F Paul Wilson - Novel 10

by Midnight Mass (v2. 1)

  Except for the birds, but they didn't count.

  The silence got to Lacey. She found the emptiness here eerier and far more surreal than the close call with that pair of emaciated vampires. It sent cramps rippling through her intestines.

  But even so, it was good to be out of the tunnels, to feel a fresh breeze on her face, to inhale clean air. They'd found three more undead scattered in alcoves along the shuttle tracks before they reached the Lexington Avenue line, and a half a dozen more on the nine-block length of track they walked down to the Thirty-third Street station. All were emaciated, and they dispatched them without difficulty.

  The morning was further along than they'd intended by the time they crept up to street level.

  "We've got to head uptown a couple of blocks, then west," Lacey said.

  Her uncle had laid out their route, but this was her city so it was only natural that she take the lead here.

  "We'll be exposed," Carole said. "I don't like that."

  "Neither do I, but the only really open spot will be crossing Thirty-fourth. After that there should be lots of nooks and crannies to hide in if need be."

  They made a headlong dash to Thirty-fifth, then turned left.

  "This area used to be called Murray Hill," Lacey told Carole as they hurried along the sidewalk, staying low, ever ready to duck into a doorway at the first sign of movement or sound of a car. "I guess it still is. Very tony, very high rent. At least it was."

  But now it was a ghost town, pimpled here and there with piles of black plastic garbage bags, torn open, their contents pawed and pecked through by rats and pigeons, perhaps even people. Waiting in vain to be picked up by a non-existent sanitation department. Waiting for Godot.

  She led Carole past the brick-fronted Community Church of New York with BLESSED ARE THE PEACEMAKERS emblazoned on its front wall.

  Peacemakers... is that us? she wondered.

  Further up on the right, on the corner of Madison Avenue, sat a brown-stone church and steeple.

  "The Church of the Incarnation," Carole muttered as they passed. "I wonder ... oh, it's Episcopal."

  "Almost as good as Catholic, right?"

  Carole smiled. "But not quite."

  They dashed across Madison to the shadows of the Oxford University Press offices, then continued on toward Fifth Avenue. Before reaching Fifth they found the broken side doors of the City University Graduate Building. They squeezed through and climbed to the second floor. There, through huge arched windows, they had a panoramic view of the Art Deco lower levels of the Empire State Building and the intersection of Fifth Avenue and Thirty-fourth Street.

  Lacey leaned forward to see if she could see the top.

  "Don't get too close to the window," Carole said, pointing to the sunlight slanting through the dusty air. "Somebody might see you."

  Lacey nodded, too awestruck by what she saw.

  "Look. They have electricity."

  Houlihan's bar and restaurant, occupying the ground-floor corner of the Empire State nearest them, was lit up inside. A neon Red Hook Lager sign glowed in the window. She'd stopped in there once to eat but had walked out. Fourteen bucks for a hamburger. Location, location, location.

  "Joseph told us they were using the generators."

  "I know. But it's been so long since Eve seen a working electric light, I. .. it's kind of wonderful in a way. Gives me hope."

  They found some chairs well back in the shadows and settled down to watch. A few Vichy hung around under the canopied front entrance, but otherwise there wasn't much activity.

  "Do you think this is the right way to go?" Lacey said after a while. "The three of us attacking the Empire State Building, I mean."

  "We don't know that we will be. That's why we're here now. To see if it's feasible."

  "Don't get me wrong, but do you get the feeling that no matter what we find, somehow Joe's going to think it's feasible?"

  Carole turned and stared at her. "I don't think I understand."

  "I think you do. My uncle's got a major hard on for this Franco."

  Lacey—

  "It's true and you know it. That's all he's talked about since we did the Post Office: Franco, Franco, Franco. Here we are, possibly the only three humans in the world with firsthand knowledge of the vampires' secret—how the death of one reverberates through the progeny, wiping out all his or her get down the line—and we're all together in New York instead of splitting up and trying to make it into the unoccupied areas of the country to spread the news."

  "We've been through that."

  "Yeah, I know, but..."

