Or what he’d took to be a cigarette glow.
“Aw, shit,” he said softly. Then louder as the full impact hit home. “Aw, shit!”
Chapter Fifty-Eight
Paul’s cry alerted Carl just as the red eyes charged him.
The mattress bounced as Freddie plopped next to him at the window, shouting “What? What? What is it?”
Paul zeroed in with the flashlight beam again, picking up Carl flailing away, beating the rat off with a tree branch and muttering curses. Off the spotlight, Paul could see more red eyes climbing out of the ravine and charging, maybe a half dozen pairs or more.
“Get inside,” Freddie screamed into the night.
Paul grabbed a radio from the desk, stabbed a button and blurted, “They’re coming from the woods.”
He wasn’t sure anyone was monitoring the call or even if he’d used the right channel, but it would have to do.
Loud thrashing from below. Again he aimed his flashlight beam on the night scene out that back window. Carl was holding his own against the one savage rodent and the others hadn’t overtaken him yet. From the tree line where the land dropped off, he saw bushes bent as shadowy shapes much heavier than rats thrashed upward. Paul’s beam caught a white hand gripping a patch of weeds at the edge of the ravine, and a human body lifting itself topside.
“To your right!” Freddie helplessly warned the Sundowner in the open.+
Carl stopped beating at the vicious rat long enough to take in the larger shape crawling to its feet. The ember at the end of Carl’s tightly clenched cigarette grew brighter as he pulled a beer bottle toward his face and lit the cloth fuse. From a quick windup, he flung the homemade bomb. It hit the vampire too soon, before the flame had discovered the fumes. It fizzled and died in the now steady rain.
The vampire had been caught by surprise, though, and he threw himself over the ravine’s edge as the bottle bounced helplessly off his elbow.
“He’ll be back,” Paul muttered.
Three more human shapes bound from the ravine as the door swung open behind them and got backstopped by the wall. Paul and Freddie wheeled to confront whatever was coming at them, a voice saying, “Easy, easy. It’s me.”
Big Denver Dugan stood in the doorway with his rifle on his hip and a look on his face like he’d seen it all before. He crossed the room, grabbed the bed the two men were perched on, and flung it aside. Freddie and Paul toppled to the floor in an indignant heap and crawled to join the big man at the window.
Denver, who had his rifle barrel poked out and the scope up to his eye, got the bolt action flying. Squeezed off a muffled bark of a round. Expelled a shell with a flick of the bolt and fired twice more, knocking down all three charging vampires.
“Holy shit,” Freddie muttered, obviously impressed.
Two more shadowy figures sprang topside. Paul tracked them with his flashlight beam for the benefit of the Sundowner struggling on the ground. While kicking at rats slashing at his ankles, Carl swung a tree limb at one of the charging vampires, thumping him in the ribs and sending him sprawling.
The second one was smaller than the first. The Craven boy Drake had told him about, Paul realized as the young night creature dodged a blow and snapped the air with his teeth.
Carl backed up, still swinging. Denver elbowed himself more room at the window and began steadily pinging lead into the rain. Mud divots flew.
“Noooo,” a voice screamed, a bloodcurdling sound.
And now a teenage girl—Patty Craven, Paul decided—charged to the aid of her kid brother.
“Keerist,” Denver said softly.
He targeted the girl, but missed. She charged like a wide receiver, running patterns, her dark hair flying wet behind her. She grabbed her brother just as one of Denver’s .22s found its mark.
The Craven siblings fell. Paul winced at the sight of the two bullet-torn bodies, but that was before they rolled and rose to groggy seated positions.
Three more shadows disentangled from the vegetation at the ravine’s edge.
The boy and his sister regained their footing.
“Hit them in the heart,” Paul advised.
“Try it sometime,” Denver replied as he twisted, pushed and pulled the bolt and squeezed off two more rounds. The second, time, all that could be heard was a metallic clack.
The old guy cursed. He tossed aside the long-barreled weapon and backed up to the middle of the motel room as he pawed at his clothing.
