“No!” Nina pushed past Johnny. “You stay right here.”
Johnny pulled a butcher’s knife from a nearby block while Huck kept his head on a swivel, refusing to let the young boy vanish into thin air like the others. Keeping less than three feet of distance between them, they covered every nook and cranny someone – or something – could emerge: the pantry, the coolers, the hallway leading to the office at the other end.
Holding her breath, Nina leaned against the cold metal and someone pounded on the other side, making her jump back. She looked over her shoulder at the others and exhaled a calming breath before cautiously leaning in to the magnifying lens. Deep down, Huck didn’t want to know who was out there. He wanted to wake up in his own bed with a restored ‘69 Chevy Camaro parked in the three-car garage just waiting for him to pop her cherry. Like it was supposed to be. He hadn’t done anything for him in a long time and buying that car was just the selfish distraction he needed.
Pushing away from the door, Nina turned to meet his expectant eyes, no breath visible on her lips.
“Who is it?” Huck whispered, cursing himself for even asking because, unless the National Guard was standing outside that door, the answer couldn’t be good.
She stared at him through wide eyes before releasing a plume of breath. “Ramona.”
Chapter Thirteen
Garlic and Crosses
“What?” Huck gasped, taking her place at the door. The glass peephole was cold and fuzzy but he could see Ramona looking over her shoulder into the trees behind. The trucker must’ve cleared the frost from the glass so they could see it was her. Huck grabbed the deadbolt and Taylor plopped a hand down on his shoulder.
“Don’t.”
“Why not?”
“It’s a trick.”
DeSean frowned at Taylor. “You think she’s one of them now?”
“Of course, she is,” Andrews snapped. “Do any of you people ever read books or watch a movie?”
“You people?” DeSean set his jaw. “Fuck that supposed to mean, Vanilla Ice?”
“It means she’s playing for the other team now, genius.”
“Fuck that, she saved us,” Huck replied, turning the deadbolt and pulling the door back. Ramona stumbled in with a wintery blast, teeth chattering like ice cubes in the bottom of a glass. He shut and locked the door and when she spoke, her words were so slurred by the cold, they were impossible to understand. Odd sounds tumbled past her blue lips and everyone gasped at the same time. Eyes bulging, Huck backed into a rack of pots and pans, knocking them to the floor in a clatter.
“Goddamn!” DeSean said, cocking the gory tenderizer back in a mighty fist like the Norse god of thunder himself.
Ramona’s horn-rimmed glasses were missing and the cold rolled from her clothing in waves. “So fold,” she slurred, crossing her arms over a red vest and violently shivering.
“What is that?” Johnny asked, pointing the butcher’s knife at her face.
DeSean fumbled the cellphone from his coveralls and held the screen up, illuminating Ramona’s frosted eyebrows and a stream of frozen mucus running from her nose. The beam followed a thin trail of blood up her cheek, glinting off something protruding from her left eye. Inhaling abruptly, he backed into a floor mixer and nearly knocked it over.
Ramona held up a hand to block out the glare, registering the horror in everyone’s eyes. “Whuss frong?” she cried, bringing a shaky hand to her face.
“Don’t touch it,” Huck cried out, rushing across the room and pushing her arm down.
“Shoot her, Bob!” DeSean raised the bloody mallet. “She’s one of them.”
“Now, just hang on!” Huck held a hand out. “We don’t know anything yet.”
“Look at her skin, white boy!”
“She’s freezing!”
The deputy took a hand from the Uzi just long enough to point at her face. “There’s something sticking out of her eye!”
Ramona’s face stretched like it was melting, running into the folds in her neck. “What!” she panted, bringing a clumsy hand to her face and driving the silver toothpick further into her eyeball. Recoiling, she wailed in pain.
“Don’t touch it,” Huck shouted, grabbing her wrist.
“Pull it out!” she shrieked, fighting against him.
Taylor steadied the revolver and chased his breath. “Take a picture, DeSean!”