  It was easier to move around within the occupied zone than to get out of it. Vichy were stacked at the Delaware River crossings waiting to pick off anyone who tried. Joe's theory was that if they could knock off Franco and his get, the Vichy network would collapse in disarray—at least for a while—and they could waltz across.

  Maybe.

  "And remember," Carole said, "one of the parishioners has a shortwave and is probably broadcasting the news to the world right now."

  "We don't know that. And who'd believe him?"

  "Exactly. That's why we agreed it will be much better to be able to show than simply tell."

  Another idea of Joe's: use the building's security system to videotape the deaths of Franco and his get. Then they'd have proof.

  "Look, Carole, I know Franco is the head honcho and taking him down will put a serious crimp in the undead master plan, but do you get the feeling that there's more to it, that if Joe could demonstrate this get-death on another undead of equal stature, he'd bypass the opportunity and remain fixed on Franco?"

  Carole's tone took on a definite chill. "You're saying that Joseph would jeopardize our lives and what we know just to get revenge on Franco?"

  "You're not answering the question."

  Carole looked away.

  Was it simple revenge? That had to be part of it, Lacey knew, and she had her own score to settle with this monster for what he had done to her Uncle Joe. But she sensed something more than revenge driving Joe to this showdown, something she was missing.

  That worried her.

  "Look, Carole, you've got to admit that Joe isn't exactly the same guy he was a week ago. He was dead, and now he's not. What brought him back to life? It wasn't your God, so what was it?"

  "God intervened. Joseph was supposed to become one of the undead, but he did not. God has turned the Devil's own work back on him, making Joseph an instrument of His divine vengeance."

  "Buy into that if you want, Carole. I don't. I can't. And I'm a little worried about that weird dream he's been having. We know Joe's been to hell and back. I just hope he didn't bring a little of that hell back with him."

  - 14 -

  CAROLE . . .

  By Sunday evening they were ready to make their move.

  Fifty-three minutes before sundown, as soon as Joe was up and fed—Lacey's turn tonight—he got behind the wheel of the Navigator and drove down Broadway. Lacey sat up front next to her uncle; Carole had the rear to herself.

  "Are we ready for this?" he said as they approached Thirty-fourth Street.

  Carole wasn't sure. She hoped so.

  They'd learned through three days and three nights of steady surveillance that the Vichy—the more time she spent with Joseph and Lacey, the more Carole found herself using that designation—stuck to a fairly rigid schedule of two shifts: a large contingent of perhaps twenty-five or thirty worked the days, while only a half dozen or so manned the entrance at night.

  They'd taken over Houlihan's and turned the bar-restaurant into a cafeteria of sorts. It served two meals a day—breakfast and dinner—at change of shift. Using binoculars, Carole and Lacey had watched from their perch across the street as the Vichy attacked heaps of scrambled eggs every morning—the cook had to be using the powdered kind—and pots of some sort of stew every evening.

  All three agreed that the meal break at shift change was the time to strike. All the
Vichy were concentrated in Houlihan's then. They'd settled on dawn, Monday, for their assault.

  But assault how?

  Joseph and Lacey had wanted to find a way to use the napalm, rig it somehow to explode and turn the restaurant into an inferno while the Vichy were eating their breakfast. But the "somehow" eluded them. And even if they did manage to come up with a way to explode it, the napalm presented too many chances for something to go wrong. If they were only partially successful—if they killed some but not all of the Vichy—they'd have to abandon all hope of success. They couldn't win a fire fight with them, and from then on the Vichy would be warned and on full alert.

  Carole had had a better idea. This was why she'd brought along the canister of sodium fluorosilicate. She'd had a feeling they might need a more silent form of death than bullets and napalm. She'd found canisters of the chemical at one of the local municipal utility authorities where it was used to purify the water supply. At a few parts per million, sodium fluorosilicate was harmless. But ingestion of half a gram of the odorless and tasteless powder interfered with cellular metabolism, making you deathly ill. A gram caused convulsions and death. Not a pretty way to go, but probably better than being burned alive by napalm.

