Midnight Mass

Sounded to Al like Stan had already given Kenny's idea some thought and had shit-canned it.

Kenny said, "Hey, no, but—"

"Then shut the fuck up. And leave the cow alone."

Kenny pulled his hand away from the blonde and sat on it.

"Jesus, guys. It's been a long time. I need some."

"Hey, I need some too," Al told him. "But I ain't ready yet to get killed for a little pregnant poontang, know what I mean?"

Stan said, "Look at it this way. We gotta take some shit now and then, but you know anybody else got it better? We hold the fort, man. We hold the fort for them till we get to join up." He grinned. "Then we'll have assholes holding the fort for us."

Stan seemed to think that was real funny. He laughed about the rest of the way into Lakewood.

CAROLE . . .

Sister Carole finished her prayers at sundown and went to check on the cooled filtrate. The bottom of the pan was layered with potassium chlorate crystals. Potent stuff. The Germans had used it in their grenades and land mines during World War One.

She got a clean Mr. Coffee filter and poured the contents of the pan through it, but this time she saved the residue in the filter and let the liquid go down the drain.

Sister Carole ignored the voice and spread out the crystals in the now-empty pan. She set the oven on LOW and placed the pan on the middle rack. She had to get all the moisture out of the potassium chlorate before it would be of any use to her.

So much trouble, and so dangerous. If only her searches had yielded some dynamite, even a few sticks, everything would have been so much easier. She'd searched everywhere—hunting shops, gun stores, construction sites. She'd found lots of other useful items, but no dynamite. Only some blasting caps. She no choice but to improvise.

This was her third batch. She'd been lucky so far. She hoped she survived long enough to get a chance to use it.

GREGOR . . .

"You've outdone yourselves this time, boys."

Gregor stared at the three cowboys. Ordinarily he found it doubly difficult to be near them. Not simply because the crimson thirst made a perpetual test of proximity to a living font of hot, pulsing sustenance when he'd yet to feed, urging him to let loose and tear into their throats; but also because these four were so common, such low-lifes.

Gregor couldn't wait until he was moved up and would no longer be forced to deal directly with flotsam such as these. Living collaborators were a necessary evil, but that didn't mean he had to like them.

Tonight, however, he could almost say that he enjoyed their presence. He'd been unhappy about the news of a fifth slain cowboy, but was ecstatic with the prizes they had brought with them.

He had shown up shortly after sundown at the customary meeting place outside St. Anthony's church. Of course, it didn't look much like a church now, what with all the crosses broken off. He'd found the scurvy trio waiting for him as usual, but they had with them a small boy and—dare he believe his eyes—a pregnant woman. His knees had gone weak at the double throb of life within her.

"Where's your companion?" he asked. "The woman?"

"Jackie's not feeling so hot so we left her home," said the one in the cowboy hat.

What was his name? So many of these roaches to keep track of. This one was called Stan. Yes, that was it.

"Well, I'm extremely proud of all of you."

"We thought you'd appreciate it," Stan said.

Gregor felt his grin grow even wider.

"Oh, I do. Not just for the succulence of the prizes you've delivered, but because you've vindicated my faith in you. I knew the minute I saw you that you'd make a good posse leader."

An outright lie. But it cost him nothing to heap the praise on Stan, and perhaps it would spur him to do as well next time. Maybe better. Although what could be better than this?

"Anything for the cause," the redheaded one said.

The one with the spiked dark hair—Al, Gregor remembered—gave his partner a poisonous look, as if he wanted to kick him for being such a boot-lick.

"And your timing could not be better," Gregor told them. "We have a special guest visiting from New York." He didn't mention that she was here because someone was exterminating their fellow slugs. "I will present this gravid cow to her as a gift. She will be enormously pleased."

At least Gregor hoped so. He was relying on the gift to take the edge off her reaction when she learned that another cowboy was dead.

"Is that the lady I saw you with last night?"

Al's words startled Gregor. Had this cowboy been spying on him? He felt his lips pulling back, baring his fangs.

"When was this?"

Al took half a step back. "When we was driving away after droppin off that old lady. I saw her like come up behind you."

Gregor relaxed. "Yes, that was her. These gifts will be good for me. And trust me, what is good for me will eventually prove to be good for you. I won't forget your efforts."

Pardy true. The little boy would go to the local nest leader who'd been pastor of St. Anthony's during his life and had a taste for young boys. The priest had become the de facto leader of Gregor's local get. Over the decades Gregor had noted that the newly turned took to the undead existence with varying degrees of aptitude. Father Palmeri seemed a natural. He'd adapted to his new circumstances with amazing gusto. Perhaps zeal was a better term. Some people, one might say, were born to be undead.

He'd save the boy for tomorrow since the priest already had a bloodsource lined up for tonight. The pregnant female would indeed go to Olivia. But the rest was a laugh. As soon as Gregor was moved out of here, he'd never give these walking heaps of human garbage another thought.

But he smiled as he turned away.

"As always, may your night be bountiful."

CAROLE . . .

A little after sundown, Sister Carole removed the potassium chlorate crystals from the oven. She poured then into a bowl and then gently, carefully, began to grind them down to a fine power. This was the touchiest part of the process. A little too much friction, a sudden shock, and the bowl would blow up in her face.

Sister Carole made no reply as she continued the grinding. When the powder was sifted through a four-hundred-mesh screen, she spread it onto the bottom of the pan again and placed it back in the oven to remove the last trace of moisture. While that was heating she began melting equal parts wax and Vaseline, mixing them in a small Pyrex bowl.

When the mix had reached a uniform consistency she dissolved it in some camp stove gasoline. She removed the potassium chlorate powder from the oven and stirred in three percent aluminum powder to enhance the flash effect. Then she poured the Vaseline-wax-gasoline solution over the powder. She slipped on rubber gloves and began stirring and kneading everything together until she had a uniform, gooey mess. This went on the windowsill to cool and to speed the evaporation of the gasoline.

Then she went to the bedroom. Soon it would be time to go out and she had to dress appropriately. She stripped to her white cotton underpants and laid out the tight black skirt and red blouse she'd lifted from the shattered show window of that deserted shop down on Clifton Avenue. She slipped her small breasts into a heavily padded bra, then began squeezing into a fresh pair of black pantyhose.

I know, she thought. That's the whole idea.

JOE . . .

Father Joe Cahill watched the moon rise over the back end of his old church and wondered about the wisdom of coming back. The casual decision made in the full light of day now seemed reckless and foolhardy in the dark.

But no turning back now. He'd followed Zev to the second floor of this three-story office building across the street from the rear of St. Anthony's, and here they'd waited for dark. It must have been a law office once. The place had been vandalized, the windows broken, the furniture trashed, but an old Temple University Law School degree hung askew on the wall, and the couch was still in one piece. So while Zev caught some Z's, Joe sat, sipped a little of his Scotch, and did some heavy thinking.

Mostly he thought about his drinking. He'd done too much of that lately, he knew; so much so that he was afraid to stop cold. So he was allowing himself just a touch now, barely enough to take the edge off. He'd finish the rest later, after he came back from that church over there.

He'd been staring at St. Anthony's since they'd arrived. It too had been extensively vandalized. Once it had been a beautiful little stone church, a miniature cathedral, really, very Gothic with all its pointed arches, steep roofs, crocketed spires, and multifoil stained glass windows. Now the windows were smashed, the crosses that had topped the steeple and each gable were gone, and anything resembling a cross on its granite exterior had been defaced beyond recognition.

As he'd known it would, the sight of St. Anthony's brought back memories of Gloria Sullivan, the young, pretty church volunteer whose husband worked for United Chemical International in New York; he commuted to the city every day, trekked overseas a little too often. Joe and Gloria had seen a lot of each other around the church offices and had become good friends. But Gloria had somehow got the idea that what they had went beyond friendship, so she showed up at the rectory one night when Joe was there alone. He tried to explain that as attractive as she was, she was not for him. He had taken certain vows and meant to stick by them. He did his best to let her down easy but she'd been hurt. And angry.

That might have been that, but then her five-year-old son Kevin had come home from altar boy practice with a story about a priest making him pull down his pants and touching him. Kevin was never clear on who the priest had been, but Gloria Sullivan was. Obviously it had been Father Cahill—any man who could turn down the heartfelt offer of her love and her body had to be either a queer or worse. And a child molester was worse.

She took it to the police and to the papers.

Joe groaned softly at the memory of how swiftly his life had become hell. But he had been determined to weather the storm, sure that the real culprit eventually would be revealed. He had no proof—still didn't—but if one of the priests at St. Anthony's was a pederast, he knew it wasn't him. That left Father Alberto Palmeri, St. Anthony's fifty-five-year-old pastor.

Before Joe could get to the truth, however, the bishop had stepped in and removed Joe from the parish. Joe left under a cloud that had followed him to the retreat house in the next county and hovered over him till this day. The only place he'd found even brief respite from the impotent anger and bitterness that roiled under his skin and soured his gut every minute of every day was in the bottle—and that was sure as hell a dead end.

So why had he agreed to come back here? To torture himself? Or to get a look at Palmeri and see how low he had sunk?

Maybe that was it. Maybe seeing Palmeri wallowing in his true element would give Joe the impetus to put the whole St. Anthony's incident behind him and rejoin what was left of the human race—which needed all the help it could get.

And maybe it wouldn't.

Getting back on track was a nice thought, but over the past few months Joe had found it increasingly difficult to give much of a damn about anyone or anything.

Except maybe Zev. The old rabbi had stuck by him through the worst of it, defending him to anyone who would listen. But an endorsement from an Orthodox rabbi hadn't meant diddly in St. Anthony's.

Yesterday Zev had biked all the way to Spring Lake to see him. Old Zev was all right.

And he'd been right about the number of undead here too. Lakewood was crawling with the things. Fascinated and repelled, Joe had watched the streets fill with them shortly after sundown.

But what had disturbed him more were the creatures he'd seen before sundown.

The humans. Live ones.

The collaborators. The ones Zev called Vichy.

If there was anything lower, anything that deserved true death more than the undead themselves, it was the still-living humans who worked for them.

A hand touched his shoulder and he jumped. Zev. He was holding something out to him. Joe took it and held it up in the moonlight: a tiny crescent moon dangling from a chain on a ring.

"What's this?"

"An earring. The local Vichy wear them. The earrings identify them to the local nest of undead. They are spared."

"Where'd you get it?"

Zev's face was hidden in the shadows. "The previous owner ... no longer needs it.

"What's that supposed to mean?"

Zev sighed. He sounded embarrassed. "Some group has been killing the local Vichy. I don't know how many they've eliminated, but I came across one in my wanderings. Not such a pleasant task, but I forced myself to relieve the body of its earring. Just in case."

Joe found it hard to imagine the old pre-occupation Zev performing such a grisly task, but these were different times.

"Just in case what?"

"In case I needed to pretend to be one of them."

Joe had to laugh. "I can't see that fooling them for a second."

"Maybe a second is all I'd need. But it will look better on you. Put it on."

"My ear's not pierced."

A gnarled hand moved into the moonlight. Joe saw a long needle clasped between the thumb and index finger. "That I can fix," Zev said.

* * *

"On second thought," Zev whispered as they crouched in the deep shadows on St. Anthony's western flank, "maybe you shouldn't see this."

Puzzled, Joe squinted at him in the darkness.

"You lay a guilt trip on me to get me here, you make a hole in my ear, and now you're having second thoughts?"

"It is horrible like I can't tell you."

Joe thought about that. Certainly there was enough horror in the world outside St. Anthony's. What purpose did it serve to see what was going inside?

Because it used to be my church.

Even though he'd been an associate pastor, never fully in charge, and even though he'd been unceremoniously yanked from the post, St. Anthony's had been his first parish. He was back. He might as well know what they were doing inside.

"Show me."

Zev led him to a pile of rubble under a smashed stained glass window. He pointed up to where faint light flickered from inside.

"Look in there."

"You're not coming?"

"Once was enough, thank you."

Joe climbed as carefully, as quietly as he could, all the while becoming increasingly aware of a growing stench like putrid, rotting meat. It was coming from inside, wafting through the broken window. Steeling himself, he straightened and peered over the sill.

For a moment he felt disoriented, like someone peering out the window of a Brooklyn apartment and seeing the rolling hills of a Kansas farm. This could not be the interior of St. Anthony's.

In the flickering light of dozens of sacramental candles he saw that the walls were bare, stripped of all their ornaments, including the plaques for the Stations of the Cross; the dark wood was scarred and gouged wherever there had been anything remotely resembling a cross. The floor too was mostly bare, the pews ripped from their neat rows and hacked to pieces, their splintered remains piled high at the rear under the choir balcony.

And the giant crucifix that had dominated the space behind the altar— only a portion remained. The cross pieces on each side had been sawed off so that an armless, life-size Christ now hung upside down against the rear wall of the sanctuary.

Joe took in all that in a flash; then his attention gravitated to the unholy congregation that peopled St. Anthony's this night. The collaborators—the Vichy humans—made up the periphery of the group. Some looked like bikers and trailer-park white trash, but others looked like normal, everyday people. What bonded them was the crescent-moon earring dangling from every right earlobe.

But the rest, the group gathered in the sanctuary—Joe felt his hackles rise at the sight of them. They surrounded the altar in a tight knot. He recognized some of them: Mayor Davis, Reverend Dalton, and others, their pale, bestial faces, bereft of the slightest trace of human warmth, compassion, or decency, turned upward. His gorge rose when he saw the object of their rapt attention.

A naked teenage boy—his hands tied behind his back, was suspended over the altar by his ankles. He was sobbing and choking, his eyes wide and vacant with shock, his mind all but gone. The skin had been flayed from his forehead—apparently the Vichy had found an expedient solution to the cross tattoo—and blood ran in a slow stream across his abdomen and chest from his freshly truncated genitals. And beside him, standing atop the altar, a bloody-mouthed creature dressed in a long cassock. Joe recognized the thin shoulders, the graying hair trailing from the balding crown, but was shocked at the crimson vulpine grin he flashed to the things clustered below him.

"Now," said the creature in a lightly accented voice Joe had heard a thousand times from St. Anthony's pulpit.

Father Alberto Palmeri.

From the group a hand reached up with a straight razor and drew it across the boy's throat. As the blood sprang from the vessels and flowed down over his face, those below squeezed and struggled forward like hatchling vultures to catch the falling drops and scarlet trickles in their open mouths.

Joe fell away from the window and vomited. He felt Zev grab his arm and lead him away. He was vaguely aware of crossing the street and heading back toward the ruined legal office.

ZEV . . .

"Why in God's name did you want me to see that?"

Zev looked across the office toward the source of the words. He could make out a vague outline where Father Joe sat on the floor, his back against the wall, the open bottle of Scotch in his hand. The priest had taken one drink since their return, no more.

"I thought you should know what they were doing to your church." He felt bad about the immediate effect on Joe, but he was hoping the long-term consequences would benefit him and others.

"So you've said. But what's the reason behind that one?"

Zev shrugged in the darkness. "I'd gathered you weren't doing well, that even before everything else began falling apart, you had already fallen apart. So when this woman who saved me urged me to find you, I took up the quest and came to see you. Just as I expected, I found a man who was angry at everything and letting it eat up his guderim. I thought maybe it would be good to give that man something very specific to be angry at."

"You bastard!" Father Joe whispered. "Who gave you the right?"

"Friendship gave me the right, Joe. I should know that you are rotting away and do nothing? I have no congregation of my own anymore so I turned my attention on you. Always I was a somewhat meddlesome rabbi."

"Still are. Out to save my soul, ay?"

"We rabbis don't save souls. Guide them maybe, hopefully give them direction. But only you can save your soul, Joe."