“Hope I got a cigarette,” he said before finding one.
Paul swung his flashlight at every shadow that moved out there. Carl was swinging away with his tree stump, screaming “Someone do something” as he made a slow retreat to one of the lower floor windows.
He’d raised a screen beforehand for just such an emergency escape, but Paul saw that he’d never be able to wiggle through the small opening and into the relative safety of a room without exposing his back.
One bite was all it took.
Downed shadows on the field were clambering to their feet, and more climbed out of the ravine. One of the newcomers had flowing blond hair that instantly identified him at Jason Penney.
The air rushed out of Paul’s lungs with the force of a hiccup as he was suddenly knocked aside. Freddie, next to him, sprawled in similar upended fashion as Denver cleared even more room at the window.
“Take this, you bastards,” he shouted before dropping the flaming bottle into the night.
Paul got back to the window just in time to see it shatter, splashing gasoline all over the Craven boy and giving Carl time to duck into the first-floor room.
The young vampire looked up, his eyes gleaming with white-hot hunger.
No explosion. No eruption of fire. Not like in the movies at all.
“Son of a bitch,” said Denver.
He filled his lungs with cigarette smoke, turning half the remaining butt to ember. He removed it from between his lips, stared at it for half a second, then flung it out the window.
Patty Craven screamed even louder than her little brother as his drenched clothing erupted in flames. The boy ran, a fireball, a beautiful streaking meteor of light and anguish.
Denver already had another smoke fired up. He used it to light another pillowcase fuse. He tossed the bottle farther out the window than the first one. It missed the roving shadow, but smashed on the ground in front of its feet, lighting the vampire’s ankles. The flames grew as the creature made every effort to outrun it.
Freddie grabbed Denver’s cigarette from his mouth and jammed it between his own lips. It crackled as he inhaled, and the ember grew. Beginner’s luck, his first flaming missile taking out two of the night creatures.
Jason Penney’s face turned skyward, contorted in agony and fury as his clothing blackened and drew tight around him. The vampire fell and rolled. Still smoldering in the rain, he crawled to the ravine lip and let gravity pull him from view.
But not before throwing Paul a glare of rage and pain that made him shudder.
“Listen,” said Freddie.
All three froze in position. Paul could hear Carl slamming the window and stomping around in the room directly beneath them. Under that sequence of sounds, he heard the deep rumble of an engine of impressive size. He felt it in his feet as the motel trembled. They heard D.B. throwing out orders, his voice without its usual tight control.
“Everyone back, dammit,” he shouted. “Jermaine, pick ‘em off!”
“Stay here,” Paul ordered the others before bolting from the room.
“Sweet Jesus,” he heard Jermaine cry out.
He was crouched behind a metal balcony rail, his Smith & Wesson pointed at the night sky. The gun in his hand looked forgotten, useless.
Which it was, Paul admitted. Might as well have been a magnet-tipped dart against the monstrous vehicle roaring straight at the cars barricading the top of the driveway.
Paul fell back into the motel room he’d vacated just as he heard the other two crying out and flin
ging themselves to the floor. What buzzed past his face sounded like a hornet before it whacked a wall and buried itself into plaster that turned instantly to dust. The flashlight fell and threw wild, rolling patterns of light and shadow at the wall and ceiling.
In the next moment, more bullets zinged through the air and punched holes in the plaster, shattered the mirror and turned the cheap wall art to splinters. Outside, metal squealed and crashed against metal, glass broke and voices carried.
As the flashlight continued its wild movement, Paul caught sight of both scared men, gasping in pain and confusion, both covered in blood.
“Freddie, Denver. Talk to me,” Paul said.
While shouting in their faces, he tried ignoring the other sounds, the barking of gunfire and the whump of gasoline bombs he could feel in his heart. Men screaming orders and squealing in pain from the front of the motel. Trying not to lose focus, he grabbed fist holds of clothing and dragged both men away from the window and propped them against a safer wall.
If there was such a thing.
All the while, he shouted at them, demanded that they speak to him, tell him who was hit and where.