  Carole wished there were another way, one that could be delivered by someone else and not multiply the number of lives she'd already taken. But there was nothing and no one. It was her idea, her responsibility. She couldn't shirk it off on someone else.

  The question was, how to get it into the Vichy? Obviously via their food. This evening's sortie would accomplish that—they hoped.

  Joseph turned the big SUV onto Thirty-fourth and said, "Let's pray that those technicians I've been watching don't eat with the rest of them tomorrow. We need them. And besides, they appear to be innocent. The three of them seem older than the typical Vichy, they're unarmed, and dress like middle managers. They arrive in a group every morning, flanked by two Vichy.

  They're not tied or manacled, but I get the impression they're prisoners of some sort."

  "But they could wind up sick or dead," Lacey said. "Then what do we do?"

  "Please, God, don't let them," Carole said. She had blood on her hands, she was crimson to her elbows, but so far none of it was innocent.

  "But what if they do?" Lacey persisted.

  Joseph shook his head. "I've been watching three dawns in a row and not once have they eaten with the others. In fact, by the time they're brought in, breakfast is just about done, and they're taken directly inside. Let's hope tomorrow is no exception."

  Halfway between Sixth and Fifth Avenues, Joseph slowed the car to a crawl. Carole leaned forward, peering ahead between Joseph and Lacey toward the lighted windows of Houlihan's, glowing like a beacon in the fading light. She searched for signs of stray Vichy who'd wandered away from the Fifth Avenue entrance around the corner where they usually hung out. But nothing was moving on the street except their car.

  "Damn!" Joseph said. "The earring. Would somebody do the honor?"

  Lacey fished the Vichy earring off the dashboard and punched it through his earlobe.

  "Didn't feel a thing," he said. "Are you ladies ready?"

  "Ready as I'll ever be," Lacey said. "How about you, Carole?"

  Carole could only nod. Her mouth was too dry for speech. They were entering the belly of the beast.

  Joseph swung the car into the curb and stopped. Houlihan's lit-up interior was empty. Dinner wasn't ready yet. The cook was back in the kitchen.

  "I'll turn the car around and wait here. Hurry. And be careful."

  Carole watched Lacey shove a pair of steel bars she called "nunchucks" up the left sleeve of her sweatshirt. She turned to Carole and took a deep, quavering breath.

  "Let's roll."

  Carole alighted with her backpack in her hand. She'd removed the stakes and crosses and hammer and replaced them with a football-size sack of sodium fluorosilicate. A pound of the stuff. Enough to kill the Empire State Building's Vichy contingent a dozen times over.

  They hurried across the sidewalk, pushed through the revolving glass doors, and headed straight for the rear of the restaurant area. The air smelled sour. The bar, tables, and floor were littered with paper plates, food scraps, and empty beer cans. Waves of glistening brown beetles scurried out of their way as they approached.

  "Cockroaches," Carole whispered. "I've never seen so many."

  "Maybe they feel some kinship with the clientele," Lacey replied.

  They paused outside the swinging doors to the kitchen. Light filtered through the two round, grease-smeared windows.

  "Okay," Lacey said. "I go first."

  She pushed through the doors; Carole followed. A fat, balding, cigar-chewing man in a bulging tank top stood before a stove, stirring a big pot. He looked up as they entered.

  "Who the fuck are you?" he said.

  "A couple of hungry ladies," Lacey said. "Got any dinner you can spare?"

  "Yo." He grinned and grabbed his crotch. "I got dinner right here."

  "That's not exactly what we had in mind."

  "You eat some of this, you get to eat some of what's cookin in the pot. Capisce?"

  While Lacey talked, Carole looked around the filthy mess of a kitchen. She didn't see a gun. The cook probably couldn't imagine he'd need one. Immediately to her right she spotted the other thing she was looking for: half a dozen ten-pound canisters of powdered eggs. One was open, its lid slightly askew.

  "I'm kind of cranky right now," Lacey was saying. "I'm hungry, I've got low blood sugar, and I'm feeling premenstrual. You'll like me better when I'm not hypoglycemic."

