These were not the vampires of the men’s understanding. Where was the dark romanticism, the brooding mystery, the gothic beauty? These things were no more refined than a pack of dingoes.
The vampires flipped Orlock onto his back. Some held him down while others tore his clothes off. His body was cadaver-pale, limbs like splits of bleached wood, flesh hanging off the bones like bread dough off a dowel. His penis, childish in proportion, hung between quivering thighs. Tripwire watched the pretty blonde vampire reach between his legs and stretch it to excruciating tautness before snipping it off between her teeth. The old vampire howled.
Tripwire edged beside Oddy. “Got that holy water?”
Oddy pulled the vial from his pocket. Tripwire held his hands out. A white phosphorus grenade was cupped in each palm. “Douse ’em.”
Freeing an arm, Orlock raked his nails across surfer-dude’s face. They sank into surfer-dude’s left eye, slitting the retina open. Surfer-dude’s hands flew to his face like flame-stung moths. Surfer-dude’s burst open eye drooled out of its socket. Surfer-dude’s eye-jelly, black and syrupy, poured down his cheeks. Orlock slashed again, opening up surfer-dude’s neck, digging inside the wound, yanking the esophagus out. It dangled to surfer-dude’s breastbone like an obscene necktie.
The turbaned vampire clamped his teeth over Orlock’s nose. It tore free with a dreadful splintering noise. Turban spat it into the snow and went back for more.
Oddy spilled holy water over the grenades. The other men assembled in a loose battle formation behind Tripwire. Answer pulled a stake from his pack and the others followed suit.
The man wearing the KISS THE COOK apron was pulling Orlock’s stomach apart. The ancient vampire’s flesh tore with sickening ease and a sound like old newspapers. He laid the skin-flaps across Orlock’s ribs and dipped his hands into the chest cavity, squeezing and mashing as Orlock bucked like a bug on a pin. The organs KISS THE COOK tore free were desiccated, like withered pieces of fruit. He crushed one in his fist and it burst apart in a cloud of dust.
The holy water froze around the grenades, encasing them in a thin glaze of ice. Tripwire pulled the pins, whispered, “Fire in the hole,” and lobbed them at the massed vampires.
They landed softly: Beehive’s attention was drawn to the fist-sized holes in the snow for a brief moment before returning to the matter at hand. A white vapor-trail rose from the holes and a heartbeat later—
B-Ba-BOOM.
A momentary radiance followed by a lethal hailstorm of whizzing metal. The men shielded their mouths and noses against the deadly phosphorus fumes. The noise of the explosions gave way to a wild and horrified screaming, a sound so shocking in its intensity it seemed as though the screamer’s lungs must surely burst from the strain.
The vampires, almost every one of them, had been struck by shrapnel. The effect was violent, bizarre, and instantaneous. Thick, green-tinted smoke poured out of every wound. It was as if a tiny woodsman had kindled a fire inside of them, stoking it heavily, until the resultant smoke was forced from any vent it could find. Smoke hissed from bloodless slits in chests and arms and legs; smoke billowed out of mouths and—cartoonishly, horrifically—from noses and ears; smoke surged out of a gash in surfer-dude’s forehead with a steam-whistle’s shriek.
The vampires spun in pain-maddened pirouettes. The internal combustion was so fierce that the hair of their heads and underarms and even their crotches burst into flame, crackling and glowing like piles of burning twigs. The pretty blonde vampire hacked up gobs of her lungs, the black, smoking clots spattering the snow.
Ironically, only Orlock avoided the shrapnel, on account of his position at the bottom of the pile. Amazingly, he stood.
“He’s not going to be the next Barker’s Beauty,” Zippo said.
Indeed he would not: all that remained of Orlock’s face were his eyes and upper palate, a few lonesome teeth, half an ear. The flaps of skin that had once sheltered the inner workings of his mouth caught the breeze like freakish sails. Viscera spooled out of the hole in his gut in petrified spaghetti loops.