Silence hung in the air for a while. Suddenly the crescent-moon earring Zev had given Father Joe landed in the puddle of moonlight on the floor between them. He noticed a speck of crimson on the post.

"Why do they do it?" the priest said. "The Vichy—why do they collaborate?"

"The first ones are quite unwilling, believe me. They cooperate because their wives and children are held hostage by the undead. But before too long the dregs of humanity begin to slither out from under their rocks and offer their services in exchange for the immortality of vampirism."

"Why bother working for them? Why not just bare your throat to the nearest bloodsucker?"

"That's what I thought at first," Zev said. "But as I witnessed the Lakewood holocaust I detected their pattern. After the immediate onslaught—and the burning of the bodies of their first victims—they change tactics. They can choose who joins their ranks, so after they've fully infiltrated a population, they start to employ a different style of killing. For only when the undead draws the life's blood from the throat with its fangs does the victim become one of them. Anyone drained as in the manner of that boy in the church tonight dies a true death. He's as dead now as someone run over by a truck. He will not rise tomorrow night."

"So the Vichy work for them for the opportunity of getting their blood sucked the old-fashioned way."

"And joining the undead ranks."

Zev heard no humor in the soft laugh that echoed across the room from Father Joe.

"Great. Just great. I never cease to be amazed at our fellow human beings. Their capacity for good is exceeded only by their ability to debase themselves."

"Hopelessness does strange things, Joe. The undead know that. So they rob us of hope. That's how they beat us. They transform our friends and neighbors and leaders into their own, leaving us feeling alone, completely cut off. Some can't take the despair and kill themselves."

"Hopelessness," Joe said. "A potent weapon."

After a long silence, Zev said, "So what are you going to do now, Father Joe?"

Another bitter laugh from across the room.

"I suppose this is the place where I declare that I've found new purpose in life and will now go forth into the world as a fearless vampire killer."

"Such a thing would be nice."

"Well screw that. I'm only going as far as across the street."

"To St. Anthony's?"

Zev saw Father Joe take a swig from the Scotch bottle and then screw the cap on tight.

"Yeah. To see if there's anything I can do over there."

"Father Palmeri and his nest might not like that."

"I told you, don't call him Father. And screw him. Nobody can do what he's done and get away with it. I'm taking my church back."

In the dark, behind his beard, Zev smiled.

COWBOYS . . .

Al had the car out on his own. He wasn't supposed to, gas being hard to come by and all, but he needed to be alone, or at least away from Kenny. Yeah, sure, they'd been friends forever but they'd never been together 24-7. Usually the four of them played cards and did some drinking before turning in. But Jackie was out of commission and Stan was still pissed and wasn't playing cards with nobody, so that left Al with just Kenny.

They all lived together in one of the big mansions off Hope Road. Stan liked to brag that one of the Mets used to live there. Big deal. The place had all the comforts of home: electricity from a generator, videotapes and DVDs—with a good selection of porn—and a fridge full of beer. But sometimes Kenny could wear you out, man. Big time. Like tonight.

Al was feeling better already, banging his head in time to Insane Clown Posse's "Cemetery Girl" as he cruised the dark streets.

He looked up. Clouds hid the moon. He wished it was out and full. Amazing how dark a residential street could be when there was no traffic, no street lights. At least he had his headlights and—

Whoa. He hit the brakes. He'd just passed someone on the sidewalk. Someone female looking. And not too old.

He quick took off his earring and flipped the Caddy into reverse. He kept the earring palmed, ready to flash it if the lady turned out to be one of the bloodsuckers, but otherwise keeping it out of sight just in case this was somebody looking for a new cowboy to kill.

He did a slow backup while he searched the shadows and moonlit patches. Nothing. Shit. Either he was seeing things or he'd spooked her.

He was just about to slam back into DRIVE when he heard a voice. A woman's voice.

"Hey, mister."

Al grabbed his flashlight from the passenger seat and beamed it toward the voice.

A woman half hiding behind a tree in the bushes. Not undead. Maybe thirty, skinny but not bad looking. He played the light up and down her. Short dark hair, lots of eye makeup, a red sweater tight over decent-size boobs, a short black skirt very tight over black stockings.

Despite the alarm bells going off in his brain, Al ignored them as he felt his groin start to swell. He left the car in the middle of the street—like he had to worry about getting a ticket, right?—and walked over to her.

"Who're you?"

She smiled. No, not bad looking at all.

"My name's Carole," she said. "You got any food?"

"Some." Yeah, she looked like she could use a few good meals. "But not a whole helluva lot."

Actually, he had a lot of food, but saw no reason to let her know that.

"Can you spare any?"

"I might be able to help you out some. Depends on how many mouths we're talking about."

"Just me and my kid."

The words jumped out of his mouth before he could stop them: "You got a kid?"

She waved her hands in quick, nervous moves. "Don't worry. She's only four. She don't eat much."

A four-year-old. Two kids in one day. Almost too good to be true.

His brain kicked into overdrive. How to play this? For a while now he'd had this little scheme of keeping a piece on the side, with neither the bloodsuckers or the posse knowing nothing about her. He'd get her a house, keep her fed, keep her protected. But it sounded like this Carole already had herself a house. Even better. She could stay where she was and he'd visit her whenever he could get away. She treated him right, they could play house for a while. She gave him any trouble, like holding out on him, she and her brat became gifts to Gregor. That was where they were going to wind up anyway, but no reason Al couldn't get some use out of her before she became some bloodsucker's meal or wound up on a cattle farm.

And maybe he'd get real lucky. Maybe she'd get pregnant before he turned her in.

"Well... all right," he said, trying to sound reluctant. "Bring her out where I can see her."

"She's home asleep."

"Alone?" Al was like immediately pissed. He already considered that kid his property. He didn't want no bloodsucker sneaking in and robbing him of what was rightfully his. "What if—?"

"Don't worry. I've got her surrounded by crosses."

"Still, you never know." He paused, thinking. "Here's the deal. I got food but I got this tiny little rundown place that ain't fit for the cockroaches that live there. Maybe I could like spend some time at your place. That way I could guard you and your kid from those cowboys. They'd love nothing better'n hauling a little kid into the bloodsuckers."

Did that sound concerned enough?

A hand flew to her mouth. "Oh dear!" Her voice softened. "You must be a good man."

"Oh, I'm the best," he said.

And I've got this friend behind my fly who's just dying to meet you.

"I'll show you my place," she said. "It's not much but there's room for you."

Yeah, babe. Right on top of you.

She got in the car and directed him to the corner and around to the middle of the next block to an old two-story colonial set back among some tall oaks on an overgrown lot. He nodded with growing excitement when he saw a child's red wagon parked against the front steps.

"You live here? Hell, I musta passed this place a couple of times already today."

"Really?" she said. "We usually stay hidden in the basement."

"Good thinkin."

He followed her up the steps and through the front door. Inside there was a couple of candles burning but the heavy drapes hid them from outside.

"Lynn's sleeping upstairs," she said. "I'll just run up and check on her."

Al watched her black-stockinged legs hungrily as she bounded up the bare wooden stairway, taking the steps two at a time. He adjusted his jeans for a little more comfort. Man, he was hard as a rock. Couldn't wait to get her out of that miniskirt and himself into—

And then it hit him: Why wait till she came back down? What was he doing standing around down here when he could be upstairs getting himself a preview of what was to come?

"Yoo-hoo," he said softly as he put his foot on the first step. "Here comes Daddy."

But the first step wasn't wood. Wasn't even a step. His foot went right through it, like it was made of cardboard or something. As Al looked down in shock he saw that it was made of cardboard—painted cardboard. His brain was just forming the question Why? when a sudden blast of pain like he'd never known in his whole life shot up his leg from just above the ankle.

He screamed, lunged back, away from the false step, but the movement tripled his agony. He clung to the newel post like a drunk, weeping and moaning for God knew how long, until the pain eased for a second. Then slowly, gingerly, accompanied by the metallic clanking of uncoiling chain links, he lifted his leg out of the false tread.

Al let loose a stream of curses through his pain-clenched teeth when he saw the bear trap attached to his leg. Its sharp, massive steel teeth had sunk themselves deep into the flesh of his lower leg.

But fear began to worm through the all-enveloping haze of his agony.

The bitch set me up!

Kenny had wanted to find the guys who were killing the cowboys. But now Al had done just that, and it scared him shitless. What a dumbass he was. Baited by a broad—the oldest trick in the book.

Gotta get outta here!

He lunged for the door but the chain caught and brought him up short with a blinding blaze of agony so intense his scream damn near shredded his vocal cords. He toppled to the floor and lay there whimpering like a kicked dog until the pain became bearable again.

Where were they? Where were the rest of the cowboy killers? Upstairs, laughing as they listened to him howl? Waiting until he wore himself out so he'd be easy pickings?

He'd show them.

Al pulled himself to a sitting position and reached for the trap. He tried to spread its jaws but they were locked tight on his leg. He wrapped his hand around the chain and tried to yank it free from where it was fastened below but it wouldn't budge.

Panic began to grip him now. Its icy fingers were tightening on his throat when he heard a sound on the stairs. He looked up and saw her.

A nun.

He blinked and looked again.

Still a nun. He squinted and saw that it was the broad who'd led him in here. She was wearing a bulky sweater and loose slacks, and all the makeup had been scrubbed off her face, but he knew she was a nun by the thing she wore on her head: a white band up front with a black veil trailing behind.

And suddenly, amid the pain and panic, Al was back in grammar school, back in St. Mary's before he got expelled, and Sister Margaret was coming at him with her ruler, only this nun was a lot younger than Sister Margaret, and that was no ruler she was carrying, that was a baseball bat—an aluminum baseball bat.

He looked around. Nobody else, just him and the nun.

"Where's the rest of you?"

"Rest?" she said.

"Yeah. The others in your gang. Where are they?"

"There's only me."

She was lying. Had to be. One crazy nun killing all those cowboys? No way! But still he had to get out of here. He tried to crawl across the floor but the fucking chain wouldn't let him.

"You're makin a mistake!" he cried. "I ain't one a them!"

"Oh, but you are," she said, coming down the stairs.

"No. Really. See?" He touched his right ear lobe. "No earring."

"Maybe not now, but you had one earlier." She stepped over the gaping opening of the phony tread and circled to his left.

"When? When?"

"When you drove by earlier today. You told me so yourself."

"I lied!"

"No, you didn't. But I lied. I wasn't in the basement. I was watching through the window. I saw you and your three friends in that car." Her voice suddenly became cold and brittle and sharp as a straight razor. "And I saw that poor woman you had with you. Where is she now? What did you do with her?"

She was talking through her teeth now, and the look in her eyes, the strained pallor of her face had Al ready to pee his pants. He wrapped his arms around his head as she stepped closer with the bat.

"Please!" he wailed.

"What did you do with them?"

"Nothin!"

"Lie!"

She swung the bat, but not at his head. Instead she slammed it with a heavy metallic clank against the jaws of the trap. As he screamed with the renewed agony and his hands automatically reached for his injured leg, Al realized that she must have done this sort of thing before. Because now his head was completely unprotected and she was already into a second swing. And this one was aimed much higher.

CAROLE . . .

Sister Carole looked down at the unconscious man with the bleeding head and trapped, lacerated leg. She sobbed.

"I know," she said aloud.

She was so tired. She'd have liked nothing better now than to go upstairs and cry herself to sleep. But she couldn't spare the time. Every moment counted now.

She tucked her feelings—her mercy, her compassion—into the deepest, darkest pocket of her being, where she couldn't see or hear them, and got to work.

The first thing she did was tie the cowboy's hands good and tight behind his back. Then she got a washcloth from the downstairs bathroom, stuffed it in his mouth, and secured it with a tie of rope around his head. That done, she grabbed the crowbar and the short length of two-by-four from where she kept them on the floor of the hall closet; she used the bar to pry open the jaws of the bear trap and wedged the two-by-four between them to keep them open. Then she worked the cowboy's leg free. He groaned a couple of times during the process but he never came to.

She bound his legs tightly together, then grabbed the throw rug he lay upon and dragged him and the rug out to the front porch and down the steps to the red wagon she'd left there. She rolled him off the bottom step into the wagon bed and tied him in place. Then she slipped her arms through the straps of her heavily loaded backpack and she was ready to go. She grabbed the wagon's handle and pulled it down the walk, down the driveway apron, and onto the asphalt. From there on it was smooth rolling.

Sister Carole knew just where she was going. She had the spot all picked out.

She was going to try something a little different tonight.

COWBOYS . . .

Al screamed and sobbed against the gag. If he could just talk to her he knew he could change her mind. But he couldn't get a word past the cloth jammed against his tongue.

And he didn't have long. She had him upside down, strung up by his feet, swaying in the breeze from one of the climbing spikes on a utility pole, and he knew what was coming next. So he pleaded with his eyes, with his soul. He tried mental telepathy.

Sister, Sister, Sister, don't do this! I'm a Catholic! My mother prayed for me every day and it didn't help, hut I'll change now, I promise! I swear on a stack of fuckin bibles I'll be a good boy from now on if you'll just let me go this time!

Then he saw her face in the moonlight and realized with a final icy shock that he was truly a goner. Even if he could make her hear him, nothing he could say was going to change this lady's mind. The eyes were empty. No one was home. The bitch was on autopilot.

When he saw the glimmer of the straight razor as it glided above his throat, there was nothing left to do but wet himself.

CAROLE . . .

When Sister Carole finished vomiting, she sat on the curb and allowed herself a brief cry.

She dragged herself to her feet. She had two more things to do. One of them involved touching the fresh corpse. The second was simpler: starting a fire to attract other cowboys and their masters.

GREGOR . . .

Gregor stood amid his get-guards and watched as cowboy Kenny ran in circles around his dead friend's swaying, upended corpse.

"It's Al! The bastards got Al! I'll kill 'em all! I'll tear 'em to pieces!"

How Gregor wished somebody would do just that. He'd heard about these deaths but this was the first he'd seen—an obscene parody of the bloodletting rituals he and his nightbrothers performed on the cattle. This was acutely embarrassing, especially with Olivia newly arrived from New York.

"Come out here!" Kenny screamed into the darkness. "Come out and fight like men!"

Stan, the head of this posse, was stamping out the brush fire at the base of the utility pole.

"We should be getting back, Gregor," one of his guards whispered. "It's too open out here. Not safe."

All four of them had their pistols drawn and were eyeing the night, their heads rotating back and forth like radar dishes.

Gregor ignored him and called out, "Someone cut him down."

Stan pointed to Kenny. "Climb up there." Hey, no—

"He was your bud," Stan said. "You do it."

Kenny reluctantly climbed the pole.

"I want to let him down easy!" he yelled when he'd reached the rope.

"Just cut the rope," Stan said.

"Dammit, Stan. Al was one of us! I'll cut it slow and you ease him down."

"Oh, fuck, all right," Stan said. "C'mere, Jackie, and help me."

The woman stood back by one of the cars that had brought them all here. Not the fancy convertible the posse had been using recently—Al had apparently taken that for a drive and never come back. She had a bandage around her head over a blackened left eye. Gregor wondered what had happened to her. Beaten by one of her own posse perhaps?

He looked at Jackie and remembered lusting after women for their bodies; now he cared only for the red wine running through them. Sexual lust was a dim memory. He hadn't had an erection since he was turned, seventy years ago.

Blood . . . always blood. Gregor was glad he had supped before accompanying these cowboys to their dead friend.

This made six dead. Two in the past three days. The pace was accelerating. Olivia would be on the warpath.

Jackie shook her head. "No way," she said, her voice faint. "I can't."

"Get your skinny ass over here!"

"He's comin down!" Kenny shouted.

