readying to run, fearing it was coming for her, but it veered away, toward the empty darkness.

Confused? The side of its skull looked bashed in. Too damaged to know what it was doing? Well, that was fine with Shanna…

Except if it got away and bit someone, the plague would be loose and there’d be no stopping it.

She screamed. “Will somebody please—oh, crap!” He was going to get away and no one was paying her a bit of attention.

She glanced in the rear of Clay’s Suburban and saw his super shotgun, his beloved AA-something. She didn’t want to touch it…she remembered Marge back in the chapel, but somebody had to stop that thing.

She grabbed the gun and went around the other side of the car in time to see the dracula passing. How hard could this be? She raised the shotgun, pointed it toward the thing, and, closing her eyes—she couldn’t look—pulled the trigger.

The gun boomed but had nowhere near the kick of that pistol Clay had handed her.

She opened her eyes and saw the dracula on the pavement. She was about to congratulate herself when she realized it was still alive, if that was what you could call whatever it was, and trying to regain its feet. But it couldn’t. Shanna had shredded its knees.

“Lower your weapon!” shouted a voice behind her.

She turned and found herself facing the muzzles of half a dozen guns of various shapes and sizes and a chorus telling her to drop it. She laid the shotgun gently on the pavement. After all, Clay loved that thing.

“Now you listen!” she said.

A soldier with three stripes on his arm—that meant sergeant, right?—who looked like he was in charge, got in her face. “What do you think you’re doing, firing that here?”

Shanna jerked a thumb over her shoulder. “One of them was getting away.”

A couple of the soldiers looked past her. She could tell by their expressions they’d never seen a dracula before.

The sergeant said, “Put it down!”

Half the soldiers turned their weapons toward the leaping monstrosity. In a rain of automatic weapon fire, they cut it to shreds.

“Did you see that thing?”

“What the fuck?”

“Some kind of monster.”

Then four of the hospital’s third-floor windows facing the parking lot blew out, belching flame and filling the air with bits of glass and charred flesh.

Jenny

JENNY continued to stare up at the military helicopter. Over the din of the rotors she yelled, “Down here!”

It hovered directly overhead, and she watched one of the bay doors open. Then they began to lower a rescue basket down on a cable.

No…not a rescue basket.

What the heck is that?

Clay

CLAY descended cautiously through the stairwell, Glock out and ready, but nothing leaped out of the shadows. The dracula population appeared to have been reduced to endangered-species level. No loss. This was one species that cried out for extinction.

He was passing the pediatrics floor when he remembered Randall saying he’d had to leave Alice behind. Well, pediatrics was where he’d have left her.

Clay stopped and considered the risk-benefit ratio. What if he allowed himself five minutes to search for Alice? Taurus Raging Bulls didn’t come cheap, but even if someone simply gave him another, it wouldn’t be Alice. He’d grown attached to Alice.

He checked his watch and marked the time. Really. Five minutes—not a second more. What could it hurt?

He eased through the door and made his way down the hall, thinking how anybody watching him would think he was out of his mind. Well, some people thought that anyway, especially when they learned he’d named his Taurus. But every so often you came across a weapon special enough for a name. Look at Davy Crockett. Hadn’t he named his trusty flintlock Betsy? There you go. Nuff said.

Near the nursing station Clay found a door that looked like someone had taken a chainsaw to it. Randall? Through another doorway he saw that clown dracula flat on its back, very dead. And there on the floor, amid fallen plaster and a string of guts that looked like they’d been tied into shapes…

“Alice!”

Shanna

WHAT had happened? An explosion could mean only one person: Clay. But what could he have been carrying to blow out a wall like that? Better not to think about it. Who knew what Clay carried in his bag of tricks?

She just hoped he hadn’t gone up with it.

The sergeant had told two soldiers to escort her—a euphemism—to the trailer at the rear of the lot. They pulled her inside and stuck her in what they’d called “the command center.”

It looked improvised in some ways—a featureless space with no decorations and half a dozen one-piece polymer chairs. But the small, fixed window that had to be at least an inch thick said otherwise. The best thing about that window was it faced the parking lot. Shanna had her nose pressed against it now, hands cupped around her eyes to shut out the room light, straining to see what was going on.

The door opened behind her. She turned to see four disheveled-looking kids being herded into the room by the same two soldiers who had brought her. They moved away and then another soldier—with bars on his shoulders—strolled inside. He had gray hair and a barrel chest, and his expression was grim. He stared hard at Shanna.

“Who are you?” he demanded.

“Shanna Wiener. I’m an anthropologist.”

“Colonel Halford. My men just caught some sort of creature, Ms. Wiener. It attacked them, we believe, with intent to eat them.”

“Not eat them,” Shanna corrected. “It wanted to suck their blood.”

“Do you know what it is?”

“It’s…” Shanna’s voice went soft. “It’s a dracula.”

“A dracula.”

She nodded.

“As in a vampire? The kind you fight with crosses and garlic?”

She shook her head. “Crosses don’t work. I don’t know about the garlic.”

Shanna expected disbelief, but Halford simply nodded.

“Do you know how many there are?”

“No. The infection spread quickly. There could be hundreds.”

He nodded again. Two soldiers came in and saluted. Col. Halford saluted back.

“The autoclave is in place, sir.”

“Sound the sirens. Clear everyone to the perimeter. I want detonation in sixty seconds from the moment I stop talking. Dismissed.”

The men hurried off.

“What’s an autoclave?” Shanna asked. She didn’t like the sound of it.

“Same as in a hospital. Used for sterilizing medical equipment. Except this sterilizes a much larger area.”

“It’s a bomb?”

“It’s a giant shaped charge. When detonated it will shoot a plasma jet down through the hospital roof with irresistible force at a speed of eight-thousand feet per second. The jet will penetrate each of the floors like an anti-tank missile melting through a steel armor plate. The air in the hospital will heat to ten thousand degrees, sterilizing the entire structure.”

Shanna shook her head. “My boyfriend…my fiancé, is still in there.”

“I’m sorry, Ms. Wiener. I have my orders.”

No. This couldn’t be happening. The military was here. They could help him.

“Please. He’s a good man. A cop. He saved a lot of people tonight.”

“I know. I just heard from four children who talked about a policeman with a big cool gun. But I also heard from Dr. Driscoll, my medical officer. She confirmed these creatures are contagious. We simply can’t risk any of them getting away. They’ve managed to kill six of my men in less than ten minutes, Ms. Wiener. Good men, well trained. Durango has a population of fourteen thousand, and it’s only ten miles away. If one of those things manages to get there, it will be a slaughter.”

Shanna didn’t think, she acted, running for the door, leaping out into the night, sprinting for the hospital as fast as she could.

She had to get Clay out of there. Had to—

Two men tackled her.

A few seconds later she was in handcuffs, being dragged away, screaming at the top of her lungs, “Clay! CLAAAAAY!”

Jenny

BY the time she realized that the object they had lowered onto the roof was a bomb—a huge, army-green charge—Jenny had just enough time for a belly laugh. She thought of Randall…dear, sweet, Randall. He would have appreciated the humor of surviving a dracula outbreak only to be killed by the good guys.

It was damn ironical.

Clay

HE snatched up the Taurus and began wiping her off. Poor Alice was a mess—blood, plaster dust, and who knew what else.

He hugged her to his chest. “Hey, baby. Gonna take you home and get you cleaned up and oiled and good as—”

Then he heard screaming. He’d heard a lot of screaming that day, but this seemed to be coming from outside. And rather than the incoherent, senseless terror he’d gotten used to, this sounded a lot like his name.

He hurried to the nearby window, broken out by Adam’s farewell blast directly above, and stared out over the parking lot.

One floor down and maybe a hundred yards away…that looked like Shanna, being dragged away by some soldiers. She continued to cry out to him.

Why was she so panicked? She was safe down there.

Then he grinned. Probably worried sick about him. Or missing him something fierce.

“Don’t worry, babe. I’ll be right—”

He heard a boom from above and then a blast of heat like a solar flare seared through the hospital, hurling his burning body through the window.

Shanna

SHANNA was still screaming when the roof of the hospital exploded in an incandescent flare. The boom and shockwave stopped her in her tracks and she watched in horror as the windows and walls of the fourth floor vomited flame and debris, followed almost immediately by the third and second and first. Every entrance, every exit blew its doors and shot flames like giant blowtorches.

And then the floors began to collapse—first the roof onto the fourth, then the fourth onto the third, pancaking all the way down to ground level, leaving only a flame-riddled cloud of smoke and dust and debris on the far side of the parking lot.

A cheer went up from the watching soldiers and she wanted to kill them. Instead, she began to cry. Huge, wracking sobs shook her to her toes.

Clay… she felt the ring box in her pocket pressing against her thigh. A good man, a hero, and no one would know. No, wait. Those kids would know. They’d remember the guy with the big cool gun. Clay would love to be remembered that way.

Colonel Halford walked over, told his men to release her.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“You can take that sorry and shove it up your ass.”

She stormed away, and no one bothered to stop her. The cool night was now hot as the summer in Nevada, and the burning hospital bright enough to see the damage that had been done to it. The autoclave had performed as advertised. The building wasn’t just sterilized. It was annihilated. Nothing could have survived that.

Choking back a sob, Shanna headed toward the TV crew. They were interviewing a man. A doctor. Incredibly, his scrubs were pristine, not a mark on them. He held a sleeping baby close to his chest, while a good-looking brunette asked him how he had managed to save the infant.

“Her name is Daniella. She was handed to me by your cameraman when the helicopter landed. Incredibly, some soldiers almost shot both of us, until I could prove we hadn’t been bitten.”

“Is the baby okay?” the reporter asked.

“I’m happy to report she’s completely healthy. Even in tragedies such as this, miracles happen.”

Something about the man’s voice was familiar. She walked closer, to get a look at his face. He was young, longish brown hair, had a strong jaw and deep eyes. Shanna immediately found him attractive, and the feeling shamed her, especially so soon after Clay’s death.

But something about him drew her.

The TV reporter seemed to feel the same way. It appeared that at any moment, she’d leap into his arms.

“Thank you, Doctor Cook.”

As soon as the camera turned away, Dr. Cook approached.

“Hello, Shanna.”

Shanna sniffled. “Do we know each other?”

“We met once before. I was Mortimer’s doctor.”

He reached out his hand. Shanna took it, finding his grip surprisingly cold.

“You seem familiar, but I’m afraid I really don’t recall you.”

He smiled, revealing absolutely perfect teeth. “That’s okay. I’m arranging a ride into town. Would you like to come along?”

Shanna seriously considered it, but something about the handsome man struck her as creepy.

“No, thanks.”

Darkness flashed across Dr. Cook’s eyes, so quickly Shanna couldn’t be sure she hadn’t imagined it. The doctor bowed politely.

“Some other time, perhaps.”

Then he pressed his cold lips to her hand, turned on his heel, and walked off into the night with the infant.

Shanna wondered where she should go next. She thought of Clay’s father. He didn’t sound like someone she’d want to hang around with, but a survivalist type might be just what she needed right now. He deserved to know that his son was dead, and how he died. And he’d be the type to believe why he died.

Where had he said Daddy lived?

Up near Silverton?

That was where she would go.

The Man in the Pristine Scrubs

“YOU are hungry, aren’t you,” he cooed to the infant in his arms. “Well, we’ll fix that.”

His canine teeth extended. They were so much better than the previous, unwieldy set he’d shed in the laundry room less than half an hour ago. This new form was superior. His thoughts were clear, focused. And he looked human. Better than human. Better than his best days on Wall Street. He’d blend in much better than those monsters.

Better still, he was young and healthy again.

He bit the tip of his index finger and watched the blood well into a bead, then touched it to the baby’s mouth. She made a face at first, then began to suck.

“Looks like we’ve got our work cut out for us, little one. We seem to have experienced a setback on the way to a brave new world, but it’s only temporary. We’ll get there eventually, and you’ll play a big part. Oh, yes, little one. I have big plans for you.”

Epilogue

HE hurt. Hurt bad.

Burns, for sure. All over.

Broken arm.

Broken leg.

Make that two broken legs.