“Will you shut the fuck up?” a voice sputtered.
Freddie coughed like a man pulled almost too late from deep water. He wiped a smear of blood from his fingers onto the front of his shirt. Examining it curiously, he said, “Must be Denver’s. I’m okay, I think.”
“Bastards shot us,” Denver growled, stating the obvious. His eyelids fluttered, but couldn’t stay open. “Shit,” he said, a hand roving to the dark blood trickling down the side of his face. “I think they blew my brains out.”
Paul following the weak, yellow glow to his flashlight, which had toppled and found cover under the bed. He spilled light on Denver’s face. There was blood in his hair, on one cheek, and on his shoulder, and it dripped down one massive arm.
“You’re okay,” he said finally.
“No I’m not,” Denver argued. He pawed his face and held up a finger covered with bloody shards and grit. “Bone and brain matter,” he said resignedly.
“Window glass,” said Paul. “You got hit somewhere by flying window glass. Where does it hurt?”
The wounded man let fly with an impressive string of oaths, ending in “It hurts goddamn everywhere!”
“Freddie, stay with him,” Paul ordered.
“You think of fangs and cloaks and bats and hypnotic stare-downs,” said Freddie. “You don’t think of guns. What’s going on out there, Paul?”
“That’s what I’m going to find out.”
He crawled out the door and onto the balcony. A hand grabbed his ankle and he yelped in panic.
“It’s me, it’s me,” said Joy Dunbar, crawling up behind him. “Where’s Todd? I woke up and he was gone.”
“Stay here,” he said, pointing her toward the room he’d just exited.
With Freddie and Denver in there, it was as safe as anywhere. But she ignored him.
I’ve got to find him,” she said.
Paul tried to grab her, but she broke from his grasp and slithered down the balcony stairs on her ass.
As he peered over the rail, the rain beating the back of his head felt like yet another enemy. His first reaction to what he saw out there was to pray very loud and very fast and very earnestly for assistance he knew would never arrive in time.
Chapter Fifty-Nine
He found Marty McConlon at the end of his nose.
The mist had turned to a drizzle with hints of a hard rain to follow, but it didn’t dampen Todd’s new scent sense. Rocks, soil, pine needles, moss and even the smallest of crawlies all assailed him with their overpoweringly distinct odors. Todd had discovered a sensation as delightfully alien as the ability to see through walls.
The most appealing scent was that of Marty McConlon’s warm blood. Todd found the pudgy officer standing in the open driver’s door of his cruiser at the cul de sac that Buck Avenue became as it sideswiped the woods. The cop looked frozen in the act of stepping into the squad car, distracted by the thrashing of Todd making his way out of the underbrush.
“Ernie, that you?”
Todd skidded to a stop some thirty feet from the cop. He could clearly see McConlon squinting his way in the night rain.
Five running steps and he’d be there, but McConlon might still have time to throw himself into the car and lock the door. Then there was that fleshy hand of his wrapped around the black grip of the nine in his holster.
“Ernie?” Again, sharper this time.
“Uh huh,” Todd grunted.
He could hear frantic voices in the distance, gunshots, squealing tires and heavy-metal collision. Todd took a couple unhurried steps to the vehicle.
“Hurry up, asshole, it’s happening.” The cop was looking away now, his concentration on the unseen action to the west.
Todd grinned as the cop’s hand slid from the butt of his gun. He moved in, taking his time now, slow but steady. Two steps to go and he felt a beastly growl working its way up his throat as he bared his teeth.
He looked fat and happy, the cop who’d pulled him over and brought him and his family into this town, but his instincts were razor sharp. The gun was out of the holster even before Todd broke skin.
The bullet punched him in the belly, sent him reeling, crashing to the pavement. It sounded, even this close, less like a gunpowder explosion and more like the irritating noise made in popping a brown paper bag. Felt nothing like it was supposed to either, Todd observed as the rain pelted his upturned face.