"Damn fuck!" Stan shouted as the body slumped earthward. He reached up to grab it and—

The flash was noonday bright, the blast deafening as the shock wave knocked Gregor to the ground. His first instinct was to leap to his feet again, but he realized he couldn't see. The bright flash had fogged his night vision with a purple, amebic afterimage. He lay quiet until he could see again, then rose to his feet.

He heard wailing sounds. The woman crouched beside the car, screaming hysterically; the cowboy who had climbed the pole lay somewhere in the bushes, crying out about his back, how badly it hurt and how he couldn't move his legs. But the other two—Stan and the murdered Al—were nowhere to be seen.

His get-guards were struggling to their feet, enclosing him in a tight, four-man circle. "Are you all right, Gregor?" one said.

"Of course I'm all right," he snapped. "You wouldn't be asking that question if I weren't."

Gregor shook his head. He tried to choose carefully for his get, emphasizing intelligence. Sometimes they fell short.

Gregor began to brush off his clothes as he looked around, then froze. He was wet, covered with blood and torn flesh. The entire street glistened, littered with bits of bone, muscle, skin, and fingernail-size pieces of internal organs, leaving no way of telling what had belonged to whom.

Gregor shuddered at the prospect of explaining this to Olivia.

His fury exploded. The first killing tonight had been embarrassing enough by itself. But now another cowboy had been taken out, and still another crippled to the point where he'd have to be put down—all right in front of him. This had passed beyond embarrassment into humiliation.

When he caught these vigilantes he'd deal with them personally. And see that it took them days to die.

CAROLE . . .

Sister Carole saw the flash and heard the explosion through the window over the sink in the darkened kitchen of the Bennett house. No joy, no elation. This wasn't fun. But she did find a certain grim satisfaction in learning that her potassium chlorate plastique had worked.

The gasoline had evaporated from the latest batch and she was working with that now. The moon provided sufficient illumination for the final stage. Once she had the right amount measured out, she didn't need much light to pack the plastique into soup cans. All she had to do was make sure she maintained the proper loading density.

That done, she stuck a number-three blasting cap in the end of each cylinder and dipped it into the pot of melted wax she had on the stove. And that did it. She now had waterproof block charges with a detonation velocity comparable to forty-percent-ammonia dynamite.

"All right," she said aloud to the night through her kitchen window.

"You've made my life a living hell. Now it's your time to be afraid."

GREGOR . . .

"Three in one night!"

Olivia's eyes seemed to glow with red fire in the gloom of the Post Office basement. She'd taken up temporary residence in the old granite building.

"They booby-trapped the body." Gregor knew it sounded lame but it was the truth.

Olivia's voice was barely a whisper as she pierced him with her stare. "You've disappointed me, Gregor."

"It is a temporary situation, I assure you."

"So you keep saying, but it has lasted far too long already. The dead serfs total seven now. Seven! Wait till Franco hears!"

Gregor quailed at the thought. "He doesn't have to hear. Not yet."

"You're losing control, Gregor. You don't seem to realize that besides our strength and our special powers, we have two weapons: fear and hopelessness. We cannot control the cattle by love and loyalty, so if we are to maintain our rule, it must be through the terror we inspire in them and the seeming impossibility of ever defeating us. What have the cattle witnessed in your territory, Gregor?"

Gregor knew where this was headed. "Olivia, please, I—"

"I'll tell you what they've witnessed," she said, her voice rising. "They've witnessed your inability to protect the serfs we've induced to herd the cattle and guard the daylight hours for us. And trust me, Gregor, the success of one vigilante group will give rise to a second, and then a third, and before long it will be open season on our serfs. And then you'll have no control. Because the cattle herders are cowardly swine, Gregor. The lowest of the low. They work for us only because they see us as the victors and they want to be on the winning side at any cost. But if we can't protect them, if they get a sense that we might be vulnerable and that our continued dominance might not be guaranteed, they'll turn on us in a flash."

"I know that, and I'm—"

"Fix it, Gregor." Her voice sank to a whisper again. "I will give you till dawn Friday to remedy this. If not, you'll awaken Friday night to find yourself heading back to New York to face Franco. Is that clear?"

Dawn Friday? Gregor could scarcely believe what he was hearing. Here it was Thursday morning with only a few hours until dawn—too late to take any action now. That left him one night to catch these marauding swine. And to think he'd just made her a gift of the pregnant cow's baby. The ungrateful—

He swallowed his anger.

"Very clear."

"Good. I expect you to have a plan by sundown."

"I will."

"Leave me now."

As Gregor turned and hurried up the steps he heard a newborn begin to cry in the darkness. The sound made him hungry.

- 4 -

JOE . . .

Joe yawned and stretched his limbs in the morning light. He'd stayed up most of the night and let Zev sleep. The old guy needed his rest. Sleep would have been impossible for Joe anyway. He was too wired. So he'd sat up, staring at the back of St. Anthony's.

The undead had left before first light, dark shapes drifting out the doors and across the grass like parishioners leaving a predawn service. Joe had felt his teeth grind as he scanned the group for Palmeri, but he couldn't make him out in the dimness. He might have gone out the front. By the time the sun had begun to peek over the rooftops and through the trees to the east, the streets outside were deserted.

He woke Zev and together they walked around to the front of the church.

The heavy oak and iron doors, each forming half of a pointed arch, were closed. Joe pulled them open and fastened the hooks to hold them back. Then, taking a breath, he walked through the vestibule and into the nave.

Even though he was ready for it, the stench backed him up a few steps. When his stomach settled, he forced himself ahead, treading a path between the two piles of shattered and splintered pews. Zev walked beside him, a handkerchief pressed over his mouth.

Last night he had thought the place a shambles. He saw now that it was worse. The light of day poked into all the corners, revealing everything that had been hidden by the warm glow of the candles. Half a dozen rotting corpses hung from the ceiling—he hadn't noticed them last night—and others were sprawled on the floor against the walls. Some of the bodies lay in pieces. Behind the chancel rail a headless female torso was draped over the front of the pulpit. To the left stood the statue of Mary. Someone had fitted her with foam rubber breasts and a huge dildo. And at the rear of the sanctuary was the armless Christ hanging head down on the upright of his cross.

"My church," he whispered as he moved along the path that had once been the center aisle, the aisle once walked by daily communicants and brides with their proud fathers. "Look what they've done to my church!"

Joe approached the huge block of the altar. When he'd first arrived at St. Anthony's it had been backed against the far wall of the sanctuary, but he'd had it moved to the front so that he could celebrate Mass facing his parishioners. Solid Carrara marble, but you'd never know it now. So caked with dried blood, semen, and feces it could have been made of styrofoam.

His revulsion was fading, melting away in the growing heat of his rage, drawing the nausea with it. He had intended to clean up the place but there was too much to be done, too much for two men. It was hopeless.

"Fadda Joe?"

He spun at the sound of the strange voice. A thin figure stood uncertainly in the open doorway. A timid-looking man of about fifty edged forward.

"Fadda Joe, that you?"

Joe recognized him now. Carl Edwards. A twitchy little man who used to help pass the collection basket at 10:30 Mass on Sundays. A transplantee from Jersey City—hardly anyone around here was originally from around here. His face was sunken, his eyes feverish as he stared at Joe.

"Yes, Carl. It's me."

"Oh, thank God!" He ran forward and dropped to his knees before Joe. He began to sob. "You come back! Thank God, you come back!"

Joe pulled him to his feet.

"Come on now, Carl. Get a grip."

"You come back to save us, ain'tcha? God sent you here to punish him, didn't He?"

"Punish whom?"

"Fadda Palmeri! He's one a them! He's the worst of alia them! He—"

"I know," Joe said. "I know."

"Oh, it's so good to have ya back, Fadda Joe! We ain't knowed what to do since the suckers took over. We been prayin for someone like you and now ya here. It's a freakin miracle!"

Joe wanted to ask Carl where he and all these people who seemed to think they needed him now had been when he was being railroaded out of the parish. But that was ancient history.

"Not a miracle, Carl," Joe said, glancing at Zev. "Rabbi Wolpin brought me back." As Carl and Zev shook hands, Joe said, "And I'm just passing through."

"Passing through? No. Don't say that! Ya gotta stay!"

Joe saw the light of hope fading in the little man's eyes and something twisted within, tugging at him.

"What can I do here, Carl? I'm just one man."

"I'll help! I'll do whatever ya want! Just tell me!"

"Will you help me clean up?"

Carl looked around and seemed to see the cadavers for the first time. He cringed and turned a few shades paler.

"Yeah ... sure. Anything."

Joe looked at Zev. "Well? What do you think?"

Zev shrugged. "I should tell you what to do? My parish it's not."

"Not mine either."

Zev jutted his beard at Carl. "I think maybe he'd tell you differendy."

Joe did a slow turn. The vaulted nave was utterly silent except for the buzzing of the flies around the cadavers. A massive cleanup job. But if they worked all day they could make a decent dent in it. And then—

And then what?

Joe didn't know. He was playing this by ear. He'd wait and see what the night brought.

"Can you get us some food, Carl? I'd sell my soul for a cup of coffee."

Carl gave him a strange look.

"Just a figure of speech, Carl. We'll need some food if we're going to keep working."

The man's eyes lit again.

"That means ya staying?"

"For a while."

"I'll getcha some food," he said excitedly as he ran for the door. "And coffee. I know someone who's still got coffee. She'll part with some of it for Fadda Joe." He stopped at the door and turned. "Ay, and Fadda, I never believed any of them things was said aboutcha. Never."

Joe tried but he couldn't hold it back.

"It would have meant a lot to have heard that from you then, Carl."

The man lowered his eyes. "Yeah. I guess it woulda. But I'll make it up to ya, Fadda. I will. You can take that to the bank."

Then he was out the door and gone. Joe turned to Zev and saw the old man rolling up his sleeves.

"Nu?" Zev said. "The bodies. Before we do anything else, I think maybe we should move the bodies."

ZEV . . .

By early afternoon, Zev was exhausted. The heat and the heavy work had taken their toll. He had to stop and rest. He sat on the chancel rail and looked around. Nearly eight hours work and they'd barely scratched the surface. But the place did look and smell better.

Removing the flyblown corpses and scattered body parts had been the worst of it. A foul, gut-roiling task that had taken most of the morning. They'd carried the corpses out to the small graveyard behind the church and left them there. Those people deserved a decent burial but there was no time for it today.

Once the corpses were gone, Father Joe had torn the defilements from the statue of Mary and then they'd turned their attention to the huge crucifix. It took a while but they finally found Christ's plaster arms in the pile of ruined pews. Both still were nailed to the sawed-off crosspieces of the crucifix. While Zev and Joe worked at jury-rigging a series of braces to reattach the arms,

Carl found a mop and bucket and began the long, slow process of washing the fouled floor of the nave.

Now the crucifix was intact again—the life-size plaster Jesus had his arms reattached and was once again nailed to his refurbished cross. Joe and Carl had restored him to his former position of dominance. The poor Nazarene was upright again, hanging over the center of the sanctuary in all his tortured splendor.

A grisly sight. Zev never could understand the Catholic attachment to these gruesome statues. But if the undead loathed them, then Zev was for them all the way.

His stomach rumbled with hunger. At least they'd had a good breakfast. Carl had returned from his food run this morning with fresh-baked bread, peanut butter, and two thermoses of hot coffee. He wished now they'd saved some. Maybe there was a crust of bread left in the sack.

He headed back to the vestibule to check and found an aluminum pot and a paper bag sitting by the door. The pot was hot and full of beef stew, the sack contained three cans of Pepsi.

He poked his head out the doors but saw no one on the street outside. It had been that way all day—he'd spy a figure or two peeking in the front doors; they'd hover there for a moment as if to confirm that what they had heard was true, then they'd scurry away.

He looked down at the meal that had been left. A group of the locals must have donated from their hoard of canned stew and precious soft drinks to fix this. Zev was touched.

He was about to call out to Joe and Carl when a shadow fell across the floor. He looked up and saw a young woman in a leather jacket standing in the doorway. The first thing he did was check for her right ear for one of those cursed crescents. Easy enough to see with her close-cropped, almost boyish brown hair. She didn't. Such a relief.

"Yes?" He straightened and faced her. "Can I help you?"

"Isn't this St. Anthony's church?" she said, making a face as she looked around at the destruction.

"It was. We're trying to make it so again."

Her gaze had come to rest on his yarmulke. "But you're a—"

"A rabbi, yes. Rabbi Zev Wolpin, at your service." He gestured around him at the church. "Such a long story, you wouldn't believe."

She smiled. A pretty smile. "I'll bet. I'm looking for my uncle. He was a priest here but he left. I need to find him."

Zev felt a lightness in his chest. "His name wouldn't happen to be Cahill, would it?"

Her smile broadened. "Yeah. Father Joe Cahill. You know where he might be?"

"I believe I do." He turned and called into the nave. "Father Joe! You have company!"

LACEY . . .

Lacey totally lost it when she recognized the tall, broad-shouldered man striding toward her through the rubble of the church. He needed a shave, he needed a haircut, and his faded jeans and flannel shirt were anything but priestly, but she knew those blue eyes and the smile that lit his face when he saw her.

"Uncle Joe!"

She found herself running forward and flinging herself at him, sobbing unashamedly and uncontrollably as she clung to him like a drowning sailor to a rock.

"Lacey, Lacey," he cooed, holding her tight against him. "It's all right. It's all right."

Finally she got hold of herself and eased her deathgrip on him. She wiped her eyes.

"Sorry about that. It's just..."

"I know," he said, taking her hands in his.

Lacey looked up at her uncle. Did he? Did he realize what she'd been through to get here? She'd thought she was tough, but the trip from Manhattan had taken her longer than she could have imagined, and put to shame every nightmare she'd ever had.

"How are your mom and dad?" he asked.

She saw the forlorn hope in his eyes—her mother was his older sister—but had to shake her head.

"I don't know. I tried to contact them when the shit hit the—I mean, when everything went to hell, but the lines were down and everything was chaos. I got to wondering if they'd even bothered trying to get in touch with me."

"I'm sure they did," Uncle Joe said. "Of course they did."

"How can you be so sure? They've refused to speak to me for years."

"But they love you."

"Funny way of showing it."

"They're not rejecting you, Lacey, just your lifestyle."

"One's pretty much wrapped up in the other, don't you think. At least you kept talking to me."

She'd been moved as a kid from Brooklyn to New Jersey when her father landed a job with a big pharmaceutical company in Florham Park, but New York had remained in her blood. When it came time for college her first and last choice had been NYU, for reasons beyond what it offered academically. Its location in Greenwich Village had been equally important.

Because somewhere along her years in high school Lacey Flannery had realized she wasn't like the other girls. She needed an accepting atmosphere, a place where anything goes, to stretch her boundaries and find out about herself, learn who she really was.

In her second year at NYU she moved into an off-campus apartment with a senior named Janey Birnbaum. At the time her folks thought they were just roommates. Three years ago, right after her graduation with a BA in English, she came out.

And that was when her folks stopped speaking to her. She'd tried to visit them, tried to explain, but they hadn't wanted to see or speak to her.

The one person in the family she'd found she could talk to was, of all people, her uncle the Catholic priest. Uncle Joe hadn't approved but he didn't turn her away. He'd tried to act as go-between but her folks stood firm: either get counseling and get cured—like she was mentally ill or something!—or stay away.

She had a feeling her father was behind the hard line, but she couldn't be sure. Now she might never know.

The rabbi said, "So may I ask, what is it, this lifestyle, that your parents reject but a priest doesn't?"

"I'm a dyke."

The rabbi blinked. Probably the first time anyone had ever put it to him that bluntly. She also noticed her uncle's grimace. Obviously he didn't like the word. Lacey hadn't liked it either at first, but Janey and her more radical friends encouraged her to use to it because they were taking it back.

