Midnight Mass

F. PAUL WILSON

MIDNIGHT MASS

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this novel are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.

MIDNIGHT MASS

Copyright © 2004 by F. Paul Wilson

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Edited by David H. Hartwell

Book design by Milenda Nan Ok Lee

A Tor Book

Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

175 Fifth Avenue

New York, NY 10010

www.tor.com

Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Wilson, F. Paul (Francis Paul)

Midnight Mass / F. Paul Wilson.—1st ed.

p. cm. "A Tom Doherty Associates book." ISBN 0-765-30705-7 EAN 978-0765-30705-7

1. Vampires—Fiction. 2. New Jersey—Fiction. 3. New York (N.Y)—Fiction. 4. Clergy-Fiction. 5. Rabbis—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3573.I45695M53 2004 813'.54—dc22

2003065048

First Edition: April 2004

Printed in the United States of America

AUTHOR'S NOTE

Midnight Mass was born out of my dissatisfaction with the tortured romantic aesthetes who have been passing lately for vampires. Stephen King gave us the real deal in 'Salem's Lot, but what gives since then? I wanted to get back to the roots—go retro, if you will—and write about the soulless, merciless, parasitic creatures we all knew and loved.

My premise going in was that all the legends about the undead were true: they feared crosses, were killed by sunlight (all right, I'm told that one originated with F. W. Murnau's Nosferatu, so it's not really legend, but it has become part of the lore), were burned by holy water and crucifixes, cast no reflection, etcetera. You know them as well as I do.

I also adopted the position that all the Catholic Church's mythology is true as well. Vampire lore has been inextricably entwined with Catholic imagery. I was raised a Catholic and, though now in recovery, I feel very much at home with its icons.

Then I took Ted Sturgeon's advice and started asking the next question. The mythic power of the cross over the undead led me to a concept I'd touched on in The Keep, and I decided to explore it further.

I've known since I began writing in the early 1970s that some day I'd have to do one, so here it is: my vampire novel. (No, The Keep was a pseudovampire novel. This one's the real deal.)

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks to Kim Newman for allowing me to borrrow his usage of the word "get" as it pertains to vampires and those they've transformed into their own kind (though I've burdened the concept with more plot weight here). There are equivalent terms in the language, but certainly none with such a perfect Old World feel. If you haven't read Kim's wonderful Anno Dracula novels, you are missing a rare treat.

And, of course, a special nod to Richard Matheson, who first tilled this soil with I Am Legend.

- 1 -

ZEV . . .

Gasping in horror and revulsion, Zev Wolpin stumbled away from St. Anthony's Church. He stretched his arms before him, reaching into the dark for something, anything, to support him before he fell.

Leaves slapped his face, twigs tugged at his graying beard as he plowed into foliage. His bike.. . where was his bike? He thought he'd left it in a clump of bushes, but obviously not this clump. Had to find it, had to get away from this place. But the dark made him disoriented ... the dark, and what he'd just witnessed.

He'd heard whispers, stories he couldn't, wouldn't, believe, so he'd come to see for himself, to prove them wrong. Instead .. .

Zev bent at the waist and retched. Nothing but a bubble of bile and acid came up, searing the back of his throat.

The whispers were only partly true. The truth was worse. The truth was unspeakable.

He straightened and looked around in the darkness. Wan light from the crescent moon in the cloud-streaked sky made the shadows deeper, and Zev feared the shadows. Then he spotted a curving glint of light from the chrome on his bike's front wheel. He ran to it, yanked it by the handlebars from its hiding place, and hopped on.

His aging knees protested as he pedaled away along dark and silent streets lined with dark and silent houses, heading south when he should have been going west, but away was all that mattered now.

Lakewood was a small town, maybe ten miles from the Atlantic Ocean; a place where the Rockefeller family was said to have vacationed. So it didn't matter much if he headed south or north, he wouldn't be far from the place he now called home. The town was once home to fifty thousand or more before the undead came. Now he'd be surprised if there were a thousand left. He'd heard it was the same all up and down the East Coast.

The exertion helped clear his mind. He had to be careful. Prudent he hadn't been. In fact, he'd been downright reckless tonight, venturing out after sundown and sneaking up on St. Anthony's. Schmuck! What had he been thinking? He prayed he didn't pay for it with his life. Or worse.

He shuddered at the thought of ending up the victim in a ceremony like the one he'd witnessed tonight. He had to find temporary shelter until dawn. Even then he wouldn't be safe, but at least there wouldn't be so many shadows.

The blue serge suit coat that had once fit rather snugly now hung loose on his half-starved frame and flapped behind him as he rode. He'd had to punch new holes in his belt to hold up the pants. He'd complained so often about not being able to lose weight. Nothing to it, really. Simply don't eat.

His ever-hungry stomach rumbled. How could it think of food after what he'd just seen?

A shadow passed over him.

A blast of cold dread banished any concern about his next meal. His aging neck protested as he glanced up at the sky, praying to see a cloud near the moon. But the glowing crescent sat alone in a clear patch of night.

No! Please! He increased his speed, his legs working like pistons against the pedals. Not a flying one!

Zev heard something like a laugh above and behind him. He ducked, all but pressing his face to the handlebars. Something swooped by, clawing at the back of his coat as it passed. Its grip slipped but the glancing impact was enough to disrupt Zev's balance. His front wheel wobbled, the bike tipped to the left and hit the curb, sending him flying.

Zev landed hard on his left shoulder, his lungs emptying with a grunt. His momentum carried him onto his back. What he saw circling above him made him forget his pain. He rolled over and struggled to his feet. He instinctively checked the yarmulke clipped to his thinning gray hair, then gripped the cross dangling from a string around his neck. That might save him in close quarters, but not from a creature that could swoop down from any angle. He felt like a field mouse under the cold gaze of a hawk.

He started running. He didn't know where he was going but knew he had to move. The bike was no good. He needed a tight space where his back was protected and he could use the cross to keep his attacker at bay. One of these houses, maybe. A basement, even a sewer drain—anyplace but out here in the open where—

"Here! Over here!"

A woman's voice, calling in a stage whisper to his left. Zev looked across an overgrown lawn, saw only a large tree, a pine of some sort with branches almost brushing the ground.

"Quick! In the tree!"

A trap maybe. A team this could be—a winged one driving prey into the arms of another on the ground. He'd never heard of anything like it, but that meant nothing.

A glance over his shoulder showed him that the creature had half folded its wings and was diving his way from above. No choice now. Zev veered left for the tree and whatever waited within its shadowed branches.

He was almost there when the woman's voice shouted, "Down!"

Zev obeyed, diving for the grass. He heard a hiss of rage, felt the wind from the creature's wings as it hurtled past no more than a foot or two above him. He lurched back to his feet and staggered forward. Pale hands reached from the branches and pulled him into the shadows.

"Are you all right?" the woman said.

He couldn't see her—she was a shadow among the shadows—but her voice sounded young.

"Yes. No. If you mean am I hurt, no."

But all right? No, he was not all right. Never again would he be all right.

"Good." She grabbed his hands and pressed them against a tree limb. "Hold on to this branch. Steady it while I try to break it. Quick, before it makes another pass."

The dead branch sat chest high and felt about half an inch in diameter. With Zev steadying it, the woman threw her weight hard against it. The wood snapped with a loud crack.

"What are you—?"

She shushed him. "It's coming back."

She moved to the edge of the trees, carrying the branch with her. Zev watched her, silhouetted against the moonlit lawn. Average height, short dark hair were all he gained about her looks. He saw her crouch, then hurl her branch like a spear at the creature as it swooped by on another pass. She missed and high-pitched derisive laughter trailed into the sky.

She returned to Zev, stopped on the other side of the broken branch, and patted the front of his shirt. She pulled him close and whispered in his ear.

"Your cross—tuck it away."

"No! It will—"

"Do as I say. They can see in the dark. And try to look frightened."

Try? Who had to try?

She put an arm around him to hold him close, keeping the branch between them.

Another whisper: "Pull out that cross when I tell you."

Zev had no idea what she was up to but had nowhere else to turn, so . . .

Her grip on him tightened. "Here it comes. Ready ..."

Zev could see it now, a dark splotch among the shadows of the branches, wings spread, gliding in low, arms stretched out before it.

". . . ready . . ."

Suddenly it folded its wings and shot at them like a missile.

"Now!"

As Zev pulled out the cross he felt the woman shove him away. He lost his balance and tumbled back, saw her fall in the other direction, felt a clawed hand grip his shoulder, heard the creature's screech of triumph rise into a wail of shock and agony as it slammed against the trunk of the tree.

Zev regained his feet amid the frantic and furious struggling of the hissing creature. Its charging attack had opened a passage through the branches, lightening the shadows. As he ducked its thrashing wings he realized it had impaled itself on the broken branch. It flopped back and forth like a speared fish, then pushed away from the trunk, trying to dislodge itself from the wood that had pierced its chest.

Zev turned to run. Now was his chance to get away from this thing. But what of the woman? He couldn't abandon her.

He spotted her standing behind the creature. She'd hiked up her already short skirt and kicked at the thing's back, shoving it further onto the branch. The creature howled and thrashed, and in its struggles broke the branch off the trunk with a gunshot crack.

Free now, it whirled and staggered out into the moonlight. Its wings flapped but couldn't seem to lift it. Perhaps ten feet beyond the branches it dropped to its knees. The woman was right behind it, giving it another kick. It rolled onto its back, clawing at the wooden shaft that jutted two or three feet from its chest. Its movements were weaker now, its wings lay crumpled beneath it. Howling and writhing in agony, it gripped the branch and started to slide it out of its chest.

"No, you don't!" the woman cried.

She gripped the upper end, shoving it back down and leaning on it to hold it in place.

"This is for Bern!" she screamed, naked fury rawing her voice. "This is what you made me do to her! How does it feel? How does it feel?"

For an instant Zev wondered who was more frightening, this screeching woman or the struggling monster she held pinned to the earth.

The creature clawed and kicked at her, almost knocking her over. He had to help. If that thing got free ...

Mouth dry, heart pounding, Zev forced himself from the shadows and added his own weight to the branch. He felt it punch deeper into the thing's chest. Then a sickening scrape as it thrust past ribs and into the ground beneath.

The creature's struggles became abruptly feebler. He saw now that it was a female. It might have been beautiful once, but the sickly pallor and the bared fangs robbed it of any attractiveness.

Finally it shuddered and lay still. Zev watched in amazement as its wings shriveled and disappeared.

"Gevalt!" he whispered, although he didn't know why. "You did it! You killed one!"

He'd heard they could be killed—all the old folk tales said they could be - but he'd never actually seen one die, never even met anyone who had.

It was good to know they could be killed.

"We did." She finally released her grip on the branch but her gaze remained locked on the creature. "If you have a soul," she said, "may God have mercy on it."

What was this? Like a harpy, she screeches, then she blesses the thing. A madwoman, this was.

She faced him. "I'm sorry for my outburst. I... it's just..." She seemed to lose her train of thought, as if something had distracted her. "Anyway, thank you for the help."

"You saved my life, young lady. It's me who should be thanking."

She was staring at him. "You're Rabbi Wolpin, aren't you."

Shock stole his voice for a few heartbeats. She knew him?

"Why ... yes. But I don't recognize ..."

She laughed. A bitter sound. "Please, God, I hope not."

He could see her now. Nothing familiar about her features, no particular style to her short dark hair. He noticed a tiny crescent scar on the right side of her chin. Heavy on the eye makeup—very heavy. A tight red sweater and even tighter short black skirt hid little of her slim body. And were those fishnet stockings?

A prostitute? In these times? Such a thing he never would have dreamed. But then he remembered hearing of women selling themselves to get food and favors.

"So, you know me how?"

She shrugged. "I used to see you with Father Cahill."

"Joe Cahill," Zev said, feeling a burst of warmth at the mention of his friend's name. "I was just over at his church. I saw ..." The words choked off.

"I know. I've—" She waved her hand before her face. "She's starting to stink already. Must be an older one."

Zev looked down and saw that the creature was already in an advanced state of rot.

"We'd better get out of here," the woman said, backing away. "They seem to know when one of their kind dies. Get your bike and meet me by the tree."

Zev continued to stare at the corpse. "Are they always so hard to kill?"

"I don't think the branch went all the way through the heart at first."

"Nu? You've done this before?"

Her expression was bleak as she looked at him. "Let's not talk about it."

When Zev wheeled his bike back to the tree he found her standing beside a child's red wagon, an old-fashioned Radio Flyer. A book bag emblazoned with St. Anthony's School lay in the wagon. He hadn't noticed either earlier. She must have had them hidden among the branches.

She said, "You mentioned you were at St. Anthony's. Why?"

"To see if what I'd heard was true." The urge to retch gripped Zev again. "To think that was Father Cahill's church."

"He wasn't the pastor."

"Not in name, maybe, but they were his flock. He was the glue that held them together. Someone should tell him what's going on."

"Oh, yes. That would be wonderful. But nobody knows where he is, or if he's even alive." I do.

Her hand shot out and gripped his arm, squeezing. "He's alive?"

"Yes," Zev said, taken aback by her intensity. "At least I think so."

Her grip tightened. "Where?"

He wondered if he'd made a mistake telling her. He tried not to sound evasive. "A retreat house. Have I been there? No. But it's near the beach, I'm told."

True enough, and he knew the address. After Joe had been moved out of St. Anthony's rectory to the retreat house, he and Zev still shared many phone conversations. At least until the creatures came. Then the phones stopped working and Zev's time became devoted more to survival than to keeping up with old friends.

"You've got to find him! You've got to tell him! He'll come back when he finds out and he'll make them pay!"

"A mensch, he is, I agree, but only one man."

"No! Many of his parishioners are still alive, but they're afraid. They're defeated. But if Father Joe came back, they'd have hope. They'd see that it wasn't over. They'd regain the will to fight."

"Like you?"

"I'm different," she said, the fervor slipping from her voice. "I never lost the will to fight. But my circumstances are special."

"How?"

"It's not important. I'm not important. But Father Joe is. Find him, Rabbi Wolpin. Don't put it off. Find him tomorrow and tell him. When he hears what they've done to his church he'll come back and teach them a lesson they'll never forget!"

Zev didn't know about that, but it would be good to see his young friend again. Searching him out would be a mitzvah for St. Anthony's, but might be good for Zev as well. It might offer some shape to his life ... a life that had devolved to mere existence, an endless, mind-numbing round of searching for food and shelter while avoiding the creatures by night and the human slime who did their bidding during the day.

All right," Zev said. "I'll try to find him. I won't promise to bring him back, because such a decision will not be mine to make. But I promise to look for him."

"Tomorrow?"

"First light. And who should I say sent me?"

The woman turned away and shook her head. "No one."

"You won't tell me your name?"

"It's not important."

"But you seem to know him."

"Once, yes." Her voice grew thick. "But he wouldn't recognize me now."

"You can be so sure?"

She nodded. "I've fallen too far away. There's no coming back for me, I'm afraid."

She'd been through something terrible, this one. So had everyone who was still alive, including Zev, but her experience, whatever it was, had made her a little meshugeh. More than a little, maybe.

She started walking away, looking almost silly dragging that little red wagon behind her.

"Wait..."

"Just find him," she said without turning. "And don't mention me."

She stepped into the shadows and was gone from sight, with only the squeaks of the wagon wheels as proof that she hadn't evaporated.

Father Joe Cahill and a prostitute? Zev couldn't believe it. But even if it were true, it was far less serious than what Joe had been accused of.

Maybe she hadn't sold herself in the old days. Maybe it was something she had to do to survive in these new and terrible times. Whatever the truth, he blessed her for being here to help him tonight.

But who is she? he wondered. Or perhaps more important, who was she.

CAROLE . . .

Carole hid the red wagon behind the bushes along the side of the house, then climbed the rickety stairs to the front porch, unlocked the door, and stepped inside. That was when the voice spoke. It had been silent the whole long walk home. Now it started in again.

"Quiet," Carole muttered. "I need to listen."

She'd been in this house two weeks now, and she'd made it as secure as possible. As secure as anything could be since her world ended last month.

Last month? Yes... six weeks this coming Friday. It seemed a lifetime ago. She never would have believed everything could fall apart so fast. But it had.

Despite her security measures, she held her breath, listening for the sound of someone—or something—else in the house besides her. She heard nothing but the breeze stirring the curtains in the upstairs bedroom. It had been warm when she'd left but the night had grown chilly. May was such an untrustworthy month.

She fished the flashlight out of her shoulder bag and turned it on, then off again—just long enough to orient herself. She wasn't worried about the light being seen from outside—the blankets draped over the windows would prevent that. She wanted to save her batteries, a rare and precious commodity. When she reached the stairs she flicked the light on again so she could step over the broken first tread. She noticed little splatters of blood on the banister and newel post. She'd clean them up in the morning, when she could use natural light.

When she reached the bedroom she closed the window and quickly undressed.

Carole had no illusions about that. She pulled on a baggy gray sweatsuit and slipped beneath the covers, praying the voice would let her sleep tonight. The night's labors had exhausted her.

She thought of Rabbi Wolpin, and that made her think of Father Cahill, and that led to thoughts of St. Anthony's and the school where she'd taught, and the convent where she'd lived...

She thought of her last nights there, less than six weeks ago, just days before Easter, when everything had been so different...

GOOD FRIDAY ...

The Holy Father says there are no such things as vampires," Sister Bernadette Gileen said.

Sister Carole Hanarty glanced up from the pile of chemistry tests on her lap—tests she might never be able to return to her sophomore students—and watched Bernadette as she drove through town, working the shift on the old Datsun like a long-haul trucker. Her dear friend and fellow Sister of Mercy was thin, almost painfully so, with large blue eyes and short red hair showing around the white band of her wimple. As she peered through the windshield, the glow of the setting sun ruddied the clear, smooth skin of her round face.

Sister Carole shrugged. "If His Holiness said it, then we must believe it. But we haven't heard anything from him in so long. I hope ..."

Bernadette turned toward her, eyes wide with alarm.

"Oh, you wouldn't be thinking anything's happened to His Holiness now, would you, Carole?" she said, the lilt of her native Ireland elbowing its way into her voice. "They wouldn't dare!"

Momentarily at a loss as to what to say, Carole gazed out the side window at the budding trees sliding past. The sidewalks of this little Jersey Shore town were empty, and hardly any other cars were on the road. She and Bernadette had had to try three grocery stores before finding one with anything to sell. Between the hoarders and delayed or canceled shipments, food was getting scarce.

Everybody sensed it. How did that saying go? By the pricking in my thumbs, something wicked this way comes...

Or something like that.

She rubbed her cold hands together and thought about Bernadette, younger than she by five years—only twenty-six—with such a good mind, such a clear thinker in so many ways. But her faith was almost childlike.

She'd come to the convent at St. Anthony's two years ago and the pair of them had established instant rapport. They shared so much. Not just a common Irish heritage, but a certain isolation as well. Carole's parents had died years ago, and Bernadette's were back on the Auld Sod. So they became sisters in a sense that went beyond their sisterhood in the order. Carole was the big sister, Bernadette the little one. They prayed together, laughed together, walked together. They took over the convent kitchen and did all the food shopping together. Carole could only hope that she had enriched Bernadette's life half as much as the younger woman had enriched hers.

Bernadette was such an innocent. She seemed to assume that since the Pope was infallible when he spoke on matters of faith or morals he somehow must be invincible too.

Carole hadn't told Bernadette, but she'd decided not to believe the Pope on the matter of the undead. After all, their existence was not a matter of faith or morals. Either they existed or they didn't. And all the news out of Europe last year had left little doubt that vampires were real.

And that they were on the march.