It took a moment for his words to register and it took even longer for DeSean to snap a pic that lit up Ramona’s frostbitten face with a ghostly burst. Staring at the screen, he exhaled a slow breath, lowering his expansive chest and turning the phone to face everyone.
“See? I told you,” Huck said, helping Ramona to a stool at a stainless-steel table positioned in the middle of the room.
“Why didn’t they turn her?” Nina asked, studying her in the weak cellphone glow.
Sighing, Taylor holstered his weapon. “No clue,” he said, wiping a sheen of perspiration from his forehead.
“It’s a message.” Huck leaned against the table, watching a fresh stream of blood run from her eye. “That’s the silver toothpick Ambrose used to prick our fingers with.”
Andrews stared hard at the trucker, careful not to get too close. “What kind of sick fuck does something like that?”
“A greedy one,” Taylor answered.
Nina grabbed a winter coat hanging from a hook by the backdoor and threw it over Ramona’s snowcapped shoulders. “What happened to you, Ramona?”
Shivering, she stared dully at the polished table, replaying something in her sluggish mind and when she finally spoke, no one could understand a word she said.
From across the kitchen, DeSean studied her through dubious eyes. “How’d you get away?”
“Face,” she replied, patting her purple fingers against a vest pocket.
Frowning, Nina reached inside and pulled out a small canister.
Taylor grunted, staring at the mace without surprise. “Looks like silver isn’t their only weakness.”
The big man gestured with the tenderizer. “No, it’s not.”
“We should light a fire,” Johnny said, nodding at a long oven in the wall. “You said they use darkness as camouflage.”
“Good idea, Johnny.” Huck wasted no time balling up some aprons and napkins and stuffing them inside. His eyes scoured the place, looking for a lighter and coming up empty.
Cautiously, Taylor reached into a pocket of the coat wrapped around Ramona’s shoulders. “Bud was a smoker,” he explained, pulling out a Bic lighter. The flames were slow to gather, stingily shedding more light on Ramona’s blueish skin. If not for her boots and vest, she would’ve frozen to death.
“Let’s get her closer to the oven,” Nina suggested, helping slide the stool closer to the licking flames. She rubbed Ramona’s shoulders and traded a worried look with Huck that said the heroic trucker needed to get to a hospital and fast.
He gave her a sympathetic nod while massaging the wrinkles from his brow. Exhaustion turned his brain to mush, making it difficult to plot out his next move. When he hit a brick wall after a lengthy writing session – usually somewhere around three thousand words – there was only one cure: food and a nap. But if he took a nap now he’d never wake up again and he sure as shit wasn’t hungry. “So what now?” he asked, shaking the cobwebs from his head.
“Find some flashlights. There has to be one around here somewhere.” Taylor plopped down on a stool across the table, an exhausted sigh pushing past his lips. “Then, we wait for daylight.”
“How long is that?” Johnny asked, fixated on the silver splinter sticking out of Ramona’s left eye.
The sheriff checked the black G-Shock strangling his wrist. “Three more hours,” he glumly reported, trying the radio on his shoulder again.
“Three more hours?” Johnny looked at everyone through taken aback eyes. “We’ll never last that long!”
“Johnny,” Nina said calmly, “we’ve lasted this long, we can handle three
more hours.”
“I’m with the kid,” Andrews voted. “Look how long it took for everyone else to die around here.” Catching a sharp glance from DeSean, he lowered his voice. “Sorry man, but you know what I mean.”
“Yeah, I know what you mean. Waiting around here is a bad game plan. We should take the offensive.”
“He’s right, Bob, let’s bring the fight to them.”
Taylor’s mustache went up when he smiled. “What fight? We have no fight without daylight, I’m telling you. There’s too many of them and I guarantee you they have fully automatic rifles.” His eyes went to Nina. “I could tell by the bullet hole in Ramona’s cab.”
Everyone grew quiet beneath an itchy blanket of reality, giving way to the popping flames in the open oven. Taking her elbow, Huck pulled Nina down the hallway, stopping just outside the office where he could keep Johnny in his field of vision. “That was quite the beat down you put on old Earl out there. Where’d you learn to do that?”