That was all fine back then, but now . . . take it back from whom?

"Doesn't that mean a lesbian?" the rabbi said.

"Through and through."

"Oh. I see."

"Not just a garden-variety lesbian," Uncle Joe said. His wry smile looked forced. "A radical lesbian feminist, and an outspoken one at that."

"You forgot to mention atheist."

His smile faded a little. "I try to forget that part."

It had taken Lacey awhile to come out, but when she did she decided not to be out partway. She wasn't ashamed of who she was or how she felt and was ready to get in the face of anyone who tried to give her grief about it.

She'd started writing articles and reviews for the underground press—the radical, the gay, even the entertainment freebies—with the hope of eventually moving above ground. Her role model was Norah Vincent, who'd been writing a regular column for the Village Voice—back when there'd been a Village Voice. Lacey didn't always agree with her views but she envied her pulpit. She'd vowed that someday she'd have a column like that.

But that dream was gone now, along with so many others ...

"Anyway," she said, "I hadn't been able to contact Mom and Dad, so I decided to check up on them."

She'd been all alone then. Janey had gone out one day, scrounging for food, and never come back. After spending a week looking for her, Lacey had to face the unthinkable: Janey was either dead or had been turned into an undead. Crushed, grieving, and with New York becoming more dangerous every day, she'd decided to go home. She fought her way through the Holland Tunnel—the living collaborators hadn't closed it off yet—and made it to her folks' place in Union, New Jersey.

"When I got to their house, I found the front door smashed in and blood on the living-room rug." She felt herself puddling up, her throat tightening like a noose. "I don't think they made it."

She hoped they were alive or dead, anything but in between. They'd rejected her, they'd caused her untold pain—though she'd probably given as good as she got on that score—but they were still her parents and the thought of her mother and father prowling the night, sucking blood . . .

She'd nurtured the hope that with time they'd have come to accept her as she was—she'd never expected approval, but maybe just enough acceptance to invite her back for dinner some night. It didn't look like that was ever going to happen now.

Uncle Joe wrapped an arm around her shoulders. "I..." His voice choked off and the two of them stood still and silent.

"This was your brother, Joe?" the rabbi said.

"My big sister. Cathy."

"I'm so sorry."

"Yeah," Uncle Joe said. "So am I." He cleared his throat. "But we can hope for the best, can't we? And in the meantime, lunch is getting cold. Are you hungry, Lacey?"

She was famished.

ZEV . . .

"Tastes like Dinty Moore," Joe said around a mouthful of the stew.

"It is," Lacey said. "I ate a lot of this before I turned vegan. I recognize the little potatoes."

Zev found the stew palatable but much too salty. He wasn't about to complain, though.

They were feasting in the sacristy, the small room off the sanctuary where the priests had kept their vestments—a clerical Green Room, so to speak. Joe and Lacey sat side by side. Carl and Zev sat apart.

"What's vegan?" he asked.

"Someone who eats only veggies," Lacey said.

"But—"

"I know. Being a vegan was a luxury. Now I eat whatever I can find."

Carl laughed. "Fadda, the ladies of the parish must be real excited about you coming back to break into their canned goods like this."

Zev said, "I don't believe I've ever had anything like this before."

"I'd be surprised if you had," said Joe. "I doubt very much that something that calls itself Dinty Moore is kosher."

Zev smiled but inside he was suddenly filled with a great sadness. Kosher . . . how meaningless now seemed all the observances that he had allowed to rule and circumscribe his life. Such a fierce proponent of strict dietary laws he'd been in the days before the Lakewood holocaust. But those days were gone, just as the Lakewood community was gone.

And Zev was a changed man. If he hadn't changed, if he were still observing, he couldn't sit here and sup with these two men and this young woman.

He'd have to be elsewhere, eating special classes of ritually prepared foods off separate sets of dishes. But really, hadn't division been the main thrust of holding to the dietary laws in modern times? They served a purpose beyond mere observance of tradition. They placed another wall between observant Jews and outsiders, keeping them separate even from fellow Jews who didn't observe.

Zev took another big bite of the stew. Time to break down all the walls between people . . . while there was still enough time and people left alive to make it matter.

"You okay, Zev?" Joe asked.

Zev nodded silently, afraid to speak for fear of sobbing. Despite all its anachronisms, he missed his life in the good old days of a few months ago. Gone. It was all gone. The rich traditions, the culture, the friends, the prayers. He felt adrift—in time and in space. Nowhere was home.

And then there was the matter of the cross ... the power of the cross over the undead . . .

He'd sneaked a copy of Dracula to read when he was a boy, and he'd caught snatches of vampire movies on TV. The undead were always portrayed as afraid of crosses. But that had been fiction. Vampires weren't real—or so he'd thought—and so he'd never examined the broader implications of that fear of the cross. Now...

"You sure?" Joe seemed genuinely concerned.

"Yes, I'm okay. As okay as you could expect me to feel after spending the better part of the day repairing a crucifix and eating non-kosher food. And let me tell you, that's not so okay."

He put his bowl aside and straightened from his chair.

"Come on, already. Let's get back to work. There's much yet to do."

JOE . . .

"Almost sunset," Carl said.

Joe straightened from scrubbing the marble altar and stared west through one of the smashed windows. The sun was out of sight behind the houses there.

"You can go now, Carl," he said to the little man. "Thanks for your help." "Where you gonna go, Fadda?"

"I'll be staying right here."

Carl's prominent Adam's apple bobbed convulsively as he swallowed.

"Yeah? Well then, I'm staying too. I told you I'd make it up to ya, didn't I? An' besides, I don't think the suckers'U like the new, improved St. Ant'ny's too much when they come back tonight. I don't think they'll even get through the doors."

Joe smiled at the man, then looked around. Luckily it was May and the days were growing longer. They'd had time to make a difference here. The floors were clean, the crucifix was restored and back in its proper position, as were most of the Stations of the Cross plaques. Zev had found them under the pews and had taken the ones not shattered beyond recognition and rehung them on the walls. Lots of new crosses littered those walls. Carl had found a hammer and nails and had made dozens of them from the remains of the pews.

"You're right. I don't think they'll like the new decor one bit. But there's something you can get us if you can, Carl. Guns. Pistols, rifles, shotguns, anything that shoots."

Carl nodded slowly. "I know a few guys who can help in that department."

"And some wine. A little red wine if anybody's saved some."

"You got it."

He hurried off.

"You're planning Custer's last stand, maybe?" Zev said from where he was tacking the last of Carl's crude crosses to the east wall.

"More like the Alamo."

"Same result," Zev said with one of his shrugs.

"I've got a gun," Lacey said.

Joe stared at her. She'd been helping him scrub the altar. "You do? Why didn't you say something?"

"It's only got two bullets left."

"Where are the rest?"

She met his gaze evenly. "I had to leave them behind in a couple of people who tried to stop me. It was a tough trip getting here."

"Are you okay with that?"

She nodded. "Better than I thought I'd be. You do what you have to do."

What an amazing young woman, he thought. Who'd have thought Cathy's little girl could turn out so tough and resilient.

He remembered Lacey as a teen. She'd always been a little different from her peers. On the surface she seemed like a typical high-school kid—she dated, though she had no serious crushes, played soccer and field hockey with abandon—but on holidays and family gatherings, she'd stay in the background. Joe would make a point of sitting down with her; he'd draw her out, and then another Lacey would emerge.

The other Lacey was a thinker, a questioner. She had doubts about religion, about government. She burned with an iconoclastic fire that urged her to question traditions and break with them whenever possible. She was fascinated by the old anarchists and dug up all their works. He remembered her favorite was No Treason by someone named Lysander Spooner. Instead of hanging posters of the latest teenage heartthrob boy band in her room, Lacey had pictures of Emma Goldman and Madelyn Murray O'Hare.

Joe's sister and her husband tolerated her views with a mixture of humor and apprehension. If this was the shape and scope of Lacey's teenage rebellion, they'd live with it. It was just a phase, they'd say. She'll grow out of it. Better than drunk driving or drugs or getting pregnant.

But it wasn't a phase. It was Lacey. And later, when she came out as a lesbian, they turned their backs on her. Joe had tried to talk them out of slamming the family door, but this was more than they could take.

"Who taught you to shoot?" he asked.

"A friend." She smiled. "A guy friend, believe it or not. It was a self-defense thing. He took me out to the range until I got comfortable with pulling the trigger. I'm not a great shot, but if you're within ten feet of me and you're looking for trouble, you're gone."

Joe had to smile. "Never let it be said you're not full of surprises, Lacey."

She laughed softly. "No one's ever said that."

They turned back to scrubbing the altar. They'd been at it for over an hour now. Joe was drenched with sweat and figured he smelled like a bear, but he couldn't stop until it was clean.

But it wouldn't come clean.

"What did they do to this altar?" Lacey asked.

"I don't know. This crud ... it seems part of the marble now."

The undead must have done something to the blood and foulness to make the mixture seep into the surface as it had.

"Let's take a break."

He turned sat on the floor with his back against the altar and rested. He didn't like resting because it gave him time to think. And when he started to think he realized that the odds were pretty high against his seeing tomorrow morning.

At least he'd die well fed. Their secret supplier had left them a dinner of fresh fried chicken by the front doors. Even the memory of it made his mouth water. Apparently someone was really glad he was back.

Lacey settled next to him. She'd shed her leather jacket hours ago. Her bare arms were sheened with perspiration.

"That talk about Custer's last stand and the Alamo," she said. "You're not planning to die here, are you?"

To tell the truth, as miserable as he'd been, he wasn't ready to die. Not tonight, not any night.

"Not if I can help it."

"Good. Because as much as I can appreciate self-immolating gestures, I don't think I'm ready to take part in a Jersey Shore version of the Alamo or Little Big Horn."

"Well, the cry of 'Remember the Alamo!' did spur a lot of people to action, but I agree. Going down fighting here will not solve anything."

"Then what's the plan? We should have some sort of plan."

Good question. Did he have a plan?

"All I want to do is hold off the undead till dawn. Keep them out of St. Anthony's for one night. That's all. That will be a statement—my statement. Our statement if you want to stay on."

And if he found an opportunity to ram a stake through Palmeri's rotten heart, so much the better. But he wasn't counting on that.

"That's it?" Lacey said. "One night?"

"One night. Just to let them know they can't have their way everywhere with everybody whenever they feel like it. We've got surprise on our side tonight, so maybe it will work." One night. Then he'd be on his way. "You shouldn't feel you have to stay just because you're my niece."

"I don't. But if I—"

"What the fuck have you done?"

Joe looked up at the shout. A burly, long-haired man in jeans and a cutaway denim jacket stood in the vestibule staring at the partially restored nave. As he approached, Joe noticed his crescent moon earring.

A Vichy.

Joe balled his fists but didn't move.

"Hey, I'm talking to you, asshole. Are you responsible for this?"

When all he got from Joe was a cold stare, he turned to Zev and fixed on his yarmulke.

"Hey, you! Jew! What the hell you think you're doing here?" He started toward Zev. "You get those fucking crosses off—"

"Touch him and I'll break you in half," Joe said in a low voice.

The Vichy skidded to a halt and stared at him.

"Are you crazy? Do you know what Father Palmeri will do to you when he gets here?"

"Father Palmeri? Why do you still call him that?"

"It's what he wants to be called. And he's going to call you dog meat when he gets through with you!"

Joe pulled himself to his feet and looked down at the Vichy. Suddenly the man didn't seem so sure of himself.

"Tell him I'll be waiting." Joe gave him a hard, two-handed shove against his chest that sent him stumbling back. Damn, that felt good. "Tell him Father Cahill is back."

"You're a priest? You don't look like one."

Joe slapped him across the face. Hard. It snapped the creep's chin toward his shoulder. That felt even better.

"Shut up and listen. Tell him Father Joe Cahill is back—and he's pissed. Tell him that." Another chest shove. "Now get out of here while you still can."

Rubbing his cheek, the man backpedaled and hurried out into the growing darkness. Joe turned to Zev and found him grinning through his beard.

" 'Father Joe Cahill is back—and he's pissed.' I like that."

"It'll make a great bumper sticker," Lacey said, her eyes wide with admiration. "You were great! I never knew my uncle the priest was such a tough dude. Maybe we've got more than a prayer tonight."

Joe didn't know about that. He hoped so.

"I think I'll close the front doors," he said. "The criminal element is starting to wander in. While I'm doing that, see if we can find some more candles. It's getting dark in here."

On the front steps he unhooked the left door and closed it. He was unhooking the right when he heard a woman's voice behind him.

"Father Cahill? Is that you?"

He turned and in the dying light saw a lone figure standing by a children's red wagon at the bottom of the steps.

"Yes. Do I know you?"

He heard her sob. "Oh, it is you! You've come back!"

Joe hurried down to the sobbing woman. "Are you all right?"

"I've been praying for your return but I'm such a sinner I thought God had turned his back on us all. But you're back! Thank God!"

Something familiar about her voice . .. but she kept her head down. Joe reached out, and tilted her chin so he could see her.

He gasped when he saw her tear-stained face. He barely recognized her. Her skin was pale, her cheeks sunken, but he knew her.

"Sister Carole!"

Impulsively he threw his arms around her and pulled her against him in a hug. He wanted to laugh but feared if he opened his mouth he'd burst out crying. Sweet emotions roiled through him, making him weak. She was here, she was alive. He wanted to tell her how he'd missed her—missed knowing she was in the neighboring building, missed seeing her walk back and forth to the school, missed the smile she would flash him whenever they crossed paths.

"It's so good to see you, Carole!" He pushed her back and looked at her, hoping to see that smile. But her eyes were different, haunted. "Dear God, what's happened to you?" Immediately he thought: Stupid question. The same thing that's happened to us all. "Why are you here? I thought you'd gone to Pennsylvania for Easter."

She shook her head. "I had to stay behind ... with Sister Bernadette ... they ... I had to . . ." She loosed a single, agonized sob. "How could I stay in the convent after that?"

Joe wasn't following. Her speech was so disjointed. This wasn't like Carole. He'd always known her as a woman of quiet intelligence, with a sharp, organized mind. Everyone left alive had suffered, but what had she experienced to leave her so shattered?

"Where have you been staying?"

She looked away. "Here and there."

"Well, you're staying here now." He took her arm. "Come inside. We've got-"

She pulled away. "I can't. I've too many sins."

"We're all sinners, Carole."

"But these are terrible sins. Mortal sins. So many mortal sins."

"This is where sins are forgiven. I'm going to try to say mass later."

"Mass?" Her lip quivered. "Oh, that would be wonderful. But I can't. Even though it's a Holy Day, I—"

"What Holy—?" And then he remembered. With all that had been going on, it had slipped his mind. "Oh, God, it's Ascension Thursday, isn't it."

Sister Carole nodded. "But I'll just have to add missing Mass on a Holy Day of Obligation to my list of sins."

"Come inside, Carole. Please. I'll hear your confession."

"No." She paused, as if she were listening for something. "To receive absolution I must be sorry for my sins and promise to sin no more." She shook her head and something flashed in her eyes, something hard and dangerous. "I'm not. And I won't."

Joe stared at her, trying to fathom . . .

"I don't follow you, Carole."

"Please don't, Father. It's not a path you want to tread." She bent and grabbed the handle of her little red wagon, then turned and started away. "God bless you, Father Cahill."

Joe hurried after her. He couldn't let her go. It was too dangerous, but more than that, he wanted her near, where he could talk to her, be with her. He grabbed her arm.

"I can't let you go."