Somehow they had got themselves organized. Not only did they exist, but more of them had been hiding in Eastern Europe than even the most superstitious peasant could have imagined. And when the communist bloc crumbled, when all the former client states and Russia were in disarray, grabbing for land, slaughtering in the name of nation and race and religion, the undead took advantage of the power vacuum and struck.

They struck high, they struck low, and before the rest of the world could react, they controlled all Eastern Europe.

If they had merely killed, they might have been containable. But because each kill was a conversion, their numbers increased in a geometric progression. Sister Carole understood geometric progressions better than most. Hadn't she spent years demonstrating them to her chemistry class by dropping a seed crystal into a beaker of supersaturated solution? That one crystal became two, which became four, which became eight, which became sixteen, and so on. You could watch the lattices forming, slowly at first, then bridging through the solution with increasing speed until the liquid contents of the beaker became a solid crystalline mass.

That was how it had gone in Eastern Europe and Russia, then spreading into the Middle East and India, then China. And last fall, into Western Europe.

The undead became unstoppable.

All of Europe had been silent for months. Officially, at least. But a couple of the students at St. Anthony's High who had shortwave radios had told Carole of faint transmissions filtering through the transatlantic night recounting ghastly horrors all across Europe under undead rule.

But the Pope had declared there were no vampires. He'd said it, but shortly thereafter he and the Vatican had fallen silent along with the rest of the continent.

Washington had played down the immediate threat, saying the Atlantic Ocean formed a natural barrier against the undead. Europe was quarantined. America was safe.

Then had come reports, disputed at first, and still officially denied, of undead in Washington, DC, running rampant through the Pentagon, the legislators' posh neighborhoods, the White House itself. Then New York City. The New York TV and radio stations had stopped transmitting. And now...

"You can't really believe vampires are coming to the Jersey Shore, can you?" Bernadette said. "I mean, that is, if there were such things."

"It is hard to believe, isn't it?" Carole said, hiding a smile. "Especially since no one comes to Jersey unless they have to."

"Oh, don't you be having on with me now. This is serious."

Bernadette was right. It was serious. "Well, it fits the pattern my students have heard from Europe."

"But dear God, 'tis Holy Week! 'Tis Good Friday, it is! How could they dare?"

"It's the perfect time, if you think about it. There will be no Mass said until the first Easter Mass on Sunday morning. What other time of the year is daily mass suspended?"

Bernadette shook her head. "None."

"Exactly." Carole looked down at her cold hands and felt the chill crawl all the way up her arms.

The car suddenly lurched to a halt and she heard Bernadette cry out. "Dear Jesus! They're already here!"

Half a dozen black-clad forms clustered on the corner ahead, staring at them.

"Got to get out of here!" Bernadette said and hit the gas.

The old car coughed and died.

"Oh, no!" Bernadette wailed, frantically pumping the gas pedal and turning the key as the dark forms glided toward them. "No!"

"Easy, dear," Carole said, laying a gentle hand on her arm. "It's all right. They're just kids."

Perhaps "kids" was not entirely correct. Two males and four females who looked to be in their late teens and early twenties, but carried any number of adult lifetimes behind their heavily made-up eyes. Grinning, leering, they gathered around the car, four on Bernadette's side and two on Carole's. Sallow faces made paler by a layer of white powder, kohl-crusted eyelids, and black lipstick. Black fingernails, rings in their ears and eyebrows and nostrils, chrome studs piercing cheeks and lips. Their hair ranged the color spectrum, from dead white through burgundy to crankcase black. Bare hairless chests on the boys under their leather jackets, almost-bare chests on the girls in their black push-up bras and bustiers. Boots of shiny leather or vinyl, fishnet stockings, layer upon layer of lace, and everything black, black, black.

"Hey, look!" one of the boys said. A spiked leather collar girded his throat; acne lumps bulged under his whiteface. "Nuns!" "Penguins!" someone else said. Apparently this was deemed hilarious. The six of them screamed with laughter.

We're not penguins, Carole thought. She hadn't worn a full habit in years. Only the headpiece.

"Shit, are they gonna be in for a surprise tomorrow morning!" said a buxom girl wearing a silk top hat.

Another roar of laughter by all except one. A tall slim girl with three large black tears tattooed down one cheek, and blond roots peeking from under her black-dyed hair, hung back, looking uncomfortable. Carole stared at her. Something familiar there...

She rolled down her window. "Rosita? Rosita Hernandez, is that you?'

More laughter. " 'Rosita'?" someone cried. "That's Wicky!"

The girl stepped forward and looked Carole in the eye. "Yes, Sister. That used to be my name. But I'm not Rosita anymore."

"l can see that."

She remembered Rosita. A sweet girl, extremely bright, but so quiet. A voracious reader who never seemed to fit in with the rest of the kids. Her grades plummeted as a junior. She never returned for her senior year. When Carole had called her parents, she was told that Rosita had left home. She'd been unable to learn anything more.

"You've changed a bit since I last saw you. What is it—three years now?"

"You talk about change?" said the top-hatted girl, sticking her face in the window. "Wait'll tonight. Then you'll really see her change!" She brayed a laugh that revealed a chrome stud in her tongue.

"Butt out, Carmilla!" Rosita said.

Carmilla ignored her. "They're coming tonight, you know. The Lords of the Night will be arriving after sunset, and that'll spell the death of your world and the birth of ours. We will present ourselves to them, we will bare our throats and let them drain us, and we'll join them. Then we'll rule the night with them!"

It sounded like a canned speech, one she must have delivered time and again to her black-clad troupe.

Carole looked past Carmilla to Rosita. "Is that what you believe? Is that what you really want?"

The girl shrugged her high thin shoulders. "Beats anything else I got going."

Finally the old Datsun shuddered to life. Carole heard Bernadette working the shift. She touched her arm and said, "Wait. Just one more moment, please."

She was about to speak to Rosita when Carmilla jabbed her finger at Carole's face, shouting.

"Then you bitches and the candy-ass god you whore for will be fucking extinct!"

With a surprising show of strength, Rosita yanked Carmilla away from the window.

"Better go, Sister Carole," Rosita said.

The Datsun started to move.

"What the fuck's with you, Wicky?" Carole heard Carmilla scream as the car eased away from the dark cluster. "Getting religion or somethin? Should we start callin you Sister Rosita now?"

"She was one of the few people who was ever straight with me," Rosita said. "So fuck off, Carmilla."

By then the car had traveled too far to hear more.

* * *

"What awful creatures they were!" Bernadette said, staring out the window in Carole's convent room. She hadn't been able to stop talking about the incident on the street. "Almost my age, they were, and such horrible language!"

The room was little more than a ten-by-ten-foot plaster box with cracks in the walls and the latest coat of paint beginning to flake off the ancient embossed tin ceiling. She had one window and, for furnishings, a crucifix, a dresser and mirror, a work table and chair, a bed, and a night stand. Not much, but she gladly called it home. She took her vow of poverty seriously.

"Perhaps we should pray for them."

"They need more than prayer, I'd think. Believe me you, they're heading for a bad end." Bernadette removed the oversized rosary she wore looped around her neck, gathering the beads and its attached crucifix in her hand. "Maybe we could offer them some crosses for protection?"

Carole couldn't resist a smile. "That's a sweet thought, Bern, but I don't think they're looking for protection."

"Sure, and lookit after what I'm saying," Bernadette said, her own smile rueful. "No, of course they wouldn't."

"But we'll pray for them," Carole said.

Bernadette dropped into a chair, stayed there for no more than a heartbeat, then was up again, moving about, pacing the confines of Carole's room. She couldn't seem to sit still. She wandered out into the hall and came back almost immediately, rubbing her hands together as if washing them.

"It's so quiet," she said. "So empty."

"I certainly hope so," Carole said. "We're the only two who are supposed to be here."

The little convent was half empty even when all its residents were present. And now, with St. Anthony's School closed for the coming week, the rest of the nuns had gone home to spend Easter Week with brothers and sisters and parents. Even those who might have stayed around the convent in past years had heard the rumors that the undead might be moving this way, so they'd scattered. Carole's only living relative was an aunt, her mother's sister Joyce, who lived in Harrisburg and usually invited her to spend Easter and the following week with her; but she hadn't invited her this year, and wasn't answering her phone. She had a son in California; maybe she'd gone to stay with him. Lots of people were leaving the East Coast.

Bernadette hadn't heard from her family in Ireland for months. Carole feared she never would.

So that left just the two of them to hold the fort, as it were. The convent was part of a complex consisting of the church itself, the rectory, the grammar school and high school buildings, the tiny cemetery, and the sturdy old two-story rooming house that was now the convent. She and Bernadette had taken second-floor rooms, leaving the first floor to the older nuns.

Carole wasn't afraid. She knew they'd be safe here at St. Anthony's, although she wished there were more people left in the complex than just Bernadette, herself, and Father Palmeri.

"I don't understand Father Palmeri," Bernadette said. "Locking up the church and keeping his parishioners from making the stations of the cross on Good Friday. Who's ever heard of such a thing, I ask you? I just don't understand it."

Carole thought she understood. She suspected that Father Alberto Palmeri was afraid. Sometime this morning he'd locked up the rectory, barred the door to St. Anthony's, and hidden himself in the church basement.

God forgive her for thinking it, but to Sister Carole's mind Father Palmeri was a coward.

"Oh, I do wish he'd open the church, just for a little while," Bernadette said. "I need to be in there, Carole. I need it."

Carole knew how Bern felt. Who had said religion was an opiate of the people? Marx? Whoever it was, he hadn't been completely wrong. For Carole, sitting in the cool, peaceful quiet beneath St. Anthony's gothic arches, praying, meditating, and feeling the presence of the Lord were like a daily dose of an addictive drug. A dose she and Bern had been denied today. Bern's withdrawal pangs seemed worse than Carole's.

The younger nun paused as she passed the window, then pointed down to the street.

"And now who in God's name would they be?"

Carole rose and stepped to Bernadette's side. Passing on the street below was a cavalcade of shiny new cars—Mercedes Benzes, BMW's, Jaguars, Lin-colns, Cadillacs—all with New York plates, all cruising from the direction of the Parkway.

The sight of them in the dusk tightened a knot in Carole's stomach. The lupine faces she spied through the windows looked brutish, and the way they drove their gleaming luxury cars down the center line ... as if they owned the road.

A Cadillac convertible with its top down passed below; four scruffy occupants lounged on the seats. The driver wore a cowboy hat, a woman in leather sat next to him. Both were drinking beer. When Carol saw the driver glance up and look their way, she tugged on Bern's sleeve.

"Stand back! Don't let them see you!"

"Why not? Who are they?"

"I'm not sure, but I've heard of bands of men who do the vampires' dirty work during the daytime, who've traded their souls for the promise of immortality later on, and for ... other things now."

"Sure and you're joking, Carole!"

Carole shook her head. "I wish I were."

"Oh, dear God, and now the sun's down." She turned frightened blue eyes toward Carole. "Do you think maybe we should . . . ?"

"Lock up? Most certainly. I know what His Holiness said about there not being any such things as vampires, but maybe he's changed his mind since then and just can't get word to us."

"Sure and you're probably right. You close these and I'll check down the hall." She hurried out, her voice trailing behind her. "Oh, I do wish Father Palmeri hadn't locked the church. I'd dearly love to say a few prayers there.

Sister Carole glanced out the window again. The fancy new cars were gone, but rumbling in their wake was a convoy of trucks—big, eighteen-wheel semis, lumbering down the center line. What were they for? What did they carry? What were they delivering to town?

Suddenly a dog began to bark, and then another, and more and more until it seemed as if every dog in town was giving voice.

To fight the unease rising like a flood tide within her, Sister Carole concentrated on the simple manual tasks of closing and locking her window and drawing the curtains.

But the dread remained, a sick, cold certainty that the world was falling into darkness, that the creeping hem of shadow had reached her corner of the globe, and that without some miracle, without some direct intervention by a wrathful God, the coming night hours would wreak an irrevocable change on her life.

She began to pray for that miracle.

* * *

Carole and Bernadette had decided to leave the convent of St. Anthony's dark tonight.

And they decided to spend the night together in Carole's room. They dragged in Bernadette's mattress, locked the door, and doubled-draped the window with the bedspread. They lit the room with a single candle and prayed together.

Yet the music of the night filtered through the walls and the doors and the drapes, the muted moan of sirens singing antiphon to their hymns, the muffled pops of gunfire punctuating their psalms, reaching a crescendo shortly after midnight, then tapering off to ... silence.

Carole could see that Bernadette was having an especially rough time of it. he cringed with every siren wail, jumped at every shot. Carole shared Bern's terror, but she buried it, hid it deep within for her friend's sake. After all, Carole was older, and she knew she was made of sterner stuff. Bernadette was an innocent, too sensitive even for yesterday's world, the world before the undead. How would she survive in the world as it would be after tonight? She'd need help. Carole would provide as much as she could.

But for all the imagined horrors conjured by the night noises, the silence was worse. No human wails of pain and horror had penetrated their sanctum, but imagined cries of human suffering echoed through their minds in the ensuing stillness.

"Dear God, what's happening out there?" Bernadette said after they'd finished reading aloud the Twenty-third Psalm.

She huddled on her mattress, a blanket thrown over her shoulders. The candle's flame reflected in her frightened eyes and cast her shadow, high, hunched, and wavering, on the wall behind her.

Carole sat cross-legged on her bed. She leaned back against the wall and fought to keep her eyes open. Exhaustion was a weight on her shoulders, a cloud over her brain, but she knew sleep was out of the question. Not now, not tonight, not until the sun was up. And maybe not even then.

"Easy, Bern—" Carole began, then stopped.

From below, on the first floor of the convent, a faint thumping noise.

"What's that?" Bernadette said, voice hushed, eyes wide.

"I don't know."

Carole grabbed her robe and stepped out into the hall for a better listen.

"Don't you be leaving me alone, now!" Bernadette said, running after her with the blanket still wrapped around her shoulders.

"Hush," Carole said. "Listen. It's the front door. Someone's knocking. I'm going down to see."

She hurried down the wide, oak-railed stairway to the front foyer. The knocking was louder here, but still sounded weak. Carole put her eye to the peephole, peered through the sidelights, but saw no one.

But the knocking, weaker still, continued.

"Wh-who's there?" she said, her words cracking with fear.

"Sister Carole," came a faint voice through the door. "It's me ... Rosita. I'm hurt."

Instinctively, Carole reached for the handle, but Bernadette grabbed her arm.

"Wait! It could be a trick!"

She's right, Carole thought. Then she glanced down and saw blood leaking across the threshold from the other side.

She gasped and pointed at the crimson puddle. "That's no trick."

She unlocked the door and pulled it open. Rosita huddled on the welcome mat in a pool of blood.

"Dear sweet Jesus!" Carole cried. "Help me, Bern!"

"What if she's a vampire?" Bernadette said, standing frozen. "They can't cross the threshold unless you ask them in."

"Stop that silliness! She's hurt!"

Bernadette's good heart won out over her fear. She threw off the blanket, revealing a faded blue, ankle-length flannel nightgown that swirled just above the floppy slippers she wore. Together they dragged Rosita inside. Bernadette closed and relocked the door immediately.

"Call 9-1-1!" Carole told her.

Bernadette hurried down the hall to the phone.

Rosita lay moaning on her side on the foyer tiles, clutching her bleeding abdomen. Carole saw a piece of metal, coated with rust and blood, protruding from the area of her navel. From the faint fecal smell of the gore Carole guessed that her intestines had been pierced.

"Oh, you poor child!" Carole knelt beside her and cradled her head in her lap. She arranged Bernadette's blanket over Rosita's trembling body. "Who did this to you?"

"Accident," Rosita gasped. Real tears had run her black eye makeup over her tattooed tears. "I was running ... fell."

"Running from what?"

"From them. God ... terrible. We searched for them, Carmilla's Lords of the Night. Just after sundown we found one. Looked just like we always knew he would ... you know, tall and regal and graceful and seductive and cool. Standing by one of those big trailers that came through town. My friends approached him but I sorta stayed back. Wasn't too sure I was really into having my blood sucked. But Carmilla goes right up to him, pulling off her top and baring her throat, offering herself to him."

Rosita coughed and groaned as a spasm of pain shook her.

"Don't talk," Carole said. "Save your strength."

No," she said in a weaker voice when it eased. "You got to know. This Lord guy just smiles at Carmilla, then he signals his helpers who pull open the back doors of the trailer." Rosita sobbed. "Horrible! Truck's filled with these ... things'. Look human but they're dirty and naked and act like beasts.

They like pour out the truck and right off a bunch of them jump Carmiila.

They start biting and ripping at her throat. I see her go down and hear her screaming and I start backing up. My other friends try to run but they're pulled down too. And then I see one of the things hold up Carmilla's head and hear the Lord guy say, 'That's right, children. Take their heads. Always take their heads. There are enough of us now.' And that's when I turned and ran. I was running through a vacant lot when I fell on ... this."

Bernadette rushed back into the foyer. Her face was drawn with fear. "911 doesn't answer! I can't raise anyone!"

"They're all over town." Rosita said after another spasm of coughing. Carole could barely hear her. She touched her throat—so cold. "They've been setting fires and attacking the cops and firemen when they arrive. Their human helpers break into houses and drive the people outside where they're attacked. And after the things drain the blood, they rip the heads off."

"Dear God, why?" Bernadette said, crouching beside Carole.

"My guess ... don't want any more undead. Maybe only so much blood to go around and—"

She moaned with another spasm, then lay still. Carole patted her cheeks and called her name, but Rosita Hernandez's dull, staring eyes told it all.

"Is she ... ?" Bernadette said.

Carole nodded as tears filled her eyes. You poor misguided child, she thought, closing Rosita's eyelids.

"She's died in sin," Bernadette said. "She needs anointing immediately! I'll get Father."

"No, Bern," Carole said. "Father Palmeri won't come."

"Of course he will. He's a priest and this poor lost soul needs him."

"Trust me. He won't leave that church basement for anything."

"But he must!" she said almost childishly, her voice rising. "He's a priest."

"Just be calm, Bernadette, and we'll pray for her ourselves."

"We can't do what a priest can do," she said, springing to her feet. "It's not the same."

"Where are you going?"

"To ... to get a robe. It's cold."

My poor, dear, frightened Bernadette, Carole thought as she watched her scurry up the steps. I know exactly how you feel.

"Bring my prayer book back with you," she called after her.

Carole pulled the blanket over Rosita's face and gently lowered her head to the floor.

She waited for Bernadette to return ... and waited. What was taking her so long? She called her name but got no answer.

Uneasy, Carole returned to the second floor. The hallway was empty and dark except for a pale shaft of moonlight slanting through the window at its far end. Carole hurried to Bern's room. The door was closed. She knocked.

"Bern? Bern, are you in there?"

Silence.

Carole opened the door and peered inside. More moonlight, more emptiness.

Where could—?

Down on the first floor, almost directly under Carole's feet, the convent's back door slammed. How could that be? Carole had locked it herself—dead-bolted it at sunset.

Unless Bernadette had gone down the back stairs and ...

She darted to the window and stared down at the grassy area between the convent and the church. The high, bright moon had made a black-and-white photo of the world outside, bleaching the lawn below with its stark glow, etching deep ebony wells around the shrubs and foundation plantings. It glared from St. Anthony's slate roof, stretching a long wedge of night behind its Gothic spire.

And scurrying across the lawn toward the church was a slim figure wrapped in a long raincoat, the moon picking out the white band of her wimple, its black veil a fluttering shadow along her neck and upper back— Bernadette was too old-country to approach the church with her head uncovered.

"Oh, Bern," Carole whispered, pressing her face against the glass. "Bern, don't!"

She watched as Bernadette ran up to St. Anthony's side entrance and began clanking the heavy brass knocker against the thick oak door. Her high, clear voice filtered faintly through the window glass.