But somehow he’d managed to survive that explosion, that fall.

He was too weak to cry out. But that was okay. He heard soldiers sifting through the rubble.

They’d find him soon.

Until then, he had good company to kill some time with.

The best company a man could have.

He set Alice on his chest, and wondered how long it would be before they found him.

But he could be patient.

He could wait a little longer.

Not a problem.

THE END

From Joe Konrath, about this bonus content

Welcome to the supplements section. One of the cool things about ebook technology is that page count no longer matters. In print, paper costs money. The longer the book, the more it is to produce it and ship it.

Since we’re not bound by this (technically we’re not bound at all) we can include a bunch of DVD-style extras that don’t increase the cost of the ebook.

You’ve probably just finished reading the interview with all four authors about writing Draculas.

If you’re a writer, or you’re interested in how four different authors crafted a single novel, we’ve included a lengthy selection of our emails to each other during the writing process. In this, you can see how our final draft changed from our original vision, and how we put it all together.

We’ve included complete Kindle bibliographies, bios, and excerpts from our latest novels.

We’ve also included these three bonus short stories.

I’ve been fortunate to have collaborated with all of these authors on separate projects. Here’s a brief explanation of each.

Years ago, a friend of mine told me I had to meet Jeff Strand because he wrote “funny but sick shit, just like you.” I read some of his Andrew Mayhem books, loved them, and we began to correspond. I thought it would be a lot of fun to team up his Mayhem character with one of my characters from the Jack Daniels series, a private eye named Harry McGlade. We wrote a novella called SUCKERS, which came out in a limited edition hardcover and sold 250 copies. Later, I put SUCKERS up on Amazon Kindle, and it’s made us a small fortune.

A while later, we were both invited into a tiny werewolf anthology, and decided to hash out a quick story. The result was CUB SCOUT GORE FEAST. The anthology never came out, but the story lives on as a supplement to this ebook.

Blake Crouch and I met under similar circumstances. A mutual friend told us we both wrote dark, scary serial-killer books, so we checked each other out and found our writing was very similar. On a lark, I asked Blake if he wanted to try a writing experiment. I write about a driver who kills hitchhikers. He writes about a hitchhiker who kills drivers. Then, without showing each other our sections, we try to kill each other.

The result, SERIAL, was released as a freebie on Amazon, and downloaded more than 250,000 times. Amazon now carries the longer, expanded SERIAL UNCUT, which is about five times the length. Here’s the original.

I’ve been a fan of F. Paul Wilson since I was a kid, and we met a while ago at a writing convention. When we were both invited into a horror anthology, neither Paul nor I had time to write a story, so I asked him if he wanted to collaborate, which would be faster. He graciously agreed, and the result, A SOUND OF BLUNDER, was released in the antho BLOOD LITE. It’s a parody of the famous Ray Bradbury story. Thanks to Pocket Books for allowing us to include it here. Jeff Strand was also in that collection, and it’s well worth seeking out.

Collaborating is a fascinating creative endeavor. Two heads, or four heads in the case of DRACULAS, really allows the writing to come quick. Having instant feedback on scenes that are hot off the keyboard is a luxury writers don’t normally have, and hopefully the fun is apparent on the e-ink page.

It’s been my pleasure to work with these talented guys, and I hope we get a chance to do it again soon…

In which Paul, Jeff, Blake and Joe interview each other about the process and experience of writing DRACULAS…

BLAKE: Joe, the idea for this book started with you. Where did you get the concept for DRACULAS and how did you go about assembling collaborators?

JOE: While browsing bestselling Kindle titles I was surprised by how many were classic novels in the public domain. One that leapt out at me was Stoker’s DRACULA, and how many incarnations have been done of that particular character. The recent trend is turning vampires into teen heartthrobs and romantic leads. I don’t find that nearly as interesting as a horrible creature that needs human blood to survive.

I didn’t want Bela Lugosi in a black cape, or anything sexy. I wanted something ugly and horrifying. So I postulated that the original DRACULA was based on a real historical event—a human mutation that was contagious and could cause outbreaks.

So I called up Blake, because we bounce a lot of ideas off each other, and I knew this was potentially a fun one. I didn’t have time to do this on my own—too many other deadlines—but I knew how this could work. I’d written three other Jack Kilborn books (AFRAID, TRAPPED, and ENDURANCE) which all operated using the same formula: There is an overpowering evil, and several different characters fight to survive during an eight hour period. No chapter breaks, just point-of-view changes.

This structure could be done, simply, with more than one writer. All we needed were three or four motivated individuals, each whom would follow a few characters, and we could have an ensemble piece.

If I recall, Blake was up for it, and we brainstormed other writers who might be interested. I’d worked with F. Paul Wilson before on a previous story (A SOUND OF BLUNDER in the collection BLOOD LITE) and pitched it to him, hoping he’d be available and interested. Then I contacted Jeff Strand, whom I’d worked with on SUCKERS and CUB SCOUT GORE FEAST, but he wouldn’t commit to it because he was too busy with other projects.

Then I told him FPW was in, and Jeff signed up immediately.

BLAKE: Although we each have pretty unique and varying writing styles, we did our best to seamlessly interweave all the individual sections so the sum of the parts would feel like a cohesive book. Readers may have hunches about who wrote which characters, but should we go ahead and take our pants down and tell everyone who wrote what?

I’ll start. I wrote the pregnant couple, Adam and Stacie Murray, some of Moorecook, Shanna, and all of Oasis. Because Joe and I kind of jumpstarted this thing, I also wrote some of the other characters leading up to all hell breaking loose in the emergency room, and also the opening chapter.

JOE: Yeah, Blake and I came up with the setting, the premise, and the dracula rules and mythos. Then we wrote the first few thousand words, setting it all up, after asking Paul and Jeff what kind of characters they were interested in writing.

After that, I took Jenny as a main character, and then popped into various baddies, including Lanz and Moorecook and Benny.

JEFF: I wrote the point-of-view scenes with Randall the lumberjack (which notably does NOT include the scene where he gets a boner) and the point-of-view scenes with Benny the Clown.

PAUL: I gravitated immediately to the “gun-nut cop.” I have a bunch of participants in the repairmanjack.com forum who are into guns—really into guns—and I’ve learned a lot from them. They’re not nuts — they’re enthusiasts and aficionados. Some are gunsmiths. If you’ve ever held a fine firearm, you might understand and appreciate where these folks are coming from. I came up with the name Clayton Theel and he began to write himself.

BLAKE: Let’s talk about how we actually wrote this book.

JOE: It was actually pretty easy. We used a program called DROPBOX which allowed everyone to read each others’ sections instantly. The structure was a snap to fit together.

This thing was so simple to write, it’s almost laughable. I don’t think we had a single disagreement on anything. Everyone was a total professional, turning in great scenes that needed minimal editing.

It was also a lot of fun. There aren’t too many balls-to-the-wall monster books being done anymore, so this was a welcome change of pace.

JEFF: Well…there were some disagreements! But never anything heated, and none that weren’t resolved quickly, and none that ever involved anybody saying “Dude, you’re writing crap! Crap!!!”

JOE: I disagree that there were disagreements. Also, you’re writing crap.

JEFF: I forgive you. See how quickly that was resolved?

PAUL: If only all novels were this easy to write. I was fascinated to watch a dynamic of one-upsmanship develop. He’s going that far? Hmmm…I could push it a little further. That’s how some of the over-the-top scenes developed. For instance, Blake nudged me with the kangaroo mother on the OB floor (you’ll know who I mean when you get there) and a situation where Adam was about to be chomped on by Oasis, the little-girl dracula. He’d left it up to me to save him. I couldn’t resist ratcheting it up a notch.

BLAKE: Did you guys approach the writing of DRACULAS any differently from the writing of your solo work? For me, because of how fast and spontaneous we wrote, I found that very liberating and would say I didn’t approach the writing with such an anal, meticulous eye. I wrote faster, and I don’t normally write so fast, so that was interesting to push myself in a way I don’t normally.

JOE: I finished my scenes first. My secret was picking the character with the least amount to do, then sending constant emails telling you guys to expand your story arcs.

But seriously, this was one of the quickest, easiest projects I’ve ever worked on. It came together fast, and was never complicated, difficult, or a chore. I enjoyed writing it, and reading what you guys did as you turned stuff in. It was also ridiculously simple to put all the sections together.

JEFF: I didn’t approach the actual writing style any differently than I would in a solo novel, because we all had our own point-of-view characters, so I didn’t have to worry about making it sound like something that Joe Konrath/Blake Crouch/F. Paul Wilson would have written. I only had to keep a consistent narrative voice for my characters.

Obviously, there are differences in the process in a collaborative work simply because it’s considered unprofessional to scream “No! We’re gonna do it my way! My way! My way! Mine! Mine! Mine!” And there were things that I wouldn’t have done if I’d had 100% control that ended up working out really well.

JOE: The funny thing is, though, it is extremely difficult for the reader to figure out who wrote what section. The book is pretty seamless. The characters each are unique, but all of our writing wound up being very similar in execution. I don’t spot any particular moments where our fans could say, “Oh, FPW must have written that” or “That’s 100% Blake Crouch.” Each of our parts really contributed to a solid whole.

PAUL: I never let people read my first-drafts, but I felt at home with you guys so I just dumped my pages into Dropbox as they were done. (I went back and tweaked them later.) The idea was to maintain momentum and let everyone else see where you were taking things. We had no outline, just worked from a vague timeline. Mostly we wrote in sequence, but I jumped ahead a couple of times because a scene would pop fully formed into my head. We seemed to develop a sort of hive mind along the way where we kind of knew what everyone else was doing. The only time we needed an outline (and it wasn’t much) was the roof scene when all the characters were interacting.

BLAKE: Why release DRACULAS straight to Kindle?

JOE: A few reasons. First is one of publishers and rights. Having four authors collaborate on a book would be a nightmare to sell, because we all have print publishers who might want exclusives. Keeping it indie meant we weren’t bound by any preexisting contracts.

Second was speed. Self-publishing on Kindle allowed us to get this up in time for Halloween, whereas regular print would take a year to eighteen months.

Finally, we’re all selling well on Kindle, and it made sense to appeal directly to our fan bases.

BLAKE: Next up for me is finalizing a new book I’ve just finished. My first two novels, DESERT PLACES and LOCKED DOORS also just went up on Kindle for a reasonable $2.99, so I’m jazzed about that. “Serial,” which I wrote with Joe, is in the upcoming Shivers VI anthology, and I have a novella called “The Pain of Others” coming soon to Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine.

JOE: I’ve got two sci-fi ecopunk novels in the TIMECASTER series coming out in 2011 with Ace Berkley, and a few other super secret projects in the works. I’m writing the eighth Jack Daniels novel, called STIRRED, with Blake, which will also be the third in his Andrew Z. Thomas books (DESERT PLACES, LOCKED DOORS.) It’s a wrap-up to both of our series.

BLAKE: So we’re breaking that news here? Cool. I’m super-psyched to do STIRRED with Joe. The opportunity to work on a full-length novel with him and bring back a set of characters I’ve really been missing from my first two novels is a project I can’t wait to dive into.

JEFF: Next up for me is WOLF HUNT, which does for werewolves what DRACULAS did for vampires, except that I finished WOLF HUNT several months before DRACULAS, so actually it’s DRACULAS that does for vampires what WOLF HUNT did for werewolves. WOLF HUNT is funnier, though. My novella KUTTER, which is the heartwarming story (seriously!) about a sadistic serial killer whose life changes when he rescues a Boston Terrier (no, really, I’m serious about the heartwarming part), is going to be part of a two-novella collection called THE MAD & THE MACABRE, which also includes REMAINS by Michael McBride. And I’m working on other stuff.

PAUL: FATAL ERROR, the penultimate Repairman Jack novel, hit the street mid-October. Just finished a draft of THE DARK AT THE END, the (sort of) last Repairman Jack novel. I say “sort of” because the whole series ends with NIGHTWORLD which will come in 2012. Jack is a player in that novel, but the cast is an ensemble from across the Secret History.

JOE: What drew each of you to this project?