She snatched her arm free and kept moving. "You can't make me stay. Don't try. I won't. I can't." The last word was couched in a sob that damn near broke his heart.

"Carole, please!"

But she hurried on into the shadows without looking back. Joe started after her again, then stopped. Short of picking her up and carrying her back to the church—and he couldn't see himself doing that—what could he do?

Suddenly weary, he turned and climbed the steps. As he finished closing the front doors, he took one last longing look at the night.

Carole . .. what's happened to you? Please be safe.

He closed the door and wished the lock hadn't been smashed. He turned and found Lacey and Zev standing in the vestibule.

"We were getting worried about you," Lacey said.

"I ran into one of the nuns who used to teach in St. Anthony's school."

Zev's eyebrows arched. "And you didn't let her in?"

"Wouldn't come in. But she reminded me that this is a Holy Day: Ascension Thursday."

Zev shrugged. "Which means?"

"Supposedly," Lacey said, "forty days after Easter, Jesus ascended into Heaven to sit at the right hand of God." She smiled. "An ingenious way to dodge all those inconvenient questions about the state and whereabouts of the remains of the 'Son of God.' "

Joe looked at her. "Lacey, you can't still be an atheist."

She shrugged. "I never really was. I call myself that because it's such an in-your-face term. Like dyke. But atheism implies that you consider the question of a provident god important enough to take seriously. I don't. At heart I'm simply a devout agnostic."

Joe was glad Carl wasn't here to hear this. He wouldn't understand or appreciate Lacey's outspokenness. But that was Lacey. No excuses, no sugar coating: Here I am, here's what I think, take it or leave it. Through the years she'd made him angry at times, but then she'd smile and he'd see his sister Cathy in her face and his anger would fade away.

He pointed to the gold crucifix hanging from her neck. "But you wear a cross. Didn't you once tell me you'd die before wearing anything like that?"

"I damn near did die because I wasn't wearing one. So now I wear one for perfectly pragmatic reasons. I've never been one for fashion accessories, but if it chases vampires, I want one."

"But you've got to take the next step, Lacey. You've got to ask why the undead fear it, why it sears their flesh. There's something there. When you face that reality, you won't be an atheist or agnostic anymore."

Lacey smiled. "Did I mention I'm a devout empiricist too?"

"Like a worm, she wiggles," Zev said. "Too many philosophy courses."

Lacey turned to him. "That's not exactly a mezuzah hanging from your neck, rabbi."

"I know," Zev said, fingering his cross. "Like you, I wear it because it works. That is undeniable. Where its power comes from, I don't know. Maybe from God, maybe from somewhere else. The how and the why I'll figure out later. I've been too busy trying to stay alive to give it my full attention." He held up his hands. "Talk of intangibles we should save for the daylight. Now we should ready ourselves. I believe we'll soon have uninvited and unsavory company. We should be prepared."

Looking unhappy, Zev wandered away. But Joe didn't want to let this drop. He sensed a chance to break through his niece's wall of disbelief. By doing so he might save her soul.

He lowered his voice. "If the power of the cross is not from God, Lacy, then who?"

"Might not be a who," she said with a shrug. "Might be a what. I don't know. I'm just going with it for now."

" 'There are none so blind as those who will not see,' " Joe said.

"It's not blindness to not see something that won't show itself. Where's your god now?" She jutted her chin at Zev's retreating figure. "His god and yours—where's he been? This is Ascension Thursday, right? Think about that. Maybe Jesus ascended and kept on going. Turned his back on this planet and forgot about it. After the way he was treated here, who could blame him?"

Joe shook his head, feeling a growing anger mixed with dismay. He hated to hear his niece talk like this. "Are you still an anarchist too?"

"Damn betcha."

"Well now, it looks like you've got what you wanted—a world without religion, without government, without law—what do you think?"

Joe could tell by the set of her jaw and the flash of fire in her eyes that he'd struck a nerve.

"This is not at all what I was talking about! This undead empire is more repressive than any regime in human history. It makes Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia look like Sunday school!"

"And they're here to stay," Joe said, wondering if all today's plans and preparations weren't an exercise in futility.

He wondered where Palmeri was and how long before he got here.

PALMERI . . .

He wore the night like a tuxedo.

Dressed in a fresh cassock, Father Alberto Palmeri turned off County Line Road and strolled toward St. Anthony's. He loved the night, felt at one with it, attuned to its harmonies and its discords. The darkness made him feel so alive. Strange to have to lose your life before you could really feel alive. But this was it. He'd found his niche, his me'tier.

Such a shame it had taken him so long. All those years trying to deny his appetites, trying to be a member of the other side, cursing himself when he allowed his appetites to win, as he had with increasing frequency toward the end of his mortal life. He should have given in to them long ago.

It had taken undeath to free him.

And to think he had been afraid of undeath, had cowered in fear that night in the cellar of the church, surrounded by crosses. But he had not been as safe as he'd thought. A posse of Serfs had torn him from his hiding place and brought him to kneel before Gregor. He'd cried out and begged with this undead master to spare his life. Fortunately Gregor had ignored his pleas. All he had lost by that encounter was his blood.

And in trade, he'd gained a world.

For now it was his world, at least this little corner of it, one in which he was completely free to indulge himself in any way he wished. Except for the blood. He had no choice about the blood. That was a new appetite, stronger than all the rest, one that would not be denied. But he did not mind the new appetite in the least. He'd found interesting ways to sate it.

Up ahead he spotted dear, defiled St. Anthony's. He wondered what the serfs had prepared for tonight. They were quite imaginative. They'd yet to bore him.

But as he drew nearer the church, Palmeri slowed. His skin prickled. The building had changed. Something was very wrong there, wrong inside. Something amiss with the light that beamed from the windows. This wasn't the old familiar candlelight, this was something else, something more. Something that made his insides tremble.

Figures raced up the street toward him. Live ones. His night vision picked out the earrings and familiar faces of some of the serfs. As they neared he sensed the warmth of the blood coursing just beneath their skins. The hunger rose in him and he fought the urge to rip into their throats. He couldn't allow himself that pleasure. Gregor had told him how to keep the servants dangling, keep them working for him and the nest. They all needed the services of the indentured living to remove whatever obstacles the cattle might put in their way.

Someday, when he was allowed to have get of his own, he would turn some of these, and then they'd be bound to him in a different way.

"Father! Father!" they cried.

He loved it when they called him Father, loved being one of the undead and dressing like one of the enemy.

"Yes, my children. What sort of victim do you have for us tonight?"

"No victim, father—trouble!"

The edges of Palmeri's vision darkened with rage as he heard of the young priest and the Jew and the others who had dared to try to turn St. Anthony's into a holy place again. When he heard the name of the priest, he nearly exploded.

"Cahill? Joseph Cahill is back in my church?"

"He was cleaning the altar!" one of the servants said.

Palmeri strode toward the church with the serfs trailing behind. He knew that neither Cahill nor the Pope himself could clean that altar. Palmeri had desecrated it himself; he had learned how to do that when he became leader of Gregor's local get. But what else had the young pup dared to do?

Whatever it was, it would be undone. Now!

Palmeri strode up the steps and pulled the right door open—

—and screamed in agony.

The light! The light! The LIGHT! White agony lanced through Palmeri's eyes and seared his brain like two hot pokers. He retched and threw his arms across his face as he staggered back into the cool, comforting darkness.

It took a few minutes for the pain to drain off, for the nausea to pass, for vision to return.

He'd never understand it. He'd spent his entire life in the presence of crosses and crucifixes, surrounded by them. And yet as soon as he'd become undead he was unable to bear the sight of one. In fact, since he'd become undead he'd never even seen one. A cross was no longer an object. It was a light, a light so excruciatingly bright, so blazingly white that looking at it was sheer agony. As a child in Naples he'd been told by his mother not to look at the sun, but when there'd been talk of an eclipse, he'd stared directly into its eye. The pain of looking at a cross was a hundred, no, a thousand times worse than that. And the bigger the cross or crucifix, the worse the pain.

He'd experienced monumental pain upon looking into St. Anthony's tonight. That could only mean that Joseph, that young bastard, had refurbished the giant crucifix. It was the only possible explanation.

He swung on his servants.

"Get in there! Get that crucifix down!"

"They've got guns!"

"Then get help. But get it down!"

"We'll get guns too! We can—"

"No! I want him! I want that priest alive! I want him for myself! Anyone who kills him will suffer a very painful, very long and lingering true death! Is that clear? "

It was clear. They scurried away without answering. Palmeri went to gather the other members of the nest.

JOE . . .

Dressed in a cassock and a surplice, Joe came out of the sacristy and approached the altar. He noticed Zev keeping watch at one of the windows. He didn't tell him how ridiculous he looked carrying the shotgun Carl had brought back. He held it so gingerly, as if it was full of nitroglycerin and would explode if he jiggled it.

Zev turned and smiled when he saw him.

"Now you look like the old Father Joe we all used to know,"

Joe gave him a little bow and proceeded toward the altar. Lacey waved with her revolver from the other side of the nave where she stood guard by the side door. She'd put on her black leather jacket and looked ready for anything.

All right: He had everything he needed. He had the Missal they'd found in among the pew debris earlier today. He had the wine—Carl had brought back about four ounces of sour red babarone. He'd found the smudged surplice and dusty cassock on the floor of one of the closets in the sacristy, and he wore them now. No hosts, though. A crust of bread left over from breakfast would have to do. No chalice, either. If he'd known he was going to be saying Mass he'd have come prepared. As a last resort he'd used the can opener in the rectory to remove the top of one of the Pepsi cans from lunch. Quite a stretch from the gold chalice he'd used since his ordination, but probably more in line with what Jesus had used at that first Mass—the Last Supper.

He was uncomfortable with the idea of weapons in St. Anthony's but saw no alternative. He and Zev knew nothing about guns, and Carl knew little more; they'd probably do more damage to themselves than to the Vichy if they tried to use them. Only Lacey seemed at ease with her pistol. Joe hoped that just the sight of the weaponry might make the Vichy hesitate, slow them down. All he needed was a little time here, enough to get to the consecration.

This is going to be the most unusual Mass in history, he thought.

But he was going to get through it if it killed him. And that was a real possibility. This might well be his last Mass. But he wasn't afraid. He was too excited to be afraid. He'd had a slug of the Scotch—just enough to ward off the shakes—but it had done nothing to quell the buzz of the adrenaline humming along every nerve in his body.

He spread everything out on the white tablecloth he'd taken from the rectory and used to cover the filthy altar. He looked at Carl.

"Ready?"

Carl nodded and stuck the automatic pistol he'd been examining into his belt.

"Been awhile, Fadda. We did it in Latin when I was a kid, but I think I can swing it."

"Just do your best and don't worry about any mistakes."

Some Mass. A defiled altar, a crust for a host, a Pepsi can for a chalice, a sixty-year-old, pistol-packing altar boy, and a congregation consisting of a lesbian atheist and a rabbi.

Joe looked heavenward.

You do understand, don't you, Lord, that all this was arranged on short notice?

Time to begin.

He read the Gospel but dispensed with the homily. He tried to remember the Mass as it used to be said, to fit in better with Carl's outdated responses.

As he was starting the Offertory the front doors flew open and a group of men entered—ten of them, all with crescent moons dangling from their ears. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Zev move away from the window toward the altar, pointing his shotgun at them.

As soon as they entered the nave and got past the broken pews, the Vichy fanned out toward the sides. They began pulling down the Stations of the Cross, ripping Carl's makeshift crosses from the walls and tearing them apart.

Carl looked up at Joe from where he knelt, his eyes questioning, his hand reaching for the pistol in his belt. Lacey didn't look at him at all. She acted on her own.

"Stop right there!"

She held her pistol straight out before her, arms rigid. Joe saw the barrel wobble. She might be tough, he thought, but she's only twenty-five. And she's only got two rounds.

But the Vichy didn't know that. They stopped their forward progress and tried to stare her down.

"You can't get all of us," one said.

Zev worked the pump on the shotgun. The sound echoed through the church. "That's right. She can't."

He sounded a lot tougher than Joe knew he was. He hoped the Vichy were fooled.

Maybe they were. They looked at each other but didn't back off. A stand-off was good enough for now. Joe nodded and kept up with the Offertory.

Then he caught a flash of movement out of the corner of his eye. One of the Vichy had ducked through the side door behind Lacey. He carried a raised two-by-four.

"Lacey!" Zev cried. "Behind—!"

She whirled, ducking, pistol raised, but the Vichy had the jump on her. The two-by-four glanced off the side of her head and slammed into her forearm. She dropped the gun and went down. But not before landing a vicious kick on the inside of his knee. He staggered back, howling with pain while Lacey, cradling her injured arm, jumped up and scrambled toward the altar.

The Vichy cheered and went on with their work. They split—one group continuing to pull down Carl's crosses, the other swarming around and behind the altar.

Joe chanced a quick glance over his shoulder and saw them begin their attack on the newly repaired crucifix.

"Zev!" Carl said in a low voice, cocking his head toward the Vichy. "Stop em!"

"I'm warning you," Zev said and pointed the shotgun.

Joe heard the activity behind him come to a sudden halt. He braced himself for the blast. . .

But it never came.

He looked at Zev. The old man met his gaze and sadly shook his head. He couldn't do it. To the accompaniment of the sound of renewed activity and derisive laughter behind him, Joe gave Zev a tiny nod of reassurance and understanding, then hurried the Mass toward the Consecration.

As he held the crust of bread aloft, he started at the sound of the life-size crucifix crashing to the floor, cringed as he heard the freshly buttressed arms and crosspiece being torn away again.

As he held the wine aloft in the Pepsi can, the swaggering, grinning Vichy surrounded the altar and brazenly tore the cross from around his neck. Zev, Lacey, and Carl put up struggles to keep theirs but were overpowered. The Vichy wound up with Carl's gun too.

And then Joe's skin began to crawl as a new group entered the nave. They numbered about twenty, all undead. He faced them from behind the altar as they approached. His gut roiled at the familiar faces he spotted among the throng.

But the one who caught and held his attention was the one leading them.

Alberto Palmeri.

PALMERI . . .

Palmeri hid his hesitancy as he approached the altar. The crucifix and its intolerable whiteness were gone, yet something was not right. Something repellent here, something that urged him to flee. What?

Perhaps it was just the residual effect of the crucifix and all the crosses they had used to line the walls. That had to be it. The unsettling aftertaste would fade as the night wore on. Oh, yes. His nightbrothers and sisters from the nest would see to that.

He focused his attention on the man behind the altar and laughed when he realized what he held in his hands.

"Pepsi, Joseph? You're trying to consecrate Pepsi?" He turned to his nest siblings. "Do you see this, my brothers and sisters? Is this the man we are to fear? And look who he has with him! An old Jew, a young woman, and a parish hanger-on!"

He reveled in their hissing laughter as they fanned out around him, sweeping toward the altar in a wide phalanx. The young woman, the Jew, and Carl—he recognized Carl and wondered how he'd avoided capture for so long—retreated to the other side of the altar where they flanked Joseph. And Joseph . .. Joseph's handsome Irish face so pale and drawn, his mouth stretched into such a tight, grim line. He looked scared to death. As well he should be.

Palmeri put down his rage at Joseph's audacity. He was glad he had returned. He'd always hated the young priest for his easy manner with people, for the way the parishioners had flocked to him with their problems despite the fact that he had nowhere near the experience of their older and wiser pastor. But that was over now. That world was gone, replaced by a nightworld—Palmeri's world. And no one would be flocking to Father Joe for anything when Palmeri was through with him.

Father Joe . . . how he'd hated it when the parishioners had started calling him that. Well, their Father Joe would provide superior entertainment tonight. This was going to be fun.

