“I probably don’t have to spell out the lesson to be learned from all of this, but I’ll do so anyway.”
The vampire’s voice boomed from his powerful chest, under the cathedral ceiling. Though not quite as tall as Paul, the thing seemed to look down at him with eyes that had yellowed with age, irises wide and shiny with exhaustion. He looked like a time-ravished old man who’d stayed up too long.
“We recognize the irrationality of killing you for what you’ve learned about us, so we must trust you to keep our dark secrets. And yet I trust no one, so hear me now: If Babylon is to be destroyed by you, there’s no place to hide that we won’t find you. We want you and your lovely family—your attractive young wife, Darby—I’m sure there’s a story there—and your beautiful son, Tuck—to accept our generous offer for your home. We want you to take your capital gain and move quickly and quietly. But talk to Police Chief Sandy rather than Savannah Easton to complete the transaction. I shouldn’t think the whole process would take more than three weeks. We’ll cut through the red tape.”
“Why not Savannah?” Paul asked quietly as his heart juddered in his chest.
The vampire pulled open the door to the night. “You know the answer to that, Paul.”
He stepped out, setting off an alarm of squealing rodents. Paul could see dozens of the plump night shadows slithering across the vampire’s feet, dragging long tails in their ponderous wake. Drake cocked one leg and launched a kick into the ribs of one. It cracked like a hardshelled nut, and Paul could hear its breath wheezing from ruined lungs.
“Damned things,” the vampire said with an absence of heat. He spread his arms to indicate the creatures just out of reach of his long legs. “When my ego is running dangerously high, Paul, I’ll glance down and see my most fervent disciples.” He issued a tired chuckle. “That always puts me in my place.”
Chapter Thirty-Five
“Did you—?”
“Yes,” she hissed, flying down the stairs. “My God, he must be insane. There’s got to be—”
“Shush,” he warned. “Don’t say anything. We don’t know what he can pick up or how he does it.”
“That’s right, Paul.” Darby kept coming until she stood before him. She looked up, her eyes raging with a fire that seemed as lethal as anything the vampire had shown him. “We don’t have any idea what that thing sees or hears. For all we know, he’s already aware of what we have in mind. And then what, Paul? What do we do if he knows?”
Paul checked the door. He’d locked it, of course, when the vampire and his daughter left, but he checked again. “I don’t know,” he said.
He felt utterly defeated by the night, by a century of tales.
“You don’t know.” She spoke in a slow, heavy whisper. “You don’t know, and yet you invited that thing into our home.” Her voice turned to a strained rasp, a shout without volume. “Then we have to stop, Paul. We can’t go on with it. You heard what happened to that other family.”
The windows at each wing of the entry door were without curtains, and now the glass looked too inviting, too black with intrusive night.
“I can’t,” he said finally. “I can’t just leave those people.”
He was trapped. Every thought, each plan was blocked by those two competing nests of vampires in which he still didn’t allow himself to fully believe, and by the fate of the people in the Sundown Motel. And, more than anything else, by his wife and child in the house with him.
“I can’t,” he said again. “I won’t leave them. We’re relatively safe compared to them. We have to go through with it.”
Darby continued to glare up at him, but at least she didn’t ask him if he was sure that they’d be okay.
So he didn’t have to lie.
Part Three
War
Against the walls of Babylon raise a signal, make strong the watch; post sentries, arrange ambushes!
Jeremiah 51,12
There will be weeping there, and gnashing of teeth…
Luke 13:28
Chapter Thirty-Six
Sunday night, all hell broke loose at the Sundown.
Later, after they’d buried the dead in a shallow grave, Todd followed D.B. through a door behind the counter in the motel office and into Mona Dexter’s living room.
The air was frosty as the Sundown’s only working window unit hummed contentedly behind a fluttering pair of drapes. In a bookcase filled with knick knacks and on tables and a fireplace mantle with no fireplace—just a basket of tall dried flowers where the flames should be—were framed photos of Mona and a man with a graying beard.
“You can take a shower, take your stuff off if you want,” she told him, her voice still tight.