BLAKE: I loved the experience of writing “Serial” with Joe. It was a true collaboration in every sense of the word. Ever since we released that book, I knew I wanted to do something like that again, only bigger, a “Serial” squared, with double the writers, and of course, the story itself was going to have to be bigger. The prospect of essentially doing a vampire novel with four writers who could all more than hold their own in terms of scaring a reader to death really appealed to me. Considering the writers involved, I was expecting it to be a great experience. It turned out even better than I imagined. I work with Joe so much, I sometimes take it for granted what a huge fan of his I am as well, and working on this book, I was reminded of that again. Writing with F. Paul Wilson was a dream come true and a great privilege. I knew of Jeff’s work, but hadn’t read him yet. I will be correcting that oversight very soon, because man can he write!

PAUL: I know and have read all these guys. I met Jeff at various NECons over the years. Blake and I both drummed for the first Thriller Killer Band at the Phoenix Thrillerfest (he’s much better). I feel like I’ve known Joe forever, though I met him at a horror convention in 2004. Joe’s query came at a perfect time. I was just wrapping up the last Repairman Jack novel, THE DARK AT THE END, and had a window of free time. I’d worked with Joe before, knew, liked, and respected the other two participants, and this sounded like such a wild idea, how could I say no?

JEFF: When one is presented the opportunity to work on a collaborative novel with F. Paul Wilson, one says “Yes.” Joe and I had been lightly batting around the idea of a full-length novel collaboration ever since we’d finished SUCKERS. And I’d read Blake’s work based on Joe’s passionate recommendation and loved it. So basically I was just presented with an outstanding opportunity to piggyback off the success of everybody else, and took it.

JOE: I dug the main concept but didn’t have time to do it alone. It was fun working with you guys on other projects, so I was pretty sure we’d be able to make it work as a team. Funny thing is, I think it turned out better than if I’d done it on my own. You guys each brought unique flavor to the project, and came up with many ideas I would never have thought of.

So does anyone think there will be a sequel? A spin-off? A different project? I’ve got one in the back of my head called MUMMIES…

CUB SCOUT GORE FEAST

A Bonus Short Story by J.A. Konrath & Jeff Strand

“Isn’t this when you start telling scary stories, Mr. Hollis?”

Hollis grinned, staring at the boys around the campfire. Cub Scouts, none of them older than ten. For some, the first night they’d ever spent away from their families.

“Are you scouts sure you want to hear a scary story?”

“Yes!” they chorused.

“Even though it’s dark and we’re all alone in the spooky, menacing forest?”

“Yes! Yes! Yes!”

Hollis sat down on his haunches. His face became serious.

“Okay, I’ll tell you a scary story. Scary because it’s the absolute, hand-on-my-heart truth. You’ve all heard rumors about Troop 192, how they disappeared without a trace not too far from here, right?”

Several of the boys nodded.

“Well, the rumors were wrong. There were lots of traces of Troop 192. There were traces all over the place…on the ground, up in the trees, by the lake, maybe even under where you’re sitting right now. Imagine if you took a blender, like the kind your mothers use to make smoothies, but it was a giant blender, maybe…I dunno, eighteen feet high. And then you dropped the entire Troop 192 into it, and accidentally left the lid off, so that when you pressed the ‘blend’ button they sprayed all over the place. That’s what it looked like.”

“I heard it was just one kid who went missing,” said Anthony.

Hollis shrugged. “If you think one little kid has that many guts inside of his body, more power to you, but I was here. I saw it. It was gross.”

“My mom said they found him the next morning. He was playing Nintendo.”

“Oh, well, I guess your mom is in a position where she was allowed to accompany the law enforcement agencies on their search, huh? Did she somehow become deputized without anybody hearing about it? Do Hooters waitresses typically get to tag along on searches for missing children?”

“She works at Olive Garden.”

“Whatever. She wasn’t there on the night of the investigation. I’m telling you that it was the entire troop, and their insides were strewn as far as the eye can see.” Hollis made a grand gesture with both arms to emphasize the extent of the carnage. “And do you know who got blamed for it?”

Several of the scouts shook their heads.

“Madman Charlie. Oh, they arrested him, and sent him to the electric chair the next morning. But it wasn’t Madman Charlie. When Troop 192 was massacred, he was off murdering a young woman in a completely different county. No, Troop 192 wasn’t slaughtered by Madman Charlie. They weren’t even slaughtered by something…human.”

One of the youngest scouts, Billy somebody, raised his hand. No doubt because he was too terrified to hear more.

“Billy, are you too terrified to hear more?” Hollis asked. “Because that’s okay. Nobody here will judge you.”

“No, Mr. Hollis. I have to go to the bathroom.”

Hollis sighed again. “Go ahead, Billy. But don’t go too far away. Anyway, there’s something inhuman in these woods. Something that hungers for human flesh.”

Theolonious raised his hand. Probably wet himself he was so scared.

“Do we have any more hot dogs?” Theolonious asked.

“You already had three.”

“Jimmy ate the one I dropped one the ground.”

“Jimmy didn’t come with us on this trip.”

“Well, okay, I ate it, but it wasn’t as good as the two that didn’t get dropped on the ground. Can I please have another one?”

“This inhuman creature,” Hollis said, ignoring him and raising his voice, “slaughtered Troop 192 on a night very much like tonight. It cracked open their bones and sucked out the marrow, and slurped up their intestines like spaghetti, then flossed its sharp fangs with their muscle fibers. And rumor has it this insatiable monster still hunts in these very woods, on the night of…” Hollis paused for dramatic effect, “the full moon.”

“Was it a Dracula?” Cecil asked.

“Draculas don’t rip people up,” said Anthony. “Draculas just look unhappy a lot, and kiss girls like in that movie my sister watched seventeen gazillion hundred times.”

“Those were dumb Draculas,” said Cecil. “But there are cool Draculas, like in Lord of the Rings.”

“Those were orcs.”

“Not those! The other ones!”

“That was a Kraken!”

“The horrible creature,” Hollis said, standing tall and raising his arms over his head, “was a werewolf!”

“I thought werewolves just took off their shirts a lot like in that movie with the Draculas.”

Hollis shook his head. “In real life, werewolves like to crack open the rib cages of little boys with their sharp claws and bite their still-beating hearts right from their chests. That’s what happened to Troop 192.”

“If they were attacked by a werewolf,” said Anthony, “wouldn’t they become werewolves?”

“Not if their bodies were shredded and thrown around all over the trees and lake and ground. If you’d been paying attention when I started telling the story you could have caught that little detail.”

“What if a werewolf bit a skunk?” Theolonious asked. “Would it become a werewolfskunk?”

“A werewolf wouldn’t bite a skunk,” Hollis said.

“Why not?”

“Why would it bite a skunk? Would you bite a skunk?”

“I wouldn’t bite a skunk today,” said Mortimer, “but if I was a werewolf, I think I’d bite a skunk if there was one sitting there. You’d have to bite it gently, y’know, so that its whole head doesn’t come off, but I think, y’know, werewolves can bite gently when they want to, even though they usually don’t. They couldn’t use their whole jaw or, y’know, anything like that, but if they just used their front teeth and didn’t close them all the way, I think they could bite a skunk without its head coming off.”

The other cub scouts murmured their agreement.

“Y’know,” Mortimer added.

“And what if the werewolfskunk bit a deer?” asked Theolonious. “Would it turn into a werewolfskunkdeer?”

“I want to know how one werewolf ate all of Troop 192,” said Cecil. “How big is a werewolf’s stomach?”

“Haven’t I already explained that twice?” asked Hollis. “The werewolf didn’t eat their whole bodies. He ate the best parts, then scattered the rest of them all over the place so that the kids couldn’t turn into little werewolves. Do you want a demerit? Do you?”

“I need toilet paper!” Billy yelled from the woods.

“Use leaves!” Hollis hollered back.

“I tried! They’re all stuck to me!”

Fredrick raised his hand. “Would a werewolfskunkdeer try to eat people? Or would it just forage for nuts and berries?”

“You don’t even know what ‘forage’ means,” said Silas.

“It means to search for provisions.”

“Well, you don’t know what ‘tourniquet’ means!”

“Yes, I do. We learned about them last week. It’s that thing you twist around your arm or leg to stop bleeding.”

“Well, you don’t know what ‘hypothesis’ means!”

“Silas! Enough!” Hollis clenched and unclenched his fists a few times. “Anyway…”

Theolonious frowned. “So is a werewolfskunkdeer a person who changes into something that’s a wolf, skunk, and deer all at once, like it has fur and Bambi eyes and sprays skunk spray, or is it a person who can change into a wolf or a skunk or a deer?”

“I have no idea,” Hollis said.

“I think he changes into one of them, but he can’t control which one it is. So he’ll be fighting Bigfoot and he’ll want to change into a wolf because wolves are better at fighting Bigfoot, but he’ll change into a skunk instead and Bigfoot just steps on him. That’s probably why you don’t see many werewolfskunkdeers around anymore.”

“What if a werewolf bit a Dracula who bit a zombie who then bit the werewolf?” asked Cecil.

“My baby brother bit the babysitter, but she didn’t turn into a baby.”

“Shut up!” said Theolonious. “That’s not what we’re talking about!”

“But what if a werewolfskunkdeer bit a wolf? Is it a werewolfskunkdeerwolf, or does the wolf part just not matter because it was already a wolf?”

“Werewolfwolfskunkdeer sounds better,” said Anthony.

“Soon the full moon will rise,” Hollis said, raising his arms theatrically. “And then the werewolf takes its supernatural form and…”

“You mean the werewolfwolfskunkdeer.”

“No. I mean the werewolf. There’s no such thing as a werewolfskunkdeer.”

“You forgot the extra wolf. It’s werewolfwolfskunkdeer.”

“I did not forget the extra wolf. We aren’t talking about the werewolfskunk deer.”

“The werewolfwolfskunkdeer.”

“We’re talking about a werewolf! A regular old werewolf! That’s it. Just a man who turns into a goddamn wolf, okay?”

The scouts went silent. Hollis knew he’d gone too far by using the g.d. word, but the punchline to his story was so amazing and they were ruining it.

“Mr. Hollis, is this poison oak?” Billy asked, walking back to the campfire holding some leaves.

“Yes, Billy. Put that down.”

“I wish I’d picked different leaves. Can I go home?”

“No. There’s some baking soda in the tent. Let me finish my story and I’ll get it for you.”

“Could a werewolf eat a baby whole, in one bite?” asked Anthony.

“I suppose one could,” Hollis said. Actually, he knew that one could. Firsthand. Heh heh.

“So when it pooped out the baby, would the baby be a werepoopwolf?”

“What if a werepoopwolf bit a werewolfwolfskunkdeer?”

“It would be a werewolfwolfwolfpoopskunkdeer.”

“Enough,” Hollis said. “The next person who says something gets a bad report to their parents and they won’t get to come on any more of these trips. Got it? See that full moon up there? That ties into our little story, doesn’t it? Do you see the connection between what happened to Troop 192 and the lunar cycle of today? You get it, right? Do you know what Troop 192 was doing on that fateful night? They were—irony alert—sitting around listening to scary stories from their scoutmaster! Do you get where this is going?”

The scouts remained silent.

Hollis stood up.

“That’s riiiiiiiiight! The story I was trying to tell you is foreshadowing what’s going to happen tonight! Ha! How about that, you little brats? The reason there are so many similarities in the fate of Troop 192 and our situation at this very moment is because I am a werewolf!”

He stood there, facing the moonlight, waiting for the inevitable transformation.

“What story did you tell the other kids?” Cecil asked.

“Excuse me?”

“Were you telling them about another werewolf attack before that one?”

“Yes. That’s right. It’s all a vicious cycle. Each story I tell the scouts is about the previous massacre. I’ll tell the next troop about you guys.”

“If you killed all of those Cub Scout Troops, who keeps hiring you as a scoutmaster?”

He adjusted his angle. Change, dammit, change!

Theolonious raised his hand. “So if you bit a mummy—?”

Screw it, Hollis thought. He’d brought an axe.

Frederick was first, right in the middle of another stupid question when the axe caught him under the chin. It cleaved his jaw in half, his tongue waggling through the gap, blood spurting like a lawn sprinkler.