"Father! Father Palmeri! Please open up! There's a dead girl in the convent who needs anointing!"

She kept banging, kept calling, but the door never opened. Carole thought she saw Father Palmeri's pale face float into view to Bern's right through the glass of one of the church's few unstained windows. It hovered there for a few seconds, then disappeared.

But the door remained closed.

That didn't seem to faze Bern. She only increased the force of her blows with the knocker, and raised her voice even higher until it echoed off the stone walls and reverberated through the night.

Carole's heart went out to her. She shared Bern's need, if not her desperation.

Why doesn't Father Palmeri at least let her in? she thought. The poor thing's making enough racket to wake the dead.

Sudden terror tightened along the back of Carole's neck .... wake the dead...

Bern was too loud. She thought only of attracting the attention of Father Palmeri, but what if she attracted ... others?

Even as the thought crawled across her mind, Carole saw a dark, rangy figure creep onto the lawn from the street side, slinking from shadow to shadow, closing in on her unsuspecting friend.

"Oh, dear God!" she cried, and fumbled with the window lock. She twisted it open and yanked up the sash.

Carole screamed into the night. "Bernadette! Behind you! There's someone coming! Get back here now, Bernadette! NOW!"

Bernadette turned and looked up toward Carole, then stared around her. The approaching figure had dissolved into the shadows at the sound of the shouted warnings. But Bernadette must have sensed something in Carole's voice, for she started back toward the convent.

She didn't get far—ten paces, maybe—before the shadowy form caught up to her.

"NO!" Carole screamed as she saw it leap upon her friend.

She stood frozen at the window, her fingers clawing the molding on each side as Bernadette's high wail of terror and pain cut the night.

For the span of an endless, helpless, paralyzed heartbeat, Carole watched the form drag her down to the silver lawn, tear open her raincoat, and fall upon her, watched her arms and legs flail wildly, frantically in the moonlight, and all the while her screams, oh, dear God in Heaven, her screams for help were slim, white-hot nails driven into Carole's ears.

And then, out of the corner of her eye, Carole saw the pale face appear again at the window of St. Anthony's, watch for a moment, then once more fade into the inner darkness.

With a low moan of horror, fear, and desperation, Carole pushed herself away from the window and stumbled toward the hall. Someone had to help. Along the way she snatched the foot-long wooden crucifix from Bernadette's wall and clutched it against her chest with both hands. As she picked up speed, graduating from a lurch to a walk to a loping run, she began to scream—not a wail of fear, but a long, seamless ululation of rage.

Something was killing her friend.

The rage was good. It shredded the fear and the horror and the loathing that had paralyzed her. It allowed her to move, to keep moving. She embraced the rage.

Carole hurtled down the stairs and burst onto the moonlit lawn—

And stopped, disoriented for an instant. She didn't see Bern. Where was she? Where was her attacker?

And then she saw a patch of writhing shadow on the grass ahead of her near one of the shrubs.

Bernadette?

Clutching the crucifix, Carole ran for the spot, and as she neared she realized it was indeed Bernadette, sprawled face down, but not alone. Another shadow sat astride her, hissing like a reptile, gnashing its teeth, its fingers curved into talons that tugged at Bernadette's head as if trying to tear it off.

Carole reacted without thinking. Screaming, she launched herself at the creature, ramming the big crucifix against its exposed back. Light flashed and sizzled and thick black smoke shot upward in oily swirls from where cross met flesh. The thing arched its back and howled, writhing beneath the cruciform brand, thrashing wildly as it tried to wriggle out from under the fiery weight.

But Carole stayed with it, following its slithering crawl on her knees, pressing the flashing cross deeper and deeper into its steaming, boiling flesh, down to the spine, into the vertebrae. Its cries became almost piteous as it weakened, and Carole gagged on the thick black smoke that fumed around her, but her rage would not allow her to slack off. She kept up the pressure, pushed the wooden crucifix deeper and deeper in the creature's back until it penetrated the chest cavity and seared into its heart. Suddenly the thing gagged and shuddered and then was still.

The flashes faded. The final wisps of smoke trailed away on the breeze.

Carole abruptly released the shaft of the crucifix as if it had shocked her. She ran back to Bernadette, dropped to her knees beside the still form, and turned her over onto her back.

"Oh, no!" she screamed when she saw Bernadette's torn throat, her wide, glazed, sightless eyes, and the blood, so much blood smeared all over the front of her.

Oh no. Oh, dear God, please no! This can't be! This can't be real!

A sob burst from her. "No, Bern! Nooooo!"

Somewhere nearby, a dog howled in answer.

Or was it a dog?

Carole realized she was defenseless now. She had to get back to the convent. She leaped to her feet and looked around. Nothing moving. A dozen feet away she saw the crucifix still buried in the dead thing.

She hurried over to retrieve it, but recoiled from touching the creature. She could see now that it was a man—a naked man, or something that very much resembled one. But not quite. Some indefinable quality was missing.

Was it one of them}

This must be one of the undead Rosita had warned about. But could this.. . this thing ... be a vampire? It had acted like little more than a rabid dog in human form.

Whatever it was, it had mauled and murdered Bernadette. Rage bloomed again within Carole like a virulent, rampant virus, spreading through her bloodstream, invading her nervous system, threatening to take over. She fought the urge to batter the corpse.

She choked back the bile rising in her throat and stared at the inert form prone before her. This once had been a man, someone with a family, perhaps. Surely he hadn't asked to become this vicious night thing.

"Whoever you were," Carole whispered, "you're free now. Free to return to God."

She gripped the shaft of the crucifix to remove it but found it fixed in the seared flesh like a steel rod set in concrete.

Something howled again. Closer.

She had to get back inside, but she couldn't leave Bern out here.

Swiftly she returned to Bernadette's side, worked her hands through the grass under her back and knees, and lifted her into her arms. She staggered under the weight. Dear Lord, for such a thin woman she was heavy.

Carole carried Bernadette back to the convent as fast as her rubbery legs would allow. Once inside, she bolted the door, then tried to carry her up the steep stairway. She stopped on the third step. She'd intended to take Bern's body back to her room, but who knew when the poor girl would be buried?

Might be days. And the second floor got warm during the day. Better to lay her out in the cellar where it was cooler.

With Bernadette in her arms she struggled down the narrow stairwell to the cellar, almost falling twice along the way. She stretched her out on an old couch. She straightened Bern's thin legs, crossed her hands over her blood-splattered chest, and arranged her torn nightgown and raincoat around her as best she could. She adjusted the wimple on her head. Then she ran up to Bernadette's room and returned with her bedspread. She draped her from head to toe, then knelt beside her.

Looking down at that still form under the quilt she had helped Bernadette make, Carole sagged against the couch and began to cry. She tried to say a requiem prayer but her grief-racked mind had lost the words. So she sobbed aloud and asked God why? How could He let this happen to a dear, sweet innocent who had wished only to spend her life serving Him? WHY?

But no answer came.

When Carole finally controlled her tears, she forced herself to her weary feet and made her way back to the main floor. When she saw the light on in the front foyer, she knew she should turn it off. She stepped over the still form of Rosita under the blood-soaked blanket. Two violent deaths here on the church grounds, a place devoted to God. How many more beyond these grounds?

She knew she should carry Rosita to the basement as well, but lacked the strength—of either will or body.

Tomorrow . .. first thing tomorrow morning, Rosita. I promise.

She turned off the light and raced through the dark back up to her own room where she huddled shivering in her bed.

CAROLE . . .

Carole awoke in a cold sweat. Good Friday again. How many times must she relive that night?

She pushed herself up from the mattress and stumbled to the bathroom. She poured an inch of water from the tap into a glass and drank it down. Didn: t want to risk drinking too much without boiling it first.

At least the water was still running. Was that the vampires' doing? Carole wouldn't be surprised. Water was one of the necessities of life. It seemed to her the vampires wanted a certain number of the living to survive, but not to communicate. Which would explain why the electricity and the telephones went out that first weekend. Keep people isolated and insulated from any message of hope.

She found her way back to the bed and buried her head under the pillow. She needed sleep—dreamless sleep that would allow her to wake up refreshed instead of exhausted. She didn't want to dream of Good Friday again, or worse, the following day . . . the worst day of her life.

HOLY SATURDAY . . .

Carole awoke to the wail of sirens. She sat up in bed, blinking in the morning light.

A dream . . . please, God, show me that last night was all a dream.

But her throat tightened at the sight of Bernadette's empty mattress on the floor beside her bed. No ... not a dream. A living nightmare.

She'd stayed up till dawn, then she'd pulled the bedspread from the window and fallen into exhausted sleep.

The sirens. . . closer now. She crept to the window and peeked at the street below. Two police cars, red and blue lights flashing, roared past the front of the convent and made squealing turns into the church parking lot.

The police! They've come!

Carole rose and hurried across the hall to Bern's room in time to see them slow to a stop before the church.

Thank you, God, she thought. All is not lost. The police are still on the job.

Before pushing away from the window she searched the lawn to the left of the church for the remains of the vampire she'd killed last night. A bright, clear, unconscionably beautiful morning, with a high trail of brown smoke drifting from the east. She couldn't find the vampire, but she spotted Bernadette's wooden cross lying in a man-shaped puddle of brown ooze on the grass. Could that be all that remained of—?

Can't worry about that now, she thought as she dashed back into the hall and down the rear stairs. She had to get to the police, tell them about Bernadette. They'd take her to a morgue or a funeral home where Carole could arrange for a proper burial.

She reached the rear door and had just turned back the deadbolt when she glanced through the glass. The sight of a lean, wolfish man, all in denim, uncoiling from the front passenger seat of the first car froze her heart. He settled a cowboy hat over his long brown hair and looked around, smirking as if he owned the world. A tattooed blond woman in a leather vest got out of the driver seat while two more men in rough clothes slithered from the second car. The first wore his long black hair in a single braid down the middle of his back; the second was sandy haired and balding, wearing a scraggly beard to compensate for what he'd lost on his scalp. All four wore wraparound sunglasses and had silvery earrings dangling from their right lobes.

Carole ducked away from the door and jammed her hands against her mouth. She'd seen these people before, last night, leading the caravan of trucks carrying the undead into town. It seemed so long ago, a lifetime. But this could only mean that the police had lost. The undead and their caretakers were in control now.

But what were they doing here at St. Anthony's?

She crept away from the door and down the hall toward the kitchen. The windows over the sink looked out toward the church. She could watch from there and see without being seen. She needed to know what they were up to. She leaned over the big double sink and cranked the window open an inch or two, just enough to hear what they were saying.

She sniffed the air that wafted through the opening. Something burning somewhere. .. smelled like some sort of meat. She glanced at the brown smoke trailing across the sky. Could that be—?

A car door slammed. She watched the one in the cowboy hat heft a crowbar as he walked from his police car to the side door of the church. Swinging it like a baseball bat he started bashing the hooked end against the doorknob. The clang of metal on metal echoed like a church bell through the eerie silence of the morning. Then he reversed his grip and rammed the tip of the long end between the door and the frame. A few hard yanks and the door popped open.

The woman and the two other men ran inside while the cowboy returned to the police car. He leaned against the fender and lit a cigarette; he carelessly bounced the crowbar against the hood, denting it with every bounce.

A few minutes later the two other men emerged, dragging Father Palmeri between them. The priest had a bloody nose and was blubbering in fear, begging them to let him go.

The sandy-haired man laughed. "Found him hiding in the basement! Lookit him! Peed his pants!"

Carole shook her head in dismay when she saw the darker stain on Father

Palmeri's black cassock. God forgive her, she'd never liked the man, and after last night when he could have saved Bernadette simply by letting her into the church, well, she liked him even less. He was a man of God. He was supposed to set an example.

Then the woman appeared. She'd draped herself in Father Palmeri's long white chasuble and came out dancing and skipping behind the whimpering priest.

Carole felt her anger begin to boil. How dare this . . . this tramp sully holy vestments like that. It was sacrilege.

"You like basements, priest?" the cowboy said, grinning. "Good. 'Cause you're gonna be seeing a lot of them from now on."

Carole's stomach dropped. What did that mean? Were they going to turn him into a vampire? Oh, no. They couldn't do that. Not to a priest.

She had to help him, but what could she do? She was one woman and there were four of them. She watched as they locked Father Palmeri in the caged rear compartment of one of the cars. Then they started toward the convent, the cowboy in the lead, the crowbar on his shoulder.

No! Not here! Not now! And she'd unlocked the door.

Hide! The basement? No. She had to pass the rear door to reach it. They'd see her for sure. She could make it to the second floor but couldn't think of anyplace to hide up there.

She did a quick turn and her gaze came to rest on the big institutional-size oven to her left. She yanked down the door and looked inside. Could she fit? Maybe, maybe not. But even if she did fit, the plate glass window in the door would give her away. But no. A closer look showed that it was fogged with baked-on grease. Bless old Sister Mary Margaret's bad eyes. Last week was her turn to clean the oven. She never did a good job, for which Carole was now grateful.

Moving as quickly as she could without causing a racket, she slid out the two metal racks and slipped them between the oven and the neighboring cabinet. She pulled a long-handled metal spatula from the wall rack and bent the end into an acute angle. Then she sidled into the close space, her flannel nightgown sticking to the grease-splattered surfaces, and tucked her knees against her chest.

She fit. Barely. Now to get the door closed. She reached out with the spatula, hooked its bent end around the upper edge of the oven door, and pulled. It barely budged. These old oven doors were heavy. Straining her muscles, she managed to pull it a quarter of the way closed when the spatula slipped off. The door fell back with a clank.

She felt her heart kick into a higher gear as she tried again. The cowboy and his gang would be walking in any—

She heard the back door slam open and a woman's voice say, "Nice of them to leave the place unlocked."

"Probably means it's empty," said a voice she recognized as the cowboy's. "Check it out anyway. See if we can put a nun on Gregor's plate, too"

The woman snickered. "Yeah! A priest-and-nun combo platter!"

"A three-way!" someone else said.

Lots of laughter at that. But for Carole, only terror clawing at her gut. She had to close this door. Now.

She stretched out and again hooked the spatula end over the edge. The handle slipped in her sweaty palm. She tightened her grip and began to pull.

"I'll take this floor," said the cowboy's voice. "Al, you and Kenny check out upstairs. Jackie, you take the basement."

Carole heard feet moving, some away, some pounding up the stairs, and one set moving closer, toward the kitchen. The oven door was a third of the way up now. Her arm was aching. If only she could use both hands. She set her teeth and gave the door a yank. To her shock it snapped toward her once it passed the halfway mark and she had to release the spatula to keep it from slamming shut. She eased it closed just as someone walked into the room.

Carole closed her eyes and shuddered with relief, but that vanished when she opened them again and saw the spatula still hooked on the door.

She stifled a bleat of terror. The business end was sticking outside.

She looked through the grimy glass and saw a pair of denim-clad legs enter the kitchen and stop directly before the oven. The cowboy—had he spotted the spatula?

Sweet Jesus, don't let him see it!

Carole almost wept when the legs moved on.

"Let's see what we got here," she heard him say.

She heard cabinet doors swing open, heard their contents hit the floor, heard drawers pulled from their slots and dropped. He couldn' t be looking for a person—not in those spaces. What was he after?

"Ay, here we go."

More footsteps. Father Palmeri's white chasuble stopped in front of the oven. The woman.

"Whatcha got there, Stan?"

"First, whatcha find in the basement?"

"Dead nun. Least I'm pretty sure she's a nun. She's wearin a tore-up nightie and a raincoat, but she's got one of those veil hats on her head. And she was bit."

"And she still got her head?"

"Yeah. Think she ran into that dead feral outside?"

"Dunno, but someone sure kicked his ass, huh?"

"True that." The woman moved out of view of the oven glass. "So whatcha got there?"

"Homemade chocolate chip cookies. Still fresh."

"Ooh, gimme!"

Carole bit back a sob. She and Bernadette had baked those yesterday afternoon, and now these human slime were eating them.

"Yo, Stan," said a male voice. "Nobody upstairs but we got a dead goth chick in the front hall."

"Was she bit?"

"Nah. Some kinda steel pipe stickin from her gut."

"Whoa! What kinda weird shit went down here last night? Sounds like my kinda party."

They laughed and then went silent. Stuffing their faces with her cookies, Carole supposed.

Finally the cowboy said, "All right. The priest house is next. We'll take these with us. Somebody remind me we gotta come back for the bit one. We should toss her on the pile before sunset."

With that they shuffled out, leaving Carole alone and cramped and sweating in the oven. She closed her eyes and pretended she was sitting on a pew in the cool open spaces of St. Anthony's, savoring the peaceful air as she waited for mass to begin.

* * *

Carole waited more than an hour before she dared to leave the oven. After slowly straightening her cramped back, the first thing she did was peek through the kitchen window. She sagged against the sink with relief when she saw the police cars gone.

Next she ran up to her room and exchanged her grease-spotted nightgown for a plaid blouse and khaki slacks. Usually she'd wear a skirt, but not today.

She looked around. Now . . . what?

She couldn't stay here in the convent. She had to move somewhere else. But where? And how could she leave Bernadette here to be hauled off by those human animals so they could "toss her on the pile," whatever that meant?

Carole knew she had to do something. But what?

Since joining the convent a dozen years ago, straight out of high school, all important decisions had been taken out of her hands. The Sisters of Mercy had put her through college at Georgian Court where she'd earned her teaching degree. All along she'd followed the instructions of Sister Superior. A calm, contemplative existence of poverty, chastity, and obedience, devoted to prayer and study and doing the Lord's work.

Now she had to decide. She wanted to hide Bernadette's body, but couldn't think of a single safe place. She wanted to move Rosita's body down to the basement but didn't dare: The cowboy would know someone was here.

So she spent the day in a state of mental and emotional paralysis. She prayed for guidance, she walked the halls, she sat on her bed and stared out the window, watching for the cowboy and his gang, dreading the moment they returned.

The only decision she made was to hide under her bed when they did.

But they didn't return. The afternoon dragged into evening, and then the sun was down. Carole allowed herself the faint hope that they'd forgotten about Bernadette or had become involved in more pressing matters.

She draped her window, lit a candle, and began to pray.

She didn't know what time the power went out. She had no idea how long she'd been kneeling beside her bed when she glanced at the digital alarm clock on her night table and saw that its face had gone dark.

Not that a power failure mattered. She noticed barely an inch of the candle left. She held her watch face near the flame. Only 2 A.M. Would this night ever end?

She was tempted to lift the bedspread draped over the window and peek outside, but was afraid of what she might see.

How long until dawn? she wondered, rubbing her eyes. Last night had seemed endless, but this—

Beyond her locked door, a faint creak came from somewhere along the hall. It could have been anything—the wind in the attic, the old building settling—but it had sounded like floorboards creaking.

And then she heard it again.

Carole froze, still on her knees, hands still folded in prayer, elbows resting on the bed, and listened. More creaks, closer, and something else ... a rhythmic shuffle ... in the hall. . . approaching her door . . .

Footsteps.

With her heart punching frantically against the wall of her chest, Carole leaped to her feet and stepped close to the door, listening with her ear almost touching the wood. Yes. Footsteps. Slow. And soft, like bare feet scuffing the floor. Coming this way. Closer. Right outside the door now.

Carole felt a sudden chill, as if a wave of icy air had penetrated the wood, but the footsteps didn't pause. They passed her door, moving on.

And then they stopped.

Carole had her ear pressed against the wood now. She could hear her pulse pounding through her head as she strained for the next sound. And then it came, more shuffling outside in the hall, almost confused at first, and then the footsteps began again.

Coming back.

This time they stopped directly outside Carole's door. The cold was back again, a damp, penetrating chill that reached for her bones. Carole backed away from it.