He pointed at the men. A good many of his fingers had been bitten off, somewhat spoiling the effect. He said, “Glaaa…”
The monosyllabic moan acted as a rallying cry.
The vampires came at the men.
Zippo was a loner. Zippo was self-centered. Zippo did not have friends, he had business associates. Zippo knew who he was, and was generally comfortable in his skin. Hearing Grosevoir’s proposal, he’d secretly hoped to be the only survivor left to collect the bounty. He didn’t hate the other men. He wouldn’t try to kill them, or see them abandoned. Yet, at the core, all they represented was a million dollars that could be his.
This mindset persisted up until the very moment the vampires came for his old unit members. Then it all changed. Suddenly he was twenty again, back in the jungles of Vietnam. Suddenly these men’s lives had a value beyond mere dollar signs. A moment ago they’d meant nothing to him; now he would willingly go through hell for them. It was the kind of knee-jerk reaction he might make spying a child playing on the street in a speeding car’s path—unpremeditated, almost thoughtless. It had little to do with friendship, or love, or compassion. It was something different altogether, and it functioned under the understanding that they were all in this together. Live or die, they did it together.
Zippo was unable to comprehend his feelings on such a profound level. What he thought as he stepped in front of his fellow mercenaries, shielding them, preparing to take the first hit, was elementary in its simplicity:
I will die for you.
Now. Here. This moment.
“Come get it,” he whispered, and pulled the trigger.
The vampires hurled themselves at the wall of holy-water-laced flames with the heedless abandon of moths at a lit candle. Those who made it through were little more than flaming skeletons on the other side. Flesh sloughed off their bones in fiery gobbets, scattering their wake like glowing breadcrumbs. Fire licked from their eye sockets and shot from their mouths. Some retreated into the woods to lick their hideous wounds. Others were undeterred.
Beehive, her hair alight in a flaming spire, advanced on Tripwire. He backed away, fist clutching a stake. Flames gathered on Beehive’s shoulders; her outspread fingers, webbed with fire, resembled blazing gloves. Tripwire stumbled on a rock and went down on his back. Beehive grabbed at Tripwire’s neck; blisters swelled and burst on his throat. He screamed. She bent over him, mouth hot and necrotic …
Surfer-dude zeroed in on Oddy. His esophageal cord hung like a horrid pendulum, teeth very long and very white amidst the flaming wreckage of his face. Oddy snapped off a shot that spun him sideways. The vampire swayed like a three-sheets-to-the-wind drunk, left arm hanging cockeyed, bone shattered at the elbow.
Oddy cocked the Webley and fired again. The slug blew a flaming wedge out of surfer-dude’s shoulder. He took a knee. He got up again. Oddy drew a killing bead. Surfer-dude dove, tackling Oddy at the knees, driving him to the ground. Surfer-dude’s burning dreadlocks writhed like a ball of quarrelsome snakes atop his head. His nails punched through Oddy’s pants, into the soft meat of his hamstrings. Bellowing, Oddy jammed the Webley into surfer-dude’s mouth. The shot blew him upright, straightening his spine. Oddy saw the purpling night sky through the softball-sized hole in the vampire’s throat and thought of Dade…
Zippo ran the flamer’s tank dry. He shrugged it off and drew the Berettas. Answer flanked him; they stood back-to-back.
“Boy,” Zippo said fiercely, “any of these blood-suckers get their teeth into me, I want you to put me down before I start changing.”
“You got it.”
“Knew I could count on you.”
Turban and KISS THE COOK stalked in on them. Zippo pumped shots at Turban, slamming slugs into his belly and knees, bullets exiting in a spray of splintered bone. Answer’s silenced Kirikkales made a snick-a-snick sound. A daisy chain of dime-sized holes spread across KISS THE COOK
’s throat.