Todd shook his head.
She took another look at his bloody clothing and said, “Well, no offense, but…” She led him to a small love seat she hastily covered with plastic dry cleaning bags. “The furniture’s kind of new.”
D.B. sat next to him, uncomfortably close. There was a much longer couch on the other side of the coffee table, but no plastic.
At the top of the “L,” before the room took a hard right toward a doorway that seemed to lead to the kitchen, was a round wooden table with spindly legs and four blue placemats. As he sat placidly in his plastic-covered seat, Todd wondered whether she’d been expecting three guests for her next meal or if there were four settings merely because there were four chairs.
“We want answers, Mona,” D.B. said. His demand began on a firm note, but ended with a slight hitch that betrayed his tamped down panic.
She’d changed into a robe, but her black hair was still damp from the shower she’d taken immediately following her part in the evening’s frenzy. She’d gotten all the blood out, it looked to Todd.
As he inspected her, she did the same to him. She took in his gouged shoulder, then his drained face. Her eyes were a warm shade of brown.
Todd couldn’t help thinking about her eyes. And about her indigo blue place settings and the chill of her air conditioner and the way D.B.’s arm hairs touched his and the sweaty, wrinkled feel of the plastic dry cleaning bags beneath them. He couldn’t seem to focus his thoughts on vastly more important issues, no matter how hard he tried.
And that was a good thing. There was much he hadn’t the strength to confront.
“Your shoulder,” she said.
He wet him mouth. Shrugged. “Rat got me.”
She nodded. “Sure. Lots of them. You got nibbled on your arm and wrist, too, I see. Damn things got most of the others, too. I passed around a first aid kit and disinfectant. But that one on your shoulder. I noticed it before you dressed it. It looks…different.”
“It was a rat.”
“Okay,” she agreed quickly. But her eyes kept returning to it.
Todd had spent the earlier part of the evening squatting in front of a fire and scowling at the tops of oaks and sycamores in the ravine below, miffed at D.B. for not stationing him by the pool. At least there he could dip his feet in the stinky water to cool off some of the night heat.
The smudgy flames were supposed to ward off vampires. Todd supposed they might do the trick since no vampire in his right mind would come close to their damn bonfires when the outside temperature was still running in the heatstroke zone even with the sun gone.
Jermaine said, “I dunno, Pete. Just ‘cuz movie vampires don’t like fire don’t mean the real ones react the same way.”
“Don’t mean they don’t.” Ponytail Pete piled on more dry pine needles and the fire crackled with fresh life and less smoke.
“Vampires,” Duke Gates snorted.
He’d never gone away as promised. Todd could only guess how Kathy Lee had gotten him to change his mind. Now the kid cradled his nine millimeter Mauser on his knee as he sat Indian-style, staring into the flames.
“I don’t like it here,” Tonya Whittock said in a voice as soft as a night breeze. She stared off into the black woods that dropped before them.
&n
bsp; “Ain’t nothing to worry about,” her husband reassured her, but none too loudly.
Todd thought about Joy and the girls, locked into a single motel room with orders to only open up to a knock that came in a prearranged code. He hadn’t even taken a room key with him, in case it should somehow fall into enemy hands.
Something rustled in the brush.
“Jesus,” Jermaine said, gasping. He whipped his Smith & Wesson .38 into a two-handed shooter’s stance aimed at the black trees.
As Todd and the others sprang away from the noise, Duke hiccuped with quiet laughter. “Look at y’all. Jermaine’s all ‘ain’t nothin’ to worry about,’ and now look at him. He’s gonna blow holes in the first tree branch that moves.”
“Shut up,” Todd snapped and, surprisingly, the kid did.
Night is never still. Todd heard twigs snap, creek water run and the breeze—he hoped to God it was the breeze—rustle the trees. Deer and other lightfooted animals skittered over deadfalls while bats flitted low overhead. Insects screamed for love and sparse traffic sounded invisibly through the town beyond the woods.
“What is it?” Jermaine whispered to Todd.