And then the nob turned. Slowly. The door creaked with the weight of a body leaning against it from the other side, but Carole's bolt held.

Then a voice. Hoarse. A single whispered word, barely audible, but a shout could not have startled her more.

"Carole?"

Carole didn't reply—couldn't reply.

"Carole, it's me. Bern. Let me in."

Against her will, a low moan escaped Carole. No, no, no, this couldn't be Bernadette. Bernadette was dead. Carole had left her cooling body lying in the basement. This was some horrible joke . . .

Or was it? Maybe Bernadette had become one of them, one of the very things that had killed her.

But the voice on the other side of the door was not that of some ravenous beast . . .

"Please let me in, Carole. I'm frightened out here alone."

Maybe Bern is alive, Carole thought, her mind racing, ranging for an answer. I'm no doctor. I could have been wrong about her being dead. Maybe she survived . . .

She stood trembling, torn between the desperate, aching need to see her friend alive, and the wary terror of being tricked by whatever creature Bernadette might have become.

"Carole?"

Carole wished for a peephole in the door, or at the very least a chain lock, but she had neither, and she had to do something. She couldn't stand here like this and listen to that plaintive voice any longer without going mad. She had to know. Without giving herself any more time to think, she snapped back the bolt and pulled the door open, ready to face whatever awaited her in the hall.

She gasped. "Bernadette!"

Her friend stood just beyond the threshold, swaying, stark naked.

Not completely naked. She still wore her wimple, although it was askew on her head, and a strip of cloth had been layered around her neck to dress her throat wound. In the wan, flickering candlelight that leaked from Carole's room, she saw that the blood that had splattered her was gone. Carole had never seen Bernadette unclothed before. She'd never realized how thin she was. Her ribs rippled beneath the skin of her chest, disappearing only beneath the scant padding of her small breasts with their erect nipples; the bones of her hips and pelvis bulged around her flat belly. Her normally fair skin was almost blue white. The only other colors were the dark pools of her eyes and the orange splotches of hair on her head and her pubes.

"Carole," she said weakly. "Why did you leave me?"

The sight of Bernadette standing before her, alive, speaking, had drained most of Carole's strength; the added weight of guilt from her words nearly drove her to her knees. She sagged against the door frame.

"Bern ..." Carole's voice failed her. She swallowed and tried again. "I—I thought you were dead. And . . . what happened to your clothes?"

Bernadette raised her hand to her throat. "I tore up my nightgown for a bandage. Can I come in?"

Carole straightened and opened the door further. "Oh, Lord, yes. Come in. Sit down. I'll get you a blanket."

Bernadette shuffled into the room, head down, eyes fixed on the floor. She moved like someone on drugs. But then, after losing so much blood, it was a wonder she could walk at all.

"Don't want a blanket," Bern said. "Too hot. Aren't you hot?"

She backed herself stiffly onto Carole's bed, then lifted her ankles and sat cross-legged, facing her. Mentally, Carole explained the casual, blatant way she exposed herself by the fact that Bernadette was still recovering from a horrific trauma, but that made it no less discomfiting.

Carole glanced at the crucifix on the wall over her bed, above and behind Bernadette. For moment, as Bernadette had seated herself beneath it, she thought she had seen it glow. It must have been reflected candlelight. She turned away and retrieved a spare blanket from the closet. She unfolded it and wrapped it around Bernadette's shoulders and over her spread knees, covering her.

"I'm thirsty, Carole. Could you get me some water?"

Her voice was strange. Lower pitched and hoarse, yes, as might be expected after the throat wound she'd suffered. But something else had changed in her voice, something Carole could not pin down.

"Of course. You'll need fluids. Lots of fluids."

The bathroom was only two doors down. She took her water pitcher, lit a second candle, and left Bernadette on the bed, looking like an Indian draped in a serape.

When she returned with the full pitcher, she was startled to find the bed empty. She spied Bernadette by the window. She hadn't opened it, but she'd pulled off the bedspread drape and raised the shade. She stood there, staring out at the night. And she was naked again.

Carole looked around for the blanket and found it... hanging on the wall over her bed . . .

Covering the crucifix.

Part of Carole screamed at her to run, to flee down the hall and not look back. But another part of her insisted she stay. This was her friend. Something terrible had happened to Bernadette and she needed Carole now, probably more than she'd needed anyone in her entire life. And if someone was going to help her, it was Carole. Only Carole.

She placed the pitcher on the nightstand.

"Bernadette," she said, her mouth as dry as the timbers in these old walls, "the blanket . . ."

"I was hot," Bernadette said without turning.

"I brought you the water. I'll pour—"

"I'll drink it later. Come and watch the night."

"I don't want to see the night. It frightens me."

Bernadette turned, a faint smile on her lips. "But the darkness is so beautiful."

She stepped closer and stretched her arms toward Carole, laying a hand on each shoulder and gently massaging the terror-tightened muscles there. A sweet lethargy began to seep through Carole. Her eyelids began to drift closed ... so tired ... so long since she'd had any sleep . . .

No!

She forced her eyes open and gripped Bernadette's cold hands, pulling them from her shoulders. She pressed the palms together and clasped them between her own.

"Let's pray, Bern. With me: Hail Mary, full of grace ..."

"No!"

"... the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou ..."

Her friend's face twisted in rage. "I said, NO, damn you!"

Carole struggled to keep a grip on Bernadette's hands but she was too strong.

"... amongst women..."

And suddenly Bernadette's struggles ceased. Her face relaxed, her eyes cleared, even her voiced changed, still hoarse, but higher in pitch, lighter in tone as she took up the words of the prayer.

"And Blessed is the fruit of thy womb ..." Bernadette struggled with the next word, unable to say it. Instead she gripped Carole's hands with painful intensity and loosed a torrent of her own words. "Carole, get out! Get out, oh, please, for the love of God, get out now! There's not much of me left in here, and soon I'll be like the ones that killed me and I'll be after killing you! So run, Carole! Hide! Lock yourself in the chapel downstairs but get away from me now!"

Carole knew now what had been missing from Bernadette's voice—her brogue. But now it was back. This was the real Bernadette speaking. She was back! Her friend, her sister was back! Carole bit back a sob.

"Oh, Bern, I can help! I can—"

Bernadette pushed her toward the door. "No one can help me, Carole!"

She ripped the makeshift bandage from her neck, exposing the jagged, partially healed wound and the ragged ends of the torn blood vessels within it. "It's too late for me, but not for you. They're a bad lot and I'll be one of them again soon, so get out while you—"

Suddenly Bernadette stiffened and her features shifted. Carole knew immediately that the brief respite her friend had stolen from the horror that gripped her was over. Something else was back in command.

Carole turned and ran.

But the Bernadette-thing was astonishingly swift. Carole had barely reached the threshold when a steel-fingered hand gripped her upper arm and yanked her back, nearly dislocating her shoulder. She cried out in pain and terror as she was spun about and flung across the room. Her hip struck hard against the rickety old spindle chair by her desk, knocking it over as she landed in a heap beside it.

Carole groaned with the pain. As she shook her head to clear it, she saw Bernadette approaching, her movements swift, more assured now, her teeth bared—so many teeth, and so much longer than the old Bernadette's—her fingers curved, reaching for Carole's throat. With each passing second there was less and less of Bernadette about her.

Carole tried to back away, her frantic hands and feet slipping on the floor as she pressed her spine against the wall. She had nowhere to go. She pulled the fallen chair atop her and held it as a shield against the Bernadette-thing. The face that had once belonged to her dearest friend grimaced with contempt as she swung her hand at the chair. It scythed through the spindles, splintering them like matchsticks, sending the carved headpiece flying. A second blow cracked the seat in two. A third and fourth sent the remnants of the chair hurtling to opposite sides of the room.

Carole was helpless now. All she could do was pray.

"Our Father, who art—"

"Too late for that to help you now, Carole!" she rasped, spitting her name.

"... hallowed be Thy Name ..." Carole said, quaking in terror as frigid undead fingers closed on her throat.

And then the Bernadette-thing froze, listening. Carole heard it too. An insistent tapping. On the window. The creature turned to look, and Carole followed her gaze.

A face was peering through the glass.

Carole blinked but it didn't go away. This was the second floor! How—?

And then a second face appeared, this one upside down, looking in from the top of the window. And then a third, and a fourth, each more bestial than the last. And as each appeared it began to tap its fingers and knuckles on the window glass.

"NO!" the Bernadette-thing screamed at them. "You can't come in! She's mine! No one touches her but me!"

She turned back to Carole and smiled, showing those teeth that had never fit in Bernadette's mouth. "They can't cross a threshold unless invited in by one who lives there. I live here—or at least I did. And I'm not sharing you, Carole."

She turned again and raked a clawlike hand at the window. "Go aWAY! She's MINE!"

Carole glanced to her left. The bed was only a few feet away. And above it—the blanket-shrouded crucifix. If she could reach it...

She didn't hesitate. With the mad tapping tattoo from the window echoing around her, Carole gathered her feet beneath her and sprang for the bed. She scrambled across the sheets, one hand outstretched, reaching for the blanket—

A manacle of icy flesh closed around her calf and roughly dragged her back.

"Oh, no, bitch," said the hoarse, unaccented voice of the Bernadette-thing. "Don't even think about it!"

It grabbed two fistfuls of fabric at the back of Carole's blouse and hurled her across the room as if she weighed no more than a pillow. The wind whooshed out of Carole as she slammed against the far wall. She heard ribs crack. She fell among the splintered ruins of the chair, pain lancing through her right flank. The room wavered and blurred. But through the roaring in her ears she still heard that insistent tapping on the window.

As her vision cleared she saw the Bernadette-thing's naked form gesturing again to the creatures at the window, now a mass of salivating mouths and tapping fingers.

"Watch!" she hissed. "Watch me!"

With that, she loosed a long, howling scream and lunged, arms curved before her, body arcing toward Carole in a flying leap. The scream, the tapping, the faces at the window, the dear friend who now wanted only to slaughter her—it all was suddenly too much for Carole. She wanted to roll away but couldn't get her body to move. Her hand found the broken seat of the chair by her hip. Instinctively she pulled it closer. She closed her eyes as she raised it between herself and the horror hurtling toward her.

The impact drove the wood of the seat against Carole's chest; she groaned as new stabs of pain shot through her ribs. But the Bernadette-thing's triumphant feeding cry cut off abruptly and devolved into a coughing gurgle.

Suddenly the weight was released from Carole's chest, and the chair seat with it.

And the tapping at the window ceased.

Carole opened her eyes to see the naked Bernadette-thing standing above her, straddling her, holding the chair seat before her, choking and gagging as she struggled with it.

At first Carole didn't understand. She drew her legs back and inched away along the wall. And then she saw what had happened.

Three splintered spindles had remained fixed in that half of the broken seat, and those spindles were now firmly and deeply embedded in the center of the Bernadette-thing's chest. She wrenched wildly at the chair seat, trying to dislodge the oak daggers but succeeded only in breaking them off at skin level. She dropped the remnant of the seat and swayed like a tree in a storm, her mouth working spasmodically as her hands fluttered ineffectually over the bloodless wounds between her ribs and the slim wooden stakes out of reach within them.

Abruptly she dropped to her knees with a dull thud. Then, only inches from Carole, she slumped into a splay-legged squat. The agony faded from her face and she closed her eyes. She fell forward against Carole.

Carole threw her arms around her friend and gathered her close.

"Oh Bern, oh Bern, oh Bern," she moaned. "I'm so sorry. If only I'd got there sooner!"

Bernadette's eyes fluttered open and the darkness was gone. Only her own spring-sky blue remained, clear, grateful. Her lips began to curve upward but made it only halfway to a smile, then she was gone.

Carole hugged the limp cold body closer and moaned in boundless grief and anguish to the unfeeling walls. She saw the leering faces begin to crawl away from the window and she shouted at them though her tears.

"Go! That's it! Run away and hide! Soon it'll be light and then I'll come looking for you! For all of you! And woe to any of you that I find!"

She cried over Bernadette's body a long time. And then she wrapped it in a sheet and held and rocked her dead friend in her arms until sunrise on Easter Sunday.

CAROLE . . .

The voice yanked her from sleep, the voice that sounded like Bernadette's but robbed of all her sweetness and compassion.

After the horrors of Easter weekend had come loneliness. Carole had begun talking to herself in her head—just for company of sorts—to ease her through the long empty hours. But the voice had taken on a life of its own, becoming Bernadette's. In a way, then, Bern was still alive.

"Yes," Carole said, sitting up on the side of the bed and peering out the window at the lightening sky. "I suppose that was when it began."

She'd walked out of the tomb of St. Anthony's convent on Easter morning and left the old Sister Carole Hanarty behind. That gentle soul, happy to spend her days and nights in the service of the Lord, praying, fasting, teaching chemistry to reluctant adolescents, and holding to her vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, was dead.

In her place was a new Sister Carole, tempered in the forge of that night and recast into someone relentlessly vengeful and fearless to the point of recklessness.

And perhaps, she admitted with no shame or regret, more than a little mad.

She'd departed St. Anthony's and begun her hunt. She'd been hunting ever since.

Carole stretched and glanced around the room. The walls had been decked with family pictures of weddings and children when she'd moved herself in. She'd removed those and lain the ones on the bureau and dresser face down. All those smiling children ... she couldn't bear their eyes watching her.

She knew their names. The Bennetts—Kevin, Marie, and their twin girls. She hadn't known them before, but Carole felt she knew them now. She'd seen their family photos, seen the twins' bedroom.

She knew from the state of the empty house when she'd found it that the owners hadn't moved out. They'd been driven out. She hoped for the sake of their souls that they were dead now. Truly dead.

"But the rules have changed," Carole whispered.

Being a good person meant something different than it had then. And doing the Lord's work . . . well, it was an entirely different sort of work now.

- 2 -

ZEV . . .

It had been almost a full minute since he'd slammed the brass knocker against the heavy oak door. That should have been proof enough. After all, wasn't the knocker in the shape of a cross? But no, they had to squint through their peephole and peer through the sidelights that framed the door.

Zev sighed and resigned himself to the scrutiny. He couldn't blame people for being cautious, but this seemed overly so. The sun was in the west and shining full on his back; he was all but silhouetted in it. What more did they want?

I should maybe take off my clothes and dance naked?

He gave a mental shrug and savored the salt tang of the sea air. The bulk of this huge Tudor mansion stood between him and the Atlantic, but the ocean's briny scent and rhythmic rumble were everywhere. He'd bicycled from Lakewood, which was only ten miles inland from here, but the warm May day and the bright sun beating on his dark blue suit coat had sweated him up. It had taken him longer than he'd planned to find this retreat house.

Spring Lake. The Irish Riviera. An Irish Catholic seaside resort since before the turn of the century. He looked around at its carefully restored Victorian houses, the huge mansions facing the beach, the smaller homes set in neat rows running straight back from the ocean. Many of them were still occupied. Not like Lakewood. Lakewood was an empty shell.

Oh, they'd been smart, those bloodsuckers. They knew their easiest targets. Whenever they swooped into an area they went after officialdom first — the civic leaders, the cops, the firemen, the clergy. But after that, they attacked the non-Christian neighborhoods. And among Jews they picked the Orthodox first of the first. Smart. Where else would they be less likely to run up against a cross? It worked for them in Brooklyn and Queens, and so when they came south into New Jersey, spreading like a plague, they headed straight for the town with one of the largest collections of yeshivas in North America.

But after the Bensonhurst and Kew Gardens holocausts, the people in the Lakewood communities should not have taken quite so long to figure out what was going to happen. The Reformed and Conservative synagogues started handing out crosses at Shabbes—too late for many but it saved a few. Did the Orthodox congregations follow suit? No. They hid in their homes and shuls and yeshivas and read and prayed.

And were liquidated.

A cross, a crucifix — they held power over the undead, drove them away. Zev's fellow rabbis did not want to accept that simple fact because they could not face its devastating ramifications. To hold up a cross was to negate two thousand years of Jewish history, it was to say that the Messiah had come and they had missed him.

Did it say that? Zev didn't know. For all he knew, the undead predated Christianity, and their fear of crosses might be related to something else. Argue about it later—people were dying. But the rabbis had to argue it then and there. And as they argued, their people were slaughtered like cattle.

How Zev had railed at them, how he'd pleaded with them! Blind, stubborn fools! If a fire was consuming your house, would you refuse to throw water on it just because you'd always been taught not to believe in water? Zev had arrived at the rabbinical council wearing a cross and had been thrown out—literally sent hurding through the front door. But at least he had managed to save a few of his own people. Too few.

He remembered his fellow Orthodox rabbis, though. All the ones who had refused to face the reality of the vampires' fear of crosses, who had forbidden their students and their congregations to wear crosses, who had watched those same students and congregations die en masse. And soon those very same rabbis were roaming their own community, hunting the survivors, preying on other yeshivas, other congregations, until the entire community was liquidated and its leaders incorporated into the brotherhood of the undead.

This was the most brilliant aspect of the undead tactics: turn all the community leaders into their own kind and set them loose among the population. What could be more dismaying, more devastating than seeing the very people who should have been leading the resistance become enthusiastic participants in the slaughter?

The rabbis could have saved themselves, could have saved their people, but they would not bend to the reality of what was happening around them. Which, when Zev thought about it, was not at all out of character. Hadn't they spent generations learning to turn away from the rest of the world?

But now their greatest fear had come to pass: they'd been assimilated— with a vengeance.

Those early days of anarchic slaughter were over. Now that the undead held the ruling hand, the bloodletting had become more organized. But the damage to Zev's people had been done—and it was irreparable. Hitler would have been proud. His Nazi "final solution" was an afternoon picnic compared to the work of the undead. In a matter of months, in Israel and Eastern Europe, the undead did what Hitler's Reich could not do in all the years of the Second World War. Muslims and Hindus had fared just as poorly, but that was not Zev's concern. His heart did not bleed for Islam and India.

There's only a few of us now. So few and so scattered. A final Diaspora.

For a moment Zev was almost overwhelmed by grief, but he pushed it down, locked it back into that place where he kept his sorrows, and thought of how fortunate it was for his wife Chana that she died of natural causes before the horror began. Her soul had been too gentle to weather what had happened to their community.

Forcing himself back to the present, he looked around. Not such a bad place for a retreat, he thought. He wondered how many houses like this the Catholic Church owned.

A series of clicks and clacks drew his attention back to the door as numerous bolts were pulled in rapid succession. The door swung inward, revealing a nervous-looking young man in a long black cassock. As he looked at Zev his mouth twisted and he rubbed the back of his wrist across it to hide a smile.

"And what should be so funny?" Zev asked.

"I'm sorry. It's just—"

"I know," Zev said, waving off any explanation as he glanced down at the wooden cross slung on a cord around his neck. "I know."

A bearded Jew in a baggy serge suit wearing a yarmulke and a cross. Hilarious, no?

Nu? This was what the times demanded, this was what it came down to if he wanted to survive. And Zev did want to survive. Someone had to live to carry on the traditions of the Talmud and the Torah, even if there were hardly any Jews left alive in the world.

Zev stood on the sunny porch, waiting. The priest watched him in silence.

Finally Zev said, "Well, may a wandering Jew come in?"

"I won't stop you," the priest said, "but surely you don't expect me to invite you."

Ah, yes. Another precaution. The undead couldn't cross the threshold of a home unless invited, so don't invite. A good habit to cultivate, he supposed.

He stepped inside and the priest immediately closed the door behind him, relatching all the locks one by one. When he turned around Zev held out his hand.

"Rabbi Zev Wolpin, Father. I thank you for allowing me in."