How’d he end up horizontal like that? The clouds against the black sky looked unexpectedly white and shapely. He stared at them and at the rain shooting straight at him at an interesting angle. He’d never been under a rainstorm before. Not like this, looking up.
It wasn’t supposed to hurt. The bullet, not the rain. He’d heard enough stories about people not even knowing they’d been shot and having to learn about it from others. He knew a guy who’d been shot in the head while sleeping, a stray bullet coming through his bedroom window. He’d only figured it out the next day in the emergency room where he went with a headache that just wouldn’t quit.
That’s not how it was for him, though.
It burned like hell, and right away. Right there in the pit of his stomach. He couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t think. Gut shot. The worst kind. His belly burning like that, bleeding internally. How come he felt so cold? Colder than the rain on his face. His teeth chattered as his limbs went numb and heavy like frostbite.
Chapter Sixty
A flicker of motion in the corner of his vision. The cop who’d quick-drawn his holstered gun like no one’s business. From his position, sprawled on the soft ground, Todd saw a pair of wet, shiny black shoes coming his way, Marty McConlon taking his time about it. Still cautious, but now close enough for Todd to hear his raspy breathing.
“Dunbar,” the cop said. Said it to himself. Hard to say if the word registered recognition or surprise.
Todd’s eyes flew open, his hand shot out and grabbed an ankle above one of those wet, shiny black shoes. It was only as he was starting to bring the cop down that he noticed McConlon hadn’t re-holstered the nine. Its barrel pointed at Todd’s face. He let go of the ankle with one hand and blocked his face with a forearm as the gun boomed. Much closer this time, much louder.
In his mind, anyway, Todd could actually see the 110-grain bullet leaving the polymer barrel, passing all the way through forearm flesh, smashing bones and playing havoc with tough tendons and muscle tissue before continuing into his face, where it shattered jawbone and teeth easy as a bowling ball rolling into glass figurines.
Every nerve cell registered agony. He made a bubbly hitch of a sound nearly lost in the blood and bone grit and tooth enamel filling his windpipe. He retched, a powerful constriction of the muscles of his throat and mouth that burbled from him, not nearly as loud in the air as it was in his mind. His brain launched multiple electrical impulse reports, no
ne of them good.
His body twisted involuntarily when two hundred pounds of law enforcement officer landed on him, the end result of Todd’s having pulled at his ankle as he had. Somehow, his pain-clenched hands found by accident the cop’s throat.
The gun was still in play, a critically important consideration after the first two jolts to the system. He let one hand slip free of McConlon’s throat to grab the cop’s gun hand so that the third shot, when it came, hit the wet sky somewhere. Todd pulled the shooter by his throat, brought the cop’s face closer to his own, reveling in his bleat of terror.
Todd’s mouth opened, his teeth anticipating.
“Noooo,” McConlon screamed, the plea shifting abruptly into a moist gurgle.
Todd’s mind blanked as the warm fluid washed over him, the gurgles turning to airless little gasps.
It was quickly over. The vampire Dunbar’s shirt clung to him, heavy with blood and rain. His jaw throbbed. He felt and could partially see gunpowder-charred slices of his own skin hanging from his face. He reached again to tear at flesh already growing cold, but was interrupted by a crash of static. Todd rolled to one side, ready to greet new danger with a snarl of red teeth.
He saw only the fallen radio, a duplicate of the one he’d left with the earthly remains of cop Ernie.
“We got footholds on the front and back, McConlon. Where the hell are your boys?” the voice roughly demanded.
He knew that voice.
Todd stared dully at the radio before breaking into a pain-wracked grin. God, it hurt. He picked up the radio, his palms so slick he could barely keep a grip. He thumbed a button and held it close to his mouth, making his voice muffled and indistinct.
“Where you at, Zeebe?” He took his thumb off the button and waited out the static. He’d forgotten to say “Over,” and wondered if that misstep would trip him up.
“McConlon? Goddamn it, where the hell you think I am? I’m at the foot of the ravine in back of the motel. We’re taking potshots and gasoline bombs down here. Your people gonna back us up, or what?”
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