  "Ay, this ain't no Let's Make A Deal." He jabbed a finger at Lacey. "You do me before you eat"—then at Carole—"and she does me after. Otherwise you can get the fuck outta here."

  Lacey sighed and took a step toward him. "Oh, all right."

  He grinned and started loosening his belt. "That's more like it!"

  Lacey's hand darted to her sleeve and came up with her nunchucks. She whipped her hand around in a small circle, snapping her wrist and slamming one of the steel bars against the side of the cook's head. He grunted and staggered back, clutching his head. Lacey followed, swinging her nunchucks left, right, left, right, then vertically, connecting each time with either the man's head or his raised elbows. With blood spurting from his face and scalp, the cook turned away, dropped to his knees, then fell forward, covering his head with his hands and groaning.

  "Stop, stop! Take what you want!"

  "Warned you I was cranky. Now get flat on your belly and stay there." He complied, leaving the patterned soles of his sneakers facing Carole. Lacey turned and gave her a nod.

  Carole knelt beside the open canister of powdered eggs and removed the lid. It was three-quarters full. A heavy metal scoop lay inside. She pulled the bag of sodium fluorosilicate out of her backpack and began scooping the egg powder into its place.

  "You could have been nice, you know," she heard Lacey saying. "All we wanted was something to eat. Didn't your mother ever teach you to share?"

  "I'm sorry," the cook moaned. "I'm sorry!"

  "Now we'll have to take it."

  When Carole figured she'd scooped out about two pounds of egg, she zipped up the backpack, then emptied the pound of sodium fluorosilicate into the canister. The chemical was white and the powdered egg was a pale yellow. She used the scoop to mix them into a consistent color, then replaced the lid.

  God forgive her. She'd just sealed the fates and numbered the hours of dozens of men. Vicious, evil men, but men nonetheless.

  "All right," she told Lacey. "I've got the eggs."

  Lacey had the big chrome refrigerator door open and was peering inside.

  "What have we here?" she said. She reached in and removed what looked like a pepperoni and half a wheel of white cheese. "Looks like cookie's got his own private stash!" She turned to the cook and squatted beside him. "All right. We're leaving. Don't even think about moving or making a sound until we're g
one or I'll bust your head wide open and fry your brains on the grill. Capisce? "

  The cook moaned and nodded.

  Lacey looked at Carole and waggled her eyebrows. "Let go."

  JOE . . .

  Joe could see the kitchen doors through Houlihan's plate glass windows. He'd watched Carole and Lacey push through them only a few minutes ago, but it seemed like an hour.

  "Come on, ladies," he whispered. "Come on."

  The idea was to make this look like a food raid—desperate people risking their lives to take food out, not leave something behind. That was why he'd asked Lacey not to show a gun unless she had to. All it would take was one shot to bring the Vichy running. Let them think the thieves who'd hit them were amateurs armed only with nunchucks and knives.

  Am I doing the right thing? he wondered for the thousandth time since they'd arrived in New York. He had a feeling he wasn't.

  They were following his lead, trusting him with their lives. Was he, as the phrase went, exercising due diligence? He didn't know. All he knew was that once the idea of targeting Franco in his aerie had taken hold, he couldn't uproot it. He'd considered other options, but none of them held a candle to this. Because this was unquestionably the best tactic or because he'd become fixated on Franco? Part of him argued that he should have sent either Carole or Lacey west, to try to cross into unoccupied territory with the secret. But a stronger part had countered that he needed both of them along to take Franco down, and that argument had prevailed.

  And he knew why. He had a secondary goal in mind, one he dared not tell Carole and Lacey. They'd never let him go through with it.

  But he had another concern. Joe was noticing wild mood swings. In life he'd been prone to periodic lows that usually responded to a couple of stiff Scotches. Now he found himself experiencing surges of rage at the slightest provocation. He'd managed to control them so far. Like early this morning when Lacey had questioned him about some minor point in tonight's plan, he'd had this sudden urge to grab her by the throat and scream at her to stop asking so many goddamned questions.