"Brother Christopher, sir," he said, smiling and shaking Zev's hand. His suspicions seemed to have been allayed. "I'm not a priest yet. We can't offer you much here, but—"

"Oh, I won't be staying long. I just came to talk to Father Joseph Cahill."

Brother Christopher frowned. "Father Cahill isn't here at the moment."

"When will he be back?"

"I—I'm not sure. You see—"

"Father Cahill is on another bender," said a stentorian voice behind Zev.

He turned to see an elderly priest facing him from the far end of the foyer. White-haired, heavyset, also wearing a black cassock.

"I'm Rabbi Wolpin."

"Father Adams," the priest said, stepping forward and extending his hand.

As they shook Zev said, "Did you say he was on 'another' bender? I never knew Father Cahill to be much of a drinker."

The priest's face turned stony. "Apparently there was a lot we never knew about Father Cahill."

"If you're referring to that nastiness last year," Zev said, feeling the old anger rise in him, "I for one never believed it for a minute. I'm surprised anyone gave it the slightest credence."

"The veracity of the accusation was irrelevant in the final analysis. The damage to Father Cahill's reputation was a fait accompli. The bishops' rules are clear. Father Palmeri was forced to request his removal for the good of St. Anthony's parish."

Zev was sure that sort of attitude had something to do with Father Joe being on "another bender."

"Where can I find Father Cahill?"

"He's in town somewhere, I suppose, making a spectacle of himself. If there's any way you can talk some sense into him, please do. Not only is he killing himself with drink but he's become a public embarrassment to the priesthood and to the Church."

Zev wondered which bothered Father Adams more. And as for embarrassing the priesthood, he was tempted to point out that too many others had done a bang-up job of that already. But he held his tongue.

I'll try."

He waited for Brother Christopher to undo all the locks, then stepped toward the sunlight.

"Try Morton's down on Seventy-one," the younger man whispered as Zev passed.

* * *

Zev rode his bicycle south on route 71. So strange to see people on the streets. Not many, but more than he'd ever see in Lakewood again. Yet he knew that as the undead consolidated their grip on the rest of the coast, they'd start arriving with their living minions in the Catholic communities like Spring Lake, and then these streets would be as empty as Lakewood's.

He thought he remembered passing a place named Morton's on his way in. And then up ahead he saw it, by the railroad track crossing, a white stucco one-story box of a building with "Morton's Liquors" painted in big black letters along the side.

Father Adams' words echoed back to him ...on another bender ...

Zev pushed his bicycle to the front door and tried the knob. Locked up tight. A look inside showed a litter of trash, broken bottles, and empty shelves. The windows were barred; the back door was steel and locked as securely as the front. So where was Father Joe?

Then, by the overflowing trash Dumpster, he spotted the basement window at ground level. It wasn't latched. Zev went down on his knees and pushed it open.

Cool, damp, musty air wafted against his face as he peered into the Stygian darkness. It occurred to him that he might be asking for trouble by sticking his head inside, but he had to give it a try. If Father Cahill wasn't here, Zev would begin the return trek to Lakewood and write off this whole trip as wasted effort.

"Father Joe?" he called. "Father Cahill?"

"That you again, Chris?" said a slightly slurred voice. "Go home, will you? I'm all right. I'll be back later."

"It's me, Joe. Zev. From Lakewood."

He heard shoes scraping on the floor and then a familiar face appeared in the shaft of light from the window.

"Well I'll be damned. It is you! Thought you were Brother Chris come to drag me back to the retreat house. Gets scared I'm gonna get stuck out after dark. So how ya doin', Reb? Glad to see you're still alive. Come on in!"

Zev noted Father Cahill's glassy eyes and how he swayed ever so slightly, like a skyscraper in the wind. His hair was uncombed, and his faded jeans and worn Bruce Springsteen Tunnel of Love Tour sweatshirt made him look more like a laborer than a priest.

Zev's heart twisted at the sight of his friend in such condition. Such a mensch like Father Joe shouldn't be acting like a shikker. Maybe it was a mistake coming here.

"I don't have that much time, Joe. I came to tell you—"

"Get your bearded ass down here and have a drink or I'll come up and drag you down."

"All right," Zev said. "I'll come in but I won't have a drink."

He hid his bike behind the Dumpster, then squeezed through the window. Joe helped him to the floor. They embraced, slapping each other on the back. Father Joe was a bigger man, a giant from Zev's perspective. At six-four he was ten inches taller, at thirty-five he was a quarter-century younger; he had a muscular frame, thick brown hair, and—on better days—clear blue eyes.

"You're grayer, Zev, and you've lost weight."

"Kosher food is not so easily come by these days."

"All kinds of food are getting scarce." He touched the cross slung from Zev's neck and smiled. "Nice touch. Goes well with your zizith."

Zev fingered the fringe protruding from under his shirt. Old habits didn't die easily.

"Actually, I've grown rather fond of it."

"So what can I pour you?" the priest said, waving an arm at the crates of liquor stacked around him. "My own private reserve. Name your poison."

"I don't want a drink."

"Come on, Reb. I've got some nice hundred-proof Stoli here. You've got to have at least one drink—"

"Why? Because you think maybe you shouldn't drink alone?"

Father Joe winced. "Ouch!"

"All right," Zev said. "Bisel. I'll have one drink on the condition that you don't have one. Because I wish to talk to you."

The priest considered that a moment, then reached for the vodka bottle.

"Deal."

He poured a generous amount into a paper cup and handed it over. Zev took a sip. He was not a drinker and when he did imbibe he preferred his vodka ice cold from a freezer. But this was tasty. Father Cahill sat back on a case of Jack Daniel's and folded his arms.

"Nu?" the priest said with a Jackie Mason shrug.

Zev had to laugh. "Joe, I still say that somewhere in your family tree is Jewish blood."

For a moment he felt light, almost happy. When was the last time he had laughed? Probably at their table near the back of Horovitz's deli, shortly before the St. Anthony's nastiness began, well before the undead came.

Zev thought of the day they'd met. He'd been standing at the counter at Horovitz's waiting for Yussel to wrap up the stuffed derma he'd ordered when this young giant walked in. He towered over the rabbis and yeshiva students in the place, looking as Irish as Paddy's pig, and wearing a Roman collar. He said he'd heard this was the only place on the whole Jersey Shore where you could get a decent corned beef sandwich. He ordered one and cheerfully warned that it better be good. Yussel asked him what could he know about good corned beef and the priest replied that he'd grown up in Bensonhurst. Well, about half the people in Horovitz's on that day—and on any other day, for that matter—had grown up in Bensonhurst, and before you knew it they were all asking him if he knew such-and-such a store and so-and-so's deli.

Zev then informed the priest—with all due respect to Yussel Horovitz behind the counter—that the best corned beef sandwich in the world was to be had at Shmuel Rosenberg's Jerusalem Deli in Bensonhurst. Father Cahill said he'd been there and agreed one hundred percent.

Yussel served him his sandwich then. As the priest took a huge bite out of the corned beef on rye, the normal tumel of a deli at lunchtime died away until Horovitz's was as quiet as a shul on Sunday morning. Everyone watched him chew, watched him swallow. Then they waited. Suddenly his face broke into this big Irish grin.

"I'm afraid I'm going to have to change my vote," he said. "Horovitz's of Lakewood makes the best corned beef sandwich in the world."

Amid cheers and warm laughter, Zev led Father Cahill to the rear table that would become theirs, and sat with this canny and charming gentile who had so easily won over a roomful of strangers and provided such a mechaieh for Yussel. He learned that the young priest was the new assistant to Father Palmeri, the pastor at St. Anthony's Catholic Church at the northern end of Lakewood. Father Palmeri had been there for years but Zev had never so much as seen his face. He asked Father Cahill—who wanted to be called Joe—about life in Brooklyn these days and they talked for an hour.

During the following months they would run into each other so often at Horovitz's that they decided to meet regularly for lunch, on Mondays and Thursdays. They did so for years, discussing religion—oy, the religious discussions!—politics, economics, philosophy, life in general. During those lunchtimes they solved most of the world's problems. Zev was sure they'd have solved them all if the scandal at St. Anthony's hadn't resulted in Father Joe's removal from the parish.

But that was in another time, another world. The world before the undead took over.

Zev shook his head as he considered the current state of Father Joe in the dusty basement of Morton's Liquors.

"It's about the vampires, Joe," he said, taking another sip of the Stoli. "They've taken over St. Anthony's."

Father Joe snorted and shrugged.

"They're in the majority now, Zev, remember? They've taken over the whole East Coast. Why should St. Anthony's be different from any other parish?"

"I didn't mean the parish. I meant the church."

The priest's eyes widened slightly. "The church? They've taken over the building itself?"

"Every night," Zev said. "Every night they are there."

"That's a holy place. How do they manage that?"

"They've desecrated the altar, destroyed all the crosses. St. Anthony's is no longer a holy place."

"Too bad," Father Joe said, looking down and shaking his head sadly. "It was a fine old church." He looked up again. "How do you know about what's going on at St. Anthony's? It's not exactly in your neighborhood."

"A neighborhood I don't exactly have any more."

Father Joe reached over and gripped his shoulder with a huge hand.

"I'm sorry, Zev. I heard your people got hit pretty hard over there. Sitting ducks, huh? I'm really sorry."

Sitting ducks. An appropriate description.

"Not as sorry as I, Joe," Zev said. "But since my neighborhood is gone, and since I have hardly any friends left, I use the daylight hours to wander. So call me the Wandering Jew. And in my wanderings I meet some of your old parishioners."

The priest's face hardened. His voice became acid.

"Do you, now. And how fare the remnants of my devoted flock?"

"They've lost all hope, Joe. They wish you were back."

He barked a bitter laugh. "Sure they do! Just like they rallied behind me when my name and honor were being dragged through the muck. Yeah, they want me back. I'll bet!"

"Such anger, Joe. It doesn't become you."

"Bullshit. That was the old Joe Cahill, the naive turkey who believed all his faithful parishioners would back him up. But no. A child points a finger and the bishop removes me. And how do the people I dedicated my life to respond? They all stand by in silence as I'm railroaded out of my parish."

"It's hard for the commonfolk to buck a bishop."

"Maybe. But I can't forget how they stood quietly by while I was stripped of my position, my dignity, my integrity, of everything I wanted to be . . ."

Zev thought Joe's voice was going to break. He was about to reach out to him when the priest coughed and squared his shoulders.

"Meanwhile, I'm a pariah over here in the retreat house, a goddamn leper. Some of them actually believe—" He broke off in a growl. "Ah, what's the use? It's over and done. Most of the parish is dead anyway, I suppose. And if I'd stayed there I'd probably be dead too. So maybe it worked out for the best. And who gives a shit anyway?"

"Last night I met someone who does. She saved me from one of the winged ones."

"You were out at night?"

"Yes. A long story. She was dressed rather provocatively and knew me because she'd seen me with you."

Joe looked interested now. "What was her name?"

"She wouldn't say. But she begged me to find you and bring you back."

"Really." His interest seemed to be fading.

"Yes. She said when you heard what they've done to your church you'd come back and teach them a lesson they'll never forget."

"Sounds like you ran into an escaped mental patient," Joe said as he reached for the bottle of Glenlivet next to him.

"No-no!" Zev said. "You promised!"

Father Joe drew his hand back and crossed his arms across his chest.

"Talk on. I'm listening."

Joe had certainly changed for the worse. Morose, bitter, apathetic, self-pitying.

"They've taken over your church, just as they've taken over my temple. But the temple they use only for a dormitory. Your church, they've desecrated it. Each night they further defile it with butchery and blasphemy. Doesn't that mean anything to you?"

"It's Palmeri's parish. I've been benched. Let him take care of it."

"Father Palmeri is their leader."

"He should be. He's their pastor."

"No. He leads the undead in the obscenities they perform in the church."

Joe stiffened and the glassiness cleared from his eyes.

"Palmeri? He's one of them?"

Zev nodded. "More than that. He's one of the local leaders. He orchestrates their rituals."

Zev saw rage flare in the priest's eyes, saw his hands ball into fists, and for a moment he thought the old Father Joe was going to burst through.

Come on, Joe. Show me that Cahill fire.

But then he slumped back.

"Is that all you came to tell me?"

Zev hid his disappointment and nodded. "Yes."

"Good." He grabbed the Scotch bottle. "Because I need a drink."

Zev wanted to leave, yet he had to stay, had to probe deeper and see how much of his old friend was left, and how much had been replaced by this new, bitter, alien Joe Cahill. Maybe there was still hope. So they talked on.

* * *

Zev looked up at the window and saw that it was dark.

"Gevalt! I didn't notice the time!"

Father Joe seemed surprised too. He stepped to the window and peered out.

"Damn! Sun's down!" He turned to Zev. "Lakewood's out of the question for you, Reb. Even the retreat house is too far to risk now. Looks like we're stuck here for the night."

"We'll be safe?"

He shrugged. "Why not? As far as I can tell I'm the only one who's been in here for weeks, and only in the daytime. Be pretty odd if one of those leeches decided to wander in here tonight."

"We'd have to invite it in, right?"

He shook his head. "Doesn't seem to work that way with stores. Only homes."

Zev's guderim twisted. "That's not good."

"Don't worry. We're okay if we don't attract attention. I've got a flashlight if we need it, but we're better off sitting here in the dark and shooting the breeze till sunrise." Father Joe smiled and picked up a huge silver cross, at least a foot in length, from atop one of the crates. "Besides, we're armed. And frankly, I can think of worse places to spend the night."

He stepped over to the case of Glenlivet and opened a fresh bottle. His capacity for alcohol was enormous.

Zev could think of worse places too. In fact he had spent a number of nights in much worse places since the Lakewood holocaust. He decided to put the time to good use.

"So, Joe. Maybe I should tell you some more about what's happening in Lakewood."

COWBOYS . . .

King of the world.

Al Hulett leaned back in the passenger seat of the big Cadillac convertible they'd just driven out of somebody's garage, burning rubber all the way, and let the night air mess with his spiky black hair.

As usual, Stan was driving with Jackie riding shotgun. Al and Kenny had the back seat with Heinekens in their fists, Slipknot's Iowa CD in the slot, and "Skin Ticket" blasting through the speakers. Al finished his Heinie and tossed the empty over his shoulder so it landed on the trunk top. He heard a faint, frightened yelp from within, then a crash as the bottle bounced off and shattered on the asphalt behind them.

He leaned back and pounded a fist on the trunk. "Ay, shuddup up in there! You're messin with my meditation!"

This brought a howl of laughter from Kenny, which didn't necessarily mean it was real funny, just that Kenny was always a good audience.

He and the Kenman had been together since grammar school. How many years was that now? Ten? Twelve? Couldn't be more than a dozen. No way. Whatever, the two of them had stuck together through it all, never breaking up, even when Kenny pulled that short jolt in Yardville on a B&E. Even when the whole world went to hell.

But they'd come through it all like gold. They'd hired out to the winners. Joined the best hunting pack around.

Coulda turned out different. He and Kenny coulda had their throats chewed out and their heads ripped off just like a bunch of guys they knew, but they happened to be the right guys in the right place at the right time.

The right place was a bar they'd broken into, and the right time had been Easter morning—didn't know it was Easter then, only learned that later.

Al and Kenny and some friends had started partying Friday afternoon in this old shotgun shack back in the pines. By Sunday morning they'd run out of booze, so they rode their Harleys out to Route 9. That was when they learned about all the shit that had went down the past two nights. So they'd broke into this bar-package store and were helping themselves to some liquid refreshment when this dude in a cowboy hat walked in. Said his name was Stan. Said he saw their Harleys outside and was wondering if they was the kinda guys who might like to go to work for the winners.

Al and Kenny weren't too sure about that at first, so Stan said the chai-slurpin, Chardonnay-sippin, Gap-wearin, hummus-dippin, classic-rock-listenin world that had thought "loser" every time it looked at them and had never given them a chance was on its knees now and did they want to help bust a coupla caps in its fuckin head to put it down for good?

That Stan, man, he had a way with words.

Still. . . workin for the vampires . . .

Then Stan had made them an offer they couldn't refuse.

So that was why Al was riding in a Caddy tonight 'stead of on a Harley.

King of the fucking world.

Well, not king, really. But at least a prince ... when the sun was up.

Night was a whole different story.

If you could get used to the creeps you were working for, it wasn't too bad a set-up. Could have been worse, Al knew—a lot worse.

Like being cattle, for instance.

Pretty smart, those bloodsuckers. America thought it was ready for them but it wasn't. They hit high, they hit low, and before you knew it, they was in charge of the whole East Coast.

Well, almost in charge. They did whatever they damn well pleased at night, but they'd never be in charge around the clock because they couldn't be up and about in the daylight. They needed somebody to hold the fort for them between sunrise and sunset.

That was where Al and Kenny and the other cowboys came in. They'd all been made the same offer.

They could be cattle, or they could be cowboys and drive the cattle.

Not much of a choice as far as Al could see.

You see, the bloodsuckers had two ways of killing folks. They had the usual way of ripping into your neck and sucking out your blood. If they got you that way, you became one of them come the next sundown. But once they had the upper hand, they changed their feeding style. Smart, those bloodsuckers. If they got too many of their kind wandering around, they'd soon have nobody to feed on—a world full of chefs with nothing to cook. So after they were in control, they got the blood a different way, one that didn't involve sucking it out. You died unsucked, you stayed dead. Something they called true death.

But they'd offered Al and Stan and the guys undeath. Be their cowboys, herd the cattle and take care of business between sunrise and sunset, be their muscle during the day, do a good job for ten years, and they'd see to it that you got done in the old-fashioned way, the way that left you like them. Undead. Immortal. One of the ruling class.

"Ay-yo, Al," Kenny shouted over the howl of "Disasterpiece."

"What kinda vampire you gonna be?"

Not again, Al thought. They'd worked this over too many times for Al's taste. It was getting real old. But Kenny never seemed to tire of gnawing this particular bone.

Kenny had this pale cratered skin. Even though he was in his twenties he still got pimples. Looked like the man in the moon now, but in the old days he'd been a real pizza face. Once he almost killed a guy who'd called him that. And he had this crazy red hair that used to stick out in all directions when he didn't cut it, but even when he did it Mohican style, like now, all shaved off on the sides and showing the ugly knobs on his skull, it looked crazier than ever. Made Kenny look crazier than ever. And Kenny was pretty crazy as it was.

"I can tell you what kind I ain't gonna be," Al said, "and that's one of them ferals."

"Ay, I'm down wit that. I'm gonna be a pilot, man. Get me some wings."

Jackie turned down the music and swiveled in the front seat. She was thin and blonde, with a left nostril ring and a stud through her right eyebrow, and she had this tat of a devil face sticking out a Gene Simmons-class tongue on her left delt. She dangled an arm over the back near Al's knees and sneered.

"Wings? You'll be lucky if you get a plate of Buffalo wings."

Stan seemed to think this was real funny. Even Al had to laugh a little.

Kenny made this sour face. "Funny. Real fuckin funny."

"How many kinds of vampires are there, anyway?" Al said.

He wasn't just trying to take the heat off Kenny, he really wanted to know. In the weeks since he'd joined the posse he'd noticed that some of the bloodsuckers could sprout wings and fly. Most just walked around like everybody else—only at night, of course—and looked like everybody else, although some had faces that seemed to turn uglier and uglier as time went on.

Then there was the kind that were pretty much like animals. These were scary. Al had only seen a couple of them from a distance and that was plenty close enough. Hardly nothing human left in their faces or the way they moved. Couldn't even talk. The other bloodsuckers called them "ferals" and they were like vampire shock troops. These were the guys they let loose when they first blew into a town. Al gathered they must be kinda hard to control because the other vampires kept them locked up pretty much of the time.