Hollis pinned Billy under his foot and hacked his arm off, then dangled it above his face, teasing him.

“Stop hitting yourself!” he yelled in Billy’s face, slapping him with his own hand. It was good fun until shock set in and Billy stopped screaming.

Cecil got a straight chop to the throat, but the axe wasn’t sharp enough to decapitate him fully, and his head flopped backward, still attached to some sinew.

As he’d warned earlier, Hollis drove the axe head into Anthony’s ribcage, cracking it open, then diving in the feast on the child’s still-beating heart with his razor-sharp werewolf fangs that seemed rather flat and dull for the job. He did manage to bite off a piece of something that could have been a ventricle, but might have been an atrium. Hollis always got those confused.

Theolonius watched, eyes wide, hugging his knees. He was covered in blood that wasn’t his own. Hollis raised the axe, ready to make a lupine feast of the boy’s small brain, when Theolonious began to scream.

No, not a scream.

That’s more like a howl.

First the boy’s nose extended, becoming hairy and snoutish.

Then claws burst from his fingertips, curving into the shape of scythes.

Hollis dropped the axe, dumbfounded, as the miniature werewolf then grew…

Antlers?

Theolonious quickly spun around, lifting his giant black tail, one that had a white stripe running down it ala Pepe Le Pew.

“Oh no…”

The werewolfskunkdeer sprayed Hollis with its anal scent glands while the scoutmaster was screaming, and some of the spray got into Hollis’s mouth. The smell…the taste…was so bad, Hollis had no choice but to whip out his Swiss Army Knife, thumb open the mini scissors, and immediately begin snipping away at his own nose and tongue, snip snip snipping until…

“Mr. Hollis? Is this the baking soda?”

Hollis blinked away the daydream and stared at Billy.

Hollis sighed. “That’s it, Billy.”

Theolonious raised his hand. “Mr. Hollis? Will we get our fishing merit badges tomorrow?”

“Yes, Theolonious.”

“Is storytime over?” Cecil asked.

“I guess.”

Silas raised his hand.

“What, Silas? Do you want to ask me what ‘transitory’ means?”

“I want to know what’s wrong with your ears. They’re getting longer.”

Hollis slapped his hands against the sides of his head. Indeed, his ears were getting longer. Longer and hairier.

He jammed a finger into his mouth, tapping the quick growing fangs.

It’s about time.

Hollis leapt onto Silas, taking the boys whole head in his mouth. He squeezed his mighty werewolf jaws closed, feeling the skull bend inward, then crack suddenly, popping open like a walnut, squirting hot brains through Silas’s nasal cavity.

With Cecil, he dug his snout into the boy’s belly, clenching his teeth down on a length of intestines, holding tight as Cecil ran for the trees. Cecil managed to pull out his intestines, both large and small, his colon, his stomach, and something that might have been a spleen, before keeling over.

With Billy, Hollis dug one of his claws through the child’s eye socket, then dug it through his skull and out the other eye, holding him like a six-pack. Then he pulled, tearing off the bridge of Billy’s nose.

Theolonious cried out in horror, and Hollis ripped his lungs out of his chest, squeezing them like an accordion, making the scream go on and on and…

“Mr. Hollis? Is that a werewolfskunkdeer?” Cecil asked, pointing at something in the woods.

Hollis shook his head to clear it. The fantasies were getting more and more real. The medication wasn’t working like it should.

“It’s not?” Cecil asked.

“What are you pointing at, Cecil?”

“That thing, with the horns.”

“You mean the tree?”

“No, the…oh, yeah. The branches looked like horns.”

And then the transformation began. For real this time? Hollis bit down on the inside of his mouth as hard as he could. It hurt like hell—this was definitely real. Those little bastards were about to see what a true werewolf could do.

The scouts stared at him. Their jaws dropped as one.

The inside of his cheek was bleeding pretty badly. He shouldn’t have bit so hard.

“That’s right,” he said. “Just like I’ve been hinting over and over, I am a werewolf! And on this night of the full moon, I shall enjoy a Cub Scout gore feast!”

Cecil screamed. Hollis laughed and then, transformation complete, let out the howl of the beast he had become.

“That’s it?” asked Billy.

“What?”

“You’re not very furry.”

“My arms are hairy!”

“Not that hairy. My dad’s arms are hairier.”

“Look at my ears! Those aren’t normal ears anymore. Look at my fingernails! And my nose sort of looks like a snout now!”

“I thought werewolves were supposed to be a lot scarier,” said Theolonious.

“You know what? You kids suck! It’s not my fault that the werewolf who bit me didn’t break the skin all the way, and that I don’t do a complete change! You should still be terrified! When’s the last time you saw somebody’s fingernails grow a full half-inch within ten seconds? Never, that’s when? You’ve never seen somebody’s nose change shape like that!”

“My sister got hit in the face with a basketball and—”

“Shut the hell up! I have killed hundreds of Cub Scouts, and if you think your ridiculous werewolfwolfskunkdeermoosepygmy fucker is the height of terror, then you can all just…just…” No, no, no, I promised myself I wasn’t going to do this again. Please, not again. Don’t let it happen again…

It happened again. Hollis succumbed to tears.

There was a long, uncomfortable silence.

“Mr. Hollis, can we go home and play Nintendo?”

“Yes.” Mr. Hollis wiped the tears from his eyes. “Yes, we can.”

THE END

Serial

A Bonus Short Story by Blake Crouch & J.A. Konrath

1

The hardest thing about killing a hitchhiker is finding one to pick up.

Donaldson could remember just ten years ago, when interstates boasted a hitcher every ten miles, and a discriminating killer could pick and choose who looked the easiest, the most fun, the juiciest. These days, cops kept the expressways clear of easy marks, and Donaldson was forced to cruise off-ramps, underpasses, and rest areas, prowl back roads, take one hour coffee breaks at oases. Recreational murder was becoming more trouble than it was worth.

He’d found this one standing in a Cracker Barrel parking lot. The kid had been obvious, leaning against the cement ashtray near the entrance, an oversize hiking pack strapped to his back. He was approaching every patron leaving the restaurant, practicing his grin between rejections.

A ripe plum, ready to pluck.

Donaldson didn’t even have to initiate contact. He walked in to use the bathroom and strolled out car keys in hand, letting them jingle a bit. The kid solicited him almost immediately.

“Excuse me, sir. Are you heading up north?”

Donaldson stopped, pretending to notice the man for the first time. He was young, maybe mid-twenties. Short, reddish hair, a few freckles on his face, mostly hidden by glasses. His clothing looked worn but of good quality. Donaldson was twice his age, and damn near twice his weight.

Donaldson rubbed his chin, which he knew softened his harsh features.

“In fact I am, son.”

The boy’s eyes lit up, but he kept a lid on his excitement. Any hitcher worth his salt knew to test the waters before sealing the deal.

“I am, too. If you’d like some company, I can chip in for gas.” He hooded his eyes and quickly added, “No funny stuff. I’m just looking for a ride. I was hoping to get to Ogden by midnight. Got family up there. My name’s Brett, by the way.”

Well played, Donaldson thought. Friendly, a little desperate, making clear this wasn’t a sexual hookup and that he had people waiting for him.

As if any of that would keep him safe.

“How do I know you’re not some psycho?” Donaldson asked. He knew that was pushing it, but he liked the irony.

“There’s a gas station across the street. I can top off the tank, pay with a credit card. All gas stations have cameras these days. Credit card is a paper trail. If anything happens to you, that would link me to your car, and I’d get caught.”

Smart kid. But not that smart.

The really smart ones don’t hitchhike.

“Won’t need gas for a few hundred miles.” Donaldson took off his Cubs baseball hat, running a hand over his gray, thinning hair. Another way to disarm the victim. No one feared grandfatherly types. “Until then, if you promise not to sing any show tunes, you got yourself a ride.”

Brett smiled, hefted his pack onto his shoulders, and followed his ride into the parking lot. Donaldson unlocked the doors and the kid loaded his pack into the backseat of Donaldson’s 2006 black Honda Accord, pausing when he saw the clear plastic covers on the front seats.

“My dog, Neil, usually rides up front with me,” Donaldson said, shrugging. “I don’t like him messing up the upholstery.”

Brett flashed skepticism until he noticed the picture taped to the dash: Donaldson and a furry dachshund.

“Sheds like crazy,” Donaldson said. “If you buy a dog, stick with short-haired breeds.”

That was apparently reassurance enough, because Brett climbed in.

Donaldson heaved himself into the driver’s seat, the car bouncing on its shocks.

“Buckle up for safety.” Donaldson resisted the urge to lick his lips, then released the brake, started the car, and pulled onto the highway.

The first ten miles were awkward. Always were. Strangers tended to stay strangers. How often did a person initiate conversation on a plane or while waiting in line? People kept to themselves. It made them feel safe.

Donaldson broke the tension by asking the standard questions. Where’d you go to school? What do you do for a living? Where you headed? When’d you start hitchhiking? Invariably, the conversation turned to him.

“So what’s your name?” Brett asked.

“Donaldson.” No point in lying. Brett wouldn’t be alive long enough to tell anyone.

“What do you do, Donaldson?”

“I’m a courier.”

Donaldson sipped from the Big Gulp container in the cup holder, taking a hit of caffeinated sugar water. He offered the cup to Brett, who shook his head. Probably worried about germs. Donaldson smiled. That should have been the least of his worries.

“So you mean you deliver packages?”

“I deliver anything. Sometimes overnight delivery isn’t fast enough, and people are willing to pay a premium to get it same day.”

“What sort of things?”

“Things people need right away. Legal documents. Car parts for repairs. A diabetic forgets his insulin, guy loses his glasses and can’t drive home without them, kid needs his cello for a recital. Or a kidney needs to get to a transplant location on time. That’s the run I’m on right now.”

Donaldson jerked a thumb over his shoulder, pointing to the backseat floorboard. Brett glanced back, saw a cooler sitting there, a biohazard sticker on the lid.

“No kidding, there’s a kidney in there?”

“There will be, once I get it.” Donaldson winked at the kid. “By the way, what’s your blood type?”

The kid chuckled nervously. Donaldson joined in.

A long stretch of road approaching. No cars in either direction.

“Sounds like an interesting job,” Brett said.

“It is. Perfect for a loner like me. That’s why it’s nice to have company every so often. Gets lonely on the road.”

“What about Neil?”

“Neil?”

Brett pointed at the photograph on the dashboard. “Your dog. You said he rode with you sometimes.”

“Oh, yeah. Neil. Of course. But it isn’t the same as having a human companion. Know what I mean?”

Brett nodded, then glanced at the fuel gauge.

“You’re down to a quarter tank,” he said.

“Really? I thought I just filled up. Next place we see, I’ll take you up on that offer to pay.”

It was a bright, sunny late afternoon, clean country air blowing in through the inch of window Donaldson had open. A perfect day for a drive. The road ahead was clear, no one behind them.

“So seriously,” Donaldson asked, “What’s your blood type?”

Brett’s chuckle sounded forced this time, and Donaldson didn’t join in. Brett put his hand in his pocket. Going for a weapon, or holding one for reassurance, Donaldson figured. Not many hitchers traveled without some form of reassurance.

But Donaldson had something better than a knife, or a gun. His weapon weighed thirty-six hundred pounds and was barreling down the road at eighty miles per hour.

Checking once more for traffic, Donaldson gripped the wheel, braced himself, and stood on the brake.

The car screeched toward a skidding halt, Brett’s seatbelt popping open exactly the way Donaldson had rigged it to, and the kid launched headfirst into the dashboard. The spongy plastic had, beneath the veneer, been reinforced with unforgiving steel.

The car shuddered to a stop, the stench of scorched rubber in the air. Brett was in bad shape. With no seatbelt and one hand in his pocket, he’d banged his nose up pretty good. Donaldson grasped his hair, rammed his face into the dashboard two more times, then opened the glove compartment. He grabbed a plastic zip tie, checked again for oncoming traffic, and quickly secured the kid’s hands behind his back. In Brett’s coat pocket, he found a tiny Swiss Army knife. Donaldson barked out a laugh.