"Joseph, Joseph, Joseph," he said as he stopped and smiled at the young priest across the altar. "This futile gesture is so typical of your arrogance."

But Joseph only stared back at him, his expression a mixture of defiance and repugnance. And that only fueled Palmeri's rage.

"Do I repel you, Joseph? Does my new form offend your precious shanty-Irish sensibilities? Does my undeath disgust you?"

"You managed to do all that while you were still alive, Alberto."

Palmeri allowed himself to smile. Joseph probably thought he was putting on a brave front, but the tremor in his voice betrayed his fear.

"Always good with the quick retort, weren't you, Joseph. Always thinking you were better than me, always putting yourself above me."

"Not much of a climb where a child molester is concerned."

Palmeri's anger mounted.

"So superior. So self-righteous. What about your appetites, Joseph? The secret ones? What are they? Do you always hold them in check?" He pointed to the girl in the leather jacket. "Is she your weakness, Joseph? Young, attractive in a hard sort of way. Is that your style? Do you like it rough? Are you fucking her, Joseph?"

"Leave her out of this. She just showed up today."

"Well, if not her, then who? Are you so far above the rest of us that you've never given in to an improper impulse, never assuaged a secret hunger? You'll have a new hunger soon, Joseph. By dawn you'll be drained—we'll each take a turn at you—and before the sun rises we'll hide your corpse from its light. You'll stay dead all day, but when the night comes you'll be one of us."

He stepped closer, almost touching the altar.

"And then all the rules will be off. The night will be yours. You'll be free to do anything and everything you've ever wanted. But blood will be your prime hunger, and you'll do anything to get it. You won't be sipping your god's thin, cold blood, as you've done so often, but hot human blood. You'll thirst for it, Joseph. And I want to be there when you take your first drink. I want to be there to laugh in your self-righteous face as you suck up the crimson nectar, and keep on laughing every night as the red hunger carries you into infinity."

And it would happen. Palmeri knew it as sure as he felt his own thirst. He hungered for the moment when he could rub dear Joseph's face in the reality of his own bloodlust.

"I was just saying Mass," Joseph said coolly. "Do you mind if I finish?"

Palmeri couldn't help laughing this time.

"Did you really think this charade would work? Did you really think you could celebrate Mass on this?"

He reached out and snatched the tablecloth from the altar, sending the Missal and the piece of bread to the floor and exposing the fouled surface of the marble.

"Did you really think you could effect a transubstantiation here? Do you really believe any of that garbage? That the bread and wine actually take on the substance of"—he tried to say the name but it wouldn't form—"the Son's body and blood?"

One of his nest sisters, Eva, a former councilwoman, stepped forward and leaned over the altar, smiling.

"Transubstantiation?" she said in her most unctuous voice, pulling the Pepsi can from Joseph's hands. "I was never a Catholic, so tell me ... does that mean that this is the blood of the Son?"

A whisper of warning slithered through Palmeri's mind. Something about the can, something about the way he found it difficult to bring its outline into focus...

"Eva, perhaps you should—"

Eva's grin broadened. "I've always wanted to sup on the blood of a deity."

The nest members hissed their laughter as Eva raised the can and drank.

Palmeri watched, unaccountably fearful as the liquid poured into her mouth. And then—

LIGHT!

An explosion of intolerable brightness burst from Eva's mouth and drove him back, jolted, cringing.

The inside of her skull glowed beneath her scalp and shafts of pure white light shot from her ears, nose, eyes—every orifice in her head. The glow spread as it flowed down through her throat and chest and into her abdominal cavity, silhouetting her ribs before melting through her skin. Eva was liquefying where she stood, her flesh steaming, softening, running like glowing molten lava.

No! This couldn't be happening! Not now when he had Joseph in his grasp!

Then the can fell from Eva's dissolving fingers and landed on the altar top. Its contents splashed across the fouled surface, releasing another detonation of brilliance, this one more devastating than the first. The glare spread rapidly, extending over the upper surface and running down the sides, moving like a living thing, engulfing the entire altar, making it glow like a corpuscle of fire torn from the heart of the sun itself.

And with the light came blast-furnace heat that drove Palmeri back, back, back until he had to turn and follow the rest of his nest in a mad, headlong rush from St. Anthony's into the cool, welcoming safety of the outer darkness.

ZEV . . .

As the undead fled into the night, their Vichy toadies behind them, Zev stared in horrid fascination at the puddle of putrescence that was all that remained of the undead woman Palmeri had called Eva. He glanced at Carl and Lacey and caught the look of dazed wonderment on their faces. Zev touched the top of the altar—clean, shiny, every whorl of the marble surface clearly visible.

He'd witnessed fearsome power here. Incalculable power. But instead of elating him, the realization only depressed him. How long had this been going on? Did it happen at every Mass? Why had he spent his entire life ignorant of this?

He turned to Joe. "What happened?"

"I—I don't know."

"A miracle!" Carl said, running his palm over the altar top.

"A miracle and a meltdown," Lacey added from behind Zev. He felt her hand on her shoulder. "Rabbi, are you feeling what I'm feeling?"

He turned to her. "Feeling how?"

She lowered her voice. "That this shouldn't be happening? That there's got to be another explanation?"

Zev wondered if the lost look in her eyes mirrored his own.

"Explanations I'm running short on."

"Me too. I'm getting pushed into a place where I'm going to have to revise . . . everything. A place where I'm going to have to accept the unacceptable and believe in the unbelievable. I don't want to go there but..."

Lacey winced as she moved her right arm. She eased it out of her jacket and looked at it.

"Good thing I was wearing leather."

Zev inspected the large purple swelling below her shoulder. "Do you think it's broken?"

She shook her head. "I don't think so. My hand and forearm are all tingly and kind of numb, but I'll be okay."

"You're sure?" Joe said.

She grimaced. "Of my arm? Yeah. But I think that's about the only thing I'm sure of anymore." She nodded to the Pepsi can lying on its side atop the altar. "What was in there?"

Joe picked up the empty can and looked into it. "You know, you go through the seminary, through your ordination, through countless Masses believing in the Transubtantiation. But after all these years... to actually know ..."

Zev saw him rub his finger along the inside of the can and taste it. He grimaced.

"What's wrong?" Zev asked.

"Still tastes like sour barbarone . . . with a hint of Pepsi."

"Doesn't matter what it tastes like," Carl said. "As far as those bloodsuckers are concerned, it's the real thing."

"No," said the priest with a small smile. "If I remember correctly, that was Coke."

And then they started laughing. Zev only vaguely remembered the old commercials, but found himself roaring along with the other three. It was more a release of tension than anything else. His sides hurt. He had to lean against the altar to support himself.

"It wasn't that funny," Joe said.

Lacey smiled. "No argument there."

"C'mon," Carl said, heading for the sanctuary. "Let's see if we can get this crucifix back together."

Zev helped Lacey slip her arm back into her jacket.

"You rest that arm," he told her.

She winced again and cradled it with her left. "I don't think I have much choice."

Zev jumped at the sound of the church doors banging open. He turned and saw the Vichy charging back in, two of them carrying a heavy fire blanket.

This time Father Joe did not stand by passively as they invaded his church. Zev watched as he stepped around the altar and met them head on.

He was great and terrible as he confronted them. His giant stature and raised fists cowed them for a few heartbeats. But then they must have remembered that they outnumbered him twelve to one and charged. He swung a massive fist and caught the lead Vichy square on the jaw. The blow lifted him off his feet and he landed against another. Both went down.

Zev dropped to one knee and reached for the shotgun. He would use it this time, he would shoot these vermin, he swore it!

But then someone landed on his back and drove him to the floor. As he tried to get up he saw Carl pulling Lacey away toward the side door, and he saw Father Joe, surrounded, swinging his fists, laying the Vichy out every time he connected. But there were too many. As the priest went down under the press of them, a heavy boot thudded against the side of Zev's head. He sank into darkness.

JOE . . .

... a throbbing in his head, stinging pain in his cheek, and a voice, sibilant yet harsh . . .

"... now, Joseph. Come on. Wake up. I don't want you to miss this!"

Palmeri's sallow features swam into view, hovering over him, grinning like a skull. Joe tried to move but found his wrists and arms tied. His right hand throbbed, felt twice its normal size; he must have broken it on a Vichy jaw. He lifted his head and saw that he was tied spread-eagle on the altar, and that the altar had been covered with the fire blanket.

"Melodramatic, I admit," Palmeri said, "but fitting, don't you think? I mean, you and I used to sacrifice our god symbolically here every weekday and multiple times on Sundays, so why shouldn't this serve as your sacrificial altar?"

Joe shut his eyes against a wave of nausea. This couldn't be happening.

"Thought you'd won, didn't you?"

Joe refused to answer him, but that didn't shut him up.

"And even if you'd chased me out of here for good, what would you have accomplished? Most of the world is already ours, Joseph, and the rest soon will be. Feeders and cattle—that is the hierarchy. We are the feeders. And tonight you'll join us. But he won't. Voila'!"

Palmeri stepped aside and made a flourish toward the balcony.

Joe searched the dim, candlelit space of the nave, not sure what he was supposed to see. Then he picked out Zev's form and groaned. The old man's feet were lashed to the balcony rail; he hung upside down, his reddened face and frightened eyes turned his way. Joe fell back and strained at the ropes but they wouldn't budge.

"Let him go!"

"What? And let all that good rich Jewish blood go to waste? Why, these people are the Chosen of God! They're a delicacy!"

"Bastard!"

If he could just get his hands on Palmeri, just for a minute.

"Tut-tut, Joseph. Not in the house of the Lord. The Jew should have been smart and run away like Carl and your girlfriend."

Carl got away? With Lacey? Thank God.

We're even, Carl.

"But don't worry about your rabbi. None of us will lay a fang on him. He hasn't earned the right to join us. We'll use the razor to bleed him. And when he's dead, he'll be dead for keeps. But not you, Joseph. Oh no, not you." His smile broadened. "You're mine."

Joe wanted to spit in Palmeri's face—not so much as an act of defiance as to hide the waves of terror surging through him—but there was no saliva to be had in his parched mouth. The thought of being undead made him weak. To spend eternity like... he looked at the rapt faces of Palmeri's fellow undead as they clustered under Zev's suspended form . . . like them.

He wouldn't be like them! He wouldn't allow it!

But what if there was no choice? What if becoming undead toppled a lifetime's worth of moral constraints, cut all the tethers on his human hungers, negated all his mortal concepts of how a life should be lived? Honor, justice, integrity, truth, decency, fairness, love—what if they became meaningless words instead of the footings for his life?

A thought struck him.

"A deal, Alberto," he said.

"You're hardly in a bargaining position."

"I'm not? Answer me this: Do the undead ever kill each other? I mean, has one of them ever driven a stake through another's heart?"

"No. Of course not."

"Are you sure? You'd better be sure before you go through with your plans tonight. Because if I'm forced to become one of you, I'll be crossing over with just one thought in mind: to find you. And when I do I won't stake your heart, I'll stake your arms and legs to the pilings of the Point Pleasant boardwalk where you can watch the sun rise and feel it slowly crisp your skin to charcoal."

Palmeri's smile wavered. "Impossible. You'll be different. You'll want to thank me. You'll wonder why you ever resisted."

"Better be sure of that, Alberto ... for your sake. Because I'll have all eternity to track you down. And I'll find you, Alberto. I swear it on my own grave. Think on that."

"Do you think an empty threat is going to cow me?"

"We'll find out how empty it is, won't we? But here's the deal: let Zev go and I'll let you be."

"You care that much for an old Jew?"

"He's something you never knew in life, and never will know: he's a friend."

And he gave me back my soul.

Palmeri leaned closer. His foul, nauseating breath wafted against Joe's face.

"A friend? How can you be friends with a dead man?" With that he straightened and turned toward the balcony. "Do him! Now!"

As Joe shouted out frantic pleas and protests, one of the undead climbed up the rubble toward Zev. Zev did not struggle. Joe saw him close his eyes, waiting. As the vampire reached out with the straight razor, Joe bit back a sob of grief and rage and helplessness. He was about to squeeze his own eyes shut when he saw a flame arc through the air from one of the windows. It struck the floor with a crash of glass and a wooomp! of exploding flame.

Joe had only heard of such things, but he immediately realized that he had just seen his first Molotov cocktail in action. The splattering gasoline splashed a nearby vampire who began running in circles, screaming as it beat at its flaming clothes. But its cries were drowned by the roar of other voices, a hundred or more. Joe looked around and saw people—men, women, teenagers— climbing in the windows, charging through the front doors. The women held crosses on high while the men wielded long wooden pikes—broom, rake, and shovel handles whittled to sharp points. Joe recognized most of the faces from the Sunday Masses he had said here for years.

St. Anthony's parishioners were back to reclaim their church.

"Yes!" he shouted, not sure of v/hether to laugh or cry. But when he saw the rage in Palmeri's face, he laughed. "Too bad, Alberto!"

Palmeri made a lunge at his throat but cringed away as a woman with an upheld crucifix and a man with a pike charged the altar—Lacey and Carl.

"Are you all right, Uncle Joe?" Lacey said, her eyes wide and angry. "Did they—?"

"You got here just in time."

She pulled out a butterfly knife, flipped it open with one hand, and began sawing at the rope around Joe's right wrist. She was using her left only; her right arm didn't seem to be of much use.

"Told ya I wouldn't let ya down, didn't I, Fadda?" Carl said, grinning. "Didn't I?"

"That you did, Carl. I don't think I've ever been so glad to see anyone in my entire life. But how—?"

"We told 'em. We run through the parish, Lacey and me, goin house to house. We told 'em Fadda Joe was in trouble at the church and we let him down before but we shouldn't let him down again. He come back for us, now we gotta go back for him. Simple as that. And then they started runnin house to house, and afore ya knowed it, we had ourselfs a little army. We come to kick ass, Fadda, if you'll excuse the expression."

"Kick all the ass you can, Carl."

Joe glanced around and spotted a sixtyish black woman he recognized as Lilly Green. He saw her terror-glazed eyes as she swiveled around, looking this way and that; he saw how the crucifix trembled in her hand. She wasn't going to kick too much ass in her state, but she was here, God bless her, she was here for him and for St. Anthony's despite the terror that so obviously filled her. His heart swelled with love for these people and pride in their courage.

As soon as his arms were free, Joe sat up and took the knife from Lacey. He sawed at his leg ropes, looking around the church.

The oldest and youngest members of the parishioner army were stationed at the windows and doors where they held crosses aloft, cutting off the vampires' escape, while all across the nave—chaos. Screams, cries, and an occasional shot echoed through St. Anthony's. The undead and their Vichy were outnumbered three to one. The undead seemed blinded and confused by all the crosses around them. Despite their superhuman strength, it appeared that some were indeed getting their asses kicked. A number were already writhing on the floor, impaled on pikes. As Joe watched, he saw the middle-aged Gonzales sisters, Maria and Immaculata, crucifixes held before them, backing a vampire into a corner. As it cowered there with its arms across its face,

Maria's husband Hector charged in with a sharpened rake handle held like a lance and ran it through.

But a number of parishioners lay in inert, bloody heaps on the floor, proof that the undead and the Vichy were claiming their share of victims too.

Joe freed his feet and hopped off the altar. He looked around for Palmeri— he wanted Palmeri—but the undead priest had lost himself in the melee. Joe glanced up at the balcony and saw that Zev was still hanging there, struggling to free himself. He started across the nave to help him.

ZEV . . .

Zev hated that he should be hung up here like a chicken in a deli window. He tried again to pull his upper body up far enough to reach his leg ropes but he couldn't get close. He had never been one for exercise; doing a sit-up flat on the floor would have been difficult, so what made him think he could do the equivalent maneuver hanging upside down by his feet? He dropped back, exhausted, and felt the blood rush to his head again. His vision swam, his ears pounded, he felt as if the skin of his face might burst open. Much more of this and he'd have a stroke or worse maybe.