Good thing. Al had a feeling if he ran into a feral at night the thing would be on him and chompin on his windpipe before it noticed he was wearing a cowboy earring.

That special earring—a dangly silver crescent-moon thing—said you were working for them. It gave you a free pass if you ran into one of them at night.

Because the night was theirs.

Being a cowboy wasn't so bad, really. You could be assigned to keep an eye on their nests, make sure no save-the-world types—Stan liked to call them rustlers—got in there and started splashing holy water around and driving stakes into their cold little hearts. Or you could be part of a posse, which meant you spent the day riding around hunting strays. One good way to earn brownie points with the bloodsuckers was to have a stray cow or two ready for them after sundown.

They had a cow in the trunk right now. Some old bitch who'd scratched and clawed at them when they rounded her up. Deserved what she had comin to her. Plus she was good for brownie points.

Those points weren't nothing to sneer at. Earn enough of them and you got to spend some stud time on one of their cattle ranches—where all the cows were human. And young.

Neither Al or Kenny or any of their pack had been to one of the farms yet, but they'd all heard it was like incredible. You came back sore, man.

Al didn't particularly like working for the vampires. But then he couldn't remember ever liking anybody he'd worked for. The bloodsuckers gave him the creeps, but what was he supposed to do? If you can't beat 'em, join 'em. Plenty of guys felt the same way.

Another thing that didn't set too well was being at the bottom of the pecking order. Seemed he had to take orders from everybody except Kenny. Stan said that would change. Told them how he'd started at the bottom too. Learned the ropes and soon got to be leader of his own posse.

Stan and Jackie was some sorta team. A good one. Al looked at Jackie. Not the greatest looking piece with that wild bottle-blond hair all black at the roots, but considering the severe lack of poontang around these parts lately, she was starting to look drop-dead gorgeous. Al could've really used a piece of her, but he knew if he went for it he'd wind up on the wrong end of that Bowie knife Stan kept strapped to his belt.

Jackie might cut him too. Just for fun. One tough broad, that Jackie. But her real talent was smoking out the ladies. Like the old bitch in the trunk. Jackie pulls out her piercings, gets dressed up in clothes that hide her tats, then goes knocking door to door, pretending to be looking for her little girl. Nobody figures a broad's gonna be working for the bloodsuckers, so sooner or later one of them answers the door and then blammo, the posse's there like coons on an open garbage can.

Al just wished the old bitch was younger. Then he coulda had a little fun with her before—

"Hail, hail, the gang's all here," Jackie said as they rounded a corner and pulled up before St. Anthony's. "And there's Gregor." She grinned at Kenny. "Maybe you should go ask him what you gotta do to earn your wings. I'm sure he'll be glad to sit down and chat about it."

Kenny didn't say nothing.

The old church was like the unofficial meeting place for Stan's posse and Gregor, the numero uno bloodsucker in charge of the Jersey Shore. One mean son of an undead bitch, that Gregor. Even the other vampires seemed to be like afraid of him. He was big, with these wide shoulders, long dark hair, ice cold blue eyes, and square pale face. But then all the bloodsuckers had pale faces. It was his smile that got to Al. Most times it looked painted on, but with all those sharp teeth of his it managed to make him look both happy and very, very hungry at the same time.

The posses had to meet with Gregor every night and tell him how things had gone while he was cutting his Z's or whatever it was the bloodsuckers did when the sun was up. It was part of the job. Al's least favorite part of the job. He didn't know what it was that made his skin crawl every time he got near one. Wasn't their looks, their dirty clothes, their stink. Something else, something you couldn't see or smell. Something you felt.

Al spotted Gregor by the church steps with his guards. He was dressed as usual in a dark suit, white shirt, no tie. Always the same, like he was going to a business meeting or something. Which put him a cut above most vampires, who never changed their clothes. Ever.

Hey, this was weird. Usually he had one or two undead goons guarding him. Tonight he had four. What was up?

Al didn't get the bodyguard thing. Like who'd ever mess with Gregor? But he didn't seem to go anywhere without them. They didn't look like the typical pumped-up guard dog types, but all four carried Glocks and razor-sharp machetes on their belts.

The local undead bigshots stood around Gregor: Mayor Davis, Council-woman Ellis, Rabbi Goldstein, and the only black face in sight, big fat Reverend Dalton.

Al had lived around Lakewood for years and never knew any of these peopie's names—like he needed to know who was mayor, right?—but he knew them now.

He looked around for the priest, Palmeri, who was usually with Gregor, but didn't see him. Just as well. There was a bad dude. Almost as creepy as Gregor.

As Stan eased the car into the curb, one of the bodyguards came over. He wore black jeans, a black shirt crusted with old blood, and a worried expression.

"No report tonight," he said in some sort of fag British accent. "Do you 'ave something for Gregor?"

Here was another thing not to like about the vampires. All the high-ups were one kind of foreigner or another. Gregor looked like John Travolta but sounded like Bela Lugosi. His guard here sounded like Mick Jagger.

"Yeah," Stan said. "Got a cow in the trunk. What's up?"

"Not your concern. I'll bring 'er to Gregor."

"Okay. Al, you and Kenny wanna get her out?"

They did that. The ride in the trunk seemed to have taken most of the fight out of the old broad. She had to be sixty-five or seventy and she didn't look so hot at first, but she came to life, screaming and yelling when she saw the bloodsuckers.

The bodyguard made a face when he saw her. " 'Ere now, what's this? She the best you could do?"

"We hit a dry neighborhood. We'll do better tomorrow."

"See that you do." He grabbed the old broad's arm and she fainted. He barely seemed to notice. "Move on. Get to your 'omes and stay inside. We'll wake you at the usual time."

As Gregor's guard dragged the unconscious broad toward the church, Stan peeled away from the curb.

"Somethin's up," Jackie said.

Stan nodded. "Wonder what's eatin them?"

"You don't think another one of us bought it, do you?" Kenny said looking all nervous.

Al knew how he felt. Someone had been offing cowboys lately. Nothing big scale, just one here, one there, but enough to make you start looking over your shoulder.

"Nah," Stan said. "They'd tell us that. This is somethin else."

As Stan cranked up Slipknot again, Al looked back at the receding church.

The local undead were carrying the old broad up the church steps. Gregor stayed on the sidewalk, his guards tight around them.

What could get vampires shook up enough that they didn't want their own posses near them? It gave him a crawly feeling in his gut.

As they turned a corner Al thought he saw a female vampire with her own set of bodyguards step out of the shadows and move toward Gregor.

GREGOR . . .

His get-guards tensed and turned at Olivia's approach but Gregor did not acknowledge it. He'd been informed of her arrival from New York an hour ago and had been aware of her presence in the shadows, watching him. He waited till she spoke.

"Good evening, Gregor," she said with a light French accent.

He whirled and smiled. "Why, Olivia. What a wonderful surprise!"

It appeared she'd dressed for the occasion: a red gown—plucked from the window of a Fifth Avenue designer shop, no doubt—and an elaborate Marie Antoinette wig over her own hair which Gregor knew to be short and mousy brown.

Their guards—she'd brought six with her—stood around and between them.

She smiled. "I'm sure." She waved her hand. "Step back, gentlemen. Gregor and I have private matters to discuss."

They did, albeit reluctantly.

Gregor shook his head as he watched the ten form a rough circle around Olivia and him. Considering recent events, he should have taken comfort in the number. That didn't make them any less of an inconvenience. One or two get-guards at all times were a nuisance, but four—he felt strangled. And Olivia with six tonight. How did she manage?

"You've come about Angelica, I suppose," he said in a low voice.

She nodded. "You knew Franco would send someone."

Yes, he had. Somehow, some way, someone had killed Angelica last night. Gregor—over the objections of his get—had personally tracked down her remains before dawn and had them removed to a place where they could be burned. Secretly burned. It wouldn't do to let the cattle know that one of the undead elite had been brought down while on the wing.

But Angelica's death was no secret among the undead. Gregor had been expecting an emissary from New York tonight, but Olivia of all people. Raw ambition from a rival get-line. This would not do.

"It could have been an accident, you know."

"I doubt that," Olivia said. "Angelica was too experienced."

Angelica—Gregor had never liked her, and hated her now. The old bitch had to go out and hunt alone. Not that any of her get-guards could have accompanied her—none of them had wings. No reason for Angelica to hunt. With her status she could have had cattle brought to her every night.

Gregor pressed his point. "It's not as if Angelica was shot down with a crossbow or the like. She was pierced with a tree branch, one that was snapped off a tree not a dozen feet from where we found her. It was quite evident that she flew into the tree and—"

Olivia smiled, showing her fangs. "I certainly don't believe that, Gregor. And neither, I dare say, do you. The situation around here has been precarious for some time, what with some sort of vigilante group running around killing your serfs. How many dead now—four?"

Gregor stiffened. "Where do you get your information?

"That's not important. Franco is concerned that the situation is getting out of hand."

"Nothing of the sort." He was sure she was overstating Franco's concern. "Everything is under control. As for these so-called vigilantes—"

"Four serfs in four weeks, Gregor. Not just killed—their throats are slit and then they're strung up for all to see. Bad enough. But now these vigilantes have taken down Angelica."

"We don't know if it was the same group."

"That's the trouble. You don't know a thing about the perpetrators, do you."

Too true. Whatever group was killing the serfs—an older term; Gregor had become used to calling them cowboys—wasn't announcing itself. No fliers, no graffiti, no name, no identity. Just a corpse twisting in the wind. They did their dirty work and then faded away.

"Some of the killings could be by copycats," Gregor offered.

"Even worse! Our hold is fragile, Gregor. We need our serfs. We can't have the night if they don't hold the day for us. The carrot-and-the-stick approach is usually sufficient, but they're as loyal as cockroaches, and if someone else comes along with a bigger stick, our carrot may not be enough."

"Scum," Gregor growled.

"Of course they are. Who but scum would sell out their own kind? But they're our scum. And we need them. Without them guarding our daysleep, we're vulnerable. If we can't protect them, they won't protect us."

"I hardly need a lecture on this, Olivia."

"Maybe you do." She pointed a long-nailed finger at him. "Because if you don't straighten this out, I'll have to do it for you."

Gregor glared at her. He knew what that meant: he'd be sent back to New York where Franco would demote him to some sort of low-level functionary.

He was a veteran of the battle of the Vatican, damn it. No one could humiliate him like that.

His thoughts drifted back. What a week that had been. Vatican City was immune to the ferals because of the plethora of crosses—crosses everywhere, on the walls, the ceilings, even the floors. The priests and the Swiss Guard had fought valiantly against the serfs. It was not until turned military commanders and soldiers began shelling the buildings with tanks and artillery that they made any progress. Vatican City eventually was reduced to rubble. That was the good news. The bad news was that the Pope had died in the shelling. It would have been such a coup to turn him and make him an icon for the Catholic undead.

Gregor missed those good old days of head-on assault: Prague, Berlin, Rome, Paris, London. They'd all fallen in days. But that approach had run into unforeseen problems. Franco was trying a new tack. Gregor agreed that it made more sense, but it lacked the heady rush of the blitzkrieg. And it allowed upstarts like Olivia to rise.

If Olivia had her way and Gregor was called back to New York, she would remove all his get—which now included the mayor, the councilwoman, the priest, and the reverend among others—and install her own in their place. Olivia's domain would expand while his would contract to near zero.

Gregor would not allow that. These vigilantes would be found and run to ground if he had to do it himself.

ZEV . . .

After a few hours their talk died of fatigue. Father Joe gave Zev the flashlight to hold, then stretched out across a couple of crates to sleep. Zev tried to get comfortable enough to doze but found sleep impossible. So he listened to his friend snore in the dusty darkness of the cellar.

Poor Joe. Such anger in the man. But more than that—hurt. He felt betrayed, wronged. And with good reason. But with everything falling apart as it was, the wrong done to him would never be righted. He should forget about it already and go on with his life, but apparently he couldn't. Such a shame. He needed something to pull him out of his funk. Zev had thought news of what had happened to his old parish might rouse him, but it seemed only to make him want to drink more. Father Joseph Cahill, he feared, was a hopeless case.

Zev closed his eyes and tried to rest. He found it hard to get comfortable with the cross dangling in front of him so he took it off but laid it within easy reach. He was drifting toward a doze when he heard a noise outside. By the dumpster. Metal on metal.

My bicycle!

He slipped to the floor and tiptoed over to where Joe slept. He shook his shoulder and whispered.

"Someone's found my bike!"

The priest snorted but remained sleeping. A louder clatter outside made Zev turn, and as he moved his elbow struck a bottle. He grabbed for it in the darkness but missed. The sound of smashing glass echoed through the basement like a cannon shot. As the odor of Scotch whiskey replaced the musty ambiance, Zev listened for further sounds from outside. None came.

Maybe it had been an animal. He remembered how raccoons used to raid his garbage at home... when he'd had a home ... when he'd had garbage ...

Zev stepped to the window and looked out. Probably an animal.

A pale, snarling demonic face, baring its fangs and hissing, suddenly filled the window. Zev fell back as the thing rammed its hand through the glass, reaching for his throat, its curved fingers clawing at him, missing. It pushed up the window, then launched itself the rest of the way through, hurtling toward Zev.

He tried to dodge but was too slow. The impact knocked the flashlight from his grasp and it rolled across the floor. Zev cried out as he went down under the snarling thing. Its ferocity was overpowering, irresistible. It straddled him and lashed at him, batting his fending arms aside, its clawed fingers tearing at his collar to free his throat, stretching his neck to expose the vulnerable flesh, its foul breath gagging him as it bent its fangs toward him. Zev screamed out his helplessness.

JOE . . .

Father Joe Cahill awoke to cries of terror.

He shook his head to clear it and instantly regretted the move. His head weighed at least two hundred pounds, and his mouth was stuffed with foul-tasting cotton. Why did he keep doing this to himself? What was the point in acting out the drunken Irish priest cliche? Not only did it leave him feeling lousy, it gave him bad dreams. Like now.

Another terrified shout, only a few feet away.

He looked toward the sound. In the faint light from the flashlight rolling across the floor he saw Zev on his back, fighting for his life against—

Jesus! This was no dream!

He leaped over to where the creature was lowering its fangs toward Zev's throat. He grabbed it by the back of the neck and lifted it clear of the floor. It was surprisingly heavy but that didn't slow him. Joe could feel the anger rising in him, surging into his muscles.

"Rotten piece of filth!"

He swung the vampire by its neck and let it fly against the cinderblock wall. It impacted with what should have been bone-crushing force, but bounced off, rolled on the floor, and regained its feet in one motion, ready to attack again. Strong as he was, Joe knew he was no match for this thing's power. He turned, grabbed his big silver crucifix, and charged the creature.

"Hungry? Eat this!"

As the creature bared its fangs and hissed at him, Joe shoved the long lower end of the cross's upright into the gaping maw. Blue-white light flickered along the silver length of the crucifix, reflecting in the creature's startled, agonized eyes as its flesh sizzled and crackled. The vampire let out a strangled cry and tried to turn away but Joe wasn't through with it yet. He was literally seeing red as rage poured out of a hidden well and swirled through him. He rammed the cross farther down the thing's gullet. Light flashed deep in its throat, illuminating the pale tissues from within. It tried to grab the cross and pull it out but the flesh of its fingers burned and smoked wherever it came in contact with it.

Finally Joe stepped back and let the thing squirm and scrabble up the wall and out the window into the night. Then he turned to Zev. If anything had happened—

"Hey, Reb!" he said, kneeling beside the older man. "You all right?"

"Yes," Zev said, struggling to his feet. "Thanks to you."

Joe slumped onto a crate, momentarily weak as his rage dissipated. This is not what I'm about, he thought. But it had felt so damn good to let loose on that vampire. Almost too good.

I'm falling apart. . . like everything else in the world.

"That was too close," Joe said, giving the older man's shoulder a fond squeeze.

"For that vampire, too close for sure." Zev replaced his yarmulke. "And would you please remind me, Father Joe, that in the future if ever I should maybe get my blood sucked and become undead that I should stay far away from you."

Joe laughed for the first time in too long. It felt good.

- 3 -

JOE . . .

They climbed out of Morton's basement shortly after dawn. Joe carried an unopened bottle of Scotch—for later. He stretched his cramped muscles and shielded his eyes from the rising sun. The bright light sent stabs of pain through his brain.

"Oy," Zev said as he pulled his hidden bicycle from behind the dumpster. "Look what he did."

Joe inspected the bike. The front wheel had been bent so far out of shape that half the spokes were broken.

"Beyond fixing, Zev."

"Looks like I'll be walking back to Lakewood."

Joe looked around, searching the ground. "Where'd our visitor go?"

He knew it couldn't have got far. He followed drag marks in the sandy dirt around to the far side of the dumpster, and there it was—or rather what was left of it: a rotting, twisted corpse, blackened to a crisp and steaming in the morning sunlight. The silver crucifix still protruded from between its teeth.

"Three ways we know to kill them," Zev said. "A stake through the heart, decapitation, or exposing them to sunlight. I believe Father Cahill has just found a fourth."

Joe approached and gingerly yanked his cross free of the foul remains.

"Looks like you've sucked your last pint of blood," he said and immediately felt foolish.

Who was he putting on the macho act for? Zev certainly wasn't going to buy it. Too out of character. But then, what was his character these days? He used to be a parish priest. Now he was a nothing. A less than nothing.

He straightened and turned to Zev.

"Come on back to the retreat house, Reb. I'll buy you breakfast."

But as Joe turned and began walking away, Zev stayed and stared down at the corpse.

"They say most of them don't wander far from where they spent their lives," Zev said. "Which means it's unlikely this fellow was Jewish if he lived around here. Probably Catholic. Irish Catholic, I'd imagine."

Joe stopped and turned. He stared at his long shadow. The hazy rising sun at his back cast a huge hulking shape before him, with a dark cross in one shadow hand and a smudge of amber light where it poured through the bottle of Scotch in the other.

"What are you getting at?" he said.

"The Kaddish would probably not be so appropriate so I'm just wondering if someone should maybe give him the last rites or whatever it is you people do when one of you dies."

"He wasn't one of us," Joe said, feeling the bitterness rise in him. "He wasn't even human."

"Ah, but he used to be before he was killed and became one of them. So maybe now he could use a little help."

Joe didn't like the way this was going. He sensed he was being maneuvered.

"He doesn't deserve it," he said and knew in that instant he'd been trapped.

"I thought even the worst sinner deserved it," Zev said.

Joe knew when he was beaten. Zev was right. He shoved the cross and bot-de into Zev's hands—a bit roughly, perhaps—then went and knelt by the twisted cadaver. He administered a form of the final sacrament. When he was through he returned to Zev and snatched back his belongings.

"You're a better man than I am, Gunga Din," he said as he passed.

"You act as if they're responsible for what they do after they become undead," Zev said hurrying along beside him, panting as he matched Joe's pace.

"Aren't they?"

"No."

"You're sure of that?"

"Well, not exactly. But they certainly aren't human anymore, so maybe we shouldn't hold them accountable on human terms."

Zev's reasoning tone flashed Joe back to the conversations they used to have in Horovitz's deli.

"But Zev, we know there's some of the old personality left. I mean, they stay in their home towns, usually in the basements of their old houses. They go after people they knew when they were alive. They're not just dumb predators, Zev. They've got the old consciousness they had when they were alive. Why can't they rise above it? Why can't they ... resist?"

"I don't know. I've never had the opportunity to sit down with one and discuss it. Maybe they can't resist. To tell the truth, the question has never occurred to me. A fascinating concept: an undead refusing to feed. Leave it to Father Joe to come up with something like that. We should discuss this on the trip back to Lakewood."

Joe had to smile. So that was what this was all about.

"I'm not going back to Lakewood."