If memory served, and it usually did, there was an off ramp less than a mile ahead, and then a remote stretch of farmland. Donaldson pulled back onto the highway and headed for it, whistling as he drove.

The farm stood just where he remembered it. Donaldson pulled off the road into a cornfield and drove through the dead stalks until he could no longer see the road. He killed the engine, set the parking brake—the Accord had transmission issues—then tugged out the keys to ensure it wouldn’t roll away.

His passenger whimpered as Donaldson muscled him out of the car and dragged him into the stalks.

He whimpered even more when Donaldson jerked his pants down around his ankles, got him loosened up with an ear of corn, and then forced himself inside.

“Gonna stab me with your little knife?” he whispered in Brett’s ear between grunts. “Think that was going to save you?”

When he’d finished, Donaldson sat on the kid’s chest and tried out all the attachments on the Swiss Army knife for himself. The tiny scissors worked well on eyelids. The nail file just reached the eardrums. The little two-inch blade was surprisingly sharp and adept at whittling the nose down to the cartilage. And the corkscrew did a fine job on Brett’s Adam’s apple, popping it out in one piece and leaving a gaping hole that poured blood bright as a young cabernet.

Apple was a misnomer. It tasted more like a peach pit. Sweet and stringy.

He shoved another ear of corn into Brett’s neck hole, then stood up to watch.

Donaldson had killed a lot of people in a lot of different ways, but suffocation especially tickled his funny bone. When people bled to death they just got sleepy. It was tough to see their expression when they were on fire, with all the thrashing and flames. Damaging internal organs, depending on the organ, was either too fast, too slow, or too loud.

But a human being deprived of oxygen would panic for several minutes, providing quite a show. This kid lasted almost five, his eyes bulging out, wrenching his neck side to side in futile attempts to remove the cob, and turning all the colors of the rainbow before finally giving up the ghost. It got Donaldson so excited he almost raped him again. But the rest of the condoms were in the car, and befitting a man his age, once he got them and returned to the scene of death, his ardor probably would have waned.

He didn’t bother trying to take Brett’s kidney, or any of his other parts. What the heck could he do with his organs anyway? Sell them on eBay?

Cleanup was the part Donaldson hated most, but he always followed a strict procedure. First, he bagged everything associated with the crime. The rubber, the zip tie, the Swiss Army knife, and the two corn cobs, which might have his prints on them. Then he took a spray bottle of bleach solution and a roll of paper towels and cleaned out the interior of his car. He used baby wipes on himself, paying special attention to his fingernails. Everything went into the white plastic garbage bag, along with a full can of gasoline and more bleach spray.

He took the money from Brett’s wallet—forty lousy bucks—and found nothing of interest in his backpack. These went into the bag as well, and then he soaked that and the body with lighter fluid.

The fire started easily. Donaldson knew from experience that he had about five minutes before the gas can exploded. He drove out of the cornfield at a fast clip, part of him disappointed he couldn’t stay to watch the fireworks.

The final result would be a mess for anyone trying to ID the victim, gather evidence, or figure out what exactly had happened. If the body wasn’t discovered right away, and the elements and hungry animals added to the chaos, it would be a crime scene investigator’s worst nightmare.

Donaldson knew how effective his disposal method was, because he’d used it twenty-six times and hadn’t ever been so much as questioned by police.

He wondered if the FBI had a nickname for him, something sexy like The Roadside Burner. But he wasn’t convinced those jokers had even connected his many crimes. Donaldson’s courier route took him across four large, Western states, a land area of over four hundred thousand square miles. He waited at least a year before returning to any particular spot, and he was finding new places to play all the time.

Donaldson knew he would never be caught. He was smart, patient, and never compulsive. He could keep on doing this until he died or his pecker wore out, and they had pills these days to fix that.

He reached I-15 at rush hour, traffic clogging routes both in and out of Salt Lake, and he was feeling happy and immortal until some jerk in a Winnebago decided to drive ten miles under the speed limit. Irritated motorists tagged along like ducklings, many of them using their horns, and everyone taking their good sweet time getting by in the passing lane.

Seriously, they shouldn’t allow some people on the road.

Donaldson was considering passing the whole lot of them on the shoulder, and as he surveyed the route and got ready to gun it, he saw a cute chick in pink shoes standing at the cloverleaf. Short, lugging a guitar case, jutting out a hip and shaking her thumb at everyone who passed.

Two in one day? he thought. Do I have the energy?

He cranked open the window to get rid of the bleach smell, and pulled up next to her under the overpass, feeling his arousal returning.

2

She set the guitar case on the pavement and stuck out her thumb. The minivan shrieked by. She turned her head, watched it go—no brakelights. The disappointment blossomed hot and sharp in her gut, like a shot of iced Stoli. Despite the midmorning brilliance of the rising sun, she could feel the cold gnawing through the tips of her gloved fingers, the earflaps of her black woolen hat.

According to her Internet research, 491 (previously 666) ranked as the third least traveled highway in the Lower-Forty-Eight, with an average of four cars passing a fixed point any given hour. Less of course at night. The downside of hitchhiking these little-known thoroughfares was the waiting, but the upside paid generous dividends in privacy.

She exhaled a steaming breath and looked around. Painfully blue sky. Treeless high desert. Mountains thirty miles east. A further range to the northwest. They stood blanketed in snow, and on some level she understood that others would find them dramatic and beautiful, and she wondered what it felt like to be moved by nature.

Two hours later, she lifted her guitar case and walked up the shoulder toward the idling Subaru Outback, heard the front passenger window humming down. She mustered a faint smile as she reached the door. Two young men in the front seats stared at her. They seemed roughly her age and friendly enough, if a little hungover. Open cans of Bud in the center console drink holders had perfumed the interior with the sour stench of beer—a good omen, she thought. Might make things easier.

“Where you headed?” the driver asked. He had sandy hair and an elaborate goatee. Impressive cords of bicep strained the cotton fibers of his muscle shirt. The passenger looked native—dark hair and eyes, brown skin, a thin, implausible mustache.

“Salt Lake,” she said.

“We’re going to Tahoe. We could take you at least to I-15.”

She surveyed the rear storage compartment—crammed with two snowboards and the requisite boots, parkas, snow pants, goggles, and…she suppressed the jolt of pleasure—helmets. She hadn’t thought of that before.

A duffle bag took up the left side of the backseat. A little tight, but then she stood just five feet in her pink crocs. She could manage.

“Comfortable back there?” the driver asked.

“Yes.”

Their eyes met in the rearview mirror.

“What’s your name?”

“Lucy.”

“Lucy, I’m Matt. This is Kenny. We were just about to have us a morning toke before we picked you up. Would it bother you if we did?”

“Not at all.”

“Pack that pipe, bro.”

They got high as they crossed into Utah and became talkative and philosophically confident. They offered her some pot, but she declined. It grew hot in the car and she removed her hat and unbuttoned her black trench coat, breathing the fresh air coming in through the crack at the top of the window.

“So where you going?” the Indian asked her.

“Salt Lake.”

“I already asked her that, bro.”

“No, I mean what for?”

“See some family.”

“We’re going to Tahoe. Do some snowboarding at Heavenly.”

“Already told her that, bro.”

The two men broke up into laughter.

“So you play guitar, huh?” Kenny said.

“Yes.”

“Wanna strum something for us?”

“Not just yet.”

They stopped at a filling station in Moab. Matt pumped gas and Kenny went inside the convenience store to procure the substantial list of snacks they’d been obsessing on for the last hour. When Matt walked inside to pay, she opened the guitar case and took out the syringe. The smell wafted out—not overpowering by any means, but she wondered if the boys would notice. She hadn’t had a chance to properly clean everything in awhile. Lucy reached up between the seats and tested the weight of the two Budweisers in the drink holders: each about half-full. She eyed the entrance to the store—no one coming—and shot a squirt from the syringe into the mouth of each can.

Kenny cracked a can of Bud and said, “Dude, was that shit laced?”

“What are you talking about?”

They sped through a country of red rock and buttes and waterless arroyos.

“What we smoked.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Man, I don’t feel right. Where’d you get it?”

“From Tim. Same as always.”

Lucy leaned forward and studied the double yellow line through the windshield. After Matt drifted across for a third time, she said, “Would you pull over please?”

“What’s wrong?”

“I’m going to be sick.”

“Oh God, don’t puke on our shit.”

Matt pulled over onto the shoulder and Lucy opened her door and stumbled out. As she worked her way down a gentle embankment making fake retching sounds, she heard Matt saying, “Dude? Dude? Come on, dude! Wake up, dude!”

She waited in the bed of the arroyo for ten minutes and then started back up the hill toward the car. Matt had slumped across the center console into Kenny’s lap. The man probably weighed two hundred pounds, and it took Lucy ten minutes to shove him, millimeter by millimeter, into the passenger seat on top of Kenny. She climbed in behind the wheel and slid the seat all the way forward and cranked the engine.

She turned off of I-70 onto 24. According to her map, this stretch of highway ran forty-four miles to a nothing town called Hanksville. From her experience, it didn’t get much quieter than this barren, lifeless waste of countryside.

Ten miles south, she veered onto a dirt road and followed it the length of several football fields, until the highway was almost lost to sight. She killed the engine, stepped out. Late afternoon. Windless. Soundless. The boys would be waking soon, and she was already starting to glow. She opened the guitar case and retrieved the syringe, gave Kenny and Matt another healthy dose.

By the time she’d wrangled them out of the car into the desert, dusk had fallen and she’d drenched herself in sweat. She rolled the men onto their backs and splayed out their arms and legs so they appeared to be making snow angels in the dirt.

Lucy removed their shoes and socks. The pair of scissors was the kind used to cut raw chicken, with thick, serrated blades. She trimmed off their shirts and cut away their pants and underwear.

Kenny and Matt had returned to full, roaring consciousness by 1:15 A.M. Naked. Ankles and wrists tightly bound with deeply scuffed handcuffs, heads helmeted, staring at the small, plain hitchhiker who squatted down facing them at the back of the car, blinding them with a hand held spotlight.

“I didn’t think you were ever going to wake up,” Lucy said.

“What the hell are you doing?” Matt looked angry.

Kenny said, “These cuffs hurt. Get them off.”

She held a locking carabiner attached to a chain that ran underneath the Subaru. She clipped it onto another pair of carabiners. A rope fed through each one, and the ends of the ropes had been tied to the handcuffs on the boys’ ankles.

“Oh my God, she’s crazy, dude.”

“Lucy, please. Don’t. We’ll give you anything you want. We won’t tell anyone.”

She smiled. “That’s really sweet of you, Matt, but this is what I want. Kind of have my heart set on it.”

She stepped over the tangle of chain and rope and moved toward the driver’s door as the boys hollered after her.

She left the hatch open so she could hear them. Kept looking back as she drove slowly, so slowly, along the dirt road. They were still begging her, and occasionally yelling when they dragged over a rock or a cactus, but she got them to the shoulder of Highway 24 with only minor injuries.

The moon was up and nearly full. She could see five miles of the road in either direction, so perfectly empty and black, and she wondered if the way it touched her in this moment felt anything like how the beauty of the those mountains she’d seen this morning touched normal people.

Lucy buckled her seatbelt and glanced in the rearview mirror. Matt had climbed to his feet, and he hobbled toward the car.

“Hey, no fair!” she yelled and gave the accelerator a little gas, jerking his feet out from under him. “All right, count of three. We’ll start small with half a mile!”

She grasped the steering wheel, heart pumping. She’d done this a half dozen times but never with helmets.

“One! Two! Three!”

She reset the odometer and eased onto the accelerator. Five, ten, fifteen, twenty miles per hour, and the boys already beginning to scream. At four-tenths of a mile, she hit forty, and in the rearview mirror, Kenny’s and Matt’s pale and naked bodies writhed in full-throated agony, both trying to sit up and grab the rope and failing as they slid across the pavement on their bare backs, dragged by their cuffed ankles, the chains throwing gorgeous yellow sparks against the asphalt.

She eased off the gas and pulled over onto the shoulder. Collected the spray bottle from the guitar case, unbuckled, jumped out, and went to the boys. They lay on their backs, blood pooling beneath them. Kenny must have rolled briefly onto his right elbow, because it had been sanded down to bone.