He watched the upside-down battle below and was glad to see the undead getting the worst of it. These people—seeing Carl among them, Zev assumed they were part of St. Anthony's parish—were ferocious, almost savage in their attacks on the undead. All their pent-up rage and fear was being released upon their tormentors in a single burst. It was almost frightening.

Suddenly he felt a hand on his foot. Someone was untying his knots. Thank you, Lord. Soon he would be on his feet again. As the cords came loose he decided he should at least attempt to participate in his own rescue.

Once more, Zev thought. Once more I'll try.

With a grunt he levered himself up, straining, stretching to grasp something, anything. A hand came out of the darkness and he reached for it. But Zev's relief turned to horror when he felt the cold clamminess of the thing that clutched him, that pulled him up and over the balcony rail with inhuman strength. His bowels threatened to evacuate when Palmeri's grinning face loomed not six inches from his own.

"It's not over yet, Jew," he said softly, his foul breath clogging Zev's nose and throat. "Not by a long shot!"

He felt Palmeri's free hand ram into his belly and grip his belt at the buckle, then the other hand grab a handful of his shirt at the neck. Before he could struggle or cry out, he was lifted free of the floor and hoisted over the balcony rail.

And the dybbuk's voice was in his ear.

"Joseph called you a friend, Jew. Let's see if he really meant it."

JOE . . .

Joe was halfway across the floor of the nave when he heard Palmeri's voice echo above the madness.

"Stop them, Joseph! Stop them now or I drop your friend!"

Joe looked up and froze. Palmeri stood at the balcony rail, leaning over it, his eyes averted from the nave and all its newly arrived crosses. At the end of his outstretched arms was Zev, suspended in mid-air over the splintered remains of the pews, over a particularly large and ragged spire of wood that pointed directly at the middle of Zev's back. Zev's frightened eyes were flashing between Joe and the giant spike below.

Around him Joe heard the sounds of the melee drop a notch, then drop another as all eyes were drawn to the tableau on the balcony.

"A human can die impaled on a wooden stake just as well as a vampire!" Palmeri cried. "And just as quickly if it goes through his heart. But it can take hours of agony if it rips through his gut."

St. Anthony's grew silent as the fighting stopped and each faction backed away to a different side of the church, leaving Joe alone in the middle.

"What do you want, Alberto?"

"First I want all those crosses put away so that I can see!"

Joe looked to his right where his parishioners stood.

"Put them away," he told them. When a murmur of dissent arose, he added, "Don't put them down, just out of sight. Please."

Slowly, one by one at first, then in groups, the crosses and crucifixes were placed behind backs or tucked out of sight within coats.

To his left, the undead hissed their relief and the Vichy cheered. The sound was like hot needles being forced under Joe's fingernails. Above, Palmeri turned his face to Joe and smiled.

"That's better."

"What do you want?" Joe asked, knowing with a sick crawling in his gut exactly what the answer would be.

"A trade," Palmeri said.

"Me for him, I suppose?" Joe said.

Palmeri's smile broadened. "Of course."

"No, Joe! "Zev cried.

Palmeri shook the old man roughly. Joe heard him say, "Quiet, Jew, or I'll snap your spine!" Then he looked down at Joe again. "The other thing is to tell your rabble to let my people go." He laughed and shook Zev again. "Hear that, Jew? A Biblical reference—Old Testament, no less!"

"All right," Joe said without hesitation.

The parishioners on his right gasped as one and cries of "No!" and "You can't!" filled St. Anthony's. A particularly loud voice nearby shouted, "He's only a lousy kike!"

Joe wheeled on the man and recognized Gene Harrington, a carpenter. He jerked a thumb back over his shoulder at the undead and their servants.

"You sound like you'd be more at home with them, Gene."

Harrington backed up a step and looked at his feet.

"Sorry, Father," he said in a voice that hovered on the verge of a sob. "But we just got you back!"

I'll be all right," Joe said softly.

And he meant it. Deep inside he had a feeling that he would come through this, that if he could trade himself for Zev and face Palmeri one-on-one, he could come out the victor, or at least battle him to a draw. Now that he was no longer tied up like some sacrificial lamb, now that he was free, with full use of his arms and legs again, he could not imagine dying at the hands of the likes of Palmeri.

Besides, one of the parishioners had given him a tiny crucifix. He had it closed in the palm of his hand.

But he had to get Zev out of danger first. That above all else. He looked up at Palmeri.

"All right, Alberto. I'm on my way up."

"Wait!" Palmeri said. "Someone search him."

Joe gritted his teeth as one of the Vichy, a blubbery, unwashed slob, came forward and searched his pockets. Joe thought he might get away with the crucifix but at the last moment he was made to open his hands. The Vichy grinned in Joe's face as he snatched the tiny cross from his palm and shoved it into his pocket.

"He's clean now!" the slob said and gave Joe a shove toward the vestibule.

Joe hesitated. He was walking into the snake pit unarmed. A glance at his parishioners told him he couldn't very well turn back now.

He continued on his way, clenching and unclenching his tense, sweaty fists as he walked. He still had a chance of coming out of this alive. He was too angry to die. He prayed that when he got within reach of the ex-priest the smoldering rage at how he had framed him when he'd been pastor, at what he'd done to St. Anthony's since then, would explode and give him the strength to tear Palmeri to pieces.

"No!" Zev shouted from above. "Forget about me! You've started something here and you've got to see it through!"

Joe ignored his friend.

"Coming, Alberto."

Father Joe's coming, Alberto. And he's pissed. Royally pissed.

ZEV . . .

Zev craned his neck, watching Joe disappear beneath the balcony.

"Joe! Comeback!"

Palmeri shook him again.

"Give it up, old Jew. Joseph never listened to anyone and he's not listening to you. He still believes in faith and virtue and honesty, in the power of goodness and truth over what he perceives as evil. He'll come up here ready to sacrifice himself for you, yet sure in his heart that he's going to win in the end. But he's wrong."

"No!" Zev said.

But in his heart he knew that Palmeri was right. How could Joe stand up against a creature with Palmeri's strength, who could hold Zev in the air like this for so long? Didn't his arms ever tire?

"Yes!" Palmeri hissed. "He's going to lose and we're going to win. We'll win for the same reason we always win. We don't let anything as silly and transient as sentiment stand in our way. If we'd been winning below and situations were reversed—if Joseph were holding one of my nest brothers over that wooden spike below—do you think I'd pause for a moment? For a second? Never! That's why this whole exercise by Joseph and these people is futile."

Futile. . . Zev thought. Like much of his life, it seemed. Like all of his future. Joe would die tonight and Zev might live on ... as what? A cross-wearing Jew, with the traditions of his past sacked and in flames, and nothing in his future but a vast, empty, limitless plain to wander alone.

Footfalls sounded on the balcony stairs and Palmeri turned his head.

"Ah,Joseph," he said.

Zev couldn't see the priest but he shouted anyway.

"Go back, Joe! Don't let him trick you!"

"Speaking of tricks," Palmeri said, leaning further over the balcony rail as an extra warning to Joe, "I hope you're not going to try anything foolish."

"No," said Joe's tired voice from somewhere behind Palmeri. "No tricks. Pull him in and let him go."

Zev could not let this happen. And suddenly he knew what he had to do. He twisted his body and grabbed the front of Palmeri's cassock while bringing his legs up and bracing his feet against one of the uprights of the brass balcony rail. As Palmeri turned his startled face toward him, Zev put all his strength into his legs for one convulsive backward push against the railing, pulling Palmeri with him. The undead priest was overbalanced. Even his enormous strength could not help him once his feet came free of the floor. Zev saw his undead eyes widen with terror when his lower body slipped over the railing. As they fell free, Zev wrapped his arms around Palmeri and clutched his cold and surprisingly thin body tight against him.

"What goes through this old Jew goes through you!" he shouted into the vampire's ear.

For an instant he saw Joe's horrified face appear over the balcony's receding edge, heard his faraway shout of "No!" mingle with Palmeri's nearer, lengthier scream of the same word, then came a spine-cracking jar and in his chest a tearing, wrenching pain beyond all comprehension. In an eyeblink he felt the sharp spire of wood rip through him and into Palmeri.

And then he felt no more.

As roaring blackness closed in he wondered if he'd done it, if this last desperate, foolish act had succeeded. He didn't want to die without finding out. He wanted to know—

But then he knew no more.

JOE . . .

Joe shouted incoherently as he hung over the rail and watched Zev's fall, gagged as he saw the bloody point of the pew remnant burst through the back of Palmeri's cassock directly below him. He saw Palmeri squirm and flop around like a beached fish, then go limp atop Zev's already inert form.

As cheers mixed with cries of horror and the sounds of renewed battle rose from the nave, Joe turned away from the balcony rail and dropped to his knees.

"Zev!" he cried aloud. "Good God, Zev!"

Forcing himself to his feet, he stumbled down the back stairs, through the vestibule, and into the nave. The undead and the Vichy were on the run, as cowed and demoralized by their leader's death as the parishioners were buoyed by it. Slowly, steadily, they were falling before the relentless onslaught.

But Joe paid them scant attention. He fought his way to where Zev lay impaled beneath Palmeri's already decomposing corpse. He looked for a sign of life in his old friend's glazing eyes, a hint of a pulse in his throat under his beard, but found nothing.

"Zev, Zev, Zev, you shouldn't have. You shouldn't have."

He stiffened as he felt a pair of arms go around him, then saw it was Lacey. Tears streamed down her cheeks as she leaned against him and sobbed. She reached out and touched Zev's forehead.

"Oh, Uncle Joe... Uncle Joe..."

Suddenly they were surrounded by a cheering throng of St. Anthony's parishioners.

"We did it, Fadda Joe!" Carl cried, his face and hands splattered with blood. "We killed 'em all! We got our church back!"

"Thanks to this man here," Joe said, pointing to Zev.

"No!" someone shouted. "Thanks to you!"

Amid the cheers, Joe shook his head and said nothing. Let them celebrate. They deserved it. They'd reclaimed a tiny piece of the world as their own, a toehold and nothing more. A small victory of minimal significance in the war, but a victory nonetheless. They had their church back, at least for tonight. And they intended to keep it.

Good. But there would be one change. If they wanted their Father Joe to stick around they were going to have to agree to rename the church.

St. Zev's.

Joe liked the sound of that.

GREGOR . . .

"I was wrong, wasn't I!" Olivia raged, waving her arms and she stormed back and forth across the main floor of the Post office. Her get-guards flanked her, watching the windows, trying to cover her as she moved. Gregor's guards clustered near him, warily watching the others. "Yesterday, when I heard that more than one of your serfs had been killed in a single night, I thought it couldn't get any worse. But now this! This!"

Gregor, still too numb with shock, said nothing.

He and his guards had been on the other side of town, roaming the streets, hunting the vigilantes, when he'd heard the news. He'd rushed back to the church, not believing it could be true. But it was. He'd found St. Anthony's aflame with searing light, too bright to look at. Crosses blazed from every window and door, the corpses of his cowboys and his get lay in a tangled pile on the front steps, and from within ... the voices of the cattle raised in hymns.

Olivia stopped her pacing and glared at him. "You allowed this to happen, didn't you, Gregor. You're trying to humiliate me, aren't you."

That did it.

"You bitch!" Gregor shouted.

He raised his fist and took a step toward her. Her guards reacted by reaching for their machetes, and Gregor's guards followed suit. As much as he wanted his hands around her throat, crushing it, twisting until her head ripped free, this was not the time or place for a pointless melee. Gregor opened his fist and stabbed a finger at Olivia.

"You conniving, self-centered bitch! Humiliate you? I'm the one whose local get has been virtually wiped out! If anyone's pride has been damaged tonight it is mine!"

"And you've nobody to blame but yourself," she snarled. "Your serfs and your get failed you, failed all of us. They deserved what they got. I see only one solution. I will have to bring in my own serfs and get to clean up your mess."

"This is what you've wanted all along, isn't it. For all I know you engineered this yourself!"

"Don't talk like a fool! I—" She stopped, held up a hand, and closed her eyes. "Wait. Wait." She opened her eyes and stared at him. "Do you see what is happening? A few of the cattle make a move against us and what do we do? We turn on each other. This is not the way."

Realizing she was right, Gregor stepped back. But he said nothing. The sting of her words remained. His get had not deserved to die.

"We have a situation," Olivia said. "One that must be kept quiet and crushed immediately. If word of what happened here tonight gets around, insurrections like this could spread like wildfire."

Gregor watched her. He didn't trust this suddenly reasonable Olivia.

"The thing to do is retake the church," he said. "Immediately."

"But we can't, Gregor. The slow attrition of your serfs to these vigilantes over the past weeks plus their wholesale slaughter tonight leaves us short of manpower. Of the ones we have left, half are ready to bolt. We'd better hope these vigilantes are so happy to have their church back that they'll stay there tomorrow, because we now have barely enough serfs to guard us during the sunlit hours. If these vigilantes should decide to put together a hunting party..."

Gregor suppressed a shudder. "They won't. They're not the vigilantes."

"You so dearly wish. Then the blame would not be on you for allowing them to roam free for so long. In fact, as I remember, you were supposed to solve the vigilante problem before this coming sunrise."

Did she have to bring that up? He'd been searching since sundown.

"It seems we've had a slight, unanticipated distraction."

She waved her hand, brushing him off. "Unlike you, I am not going to sit on my hands. I've already contacted Franco."

The word bitch rose to Gregor's lips again but he bit it back. Pointless to call names now.

"I'm sure you gave him a scrupulously evenhanded account of the night's events."

She offered him a tight smile. "Certainly. I requested a detachment of ferals and a group of tough, seasoned serfs. The plan is simple: tomorrow night they will firebomb the church and let the parishioners run out into the arms of the ferals."

Gregor had to admit it was a good plan: simple, direct. It would work.

"And what did Franco say?"

Her smile faltered. "He said he'd take it under consideration."

Gregor's mind reeled in shock. Franco is hanging me out to dry! Is this what I get for my loyalty, my efforts?

"Is he telling us to clean up our own mess?"

Olivia's eyebrows shot up. "Our mess?"

"Yes, Olivia. You were here when it happened. No matter how you spin it to Franco, he's still going to see it as our mess."

Gregor didn't know if that was true, but it didn't hurt to make Olivia squirm, get her working with him instead of against him.

"The vigilantes were your problem long before I arrived."

"And I'm telling you these are not the same people."

"A very self-serving theory."

"Their methods are different. I've been gathering information since it happened. One of my cowboys—serfs—walked in on them in the church earlier today. They didn't kill him, just pushed him around and sent him on his way. If it had been the vigilantes they would have slit his throat and hung him from a pole just like all the others."

"Maybe they've changed tactics."

Gregor shook his head. "The church problem was started by a priest and a rabbi."

"Working together? Maybe this is more of a problem than I thought."

"It is. But these two are not the vigilantes. They're worse. They're visible, and they've provided a base of operations, a rallying point for the cattle. They're doing everything the vigilantes did not do."

"This will not get you off the hook, Gregor."

"Will you listen to me? I'm trying to tell you there are two groups to deal with now, separate and distinct. And if they should band together we will be in even bigger danger."

"As I said, Gregor: theory. A theory needs proof. If you're so convinced the vigilantes are not in that church, then prove it by finding them and bringing them in. I hope you succeed."

"I find that hard to believe."

"I'm quite serious. Your serfs are becoming afraid to move about in the day. They sense a foundering ship and, like the rats they are, they're ready to jump. We can't have that. We need them to hold the day. If these people take back the day, then we might lose the night as well."