Turban grabbed Zippo. His strength was immense: Zippo felt himself in the grip of a grizzly. The vampire’s headwear unwound in flaming spirals around his head, burning with the smell of raw spices. Zippo brought his knee up into Turban’s crotch. The vampire laughed, lips melting in ropy strings, hugging Zippo tighter. The hitman’s ribs cracked. He angled one Beretta into Turban’s crotch and squeezed off three quick shots…
KISS THE COOK batted a Kirikkale from Answer’s hand. Answer raised the other pistol and fired. KISS THE COOK’s right eye imploded in a spurt of yellow stuff resembling marmalade. The vampire twisted away. Answer shot him in the ear, tearing the lobe off. The vampire moaned. Answer shot him in the nose. The vampire mewled, smelling of Brylcreem and fireplace ashes. His shot-out eye was a deep conical hole, black and yellow. There was a light bubbling sound where his nose had been. Answer wasn’t even breathing hard. He shot the aproned vampire through the cheek, blowing teeth between his lips. The vampire staggered. Answer took his stake and plunged it into KISS THE COOK’s chest.
KISS THE COOK shrieked. KISS THE COOK shook.
Then KISS THE COOK exploded in dazzling fashion.
“Huh,” Answer said.
Beehive was at Tripwire’s neck. Her teeth brushed his skin. I don’t want to die, he thought. On the other hand, I don’t want to live, if it means becoming one of them. He clamped a hand over Beehive’s face, fingers sinking into her flaming features. He pushed harder and the lion’s share of Beehive’s face came away in his hand, slipping between his fingers like fondue cheese. Beehive’s jaws rattled and clacked like wind-up chattery teeth. She tried to say something but could not on account of her tongue being fused to the roof of her mouth.
“Blaa graaa lahhe,” she blubbered. “Blaa gr—”
Tsst.
As soon as the vampires began to attack, Crosshairs had slotted his silver bullet into the Remington. His knowledge of the supernatural was sketchy—was silver good against werewolves? Witches? Bogeymen?—but silver struck him as a strong, pure metal, effective against any creature of evil. He saw Tripwire was in trouble: a faceless vampire was on his neck like a hobo on a ham sandwich. Crosshairs centered his breathing and—
Tsst.
There was no other way to describe it: Beehive’s head flew apart. Fragments of skull bone exploded off in every direction like a flock of pheasants flushed from tall grass. Her headless body twitched atop Tripwire. He shoved her off and plunged the stake into her chest. It sunk to the hilt with sickening ease: like stabbing a warm loaf of bread. Beehive thrashed. Moth-like insects flew from the stump of her neck. She shriveled into ash and blew away, leaving only a faint outline in the snow. Tripwire staggered to his feet and went to help Oddy…
Crosshairs jerked the breech to insert a new cartridge. He did not see her slinking up behind him: blonde, petite, wearing a shredded mackinaw. He did not—could not—feel her nails tearing down the back of his parka, the noise of gunfire drowning out the sound of ripping fabric. Chill wind whipped up his spine. He felt nothing. He did not feel the razor-sharp nails cutting a vertical slash above his hipbone, deep and long and red. He did not feel the blood pouring down his back, pooling in the snow.
All he felt when she shoved her hand inside the wound was a dim sense of pressure. No pain. But he knew something was terribly wrong. Although the sensation of his organs being displaced was painless, he was keenly aware that, had the proper nerve centers been operational, he would be screaming like a motherfucker.
“What the—?” He spun on wobbly legs. She was squatted on the ground at his feet. Her hands overflowed with…things.
Red things. Deep purple things. Softly-shaped things that shone wetly in the moonlight.
A yellow tube ran between her fingers, dipping into empty space, rising again to connect to…him. He realized that the tube was his intestinal tract. His mouth opened. No sound came out.
She crammed one of his organs—a liver? a kidney? Jesus Christ, they all looked the same—into her salivating maw. She sucked greedily, like an infant. The organ changed color, purple to red to pink to peach to bone-white as she drained it of blood.
“Oh, Lord,” Crosshairs whispered. “Oh, Jesus, no.”
Crosshairs’s legs buckled. An out-of-place odor—French vanilla?—filled his nostrils for a second before fading. His eyes were hard and dry, like marbles. He couldn’t feel himself dying. This knowledge, the underhanded injustice of it, made him want to cry. “Give…give those back,” he said quietly.