“Please,” Matt croaked. “Please.”

“You don’t know how beautiful you look,” she said, “but I’m gonna make you even prettier.” She spritzed them with pure, organic lemon juice, especially their backs, and to the heartwarming depth of their new screams, skipped back to the car and hopped in and stomped the gas, their cries rising into something like the baying of hounds, Lucy howling back. She pushed the Subaru past fifty, to sixty, to seventy-five, and in the illumination of the spotlight, the boys bounced along the pavement, on their backs, their sides, their stomachs, and with every passing second looking more and more lovely, and still making those delicious screams she could almost taste, Lucy driving with no headlights, doing eighty under the moon, and the cold winter wind rushing through the windows like the breath of God.

She made it five miles (no one had ever lasted five miles and she credited those well-made snowboarding helmets) before the skeletons finally went quiet.

Lucy ditched what was left of the boys and drove all night like she’d done six blasts of coke, arriving in Salt Lake as the sun edged up over the mountains. She checked into a Red Roof Inn and ran a hot bath and cleaned the new blood and the old blood out of the ropes and let the carabiners and the chains and the handcuffs soak in the soapy water.

In the evening she awoke, that dark weight perched on her chest again. The guitar case items had dried, and she packed them away and dressed and headed out. The motel stood along the interstate, and it came down to Applebee’s or Chili’s.

She went with the latter, because she loved their Awesome Blossom.

After dinner, she walked outside and stared at the Subaru in the parking lot, the black rot flooding back inside of her, that restless, awful energy that could never be fully sated, those seconds of release never fully quenching, like water tinged with salt. She turned away from the Subaru and walked along the frontage road until she came to a hole in the fence. Ducked through. Scrambled down to the shoulder of the interstate.

Traffic was moderate, the night cold and starry. A line of cars approached, bottled up behind a Winnebago.

She walked under the bridge, set down her guitar case, and stuck out her thumb.

3

Donaldson pulled over onto the shoulder and lowered the passenger window. The girl was young and tiny, wearing a wool cap despite the relative warmth.

“Where you headed?” He winked before he said it, his smile genuine.

“Missoula,” Lucy answered.

“Got a gig up there?” He pointed his chin at her guitar case.

She shrugged.

“Well, I’m going north. If you chip in for gas, and promise not to sing any show tunes, you can hop in.”

The girl seemed to consider it, then nodded. She opened the rear door and awkwardly fit the guitar case onto the backseat. Before getting in, she stared at the upholstery on the front seats.

“What’s with the plastic?” she asked, indicating Donaldson’s clear seat covers.

“Sometimes I travel with my dog.”

Lucy squinted at the picture taped to the dashboard—the portly driver holding a long-haired dachshund.

“What’s its name?”

“Scamp. Loveable little guy. Hates it when I’m away. But I’m away a lot. I’m a courier. Right now, I’m headed up to Idaho Falls to pick up a donor kidney.”

Her eyes flitted to the backseat, to a cooler with a biohazard sign on the lid.

“Don’t worry,” he said, taking off his hat and rubbing a hand through his thinning gray hair. “It’s empty for the time being.”

The girl nodded, started to get in, then stopped. “Would you mind if I sat in the back? I don’t want to make you feel like a chauffeur, but I get nauseated riding up front unless I’m driving.”

Donaldson paused. “Normally I wouldn’t mind, Miss, but I don’t have any seat belts back there, and I insist my passengers wear one. Safety first, I always say.”

“Of course. Can’t be too careful. Cars can be dangerous.”

“Indeed they can. Indeed.”

The front passenger door squeaked open, and the girl hopped in. Donaldson watched her buckle up, and then he accelerated back onto the highway.

Grinning at her, he rubbed his chin and asked, “So what’s your name, little lady?”

“I’m Lucy.” She looked down at the center console. A Big Gulp sweated in the drink holder. She reached into her pocket and looked at the man and smiled. “I really appreciate you picking me up. I don’t think I caught your name.”

“Donaldson. Pleased to meet you.”

“Is that really your last name, or are you one of those guys who have a last name for a first name?”

“No, that’s my first.”

They drove in silence for a mile, Donaldson glancing between the girl and the road.

“Highway’s packed this time of day. I bet we’d make better time on the county roads. Less traffic. If that’s okay with you, of course.”

“I was actually just going to suggest that,” Lucy said. “Weird.”

“Well, I wouldn’t want to do anything to make you feel uncomfortable.” Donaldson glanced down at Lucy’s pocket. “Pretty young thing like yourself might get nervous driving off the main drag. In fact, you don’t see many young lady hitchers these days. I think horror movies scared them all away. Everyone’s worried about climbing into the car with a maniac.”

Donaldson chuckled.

“I love county roads,” Lucy said. “Much prettier scenery, don’t you think?”

He nodded, taking the next exit, and Lucy leaned over, almost into his lap, and glanced at the gas gauge.

“You’re running pretty low there. Your reserve light’s on. Why don’t we stop at this gas station up ahead. I’ll put twenty in the tank. I also need something to drink. This mountain air is making my throat dry.”

Donaldson shifted in his seat. “Oh, that light just came on, and I can get fifty miles on reserve. This is a Honda, you know.”

“But why push our luck? And I’m really thirsty, Donaldson.”

“Here.” He lifted his Big Gulp. “It’s still half full.”

“No offense, but I don’t drink after strangers, and I um…this is embarrassing…I have a cold sore in my mouth.”

The gas station was coming up fast, and by all accounts it appeared to be the last stop before the county road started its climb into the mountains, into darkness.

“Who am I to say no to a lady?” Donaldson said.

He tapped the brakes and coasted into the station. It had probably been there for forty years, and hadn’t updated since then. Donaldson sidled up to an old-school pump—one with a meter where the numbers actually scrolled up, built way back when closed-circuit cameras were something out of a science fiction magazine.

Donaldson peered over Lucy, into the small store. A bored female clerk sat behind the counter, apparently asleep. White trash punching the minimum wage clock, not one to pay much attention.

“The tank’s on your side,” Donaldson said. “I don’t think these old ones take credit cards.”

“I can pay cash inside. I buy, you fly.”

Donaldson nodded. “Okay. I’m fine with doin’ the pumpin’. Twenty, you said?”

“Yeah. You want anything?”

“If they have any gum that isn’t older than I am, pick me up a pack. I’ve got an odd taste in my mouth for some reason.”

Lucy got out of the car. Donaldson opened the glove compartment and quickly shoved something into his coat pocket. Then he set the parking brake, pocketed the keys, and followed her out.

While Donaldson stood pumping gas into the Honda, Lucy walked across the oil-stained pavement and into the store. The clerk didn’t acknowledge her entrance, just sat staring at a small black-and-white television airing Jeopardy, her chin propped up in her hand and a Marlboro Red with a one-inch ash trailing smoke toward the ceiling.

Lucy walked down the aisle to the back of the store and picked a Red Bull out of the refrigerated case. At the drink fountain, she went with the smallest size—sixteen ounces—and filled the cup with ice to the brim, followed by a little Dr. Pepper, Mountain Dew, Pepsi, and Orange Fanta.

She glanced back toward the entrance and through the windows. Donaldson was still fussing with the pump. She reached into her pocket and withdrew the syringe. Uncapped the needle, shot a super-size squirt of liquid Oxycontin into the bubbling soda.

At the counter, she chose a pack of Juicy Fruit and pushed the items forward.

The clerk tore herself away from a video Daily Double and rang up the purchase.

“$24.52.”

Lucy looked up from her wallet. “How much of that is gas?”

“Twenty.”

“Shit, I told him just do fifteen. Here.” She put a Jefferson on the filthy counter. “I’ll send him in with the balance, ‘cause this is all I’ve got.”

“Don’t be trying to steal my gas.”

Donaldson was screwing on the gas cap when Lucy walked up. She said, “They still need five bucks. I’m sorry. It came to more than twenty with the drinks and gum. I’m out of cash.”

“No ATM?”

“Here? Lucky they have electricity. I’ll get you next stop.” She flashed a shy grin, sashaying her fingers through the air. “Cross my heart and hope to die.”

He just stared at her for a moment, then turned and started toward the store. Lucy opened the front passenger door and traded out Donaldson’s Big Gulp for the fresh drink. She tossed the bucket-size cup into a trashcan between the pumps and climbed in.

Donaldson was at the counter. Lucy glanced into the backseat at the cooler with the biohazard sign. She looked into the convenience store, back at the cooler, then spun quickly around in her seat and reached back toward the lid.

Empty. The inside a dull, stained white. She closed it again.

Donaldson’s footsteps slapped at the pavement. She settled back into her seat as he opened his door. The chassis bounced when he eased his bulk behind the wheel.

“Sorry about that,” Lucy said. “I thought I had another ten. I could swear my snowboarder friend gave me some cash.” She stuck out her lower lip, pouting. “I got you some gum. And a new drink.”

Donaldson frowned, but he took the Juicy Fruit, ran it under his nose.

“Thank you, kindly. Fresh soda too, huh?”

Lucy cracked open the Red Bull and nodded.

“Cheers. To new friends.” She took a sip. A trail of pink liquid dribbled down the corner of her mouth, hugging her chin and neck, dampening her shirt.

Donaldson shifted in his chair and reached for the cup. He sipped on the straw and made a face.

“What flavor is this?”

“I didn’t know what you liked,” Lucy said. “So I got you a little of everything.”

Donaldson chuckled his approval, then turned the key and put the car into gear.

The winding county road ahead was pitch black, like driving through ink. Donaldson sipped his soda. Lucy watched him closely, taking periodic nips at her energy drink. The cool, dry air seemed to crackle with electricity as they climbed into the mountains.

“So is that really a guitar in that case?” Donaldson asked after five miles of silence.

“What do you think?”

“I’ll be honest with you, darlin’. You’re a bit of a mystery to me. I’ve been around, but I’m not sure what to make of you.”

“How so?”

“You’re young. But you’ve heard of Vietnam, I’m guessing.”

“I loved Platoon.”

Donaldson nodded. “Well then, you were practically there in the rice paddies with me, going toe-to-toe with the Cong.”

He drank more soda. Lucy watched.

“Took some shrapnel in my hip in Ca Lu,” Donaldson said. “Nicked my sciatic nerve. Biggest nerve in the body. Pain sometimes gets so bad I can chew through a bath towel. Do you understand pain, little girl?”

“More so than you’d think.”

“So you should know, then, opiates and I are friends from way back.” Donaldson took a big pull off the soda. “So spiking my drink here hasn’t done much more than make me a little horny. Actually a lot horny.” Donaldson turned to Lucy. “You’re about as musical as I am Christian. So you want to tell me what your game is, or do I take you over my knee and spank you right now like the naughty girl you are?”

Lucy said, “It’s Oxycontin. Did they have that back in ‘Nam, gramps? And you being one fat bastard, I squirted two hundred and fifty milligrams into your drink. I’m not some frat boy trying to roofie up a chunky freshman. I gave you the rhino dose.”

She tested the weight of the Styrofoam cup. “Jesus, you’ve already gone through half of it? I’m actually more concerned you’re going to die of a drug overdose instead of the fun I have planned.”

She reached across the seat and squeezed his leg. “Look, you will be losing consciousness shortly, so we don’t have much time. Pull the car over. I’d like to take you up on that spanking.”

Donaldson stared at her, blinked hard twice, and stomped the brake pedal.

Lucy’s seatbelt released and she slammed into the metal-reinforced dashboard. Donaldson shook his head, then swiped the zip tie from his pocket. He grabbed a handful of wool cap and the hair beneath it and yanked Lucy up off the floor. She fought hard, but weight and strength won out and he cinched her hands behind her back.

Donaldson glanced through the windshield, then checked the rearview mirror. Darkness.

Lucy laughed through her shattered nose and ran her tongue along her swollen upper lip and gums—two front teeth MIA.

Donaldson blinked and shook his head again. Pulled off the road onto the shoulder.

“We’re gonna have some fun, little girl,” he said. “And two hundred and fifty milligrams is like candy to me.”