Folding her arms over her coat, she stared up into his eyes. “I’m a part-time kickboxing instructor,” she whispered, giving him a sheepish smile that warmed his heart. “Remember?”
“Well, I guess that paid off, didn’t it?”
“Wish it would’ve when they snatched me,” she replied, letting her eyes stray from focus. “I’d be asleep in my bed right now.”
Huck sharpened his gaze. “So, what do you do full-time? Yoga-goat instructor?”
Abrupt laughter tickled her curvy lips, brightening her almond-shaped eyes “I own a candy store.”
“A candy store?” Knitting his brow, a smile broke out across his face that felt oddly good on his lips. After everything they’d been through over the past few hours, he never thought he would smile again. And really, why should he? His life was on a serious cold streak, brought on by some unknown curse, and when Nina’s grin caught his eye he felt guilty thinking about how pretty she was, so he turned to Ramona and the toothpick instead.
His spirits sank.
Three hours.
Fuck.
Trapped inside this icebox, three hours felt like three days and Johnny was right…they’d never last that long. RaeAnn surged to the forefront of Huck’s mind, plunging a knife through his heart as smoke rolled from the oven. It would be the simple things he missed the most – like watching her chocolate colored hair dance with the wind as she ran with a pinwheel out by the lake, or stopping for ice cream after a…
“When will you try again?”
Blinking, he turned a puzzled expression to Nina.
“To write another novel,” she explained, staring up into his eyes.
Looking away, Huck scanned the diecast cars and trucks littering Bud’s office, face flushing with heat. This wasn’t the first time someone asked him that question – including his ever-tenacious agent, Erica Flowers, the darling of Madison Avenue. In the end, he still had the same answer. “After my last bomb, maybe never.”
She squeezed his hand and smiled. “A setback is just a setup for a comeback.”
He fell into her warm eyes, temporarily forgetting the madness going on around them. In this moment, they were the only two people on the entire planet and it didn’t feel wrong. “How long have you been waiting to use that line?” he asked, rubbing a thumb across the back of her hand.
“A long time.”
Inhaling deeply, his eyes moved across the room, stopping on the metal toothpick in Ramona’s eye. “Yeah well, I just might have an idea for a new book.”
Nina snorted. “Yeah, you just might.”
“Hello? Franklin?” Taylor let up on the mic and, this time, not even static responded, sinking his posture on the stool.
“Do you think he heard you the first time?”
The sheriff shook his head. “I don’t know, Johnny. I hope so, buddy.”
DeSean pulled a case of bottled water from a rack against the wall and set it on the table, tearing it open and passing it out. Ushering Nina back over, Huck gave him a tightlipped smile and drank greedily. He hadn’t had time to be thirsty and, with two more chugs, finished the entire bottle. The others mimicked him, drinking like they’d just crossed the Sahara on foot.
“We’re going to get out of here alive.”
Everyone stopped drinking and looked at Sheriff Taylor.
“I promise,” he added, setting his unopened bottle on the table.
No one replied, unable to rise above their own misgivings. Words were cheap and everyone knew it. This wasn’t a nut-bag shooter with some weak axe to grind no one will ever understand. Soviet paratroopers weren’t dropping from the sky with machineguns hanging from their necks. No, this was different. This was supernatural and, after what they just witnessed, Huck was fairly certain humans were no match for the supernatural.
Taylor took a quick headcount, lips barely moving with his finger. Exhaling a downhearted breath, his voice dropped to a whisper. “Seven.”
Blowing a rolling cloud out, Huck watched Taylor use a rag to polish his weapon. At least their numbers were rising. A minute ago, they were down to six. He watched Ramona shake her head like a mosquito was buzzing about her ear and the more the shock wore off, the angrier he became. Ambrose had to die. There were no two ways about it. All of them had to die because they knew where Huck lived and if he didn’t end this now, they would come for him later. He had to make them understand he was more trouble than he was worth.