That will never happen, Gregor thought. I will not allow it.

"I will bring in these vigilantes as promised. And when I do, I'll bleed them—just enough to weaken them. Then I'll give them to the cowboys to finish. I'll let them take as long as they like to exact their revenge. And then they'll see that we take care of our helpers. And the rest of the cattle will see that resistance is futile."

He had to succeed, had to prove that the vigilantes were not connected with the church rebels, otherwise the blame for the fall of the church would rest on his shoulders. His whole future depended on finding those damn vigilantes.

"Let's hope so," Olivia said. "Meanwhile, I won't be idle while waiting to hear from Franco. I'm going to have that church watched closely in case this priest or rabbi or anyone else from inside steps out." Her eyes blazed. "I want one of them."

"For what?" Gregor asked.

"For answers. For leverage. For.. . fun." Olivia smiled. "I can be very inventive."

- 5 -

JOE . . .

Father Joe gave the dirt on Zev's grave a final pat with his shovel, then turned away. He didn't know any of the Jewish prayers for the dead, so he'd made up a prayer of his own to send his old friend on his way.

Lacey walked beside him, a shovel across her shoulder. "You were really close to him, weren't you."

"Like a brother. Closer than a brother. Brothers drag all sorts of baggage into their relationship as adults. We had none of that. We didn't even share the same culture."

"He seemed like a good man."

"He was. He had a kind, generous, gentle soul. I will miss him terribly."

Joe's throat clenched. He still couldn't believe Zev was gone. He'd feared him dead after the vampires invaded, but hadn't really believed it. Now he had no choice.

He looked around. Rifle- and shotgun-toting men stood at the corners of the little church graveyard. Joe had found spots in the crowded soil for Zev and the four parishioners who'd died during last night's fight, and this morning a crew of volunteers—Lacey among them—had started digging.

He glanced at his niece, noting the sheen of perspiration on her bare arms, the nasty-looking bruise below her shoulder. It didn't seem to be bothering her much this morning. She was in good shape and surprisingly strong. She'd held her own with that shovel.

The midday sun hung high and hot as they followed the walk around to the front of the church where half a dozen women were busy scrubbing the steps. Two more armed men patrolled the sidewalk behind them.

"Good job, ladies," Joe said.

The women smiled and waved.

"Sure looks better than it did this morning," Lacey said.

Joe nodded. They'd hurled the bodies of the vampires and the dead Vichy out the front door last night. In hindsight, that had been an error, because the morning sunlight created a terrible mess, reducing some of the undead cadavers to a foul, brown goo that stained the steps and coated the Vichy bodies.

Carl had found a front-end loader and the men used that to haul the stinking mess to a vacant lot where it was buried in a mass grave.

Lacey stared at the stains. "Lots of death last night." She turned to Joe, her eyes troubled. "Why don't I feel bad?"

"Maybe because this is war. A war like never before. In past wars the enemy gets propagandized into monsters, subhuman creatures. In this war we don't have to do that. They are subhuman monsters."

"And the Vichy?"

"They're just subhuman."

She continued to stare at him. "This is not the Uncle Joe I knew."

How right she was. He sensed that memories of last night's carnage and bloodshed would keep him awake for months, maybe years. But he couldn't allow himself to dwell on it. He had to move on.

"Thank God I'm not. The old Father Joe would have tried to reason with them. But I worry that many more scenes like last night will change us, make us more like them."

"So? Maybe we need to become more like them if we're to survive. In a war you have to submerge a lot of the decent impulses and empathy that made you a good partner or spouse or parent or neighbor. Especially in this war, because we're dealing with an enemy that has lost all decent impulses. You offer an olive branch and they'll shove it down your throat. Will we be changed by this? Look around you, Unk: we already are."

He nodded. "We'll all be either dead or permanently scarred when this is over. And so, in the unlikely event that we win, we'll still lose." He managed a smile for her. "How's that for optimism?"

She shrugged. "One thing's for sure. The Uncle Joe who used to say, 'Just have faith and everything will turn out fine' is gone."

Yes, he is, Joe thought with a deep pang of regret. Gone forever.

"Do you miss him, Lacey?"

"Yes and no. He was a great, easygoing guy, but he's not what we need now. And speaking of now, here comes the big question: what next?"

Good question. Joe had been thinking about that. He closed his eyes, lifted his face to the sun, and watched the glowing red inner surface of his lids.

The sun ... their greatest ally. As long as it was out, he and the parishioners had a fighting chance. The Vichy, what remained of them, seemed cowed. A few had shown their faces in the vicinity but were quickly chased off without offering even token resistance. Every so often Joe would spot one skulking in the shadows a few blocks away, watching the church, but none ventured close.

But once the sun set, the balance would shift to the undead and their collaborators.

"I think we should start a compound," he said.

"You mean, like a fort?"

"Not so much a fort as a consolidation. Gather everyone close for mutual protection and pooling of resources."

Lacey nodded. "The Ben Franklin approach."

"Ben Franklin?"

"Yeah. What he said at the signing of the Declaration of Independence: 'We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.' "

"Declaration of Independence ... I guess we did that last night."

"Damn right. But with deeds instead of words on paper."

"But as for hanging together, that's the plan—and I don't mean by our necks. The living are scattered all over town now. That leaves us vulnerable to being picked off one by one. But if we use the church as a hub and bring everybody toward the center—"

"Circle the wagons, in other words."

"Exactly. As of now we've got the rectory, the convent, and the church itself. That'll house some people, but it's not enough. We need to expand."

"You got that right."

By word of mouth and who knew how else, the news that someone was fighting back had spread. A steady stream of newcomers, anxious to join the fight, had been flowing to the church all morning. Many of them were not even Catholic. Jews, Protestants, even Muslims were showing up, wanting to know how they could be part of what was happening. Joe had passed the word to welcome everyone. This was not a time for divisions. The arbitrary walls that had separated people in the past had to be knocked down. There could be only one belief system now: the living versus the undead and those who sided with them.

"There's an empty office building across the street from the back of the church," Joe said, remembering the night he and Zev had spent there. Had it been only two nights since then? "That should hold a lot of folks. We'll start there."

"I passed a couple of furniture stores on the way here," Lacey said. She pointed south. "If I remember, they're just a few blocks that way."

"You're right," Joe said. "I know the places."

"We can raid them for bedding."

"Great idea. Once we set that up, we'll take over the surrounding houses— assuming they're unoccupied."

"Pretty safe assumption," Lacey said. "If the owners somehow survived, I can't see them hanging around for long, considering what's been going down in the church."

"But first I want to start blocking off the surrounding streets—get old cars, line them up in the intersections. That'll fend off or at least slow down any blitzkrieg-style counterattacks."

He felt Lacey's hand on his arm and turned to find her staring at him.

"You've given this a lot of thought, haven't you."

"That's just it. I haven't. I'm making it up as I go along. As I told you last night, my original intent was to hold the place for one night, say Mass, then move on."

Lacey smiled. "I was wondering what happened to that idea."

"It got lost in the crowd."

Joe hadn't counted on drawing a crowd. Now that he had, what did he do with them? He couldn't perform the loaves-and-fishes miracle. How was he going to feed them? But seeing the desperate hope gleaming in their eyes this morning, he couldn't simply walk out on them.

"So ..." Lacey said slowly. "Beyond a compound .. . what?"

"I wish I knew."

"You realize, don't you, that we can't win."

"I don't realize any such thing."

"Hey, Unk," she said, her grip tightening on his arm. "We're only a hundred people and there are millions of them. They've got Europe, the Middle East, India, and most of Asia."

"But they haven't got the U.S. They hold the East Coast but the rest of the country is still alive."

"How can you be sure?"

"I was talking to one of the newcomers this morning. His name's Gerald Vance and he's got a battery-powered shortwave radio. He told me he's been talking to people all over the country. Philadelphia's gone but Harrisburg and Pittsburgh have only seen an occasional vampire. Same with Rochester. Atlanta fell but Alabama's fine. The Midwest and the West Coast are still in the hands of the living. So you see, it's not over."

Lacey looked away. "After seeing what's happened to the rest of the world, you could argue that it's just a matter of time."

Joe lowered his voice. "I'd appreciate it if you wouldn't talk like that. Last night was the first good thing that's happened to these people in a long time, so if you don't mind ..."

Lacey held up a hand. "Okay. 'Never is heard a discouraging word.' But if that's true about the rest of the country, then instead of staying here maybe we should be thinking about throwing a convoy together and heading west."

Joe shook his head. He'd already thought of that.

"We're being watched. We start to assemble dozens of cars, they'll know what we're planning. They'll be waiting for us. We'll be sitting ducks on the road."

He'd seen it play out in his mind's eye. He'd envisioned a line of cars racing down Route 70 at dawn. But he'd also envisioned a Vichy roadblock, gunfire, bloodshed, disabled cars, the convoy stalled, blocked fore and aft, the sun going down, and then . . . massacre.

"We've got a better chance here. I told Vance to get on his radio and spread the word of what we're doing here. Maybe it will spur others to do the same. Right now we've set a fire. If we remain the only bonfire, I agree: we're doomed. But if we can start a trend, inspire a hundred, a thousand fires along the coast, we'll no longer be the center of attention. We might have a chance."

Lacey was nodding. "And if the rest of the country gets the message that there is hope, that resistance is not futile ..." She grinned and raised her fist. "I always wanted to be a revolutionary."

"Well, you're going to get your wish." Joe yawned. When was the last time he'd slept? "My wish is for forty winks."

"Why don't you bed down for a while in the rectory? You catch your forty while I take some people over to that office building and check it out. We'll see how we can divide it up for living arrangements."

Joe stared at her. Where did she get her energy?

"Aren't you tired?"

She shrugged. "I've never needed much sleep. Besides, I had a nap."

"When?"

She smiled. "While you were saying Mass."

Joe sighed. "When are you going to face facts and admit—?"

"Hush." She put a finger to her lips. "I'm still not on board, but we'll argue about this some other time. Right now, there's too much work to do."

Joe watched her stride off, thinking that whoever said there are no atheists in foxholes obviously hadn't met Lacey.

LACEY . . .

Lacey gazed out the window at the lengthening shadows and rubbed her burning eyes.

Tired. She hadn't found time for another nap yet. All she needed was twenty minutes and she'd be good for hours more of activity.

Her uncle and the rest were in the process of working out a sleep schedule, assigning shifts. Some of them were going to have to live undead style, sleeping in the day, up all night, while others would keep a more normal schedule.

Lacey figured she'd volunteer for the undead shift since she tended to be a night person anyway.

She turned away from the window and checked out the room behind her. The desks had been pushed into a corner and a mattress and box spring placed in the center of the floor. Not fancy but functional, and a helluva lot more comfortable than trying to sleep on the church's stone floor.

She stretched her aching muscles. A good workout today, driving pickup trucks to the furniture stores, hauling bedding back, and lugging it up the steps to the upper floors. Toward the end of the afternoon she would have given anything for a generator to power up the elevator.

Back to the window for another look at the grand old Victorian next door. Janey had been so into Victorians, dragging Lacey around the city, pointing out this Second Empire and that Italianate until she'd caught the bug too. They'd planned someday to come down to Asbury Park, buy a place like the three-story affair next door and renovate it, dress it up like those fabulous painted ladies they'd salivated over on their trip to San Francisco last year.

Lacey felt a lump grow in her throat. Janey . . . they'd had such good times together ... the best years of her life. She missed her. Losing her had left an cavity where she'd once had a heart.

Where are you, Janey? What did they do to you?

Lacey knew in that instant which building she wanted added next to Uncle Joe's "compound."

Why not suggest it to him now?

She ducked into the hall and started down the stairwell, only to have to back up to allow a couple of the parish men to pass with a queen-size mattress.

"I'm heading over to the church to see Father Joe," she told them.

"Give us a minute and I'll escort you back," said a red-faced, heavyset man in a plaid shirt.

Lacey waved him off. "Don't be silly. It's a hundred feet away. And the street's blocked."

Probably just wants a break from all the lifting and hauling, she thought as she stepped outside.

She checked up and down the street. Nothing moving. No one in sight.

As she started across the street she glanced again at the old house and figured, why not check it out first? If it wasn't habitable—say, a big hole in the roof or something like that—why waste her time?

But she wasn't going in there alone. No way. She'd seen enough horror movies to know you don't go into empty houses alone when there are bad guys about.

She looked around, saw a short, muscular guy in a sleeveless T-shirt crossing the street, heading from the church toward the office building. What was his name? Enrico. Yeah, that was it.

"Hey, Enrico. Want to help me check out this place next door? See if we can move people in there?"

"Sure," he said, grinning. "Let's go."

She waited for him to catch up, then together they headed for the front steps and climbed onto the porch. She tried the door, hoping it was unlocked—she hated the thought of breaking one of those old windows to get in—and smiled as the latch yielded to the pressure of her thumb. All right!

Enrico hung in the living room while Lacey hurried through the cool, dark, silent interior. The decor was not authentically Victorian—nowhere near cramped and cluttered enough—but the place hadn't been vandalized. The two upper floors held five small bedrooms and one larger master bedroom, all furnished with beds and dressers. The couch in the first-floor sun room could sleep another, once all the dead house plants were removed.

Perfect, she thought, feeling the best she had all day. This is a definite keeper. And I've got first dibs on the master bedroom.

She came down the main staircase—the house had a rear servants' stairway as well, running to and from the kitchen—and found the living room empty.

"Enrico?"

Maybe he'd done a little exploring on his own. She headed for the kitchen and stopped cold when she saw a pair of feet jutting toes-up from behind a counter. She wanted to run but knew she had to check. She hurried forward, took a look at the kitchen carving knife jutting from Enrico's bloody chest, at his dead, glazed eyes staring at the ceiling, then spun and ran.

She didn't head for the front door. Instead she sprang for the French doors and leaped onto the verandah. There she ran into three waiting Vichy and had no time to react before something cracked against her skull, sending lightning bolts through her suddenly darkening vision. She lashed out with her booted foot but struck only air, and then another blow to her head sent her down.

She had flashes of faces, one clean-shaven, one bearded, one with braided hair, snatches of voices . . .

"Got one!" . . . "Hey, she's fine! She's really fine!"

A feeling of being carried, then an impact as she was tossed into the rear of a van, the van starting to move, then more voices...

"We get major points for this—major!" . . . "Man, she's so fine! Shame to hafta give her to the bloodsuckers." . . . "Ay, yo, they only said they wanted a live one. Didn't say nothin 'bout havin to be a virgin, know'm sayin?"

Laughter.

"Right! Fuckin-ay right!"

And then the feeling of her clothes being torn from her body . . .

CAROLE . . .

Sister Carole watched a beat-up old van race along the street. She couldn't see who was driving but it was coming from the direction of St. Anthony's.

St. Anthony's . . . how she'd wanted to step inside when she'd passed by this morning. She'd heard the voices drifting through the open front doors, responding to Father Joe during Mass, and they'd tugged her up the steps to participate and ... to see Father Joe's face once more. But she couldn't allow it. She was unworthy . . . too unworthy.

She'd seen the stains on the steps—blood and fouler substances—and had asked one of the armed men guarding the front about them. He'd told her about what had happened during the night, how Father Palmeri and other undead had been routed and killed along with their living helpers, how the church was now a holy place again.

Carole had walked on with her heart singing. Maybe what she'd been doing was not all for naught. Maybe there was a Divine Plan and she was part of it.

Then again, maybe not.

Most likely not.

The song in her heart had gasped and died.

And so she'd spent most of the rest of the day working around the house. She figured it was only a matter of time before she was caught and wanted to be ready when the undead or their cowboys came for her.