He shot the pretty woman in the belly. She bent forward, as if punched. He ejected the spent cartridge. His mouth was full of something. He turned and spat a pouch of black blood into the snow. He sat down and picked up some of his guts, trying to push them back inside, but they were slick and kept slipping through his fingers. He got some loops back inside but then the pretty woman crawled forward and tugged them out again. Equilibrium tilted madly. She started to suck on his intestine like it was a pixie stick.
“Those are mine,” he whimpered. “I need them.”
She said, “I’m sorry.” She didn’t stop sucking.
Schrutt was the sound Oddy’s stake made as it sunk into surfer-dude’s chest. The burning vampire made a queer noise and started to melt. His face softened and liquefied, running off his bones in gelatinous strings. His ribcage cracked open like a bomb-bay hatch, spilling warm guts onto Oddy’s lap. Then the bones themselves melted, sagging like overcooked noodles before turning into a thick white paste that ran down Oddy’s arms. It all happened very rapidly. Oddy stood. His parka and pants were soaked with the weight of molten vampire.
Zippo’s face was purple from the hydrostatic pressure. Blood forced its way from his nostrils and ears and the corners of his eyes as Turban bear-hugged him. The vampire gibbered in a foreign dialect, breath stinking of tabouli and rotting meat. He tore a strip of skin off Zippo’s throat and lapped at the gushing blood. Zippo hawked a blood-veined loogie into Turban’s face. Turban squeezed tighter. Bones cracked. Zippo’s body curved like a tightly-strung bow.
“Fuck you,” he said through gritted teeth. “Fu…uuuck YOU.”
Answer rose up behind Turban, bringing his stake around in a hard arc at eye level, burying three inches of Canadian maple in Turban’s ear. Turban’s eardrum punctured with the soggy decompression of a balloon popped underwater—thop! The vampire gasped. His grip on Zippo loosened. Answer tugged the stake loose. The tip dripped with gelid runners of brain and tissue.
Zippo brought the Berettas up into the gap now separating Turban’s body from his. He planted the barrels on either side of Turban’s jaw and fired two pancaking rounds. The slugs cut an “X” through the vampire’s skull, exploding from his burning headgear in a swirl of cinders. Zippo jammed the barrels further into the wounds, deeper into Turban’s face, twisting, firing, twisting, firing. Slugs blew out of Turban’s head every which way, muzzle flash lighting up the backs of his eyes like Japanese lanterns.
Answer stabbed the stake into Turban’s back. The vampire let go of Zippo, who fell to the ground, puking strenuously. Turban staggered in circles, clutching at the stake. Then he gave up and exploded like a balloon full of lasagna.
Crosshairs fell to his knees. “Please…I need those…” The rifle slipped from his fingers. Even missing her chin, he was struck by the woman’s beauty: smooth skin, nose tapering to a delicate point, eyes black as jewelry-display velvet. A small scar above her upper lip. Her mouth and chin and cheeks were smeared an oily red. How did she end up here? the sniper wondered. Bad luck, bad karma, circumstances beyond her control? He could not hate the woman. He sensed she was once a tender person, a compassionate woman who didn’t like what she’d become. Crosshairs’ hair was swept back, his prosthesis crack-glazed with ice. Tears rolled down his cheek to freeze on the underside of his chin in tiny clear globes.
“Please…”
She touched his face, finger tracing the seam where flesh met latex. Her fingertips left a
sickle of blood on his face. “How did this happen?” she asked, shyly, as a child. She traced a fingertip over his lips, painting them blood-red.
He whispered, “I can’t feel you.”
She whispered, “I can’t feel you, either.”
Crosshairs’s guts were a small red ball coiled between his legs. They were no longer part of him. None of it was. None of this was actually happening. This was all some movie he’d once seen.
She rested his head between her small, cold breasts. The edges of his vision were darkening. She unclasped the clips securing the prosthesis to his face. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I can’t help myself.”
“Please,” Crosshairs heard himself say.
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