"Fine. Then we'll discuss this now. Maybe the urge to feed is too strong to overcome."

"Maybe. And maybe they just don't try hard enough."

"This is a hard line you're taking, my friend."

"Maybe I'm a hard-line kind of guy."

"You didn't used to be, but it seems you've become one."

Joe felt a flash of unreasoning anger and gave him a sharp look. "You don't know what I've become."

Zev shrugged. "Maybe true, maybe not. But did you see the face of the one that attacked me? I'm sure he didn't look like that before he was turned. They seem to change, at least some of them, on the outside. Maybe on the inside they change too."

"If they acted like mindless beasts, I'd agree. But they're intelligent, they can reason. That means they can choose."

"Do you truly think you'd be able to resist?"

"Damn straight."

Joe wasn't sure why he said it, didn't even know if he meant it. Maybe he was mentally preparing himself for the day when he might find himself in that situation.

After walking a block or so in silence, Joe said, "What I don't get is how these undead get away with breaking all the rules."

"Meaning what? Laws?"

"Not civil laws—the laws of physics and chemistry and God knows what else. I've never had a problem reconciling science and belief. God designed creation to run by certain rules; science is merely man's attempt to use his God-given intelligence to understand those rules."

"So you don't take Genesis literally."

"Of course not. It's not natural science. It was never meant to be. The Bible is the story of a people and their relationship with their God."

"A God who seems very far away lately."

Joe sighed at the truth of that. He'd felt abandoned for some time now. The air cooled as they neared the ocean, the briny on-shore breeze carrying the eternal rumble of the breakers and the calls of the seagulls as they wheeled over the jetties. Some things, at least, hadn't changed.

"It seems the undead are exempt from the rules God laid down for creation. The flying ones, for instance. You said you were attacked by one the other night. I've seen one or two gliding around on a moonlit night. How do you explain them? I'm no expert on aerodynamics, but those wings shouldn't be able to support them, yet they do. And where do the wings go when they're not using them?"

Zev shrugged. "These are questions I can't answer."

"Here's another. I was around when a gang of locals chased one down. He'd ripped up a woman's throat but he didn't get away fast enough. They blinded him with holy water, held him down with crosses, and drove a stake through his heart. Then they cut off his head."

"The traditional method, as opposed to the new Cahill method. And of course he was dead then. Truly dead."

"Right. But he didn't bleed."

"So?"

"If he doesn't have blood to feed his muscles, how do they move?"

"A mystery."

"It's as if the laws of our world have been suspended where the undead are concerned."

"Suspended by whom? Or what?"

"There's a question I'd like answered."

"All very interesting," Zev said as they climbed the front steps of the retreat house. "Well, I'd better be going. A long walk I've got ahead of me. A long, lonely walk all the way back to Lakewood. A long, lonely, possibly dangerous walk back for a poor old man who—"

"All right, Zev! All right!" Joe said, biting back a laugh. "I get the point. You want me to go back to Lakewood. Why? What's it going to prove?"

"I just want the company," Zev said with pure innocence.

"No, really. What's going on in that Talmudic mind of yours? What are you cooking?"

"Nothing, Father Joe. Nothing at all."

Joe stared at him. Damn it all, his interest was piqued. What was Zev up to? And what the hell—why not go? He had nothing better to do.

"All right, Zev. You win. I'll come back to Lakewood with you. But just for today. Just to keep you company. And I'm not going anywhere near St. Anthony's, okay? Understood?"

"Understood, Joe. Perfectly understood."

"I'm not getting involved with my old parish again, is that clear?"

"That such a thing should ever enter my mind. Feh!"

"Good. Now wipe that smile off your face and we'll get something to eat."

* * *

Later, under the climbing sun, they walked south along the deserted beach, barefooting through the wet sand at the edge of the surf. Joe had his sneakers slung over his shoulder, Zev carried a black shoe in each hand, and acted like a little kid, laughing at the chill of the water as it sloshed over his ankles.

"I can't believe you've never been to the beach," Joe said. "Not even as a kid?"

"Never."

Joe shook his head in dismay and gestured at the acres of sand. "This is Manasquan Beach. You should have seen this place on a summer weekend. Wall-to-wall people. Probably never see that again. Probably be as empty as this even on the Fourth of July."

"Your Independence Day. We never made much of secular holidays. Too many religious ones to observe. What would people do here besides swim?"

"Lie in the sun and work on their skin cancers."

"Really? I imagine that sunbathing is maybe not the fad it used to be."

Joe laughed. "Ah, Zev. Still the master of the understatement. I'll say one thing, though: The beach is cleaner than I've ever seen it. No beer cans or hypodermics."

Zev pointed ahead. "But what's that?"

As they approached the spot, Joe saw a pair of naked bodies stretched out on their backs on the sand, one male, one female, both young and short-haired. Their skin was bronzed and glistened in the sun. The man lifted his head and stared at them. A blue crucifix was tattooed in the center of his forehead. He rolled over, reached into the backpack beside him, and withdrew a huge, gleaming, nickel-plated revolver.

"Just keep walking," he said.

"Will do," Joe said. "Just out for a stroll."

As they passed the couple, Joe noticed a similar tattoo on the girl's forehead.

"A very popular tattoo," he said.

"Clever idea. That's one cross you can't drop or lose. Probably won't help you in the dark, but if there's a light on it might give you an edge."

He noticed the rest of the girl too. Small firm breasts jutting straight up despite the fact that she was on her back, dark fuzz on her pubes. He felt a stir within and looked away.

"How do you do that?" Zev said.

"What?"

"Look away from such a beautiful sight."

Are you watching me that closely? Joe wondered.

"Practice, practice, practice."

"How do you turn it off? Or does it just die?"

"Believe me, the sexual impulse doesn't die. I've always had one. I remember having crushes as a kid. I remember one girl, Eleanor Jepson, that I was infatuated with. I'd think about her night and day, I'd write poems to her - which I'd immediately tear up for fear someone would find them. I'd ride my bike past her house at least ten times a day hoping to catch a glimpse of her; I learned her schedule at school and I'd run through the halls so I could just happen to be passing her locker when she'd stop there between classes.

"But as a priest I'd do just the opposite. As soon as I felt an attraction starting I'd turn away from it. You learn to do that—to not think about something. It's different from saying, 'Don't think about a pink unicorn.' Instead you turn your mind away, you learn to not think about what you don't want to think about. Trust me, it can be done. And instead of looking for 'chance' meetings, you avoid contact except in the most public of situations. No tete-a-tetes or in-depth, one-on-one meetings, no lingering glances, no touches on the arm or shoulder. The key is to recognize the spark and douse it before it can ignite."

"Such a way to live. Pardon me, but it's unnatural."

"Tell me about it."

Celibacy hadn't been easy. How he'd ached for one particular woman, but he'd put his calling above that longing. Besides, she'd had her own vows. And nestled within him had been the hope that the new Pope might lift the ban on marriage for priests. But no one had heard from the Pope since last year.

Zev laughed. "The woman two nights ago, the one dressed like a prostitute who saved this sorry hide, for an instant there I thought, Father Joe and a prostitute ... ?"

"What did she look like?"

"Short dark hair, blue eyes, might have been prettier if she hadn't looked so haggard. I sensed she knew you. In fact I'm sure she did. The only way she knew me was because she'd seen me with you." He touched his chin. "Oh, yes. And she had a little scar right here. A tiny crescent."

Joe stopped walking. No. It couldn't be. "You could almost be describing ..." He shook his head. "No. Not dressed like that."

"Who were you thinking of?"

"One of the nuns. Sister Carole. She was.. . special."

Oh, was she ever. His heart lightened at just the thought of her.

"What? Someone was special to you and I know nothing? I thought we discussed everything."

Almost everything, Joe thought. But not this. Not Carole.

"She wasn't special just to me, she was special to everyone who knew her, or met however briefly. You would have taken to her, I know it. She was one of those people who lights up a room simply by entering it."

"Then your Sister Carole this was certainly not. Darken a room, that's what this one would do. This woman was very grim, frightening in a way; the only time she brightened was when she mentioned your name."

"No. My Carole—" He caught himself. "St. Anthony's Sister Carole, would have been out of town when the undead struck—back with her family in Pennsylvania."

He'd thought about her countless times since Good Friday.

She's safe ... I pray she's safe. She's too delicate, too sensitive for that kind of horror. She never would have survived.

"Since the mystery woman wasn't your paramour or your Sister Carole," Zev said, "I assume we can get back to priestly celibacy. I read once where priests had been allowed to marry until sometime during the Middle Ages. Why was that changed?"

"For financial reasons. Priests were accumulating wealthy estates and leaving them to their families instead of the Church. So one of the Popes instituted the no-marriage rule. It came around and bit the Church on its ass."

"Oy, did it ever."

"Yeah. The priesthood became attractive to too many who were ambiguous about their sexuality or to those who saw the Church as a sanctuary from their darker impulses; it wasn't. The impulses only became stronger. Seems to me that early entrance to a seminary interferes with normal maturation, and because of that you wind up with a percentage of priests with arrested sexual development."

Joe thanked God that he'd yielded to his vocation later in life. The love of God had always been strong in him, but he hadn't seen himself as a priest until after his graduation from Brooklyn College. The idea took hold and wouldn't let go. He'd entered the seminary at age twenty-three, but not as a virgin.

"The arrested types," he said, "they're the ones who became pedophiles, and their presence tainted the rest of us. We all got smeared with the same brush. Look at me. I'm a prime example."

"No one who knows you," Zev said, "believed a word of that."

"Didn't matter. As soon as something like that gets out, you're ruined. Guilty or innocent, who you are and whatever good you've done is canceled out." He ground his teeth. "The only feeling I've ever experienced looking at a child was the desire to see him or her grow into a God-loving adult."

Zev put a hand on his arm. "I know, Joe. I know."

They walked on in silence.

ZEV . . .

Eventually they turned west and made their way inland, finding Route 70 and following it into Ocean County via the Bridle Bridge.

"I remember nightmare traffic jams right here every summer," Joe said as they trod the bridge's empty span. "Never thought I'd miss traffic jams."

They cut over to Route 88 and followed it toward Lakewood. Along the way they found a few people out and about in Bricktown, furtively scurrying between houses. They walked a gauntlet of car dealerships, the stock sitting dirty and idle in the lots beneath waving pennants, the broken showroom windows carrying signs promising deals that would never be closed.

Zev noticed how Joe's steps seemed to grow heavier with every mile. But he had to show him something that would make his steps—and his heart— even heavier.

At the corner of New Hampshire Avenue, he turned them south.

"But it's shorter this way," Joe said, pointing down 88.

"I know. But we'll end up in the same spot, and along the way there's something you must see."

They trod the undulating pavement until they came to a baseball field, the former home of the Lakewood Blue Claws.

Joe smiled. "This brings back memories. Remember the games we used to go to?"

"I do," Zev said. The Blue Claws, a class-A minor league team, maybe, but those games had been fun. The stadium even served Kosher food. "But what I want to show you here, baseball's got nothing to do with."

"I don't think I like the sound of that." Joe pointed to the unusual number of gulls and crows circling the field. "And I know I don't like the look of that."

Zev knew as they climbed the grassy slope to the fence that whatever uneasy premonitions Joe was feeling, even the worst he could imagine would leave him unprepared for the sight that awaited him on the other side.

He remembered his recent look onto the playing field. At first he hadn't been sure what he was seeing: a huge pile of blackened debris occupying most of the diamond and spreading into the outfield. Then he'd started picking out limbs and torsos, and there, piled high where home plate used to be . .. skulls. Innumerable skulls.

Joe stared at the charred, rotting mounds for maybe ten seconds, then closed his eyes and swallowed.

"What in the name of God .. . ?"

"Hardly in the name of God," Zev said. "On those first few nights of the invasion they committed wholesale slaughter. They loosed a horde of bestial creatures—undead, yes, but only vaguely human—who beheaded their prey after drinking their blood. A way to keep down the undead population, I assume. It makes sense that they wouldn't want too many of their kind concentrated in one area. Like too many carnivores in one forest—when the herds of prey are wiped out, the predators starve. And just to make sure none of those early victims would be rising from the grave, they brought their bodies and their heads here, soaked them with kerosene, and struck a match."

"Jesus".

"Him I doubt had much to do with it either. They fed the fire for days, the smoke dirtied the sky. And when the wind blew the wrong way—oy. Even now ..." He sniffed the air. "Luckily we're upwind."

"But they were also killing off their future food supply."

"Enough of us they left to hunt down and feed on, but far too few to offer resistance of any consequence."

They walked the rest of the way into Lakewood in silence. When they entered the town . . .

"A real ghost town," the priest said as they walked Forest Avenue's deserted length.

"Ghosts," Zev said, nodding sadly. It had been a long walk and he was tired. "Yes. Full of ghosts."

In his mind's eye he saw the shades of his fallen brother rabbis and all the yeshiva students, beards, black suits, black hats, crisscrossing back and forth at a determined pace on weekdays, strolling with their wives on Shabbes, their children trailing behind like ducklings.

Gone. All gone. Victims of the undead. Undead themselves now, some of them. It made him sick at heart to think of those good, gentle men, women, and children curled up in their basements now to avoid the light of day, venturing out in the dark to feed on others, spreading the disease ...

He fingered the cross slung from his neck. If only they had listened!

And then he heard the grating sound of a heavily distorted guitar. He grabbed Joe's arm.

"Quick. Into the bushes!"

They ducked behind a thick stand of rhododendrons along the foundation of the nearest house and watched a convertible glide by. Zev counted four in the car, three men and a blond woman, all scruffy and unwashed, lean and wolfish, in cut-off sweatshirts or denim jackets, the driver wearing a big Texas hat, someone in the back with a red Mohican, all guzzling beer. The thumping blast of their music dopplered in and out. Thank God they liked to play it at ear-damaging levels. It acted as an early warning system.

"Chazzers," Zev muttered.

When they'd passed, Joe stepped out of the bushes and stared after them.

"Who the hell were they?"

"Scum of the earth. They like to call themselves cowboys. I call them Vichy."

"Vichy? Like the Vichy French?"

"Yes. Very good. I'm glad to see that you're not as culturally illiterate as the rest of your generation. Vichy humans—that's what I call the collaborators. They should all die of pox." He looked around. "We should get off the street. I know a place near St. Anthony's where we can hide."

"You've traveled enough today, Reb. And I told you, I don't care about St. Anthony's. I'll get you situated, then head back."

"You can't leave yet, Joe," Zev said, gripping the young priest's arm. He'd coaxed him this far; he couldn't let him get away now. "Stay the night. See what Father Palmeri's done."

"If he's one of them he's not a priest anymore. Don't call him Father."

"They still call him Father."

"Who?"

"The undead."

Zev watched Father Joe's jaw muscles bunch.

Joe said, "Maybe I'll just take a quick trip over to St. Anthony's myself—"

"No. It's different here. The area is thick with Vichy and undead. They'll get you if your timing isn't just right. I'll take you."

"You need rest, pal."

Father Joe's expression showed genuine concern. Zev was detecting increasingly softer emotions in the man since their reunion last night. A good sign perhaps?

"Rest I'll get when we reach where I'm taking you."

CAROLE . . .

"But I won't be going alone," Carole muttered.

She had to turn her head away from the kitchen sink now. The fumes stung her nose and made her eyes water, but she kept on stirring the pool chlorina-tor into the hot water until it was completely dissolved. She wasn't through yet. She took the beaker of No Salt she'd measured out before starting the process and added it to the mix in the big Pyrex bowl. Then she stirred some more. Finally, when she was satisfied that she was not going to see any further dissolution at this temperature, she put the bowl on the stove and turned up the flame.

A propane stove. She'd seen the big white tank out back last week when she was looking for a new home; that was why she'd chosen this old house. With New Jersey Natural Gas in ruins, and GPU no longer sending electricity through the wires, propane and wood stoves were the only ways left to cook.

I really shouldn't call it cooking, she thought as she fled the acrid fumes and headed for the living room. Nothing more than a simple dissociation reaction—heating a mixture of calcium hypochlorate with potassium chloride. Simple, basic chemistry. The very subject she'd taught bored juniors and seniors for years at St. Anthony's School.

"And you all thought chemistry was such a useless subject!" she shouted to the walls.

She clapped a hand over her mouth. There she was, talking out loud again. She had to be careful. Not so much because someone might hear, but because she worried she might be losing her mind.

Maybe she'd already lost it. Maybe all this was merely a delusion. Maybe the undead hadn't taken over the entire civilized world. Maybe they hadn't defiled her church and convent, slaughtered her best friend. Maybe it was all in her mind.

Yes, she truly did wish she were imagining all this. At least then she'd be the only one suffering, and all the rest would still be alive and well, just as they'd been before she went off the deep end.

But if this was a delusion it was certainly an elaborate, consistent one. Every time she woke up—she never allowed herself to sleep too many hours at once, only catnaps—it was the same: quiet skies, vacant houses, empty streets, furtive, scurrying survivors who trusted no one, and—

What's that?

Sister Carole froze as her ears picked up a sound outside. Music. She hurried in a crouch to the front door and peered through the sidelight. A car. A convertible. Someone was out driving in—

She ducked when she saw who was in it. She recognized that cowboy hat. She didn't have to see their earrings to know who—what—they were.

They were headed east. Good. They'd find a little surprise waiting for them down the road.

As it did every so often, the horror of what her life had become caught up to Carole then, and she slumped to the floor of the Bennett house and began to sob.

Why? Why had God allowed this to happen to her, to His Church, to His world?

Better question: Why had she allowed these awful events to change her so? She had been a Sister of Mercy.

She had taken vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, had vowed to devote her life to teaching and doing the Lord's work. But now there was no money, no one worth losing her virginity to, no Mother Superior or Church to be obedient to, and no students left to teach.

All she had left was the Lord's work.

Maybe Bernadette's voice was right. Maybe she would go to hell for what she was doing. But somebody had to make those rotten cowboys pay.

COWBOYS . . .

"Shit! Goddam shit!"

Stan's raging voice and the sudden braking of the car yanked Al from the edge of a doze. A few beers, nice warm sunlight... he'd been on his way to catching a Z or two. He opened his eyes.

To, what the fu—"

Then he saw him. Or, rather, it. Dead ahead. Dead ahead. A body, hanging by its feet from a utility pole.

"Oh, shit," Kenny said from beside him. "Another one."

Jackie turned off the music. The sudden silence was creepy.

Al squinted at the body. "Who is it?"

"I dunno," Stan said. Then he looked back at Al from under the wide brim of his cowboy hat. "Whyn't you go see."

Al swallowed. He'd turned out to be the best climber, so he'd wound up the second-story man of the team. But he didn't want to make this climb.

"What's the use?" Al said. "Whoever he is, he's dead."

"See if he's one of us," Stan said.

"Ain't it always one of us?"

"Then see which one of us it is, okay?"

Stan had been pissing Al off today with his hot-shit 'tude. He was posse leader, yeah, but give it a rest now and then, okay? But this time he was right: somebody had to go see who'd got unlucky last night.

Al hopped over the door and headed for the pole. What a pain in the ass. The rope around the dead guy's feet was looped over the first climbing spike. He shimmied up to it and got creosote all over himself in the process. The stuff was a bitch to get off. And besides, it made his skin itch. On the way up he'd kept the pole between himself and the body. Now it was time to look. He swallowed. He'd seen one of these strung-up guys up close before and—

He spotted the earring, a blood-splattered silvery crescent moon dangling on a fine chain from the brown-crusted earlobe, an exact replica of the one dangling from Al's left ear, only this one was dangling the wrong way.

"Yep," he said, loud so's the car could hear it. "It's one of us."

"Damn!" Stan's voice. "Anyone we know?"