Your biggest fan can’t wait to meet you in person.
Ambrose’s words tunneled through Huck’s head like an earworm. Who would want to drink him so badly they…
Nina squeezed his hand. “Are you okay?”
Forcing a smile, he kissed the back of her hand, igniting something inside he never thought would fire again. He loved his wife but after fifteen grueling months and counting, he’d given up on her ever returning home again. Even if she did wake up, the doctors insisted she would be a vegetable and require around the clock medical care. The deterioration savagely eating away at her body had done its damage, turning his weekly visits into monthly visits. It was tough watching someone you love turn to dust before your eyes. Even harder was explaining it to RaeAnn. She had just turned four when a drunk driver blew a red light and t-boned Chrissy on her way home from a book club she looked forward to every week. Huck tried keeping her memory alive in RaeAnn’s eyes with pictures and videos of special times she would never recall. It saddened him to watch the smile slip from her lips whenever he told her it was time to go to the care center. She wanted to go the park and play with her friends and he didn’t blame her. RaeAnn didn’t know the woman lying in that bed anymore and neither did he.
“Say Bob?”
Sheriff Taylor looked up from his firearm.
DeSean leaned against the table, making it wobble. “What was Bud talking about out in your truck?”
Taylor slapped the chamber shut, realizing everyone was staring at him. His skin took on a sickish pallor and he seemed to shrink inside his work shirt, growing smaller in the flickering light. “I have no idea,” he replied, stuffing the gun back in its holster. “I was hoping Bud would be coherent enough to help us out.” Taking off his cowboy hat, he ran a hand through his hair. “I don’t know what I’m going to tell his wife. I’ve known Bud and Amy for years.”
“Whatever it was, it seemed like he wanted it pretty bad.”
“Bud wasn’t himself anymore. They never are.”
Nina pumped Huck’s hand and swallowed whatever she was about to say. There was nothing left to say at this point. If they didn’t come up with a solid game plan, none of them would live long enough to tell Bud’s wife anything. Huck tried to think like a writer, picturing this whole thing as a horror novel from hell with only one way out.
The twist.
He had to start from the end and work his way backwards because, often times, that’s how he wrote. The fire in the oven helped thaw out his weary brain. His eyes swung around the kitchen, taking inventory.
> The revolver with its silver bullets.
DeSean and his mighty meat tenderizer.
Deputy Andrews’ Uzi with basic ammo.
These were their greatest weapons, but they would need more. Those things out there were cunning and strong, able to use the darkness and snowfall to their advantage. What was it Johnny said?
Garlic and crosses.
Huck tucked the Beretta into the small of his back. “What else you got in that bag, Deputy?”
Andrews eyes drifted out into the diner. “I’ll be right back.”
“Wait!” Taylor got up from the stool, claiming all 6’6” of his towering height. “Are you kidding me? We all go.”
Chapter Fourteen
Omertà
Huck threw another apron on the fire, casting a jumpy light over the black duffel bag resting on the silver table between them. Ramona stared vacantly at the bag with her good eye, jaw opening and closing like she was trying to clear her ears after a long flight. Filling his lungs with smoke, Deputy Andrews unzipped the bag and met their prying eyes. With Johnny safely stowed between them, Huck and Nina traded a curious glance over his head, the fire crackling in their ears.
Reaching inside, Andrews carefully removed an old wooden box and set it on the tabletop. He stared fondly at the ornate cross carved into the top, seeming reluctant to open it.
“What is that?”
Winking at Johnny, he pulled the heavy lid back. “Our secret weapon.”
Johnny’s eyes got round. “Holy crap!”
Huck leaned closer, pulse thudding in the hollow of his throat as he scanned the mysterious vials and tools tucked neatly inside a bed of red velvet. “What the hell is this?”
“This…is an antique vampire hunting kit.” Andrews pulled an old-fashioned pair of pliers from a form-fitting slot and held them up to the light. “These are for extracting their teeth.”
“Cool!” Johnny said, reaching for a vial of clear liquid.
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