He ran a clumsy paw across her breasts, squeezing hard, then turned his attention to the backseat.

The guitar case had two clasps, one on the body, one on the neck.

Donaldson slapped the left side of his face three times and then opened the case.

A waft of foulness seeped out of the velvet-lined guitar lid, although the contents didn’t seem to be the source—a length of chain. Four pairs of handcuffs. Three carabiners. Vials of liquid Oxycontin. Cutlery shears. A spotlight. A small spray bottle. Two coils of climbing rope. And a snowboarding helmet.

The front passenger door squeaked open and Donaldson spun around as Lucy fell backward out of the car. He lunged into her seat, but she kicked the door. It slammed into his face, his chin crunching his mouth closed, and as the door recoiled, he saw Lucy struggling onto her feet, her wrists still bound behind her back.

She disappeared into the woods.

Donaldson took a moment, fumbling for the door handle. He found it, but paused.

He adjusted the rearview mirror, grinning to see the blood between his teeth.

“Should we let this one go, sport? Or show the little missus that there are things a lot scarier than a guitar case full of bondage shit?”

Donaldson winked at his reflection, yanked out the keys, yanked up the brake, and shoved his door open. He weaved over to the trunk, a stupid grin on his face, got the right key in on the third try.

Among the bottles of bleach solution, the rolls of paper towels, the gas cans, and the baby wipes, Donaldson grabbed the only weapon an upstanding citizen could legally carry without harassment from law enforcement.

The tire iron clenched in his hand, he bellowed at the woods.

“I’m coming for you, Lucy! And there won’t be any drugs to dull yourpain!”

He stumbled into the forest after her, his erection beginning to blossom.

She crouched behind a juniper tree, the zip tie digging into her wrists. Absolute darkness in the woods, nothing to see, but everything to hear.

Donaldson yelled, “Don’t hide from me, little girl! It’ll just make me angry!”

His heavy footsteps crunched in the leaves. Lucy eased down onto her butt and leaned back, legs in the air, then slid her bound wrists up the length of them. Donaldson stumbled past her tree, invisible, less than ten feet away.

“Lucy? Where are you?” His words slurred. “I just wanna talk.”

“I’m over here, big boy! Still waiting for that spanking!”

His footsteps abruptly stopped. Dead quiet for thirty seconds, and then the footsteps started up again, heading in her general direction.

“Oh, no, please,” she moaned. “Don’t hurt me, Donaldson. I’m so afraid you’ll hurt me.”

He was close now, and she turned and started back toward the road, her hands out in front of her to prevent collision with a tree.

A glint of light up ahead—the Honda’s windshield catching a piece of moonlight.

Lucy emerged from the woods, her hands throbbing from circulation loss. She stumbled into the car and turned around to watch the treeline.

“Come on, big boy! I’m right here! You can make it!”

Donaldson staggered out of the woods holding a tire iron, and when the moon struck his eyes, they were already half-closed.

He froze.

He opened his mouth to say something, but fell over instead, dropping like an old, fat tree.

Donaldson opened his eyes and lifted his head. Dawn and freezing cold. He lay in weeds at the edge of the woods, his head resting in a padded helmet. His wrists had been cuffed, hands purple from lack of blood flow, and his ankles were similarly bound. He was naked and glazed with dew, and as the world came into focus, he saw that one of those carabiners from Lucy’s guitar case had been clipped to his ankle cuffs. A climbing rope ran from that carabiner to another carabiner, which was clipped to a chain which was wrapped around the trailer hitch of his Honda.

The driver-side door opened and Lucy got out, walked down through the weeds. She came over and sat on his chest, giving him a missing-toothed smile.

“Morning, Donaldson. You of all people will appreciate what’s about to happen.”

Donaldson yawned, then winked at her. “Aren’t you just the prettiest thing to wake up to?”

Lucy batted her eyelashes.

“Thank you. That’s sweet. Now, the helmet is so you don’t die too fast. Head injuries ruin the fun. We’ll go slow in the beginning. Barely walking speed. Then we’ll speed up a bit when we get you onto asphalt. The last ones screamed for five miles. They where skeletons when I finally pulled over. But you’re so heavy, I think you just might break that record.”

“I have some bleach spray in the trunk,” Donaldson said. “You might want to spritz me with that first, make it hurt even more.”

“I prefer lemon juice, but it’s no good until after the first half mile.”

Donaldson laughed.

“You think this is a joke?”

He shook his head. “No. But when you have the opportunity to kill, you should kill. Not talk.”

Donaldson sat up, quick for a man his size, and rammed his helmet into Lucy’s face. As she reeled back, he caught her shirt with his swollen hands and rolled on top of her, his bulk making her gasp.

“The keys,” he ordered. “Undo my hands, right now.”

Lucy tried to talk, but her lungs were crushed. Donaldson shifted and she gulped in some air.

“In…the…guitar case…”

“That’s a shame. That means you die right here. Personally, I think suffocation is the way to go. All that panic and struggle. Dragging some poor sap behind you? Where’s the fun in that? Hell, you can’t even see it without taking your eyes off the road, and that’s a dangerous way to drive, girl.”

Lucy’s eyes bulged, her face turning scarlet.

“Poc…ket.”

“Take your time. I’ll wait.”

Lucy managed to fish out the handcuff keys. Donaldson shifted again, giving her a fraction more room, and she unlocked a cuff from one of his wrists.

He winced, his face getting mean.

“Now let me tell you about the survival of the fittest, little lady. There’s a…”

The chain suddenly jerked, tugging Donaldson across the ground. He clutched Lucy.

“Where are the car keys, you stupid bitch?”

“In the ignition…”

“You didn’t set the parking brake! Give me the handcuff key!”

The car crept forward, beginning to pick up speed as it rolled quietly down the road.

The skin of Donaldson’s right leg tore against the ground, peeling off, and the girl pounded on him, fighting to get away.

“The key!” he howled, losing his grip on her. He clawed at her waist, her hips, and snagged her foot.

Lucy screamed when the cuff snicked tightly around her ankle.

“No! No no no!” She tried to sit up, to work the key into the lock, but they hit a hole and it bounced from her grasp.

They were dragged off the dirt and onto the road.

Lucy felt the pavement eating through her trench coat, Donaldson in hysterics as it chewed through the fat of his ass, and the car still accelerating down the five-percent grade.

At thirty miles per hour, the fibers of Lucy’s trench coat were sanded away, along with her camouflage panties, and just as she tugged a folding knife out of her pocket and began to hack at her ankle, the rough county road began to grind through her coccyx.

She dropped the knife and they screamed together for two of the longest miles of their wretched lives, until the road curved and the Honda didn’t, and the car and Lucy and Donaldson all punched together through a guardrail and took the fastest route down the mountain.

THE END

A SOUND OF BLUNDER

A Bonus Short Story by J.A. Konrath & F. Paul Wilson

“We’re dead! We’re freakin’ dead!”

Mick Brady, known by the criminal underground of Arkham, Pennsylvania as “Mick the Mick,” held a shaking fist in front of Willie Corrigan’s face. Willie recoiled like a dog accustomed to being kicked.

“I’m sorry, Mick!”

Mick the Mick raised his arm and realized that smacking Willie wasn’t going to help their situation. He smacked him anyway, a punch to the gut that made the larger man double over and grunt like a pig.

“Jesus, Mick! You hit me in my hernia! You know I got a bulge there!”

Mick the Mick grabbed a shock of Willie’s greasy brown hair and jerked back his head so they were staring eye-to-eye.

“What do you think Nate the Nose is going to do to us when he finds out we lost his shit? We’re both going to be eating San Francisco Hot Dogs, Willie.”

Willie’s eyes got wide. Apparently the idea of having his dick cut off, boiled, and fed to him on a bun with a side of fries was several times worse than a whack to the hernia.

“We’ll…we’ll tell him the truth. Maybe he’ll understand.”

“You want to tell the biggest mobster in the state that your Nana used a key of uncut Columbian to make a pound cake?”

“It was an accident,” Willie whined. “She thought it was flour. Hey, is that a spider on the wall? Spiders give me the creeps, Mick. Why do they need eight legs? Other bugs only got six.”

Mick the Mick realized that hitting Willie again wouldn’t help anything. He hit him anyway, a slap across his face that echoed off the concrete floor and walls of Willie’s basement.

“Jesus, Mick! You hit me in my bad tooth! You know I got a cavity there!”

Mick the Mick was considering where he would belt his friend next, even though it wasn’t doing either of them any good, when he heard the basement door open.

“You boys playing nice down there?”

“Yes, Nana,” Willie called up the stairs. He nudged Mick the Mick and whispered, “Tell Nana yes.”

Mick the Mick rolled his eyes, but managed to say, “Yes, Nana.”

“Would you like some pound cake? It didn’t turn out very well for some reason, but Bruno seems to like it.”

Bruno was Willie’s dog, an elderly beagle. He tore down the basement stairs, ran eighteen quick laps around Mick the Mick and Willie, and then barreled, full-speed, face-first into the wall, knocking himself out. Mick the Mick watched as the dog’s tiny chest rose and fell with the speed of a weed wacker.

“No thanks, Nana,” Mick the Mick said.

“It’s on the counter, if you want any. Good night, boys.”

“Night, Nana,” they answered in unison.

Mick the Mick wondered how the hell they could get out of this mess. Maybe there was some way to separate the coke from the cake, using chemicals and stuff. But they wouldn’t be able to do it themselves. That meant telling Nate the Nose, which meant San Francisco Hot Dogs. In his twenty-four years since birth, Mick the Mick had grown very attached to his penis. He’d miss it something awful.

“We could sell the cake,” Willie said.

“You think someone is going to pay sixty thousand bucks for a pound cake?”

“It’s just an idea.”

“It’s a stupid idea, Willie. No junkie is going to snort baked goods. Ain’t gonna happen.”

“So what should we do? I—hey, did you hear if the Phillies won? Phillies got more legs than a spider. And you know what? They catch flies too! That’s a joke, Mick.”

“Shaddup. I need to think.”

Mick the Mick couldn’t think of anything, so he punched Willie again, even though it didn’t solve anything.

“Jesus, Mick! You hit my kidney! You know I got a stone there!”

Mick the Mick walked away, rubbing his temples, willing an idea to come.

“That one really hurt, Mick.”

Mick the Mick shushed him.

“I mean it. I’m gonna be pissing red for a week.”

“Quiet, Willie. Lemme think.”

“It looks like cherry Kool-Aid. And it burns, Mick. Burns like fire.”

Mick the Mick snapped his fingers. Fire.

“That’s it, Willie. Fire. Your house is insured, right?”

“I guess so. Hey, do you think there’s any pizza left? I like pepperoni. That’s a fun word to say. Pepperoni. It rhymes with lonely. You think pepperoni gets lonely, Mick?”

To help Willie focus, Mick the Mick kicked him in his bum leg, even though it really didn’t help him focus much.

“Jesus, Mick! You know I got gout!”

“Pay attention, Willie. We burn down the house, collect the insurance, and pay off Nate the Nose.”

Willie rubbed his shin, wincing.

“But where’s Nana supposed to live, Mick?”

“I hear the Miskatonic Nursing Home is a lot nicer, now that they arrested the guy who was making all the old people wear dog collars.”

“I can’t put Nana in a nursing home, Mick!”

“Would you rather be munching on your vein sausage? Nate the Nose makes you eat the whole thing, or else you also get served a side of meatballs.”

Willie folded his arms. “I won’t do it. And I won’t let you do it.”

Mick the Mick took aim and punched Willie in his bad knee, where he had the metal pins, even though it did nothing to fix their problem.

“Jesus, Mick! You hit me in the…”

“Woof!”

Bruno the beagle sprang to his feet, ran sixteen laps around the men, then tore up the stairs.

“Bruno!” they heard Nana chide. “Get off the counter! You’ve had enough pound cake!”

Mick the Mick put his face in his hands, very close to tears. The last time he cried was ten years ago, when Nate the Nose ordered him to break his mother’s thumbs because she was late with a loan payment. When he tried, Mom had stabbed Mick the Mick with a meat thermometer. That hurt, but not as much as a wiener-ectomy would.