Stan and the rest jumped out of the car and stared up at him.

Al squinted at the face but with the gag stuck in its mouth, and the head so encrusted with clotted blood and crawling with buzzing, feeding flies darting in and out of the gaping wound in the throat, he couldn't make out no features.

"Can't tell."

"Well, cut him down then."

This was the part Al hated most of all. It seemed almost like a sin. Not that he'd ever been religious or nothing, but someday, if he didn't watch his ass, this could be him.

He pulled his K-Bar from its scabbard and sawed at the rope above the knot on the climbing spike. It frayed, jerked a couple of times, then parted. He closed his eyes as the body tumbled downward. He hummed Metallica's "Sandman" to blot out the sound it made when it hit the pavement. He especially hated the sick, wet plop of the head if it landed first. Which this one did.

"Looks like Benny Gonzales," Jackie said.

Kenny was nodding. "Yep. No doubt about it. That's Benny. Shit."

They dragged his body over to the curb and drove on, but the party mood was gone.

"I'd love to catch the bastards who're doin this shit," Stan said as he drove. "They've gotta be close by around here somewhere."

"They could be anywhere," Al said. "They found Benny back there, killed him there—you saw that puddle of blood under him—and left him. Then they cut out."

"They're huntin us like we're huntin them," Jackie said.

"But I wanna be the one to catch 'em," Kenny said.

Jackie sneered. "Yeah? And what would you do if you did?"

Kenny said nothing, and Al knew that was the answer. Nothing. He'd bring them in and turn them over. The bloodsuckers didn't like you screwing with their cattle.

But something had to be done. Lots of the cattle they roped in called Al and company traitors and collaborators and worse. Lately it looked like some of them had gone beyond name-calling and graduated to throat-slitting.

Benny Gonzales was the fifth one in a month.

Seemed the guys behind this wanted to make it look like the vampires themselves was doing the killings, but it didn't wash. Too messy. These bodies had blood all over them, and a puddle beneath them. When the bloodsuckers slit somebody's throat, they didn't let a drop of it go to waste. They licked the platter clean, so to speak.

"We gotta start being real careful," Stan was saying. "Gotta keep our eyes open."

"And look for what?" Kenny said.

"For a bunch of guys who hang out together—a bunch of guys who ain't cowboys."

Jackie started singing that Willie Nelson song "Mama, Don't Let Your Babies Grow up to be Cowboys," and it set Stan off.

"Knock it off, goddamn it! This ain't funny! One of us could be next! Now keep your fucking eyes open!"

Al studied the houses drifting by as they cruised into Point Pleasant Beach. Cars sat quietly along the curbs of the empty streets and the houses appeared deserted, their empty, blind windows staring back at him. But every so often they'd pass a yard that looked cared for, and those houses would be defiantly studded with crosses and festooned with garlands of garlic. And every so often you could swear you saw somebody peeking out from behind a window or through a screen door.

"You know, Stan," Al said. "I'll bet those cowboy killers are hiding in one of them houses with all the garlic and crosses."

"Maybe, Stan said. "But I kinda doubt it. Those folks tend to stay in after sundown. Whoever's behind this is working at night."

That made sense to Al. The folks in those houses hardly ever came out. They were loners. Dangerous loners. Armed loners. The vampires couldn't get in because of all the garlic and crosses, and the cowboys who'd tried to get in, or even take off some of the crosses, usually got shot up. The vampires had said to leave them be for now. Sooner or later they'd run out of food and have to come out. Then they'd get them.

Smart, those bloodsuckers. Al guessed they figured they had plenty of time to out wait the loners. All the time in the world.

They was cruising Ocean Avenue by the boardwalk area now, barely a block from the Atlantic. What a difference. Last year, on a nice spring day like this, you'd see all sorts of people, locals and day-trippers, hanging out. Now it was deserted. The sun was high and warm but it was like winter had never ended.

They was gliding past the empty, frozen rides when Al caught a flash of color moving between a couple of the boardwalk stands.

"Pull over," he said, tapping Stan's shoulder. "I think I just saw something."

The tires screeched as Stan made a sharp turn into Jenkinson's parking lot.

"What kinda something?"

"Something blond. With tits, I think."

Kenny let out a cowboy whoop and tossed his Heineken empty high. It smashed on the asphalt in a glittery green explosion.

"Shut the fuck up!" Stan said. "You tryin to queer this little round-up or what?"

"Hey, no, man," Kenny said. "I was just—"

"Just keep quiet and listen. You and Jackie head down two blocks and work your way back up on the boards."

"I don't wanna go with him," Jackie said, jutting her chin at Kenny.

"He needs someone with more experience along. Me and AM go up here and work our way down. Get goin and don't blow this. I don't wanna be bringin Gregor no old lady again tonight."

Jackie didn't look happy but she went. As she and Kenny trotted back to the Risden's Beach bath houses, Stan squared his ten-gallon hat on his head and pointed toward the miniature golf course at the other end of the parking lot. Al took the lead and Stan followed.

Arnold Avenue ended here in a turretlike police station, still boarded up from the winter, but its big warning sign was still up, informing anyone who passed that alcoholic beverages and dogs and motorbikes and various other goodies were prohibited in the beach and boardwalk area by order of the mayor and city council of Point Pleasant Beach.

Al smiled. The beach and the boardwalk and the sign were still here, but the mayor and the city council were long gone.

Pretty damn depressing up on the boards. The big glass windows of Jenkinson's arcade was smashed and it was all dark inside. The lifeless video games stared back with dead eyes. All the concession stands was boarded up, the paralyzed rides just rusting and peeling, and it was quiet. No barkers shouting, no kids laughing, no squealing babes in bikinis running in and out of the surf. Just the monotonous pounding of the waves against the deserted beach.

And the birds. The seagulls was doing what they'd always done. Probably the only thing they missed was the garbage the crowds used to leave behind.

Al and Stan headed south, checking all the nooks and crannies as they moved. The only other humans they saw was Kenny and Jackie coming up the other way from the South Beach Arcade.

"Any luck?" Stan called.

"Nada," Jackie said.

"Ay-yo, Al!" Kenny said. "How many Heinies you have anyway? You seein things now? What was it—a blond seagull?"

But Al knew he'd seen something moving up here, and it hadn't been no goddamn seagull. But where . . .

"Jackie," Stan said. "Take Kenny under the boards and see if anyone's hidin down there."

Kenny put on this big shit-eating grin. " Aaaaay, under the boardwalk with Jackieeee. Cooool."

Stan ignored him and spoke to Jackie. "If it's a girl like Al thinks he saw, see if you can talk her out. I ain't up for no foot race, know what I'm sayin?"

Jackie nodded. "Gotcha." She turned to Kenny and snapped her fingers, like she was talking to a dog. "C'mon, boy. We're goin for a walk."

"Ooooh. Under the boardwalk with—"

"Don't"—she jabbed a finger within an inch of his nose—"even think about it!"

Kenny, his tongue hanging out like a dog, followed her down the wooden steps to the sand. That Kenny. What a pisser.

"Let's go back to Jenk's," Stan said. "She might be hidin inside."

They'd turned and were heading back up the boards when Al took one last look back .. . and saw something moving. Something small and red, rolling across the boards toward the beach from between one of the concession stands.

A ball.

He tapped Stan on the shoulder, put a finger to his lips, and pointed. Stan's eyes widened. He glanced toward the beach, probably looking to signal Jackie and Kenny, but they were out of sight. So the two of them crept toward the spot where the ball had rolled from.

As they got closer, Al realized why they'd missed this spot on the first pass. It was really two concession stands—a frozen yogurt place and a saltwater taffy shop—with boards nailed up over the space between to make them look like a single building.

Stan tapped Al on the shoulder and pointed to the roof of the nearer concession stand. Al nodded. He knew what he wanted: the second-story man had to do his thing again.

Al got to the top of the chain link fence behind the concession stands and from there it was easy to haul himself up to the roof. His sneakers made barely a sound as he crept across the tar of the canted roof to the far side.

The girl must have heard him coming, because she was already looking up when he peeked over the edge. She had one of them cross tattoos on her forehead.

That ain't gonna help you against me, honey.

Al felt a surge of satisfaction when he saw her blond ponytail and long thick bangs. Nice.

He felt something else when he saw the tears streaming down her cheeks from her pleading eyes, and her hands raised, palms together, as if praying to him. She wanted him to see nothin—she was begging Al to see nothing.

For an instant he was tempted. The fear in those frightened blue eyes reached deep inside and touched something there, disturbed a part of him so long unused he'd forgotten it belonged to him.

And then he saw she had a little boy with her, maybe seven years old, dark haired but with eyes as blue as hers, with a tattoo on his forehead. She was pleading for the kid as much as herself. Maybe more than herself. And with good reason. The vampires loved little kids. Al didn't get it. Kids were smaller, had less blood than adults. Maybe their blood was purer, sweeter. Someday, when he was undead himself, he'd know.

But even with the kid there, Al might have done something stupid, might have called down to Stan that there was nothing here but some old torn cat who'd probably taken a swat at that ball and rolled it out. But when he saw that she was knocked up—very knocked up, as in start-boiling-the-water knocked up—he knew he had to turn her in.

As much as the bloodsuckers loved kids, they went crazy for babies. Infants were like the primo delicacy among the vampires. Al once had seen a couple of them fighting over a newborn.

That had been a sight.

He sighed and said, "Too bad, honey, but you're packin too many points." He turned and called down toward the boardwalk. "Bingo, Stan. We struck it rich."

She screamed and the little boy began to cry.

Al shook his head as he watched her cower and hold the kid tight against her. Sorry babe. It ain't always a pleasant job, but a cowboy's gotta do what a cowboy's gotta do.

And besides, all these brownie points were gonna bring him that much closer to some stud time at the nearest cattle farm.

LACEY . . .

Lacey Flannery heard them coming before she saw them. Coming her way. They weren't talking, which was a bad sign. Could mean they were on the hunt. She had a faint hope that maybe they were wanderers like her, but she wasn't about to lay any money on it.

She'd motorboated down from the Sandy Hook area last night. The water tended to be pretty safe, even at night. The suckers stayed off it. She'd abandoned the boat at first light on the inlet jetty and sacked out here under the boardwalk. She'd been awake for about half an hour now. She'd packed up her stuff and had been ready to move out when she heard footsteps on the boards above. A bunch of feet—could have been four, six, maybe eight people. So she'd stayed put, figuring they'd move on.

But instead they were coming to her.

Lacy squatted with her back against a double piling and wondered what to do. Her sleeping bag and duffel were stacked before her on the sand. Better play it safe. She dipped into her bag of tricks, briefly considered her .38, but decided against it. She didn't have many bullets and didn't know what kind of trouble the noise of a shot would bring down on her. She chose her nunchucks instead. Two twelve-inch steel rods connected by a three-inch chain.

Yeah. That'll do.

She slipped out of her black leather jacket and her bare arms goose-bumped in the breeze off the water. The tight black tank top she wore beneath wasn't much for warmth but at least it wouldn't get in her way. She looked down and noticed her nipples poking at the thin fabric. She hadn't worn a bra in three years and didn't miss it now. She rubbed her nipples to make them stick out even more. Hey, girl—use all your weapons. Then she stuck the nunchucks inside the waistband of her jeans at the small of her back. The chain was cold between her cheeks. Thong panties didn't cover much.

Her mouth felt a little dry, her palms a little moist. Let's hope they're friendly, she thought. If not, then let's hope there's no more than two of them.

She rose and peeked around the piling.

Shit. One was a woman. She was going to be harder to distract. And worse, they were wearing cowboy earrings. The good news was there were only two of them.

Lacey stepped out and faced them. "How's it going?"

The stopped dead, staring.

"Ooooh, Jackie," said the dumb-looking guy with the bad skin and the red Mohican as his eyes fixed on Lacey's chest. "This ain't Al's blonde, but she'll do. Oh, baby, will she do."

"Shut up, Kenny."

The skinny, pierced-up, white-trash blonde gave her an up and down; she seemed more interested in checking to see if Lacey's hands were empty. She looked thirty-five but was probably thirty. Not at all Lacey's type.

She fixed Lacey with her squinty brown eyes. "What're you doin down here?"

"Catching some Z's," Lacey said. "How about you two?"

"Lookin for loooove," Kenny said, grinning. "In all the wrong places." He stepped closer. "Hey, ain't you somethin. Look at those muscles, Jackie. And she got tats too."

Lacey looked down at her upper arms and the black Celtic knots that encircled each just between the sleek, well-cut bulges of her biceps and deltoids. She'd spent a lot of time on those muscles.

"Want to see them wiggle like snakes?"

She began contracting and relaxing the muscles, making them dance under the Celtic knots which in turn undulated like, well, snakes.

"Tits and tats and ripped to boot," he said, easing another step closer. "I think I'm in love. Think we can have her join the posse, Jacks?"

"No way. Besides, that ain't for us to decide."

"They look so hard," he said. "You mind if I give one a little squeeze?"

Lacey smiled. "You're talking about my muscles but you're staring at my nips."

He laughed. "Oh, I do like this one, Jackie." He looked at her. "We gotta—"

That was when Lacey kicked him. She knew how to kick, had taken classes in it, and she lashed out her foot as hard as she could, putting a lot of her lower body behind it. She landed a good one, right square in his balls. He made a breathy noise, something like "Hommf!" as he went knock-kneed and dropped to the sand. Jackie stared at him stupidly, as if trying to figure out what had just happened, while Lacey grabbed for her nunchucks. She had a grip on one end and was snapping the other in a sidearm arc when Jackie looked back at her. Her mouth was opening, starting to shout, when the steel bar caught her across the left side of her head. She tumbled to her right and hit the sand, still conscious but just barely, holding her head and groaning. Blood seeped between her fingers.

Lacey turned back to Kenny. He was down on his knees with his hands jammed between his thighs, clutching his jewels, his face gray, his mouth working.

"You fucking bitch!" he managed. "You're gonna wish—"

Lacey kicked him again, in the stomach this time, high, a bull's eye into his solar plexus. He doubled over. Kenny wouldn't be threatening Lacey or anybody else for a while.

Five seconds later she was back in her jacket and booking south with her duffel and her sleeping bag. Behind and above her she thought she heard a woman's voice cry out. The blond the two creeps had mentioned? Lacey stopped and listened. She heard another cry and looked up at a seagull coasting overhead on the breeze. It squawked again. Had that been what she'd heard?

She dropped her load and grabbed the edge of the boardwalk. The ends of the weathered boards rasped against her palms as she pulled herself up for a look—all those chin-ups at the gym were finally paying off. She held her eyes at board level. No one in sight.

She dropped back to the sand, grabbed her things, and started walking again.

No time to waste. She'd come to find her uncle.

CAROLE . . .

Sister Carole checked the Pyrex bowl on the stove. A chalky layer of potassium chloride had formed in the bottom. She turned off the heat and immediately decanted the boiling upper fluid, pouring it through a Mr. Coffee filter into a Pyrex brownie pan. She threw out the scum in the filter and put the pan of filtrate on the windowsill to cool.

She heard the sound of a car again and rushed to a window. It was the same car, the convertible, with the same occupants—

No, wait. There had been only four before. Now there were three squeezed into the rear. The woman who had been in the front earlier was in the back; she looked as if she might be sick; the man with the red Mohican seemed to be struggling with a newcomer, a young woman with long blond hair. She looked—

Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, the poor thing was pregnant!

Sister Carole suddenly felt as if something were tearing apart within her chest. Was there no justice, was there no mercy anywhere?

She dropped to her knees and began to pray for her, but in the back of her mind she wondered why she bothered. None of her prayers had been answered so far.

Maybe not, Carole thought. But if He'd answered somebody's prayers somewhere along the line, maybe she wouldn't have been forced to turn the Bennett's kitchen into an anarchist's laboratory.

The Lord helped those who helped themselves, didn't He? Especially when they were doing the Lord's work.

COWBOYS . . .

"Please leave me alone," the blonde whimpered, pushing Kenny's hand away as he tried to unbutton her top. She'd been nothing but a blubbering basket case since Al had put her kid in the trunk. "I want my little boy. Please let him out. Please!"

Al was sitting shotgun while Stan drove. Her whining was getting on Al's nerves. And so was Kenny. He turned around and checked out the back seat. Jackie was slumped on the driver side, holding an old sweatshirt against the side of her head. The bleeding had stopped but she looked pale and sick. The pregnant cow had the middle seat, and Kenny was nuzzling up against her from the other side.

Al said, "I still can't believe you got kayo'd by a girl."

Kenny kept his eyes on the cow. "I told you, man, she suckered me. I was slippin up on her, real casual like, gettin ready to make my move, and she's lookin like she's fallin for it when she punts me."

Kenny had been in sad shape for about ten or fifteen minutes, but he'd snapped back. He walked a little funny but the kick hadn't seemed to take the steam out of his usual horniness.

Jackie was another story. She'd puked once on the boardwalk, and another time in the parking lot. Al hoped she didn't puke up the car. You just didn't find a Cadillac convertible every day.

The cow started wailing about her kid again. "Please let my little boy out of the trunk! He'll suffocate!"

"Look!" Stan shouted, speaking for the first time since they'd left Point— he'd been real pissed at Kenny and Jackie for losing a girl. "I'll get your brat outta the trunk, all right. I'll tie a rope around his feet and drag him back to Lakewood if you don't shut up!"

She sobbed but didn't say anything more.

Al remembered the little kid lookin up at him as he shoved him into the trunk. "Don't let them hurt my mommy," he'd said. Kinda reminded Al of his little brother when they were kids. Never could stand his little brother.

Kenny started toyin with the cow again. "C'mon. Show ol' Kenny those pretty pregnant titties."

"Ease up, Kenny."

Kenny didn't look at him. "Mind your own fucking business, Al."

Stan looked at Al and jerked his head toward the back seat. "Straighten out your friend, will ya?"

Al grabbed Kenny's arm. "Lay off her, man."

Kenny slammed his hand away. "Yeah? What for? To save her for you? Bullshit!"

Kenny could be a real asshole at times.

"We're not saving her for me," Al said. "For Gregor. You remember Gre-gor, don't you, Kenny?"

Some of Kenny's tough-guy act faded.

"Course I do," he said. "But I don't wanna suck her blood, man." He jammed his hand down between the cow's legs. "I got other things in mind. It's been a long time, man—a long time—and I gotta—"

"What if you screw up the baby?" Al said. "What if she starts having the baby and it's born dead? All because of you? What're you gonna tell Gregor then, Kenny? How you gonna explain that to him?"

"Who says he has to know?"

"You think he won't find out?" Al said. "I tell you what, Kenny. You wanna to get your jollies with this broad, fine. Go ahead. But if that's what you're gonna do, we're droppin you and her here—right here—and drivin away. Am I right, Stan?"

Stan nodded. "Fuckin ay."

"And then you can explain any problems to Gregor yourself tonight when we meet. Okay?"

"Gregor-Gregor-Gregor! Let up, huh? You just about piss your pants every time we get near him. He ain't so tough. Gimme a stake and a hammer and show me where he snoozes and I'll show you how tough he is. Fuckin leech is what he is. Stake him through his heart, cut off his head, and then we won't have to worry bout no more fuckin shit from Gregor. Do it to alia them. Show'em all."

"Yeah?" Stan said, smilin but lookin straight ahead. "Then what?

"Then we'll be fuckin heroes, man."

"Heroes to who? These Saab-drivin, gel-haired, sprout-chewin faggots hiding behind their crosses and garlic? You wanna be heroes to them, go ahead. But what happens when word of what you done gets out to the other bloodsuckers and they come a-knockin? What then? You know how many of them there is out there, man? Zillions. They'll come back with a truckload of those ferals and rip us all to shreds. That what you want, asshole?"