He had no idea what he was supposed to be listening for. The others, particularly the Whittocks from downtown Detroit, seemed to think of him as some West Virginia mountain man, able to identify insects by their mating calls and a mammal by its footprint. In reality, he’d spent his nights in bars and bowling alleys or at home vegging in front of the TV like everyone else. He hadn’t camped out since Boy Scouts, and hadn’t liked it then.
Now, everything he heard in that dark ravine was a threat.
He shuddered at the memory of Jim Zeebe in his garage, and those hungry cops outside his jail cell. He knew exactly how bad it could get out there.
“It’s nothing,” he told Jermaine, maybe lying. He pawed sweat from his face and said, “Musta been a squirrel or rodent or—”
“Rats are rodents,” Tonya whispered. “And according to Denver Dugan, rats hang out with vampires.”
“And he’s the expert,” Todd muttered.
“What’s that?” Ponytail Pete was pointing an unsteady finger at a spot in the woods below them.
The spot looked to Todd no less black that everything else down there. He peered intently at the dark and was about to chew Pete out for scaring everyone when he saw it.
“Eyes,” Tonya whimpered.
“I don’t know,” Todd said, barely breathing. He shivered, chilled by the shirt plastered to his skin.
Twin dots of light that flickered like tiny white-hot flames.
“It might be eyes,” he reluctantly agreed. Reflecting moonlight, maybe.
Jermaine whispered, “Another pair,” and this time Todd had no doubt. More white-hot eyes, and now the others were hoarsely pointing out pinpricks of light in several places in the ravine. The lights moving slowly, steadily uphill.
“Stay cool,” Todd said with a calm he could barely muster. “They’re too close-set and low to the ground to be human.”
“Yeah…rats,” Tonya whispered.
Todd said, “Stay close to the fire and they’ll leave us alone.”
Which was when he learned just how little he knew about the subject.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
The first thing he later recalled was the way Duke Gates scrabbled away, pushing off, crablike, elbows and feet in motion, moving him quickly away from the fire. Todd wanted to warn him to stay close, but all at once he had his own problems to deal with. Lots of them.
The first one landed softly in his lap, knocking him onto his back. The weight of its fat, hairy body sent dull pain settling into Todd’s stomach and groin. It smelled like the dead dog Todd had found in a ditch near his home when he was a kid, but it was the sharp little teeth gnashing at the clothing protecting the soft of his belly that disturbed him most.
He felt his bruised groin involuntarily retract, away from the teeth. He arched his back to keep his face out of peril as the rat scrambled up his torso. The hands he flung up in front of his face drew quick stabs of pain. Grabbing the attack rat in a loose grip, its teeth already pink with his blood, Todd flung it like a cow chip back down the ravine.
“Goddamn,” someone squealed in high-pitched male panic.
Shaky flashlight beams crisscrossed Todd’s vision in drunken patterns. A muffled scream came from Tonya as three of the things tried to shimmy up her legs. Jermaine was beating Ponytail Pete about the head and shoulders with a thick stick in an effort to dislodge a snarling rodent that had hold of an ear.
Todd felt heat close to his face as Duke Gates swung a crackling tree limb snatched from the flames. With a quick fanning motion he swooped it low over an invading platoon of bright-eyes rodents. One of the creatures sprouted flames and screamed in near-human agony as it dashed for cover.
Todd threw himself on Tonya. He grabbed a sleek rat that had nearly won the race to her face. It wiggled from his grasp, slashing the back of his wrist. He dropped it, poked at it with an off-balance sissy kick that couldn’t have done much damage, but sent it down the gully with a squeal of rage.
Todd could hear gunshots in the distance, the sounds coming from the front of the motel. He thought wildly, Gunshots? How do you fight rats in the dark with bullets? Then came the footsteps crashing through the underbrush, climbing up out of the ravine and coming for him.
Shadows. Large, bulky shadows. And the same guttural growls he’d heard when Judd Maxwell was taken down behind the post office building on Main View.