“Maybe we can leave town,” Willie said, putting a hand on Mick the Mick’s shoulder.

That left Willie’s kidney exposed. Mick the Mick took advantage, even though it didn’t help their situation.

Willie fell to his knees. Bruno the beagle tore down the stairs, straddled Willie’s calf, and began to hump so fast his little doggie hips were a blur.

Mick the Mick began searching the basement for something flammable. As it often happened in life, arson was really the only way out. He found a can of paint thinner on a dusty metal shelf and worked the top with his thumbnail.

“Mick, no!”

Mick couldn’t get it open. He tried his teeth.

“You can’t burn my house down, Mick! All my stuff is here! Like my comics! We used to collect comics when we were kids, Mick! Don’t you remember?”

Willie reached for a box, dug out a torn copy of Amazing Spiderman #146, and traced his finger up and down Scorpion’s tail in a way that made Mick the Mick uncomfortable. So he reached out and slapped Willie’s bad tooth. Willie dropped the comic and curled up fetal, and Bruno the beagle abandoned the calf for the loftier possibilities of Willie’s head.

Mick managed to pop the top on the can, and he began to sprinkle mineral spirits on some bags labeled Precious Photos & Memories.

Willie moaned something unintelligible through closed lips—he was probably afraid to open his mouth until he disengaged Bruno the beagle.

“Mmphp-muummph-mooeoemmum!”

“We don’t have a choice, Willie. The only way out of this is fire. Beautiful, cleansing fire. If there’s money left over, we’ll bribe the orderlies so Nana doesn’t get abused. At least not as much as the others.”

“Mick!” Willie cried. It came out “Mibb!” because Bruno the beagle had taken advantage. Willie gagged, shoving the dog away. Bruno the beagle ran around Willie seven times then flew up the stairs.

“Bruno!” they heard Nana chide. “Naughty dog! Not when we have company over!”

Willie hacked and spit, then sat up.

“A heist, Mick. We could do a heist.”

“No way,” Mick the Mick said. “Remember what happened to Jimmy the Spleen? Tried to knock over a WaMu in Pittsburgh. Cops shot his ass off. His whole ass. You want one of them creepy poop bags hanging on your belt?”

Willie wiped a sleeve across his tongue. “Not a bank, Mick. The Arkham Museum.”

“The museum?”

“They got all kinds of expensive old stuff. And it ain’t guarded at night. I bet we could break in there, get away with all sorts of pricey antiques. I think they got like a T-rex skull. That could be worth a million bucks. If I had a million bucks, I’d buy some scuba gear, so I could go deep diving on shipwrecks and try to find some treasure so I could be rich.”

Mick the Mick rolled his eyes.

“You think Tommy the Fence is going to buy a T-rex skull? How we even gonna get it out of there, Willie? You gonna put it in your pocket?”

“They got other stuff too, Mick. Maybe gold and gems and stamps.”

“I got a stamp for you.”

“Jesus, Mick! My toe! You know I got that infected ingrown!”

Mick the Mick was ready to offer seconds, but he stopped mid-stomp.

“You ever been to the Museum, Willie?”

“Course not. You?”

“Nah.”

But maybe it wasn’t a totally suck-awful idea.

“What about the alarms?”

“We can get past those, Mick. No problem. Hey, you think I need a haircut? If I look up, I can see my bangs.”

Willie did just that. Mick the Mick stared at the cardboard boxes, soaked with paint thinner. He wanted to light them up, watch them burn. But insurance took forever. There were investigations, forms to fill out, waiting periods.

But if they went to the museum and pinched something small and expensive, chances are they could turn it around in a day or two. The faster they could pay off Nate the Nose, the safer Little Mick and the Twins were.

“Okay, Willie. We’ll give it a try. But if it don’t work, we torch Nana’s house. Agreed?”

“Agreed.”

Mick the Mick extended his hand. Willie reached for it, leaving his hernia bulge unprotected. Now that they had a plan, it served absolutely no purpose to hit Willie again.

He hit him anyway.

“I don’t like it in here, Mick.” Willie said as they entered the great central hall of the Arkham Pennsylvania Museum of Natural History and Baseball Cards.

Mick the Mick gave him a look, which was pretty useless since Willie couldn’t see his face and he couldn’t see Willie’s. The only things they could see were whatever lay at the end of their flashlight beams.

Getting in had been a walk. Literally. The front doors were unlocked. And no alarm. Really weird. Unless the museum had stopped locking up because nobody ever came here. Mick the Mick had lived in Arkham all his life and never met anyone who’d ever come here except on a class trip. Made a kind of sense then to not bother with locks. Nobody came during the day when the lights were on, so why would anyone want to come when the lights were out?

Which made Mick the Mick a little nervous about finding anything valuable.

“It’s just a bunch of rooms filled with loads of old crap.”

Willie’s voice shook. “Old stuff scares me. Especially this old stuff.”

“Why?”

“‘Cause it’s old and—hey, can we stop at Burger Pile on the way home?”

“Focus, Willie. You gotta focus.”

“I like picking off the sesame seeds and making them fight wars.”

Mick the Mick took a swing at him and missed in the dark.

Suddenly the lights went on. They were caught. Mick the Mick feared prison almost as much as he feared Nate the Nose. He was small for his size, and unfortunately blessed with perfectly-shaped buttocks. The cons would trade him around like cigarettes.

Mick the Mick ducked into a crouch, ready to run for the nearest exit. He saw Willie standing by a big arched doorway with his hand on a light switch.

“There,” Willie said, grinning. “That’s better.”

Mick wanted to punch his hernia again but he was too far away.

“Put those out!”

Willie stepped away from the wall toward one of the displays. “Hey, look at this.”

Mick the Mick realized the damage had been done. Sooner or later someone would come to investigate. Okay, maybe not, but they couldn’t risk it. They’d have to move fast.

He looked up and saw a banner proclaiming the name of the exhibit: Elder Gods and Lost Races of South Central Pennsylvania.

“What’s this?” Willie said, leaning over a display case.

Suddenly a deep voice boomed: “WELCOME!”

Willie cried, “Whoa!” and Mick the Mick jumped—high enough so as if he’d been holding a basketball he could have made his first dunk.

Soon as he recovered, he did a thorough three-sixty but saw no one else but Willie.

“What you see before you,” the voice continued, “is a rare artifact that once belonged to an ancient lost race that dwelled in the Arkham area during prehistoric times. This, like every other ancient artifact in this room, was excavated from a site near the Arkham landfill.”

After recovering from another near dunk, plus a tiny bit of pee-pee, Mick noticed a speaker attached to the underside of the case.

Ah-ha. A recording triggered by a motion detector. But the sound was a little garbled, reminding him of the voice of the aliens in an old black-and-white movie he and Willie had watched on TV last week. The voice always began, “People of Earth …” but he couldn’t remember the name of the film.

“We know little about this ancient lost race but, after careful examination by the eminent archeologists and anthropologists here at the Arkham Pennsylvania Museum of Natural History and Baseball Cards, they arrived at an irrefutable conclusion.”

“Hey, Willie said, grinning. “Sounds like the alien voice from Earth versus the Flying Saucers.”

“The artifact before you once belonged to an ancient shaman.”

“What’s a shaman, Mick?”

Mick the Mick remembered seeing something about that on TV once. “I think he’s a kind of a witch doctor. But forget about—”

“A shaman, for those of you who don’t know, is something of a tribal wise man, what the less sophisticated among you might call a ‘witch doctor.’ “

“Witch doctor? Cooool.”

Mick the Mick stepped over to see what the voice was talking about. Under the glass he saw a three-foot metal staff with a small globe at each end.

“The eminent archeologists and anthropologists here at the Arkham Pennsylvania Museum of Natural History and Baseball Cards have further determined that the object is none other an ancient shaman’s scepter of power.”

Willie looked a Mick the Mick with wide eyes. “Did you hear that? A scepter of power! Is that like He-Man’s Power Sword? He-Man was really strong, but he had hair like a girl. Is the scepter of power like a power sword, Mick?”

“No, it’s more like a magic wand, but forget—”

“The less sophisticated among you might refer to a scepter of power as a ‘magic wand,’ and in a sense it functioned as such.”

“A magic wand! Like in the Harry Potter movies? I love those movies, and I’ve always wanted a magic wand! Plus I get crazy hot thoughts about Hermoine. She’s a real fox. Kinda like Drew Barrymore. In E.T. Hey, why does the wand have a deep groove in it?”

Mick the Mick looked again and noticed the deep groove running its length.

“Note, please, the deep groove running the length of the scepter of power. The eminent archeologists and anthropologists here at the Arkham Pennsylvania Museum of Natural History and Baseball Cards believe that to be what is knows as a fuller…

A fuller? Mick thought. Looks like a blood channel.

“…which the less sophisticated among you might call a ‘blood channel.’ The eminent archeologists and anthropologists here at the Arkham Pennsylvania Museum of Natural History and Baseball Cards believe this ancient scepter of power might have been used by its shaman owner to perform sacred religious ceremonies—specifically, the crushing of skulls and ritual disemboweling.”

Mick the Mick got a chill. He hoped Nate the Nose never got his hands on something like this.

“What’s disemboweling, Mick?”

“When someone cuts out your intestines.”

“How do you dooky, then? Like squeezing a toothpaste tube?”

“You don’t dooky, Willie. You die.”

“Cool! Can I have the magic wand, Mick? Can I?”

Mick the Mick didn’t answer. He’d noticed something engraved near the end of the far tip. He leaned closer, squinting until it came into focus.

Sears.

What the—?

He stepped back for a another look at the scepter of power and—

“A curtain rod …it’s a freakin’ curtain rod!”

Willie looked at him like he was crazy. “Curtain rod? Didn’t you hear the man? It’s, like, a magic wand, and—hey, what’s that over there?”

Mick the Mick slapped at Willie’s kidney as he passed but missed because he couldn’t take his eyes off the Sears scepter of power. Maybe they could steal it, return it to Sears, and get a brand new one. That wouldn’t help much with Nate the Nose, but Mick the Mick did need a new curtain rod. His old one had broken, and his drapes were attached to the wall with forks. That made Thursdays—spaghetti night—particularly messy.

“WELCOME!” boomed the same voice as Willie stopped before another display. “What you see before you is a rare artifact that once belonged to an ancient lost race that dwelled in the Arkham area during prehistoric times. This, like every other ancient artifact in this room, was excavated from a site near the Arkham landfill.”

“Hey, Mick y’gotta see this.”

After some biblical thinking, Mick the Mick spared the rod and moved along.

“We know little about this ancient lost race but, after careful examination by the eminent archeologists and anthropologists here at the Arkham Pennsylvania Museum of Natural History and Baseball Cards, they arrived at an irrefutable conclusion: The artifact before you was used by an ancient shaman of this lost race to perform surrogate sacrifices. (For those of you unfamiliar with the term ‘shaman,’ please return to the previous display.)”

“I know what a shaman is, ‘cause you just told me,” Willie said. “But what’s a surrogate—?”

“A surrogate sacrifice was an image that was sacrificed instead of a real person. Before you is a statuette of a woman carved by the ancient lost race from a yet-to-be-identified flesh-colored substance. Note the head is missing. This is because the statuette was beheaded instead of the human it represented.”

Mick the Mick stepped up to the display and immediately recognized the naked pink figure. He’d used to swipe his sister Suzy’s and make it straddle his rocket and go for a ride. Only Suzy’s had a blonde head.

“That’s a freakin’ Barbie doll!” He grabbed Willie’s shoulder and yanked him away.

“Jesus, Mick! You know I got a dislocating shoulder!”

Willie stumbled, knocking Mick the Mick into another display case, which toppled over with a crash.

“WELCOME! What you see before you is a rare tome of lost wisdom that once belonged—”

Screaming, Mick the Mick kicked the speaker until the voice stopped.

“Look, Mick,” Willie said, squatting and poking through the broken glass, “it’s not a tome, it’s a book. It’s supposed to contain lost wisdom. Maybe it can tell us how to keep Nate the Nose off our backs.” He rose and squinted at the cover. “The Really, Really, Really Old Ones.”