At least three human-shaped figures climbed out of the ravine. They made odd rasping sounds as they charged the flailing Sundowners.
Todd rolled away as one headed straight at him. The figure froze in a predatory crouch, waiting for Todd to come to a stop. As he did so, he saw Tonya Whittock kick at the campfire, scattering ashes and flaming branches right at the crouching shadow. The thing stumbled backwards, grunting, as sparks grabbed its socks and bare legs.
It was the most ludicrous sight of the evening, the arthritic old vampire in shorts, black socks and preppy boat shoes jerkily dancing to put out his hot foot.
Something exploded, roared, and a red spot grew in the center of the elderly attacker’s chest. Arms jerking, it crashed to the ground.
Todd rose shakily and watched more of the creatures scramble up and out of the ravine. He smelled burning flesh as campfire sparks took hold of another downed vampire’s leg. More gunshots sounded in the distance.
The Sundowners were facing attack from all sides.
Duke Gates’ Mauser roared again and again and again, three flat explosions that knocked a pair of charging vampires on their asses. One was flung back down the ravine while the other, a frail, white-haired woman, remained in a seated position, clutching her stomach and gasping for air.
A hand seized Todd’s ankle, and his muscles froze rigid. It was the old fart with the shorts, black socks and gaping chest wound, but the carnage didn’t look half as bad as before. On hands and knees, the night creature dragged Todd toward him with one unexpectedly strong arm. His mouth hung slack, displaying two rows of ragged teeth. From his throat came a growl of animal lust, a gurgle of pain and carrion desire.
Todd braced himself and lashed out to free his leg. The vampire’s grip was loosened, but his other arm whipped out to lock Todd’s ankle in a two-handed embrace. Then the first withered hand let go long enough to snatch a better grip just below Todd’s knee, and in this way the vampire pulled itself steadily toward him.
Ponytail Pete struck like a placekicker, his running shoe making solid contact with the old vampire’s face. Bones snapped, teeth flew, pink spittle sprayed the air from a suddenly slack mouth. The creature’s snarl turned to a pitiful gargle, Todd momentarily forgotten. He scuttled out of the way as the vampire’s hands explored its own ruined face.
Branches broke like rifle shots. The creature who’d been shot and launched into the ravine had laboriously regained altitude and now
its head could be seen over the top as it clutched, with a muddy fist, a maple sapling that bent under its weight. Jermaine jogged several steps toward it to swing a charred log that made excellent contact with the thing’s face. It toppled back into the ravine with a howl of injured fury.
The Mauser went off several more times, until the white-haired woman on the ground stopped twitching. Her bloody housedress covered her like a shroud, her spindly pale limbs grotesquely twisted beneath her.
Nothing else moved.
Todd heard the rhythmic, hydraulic hiss of machinery and realized it was him and the others, gulping air together in harsh, frantic gulps. Someone picked up a flashlight and its shaky yellow light outlined their terror. They bled from an assortment of tiny punctures. Clothing torn, faces streaked with sweat and dirt, eyes black with shock.
“They get you?” Jermaine gasped, bending to cradle his wife while his eyes never left the ravine.
Tonya shook her head, her spasming lungs choking on a more verbal reply.
“Bastards,” Duke croaked, head craning and body twisting to see everything everywhere. The Mauser turned with him, the hammer locked back and ready for another assault wave.
“You did good,” Todd muttered to him, not believing he’d said it.
“Damn right,” the kid replied.
“What about the others?” This came from Ponytail Pete, who held the flashlight.
They seemed to realize together that the distant gunfire had ended. Then the muffled cries broke the night. Shocked Sundowners calling for help, pleading for the safety of loved ones.
“I gotta get back,” Todd said. “Make sure my wife and kids—”
Someone screeched in a voice so high-pitched that at first he thought it was Tonya, but it wasn’t. It was one of the men, and he never did learn which one. Todd saw their eyes first—Jermaine and Tonya, Duke and Ponytail Pete—wide and horror-struck, and Todd’s world slowed so that he seemed to have all sorts of time to wonder what it was that had terrified them so.
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