999

by Al Sarrantonio

  GOOD FRIDAY

  F. Paul Wilson was paid more for his story in this hook than for his first two novels with Doubleday in the 1970s. I know because he told me so, and also because I was at Doubleday at the time, and might even, though I thankfully don’t remember, have ordered up the paltry checks for him.

  How things have changed! Doubleday no longer cranks out two cheap hardcover science fiction novels a month, presold to schools and libraries (ah, cheap in price and production though they were, almost everyone involved loved them, and the line produced such classics in the horror field alone as the Shadows series, the Whispers anthologies, and the World Fantasy Award books), and F. Paul Wilson now writes highly acclaimed medical thrillers such as Deep as the Marrow, as well as continuing to work in his first loves, the science fiction and horror fields (Legacies, a new Repairman Jack novel, appeared in 1997, fourteen years after the first one, The Tomb).

  For this book, he has produced something I very much wanted—a traditional vampire story.

  “The Holy Father says there are no such things as vampires,” Sister Bernadette Gileen said.

  Sister Carole Hanarty glanced up from the pile of chemistry tests on her lap—tests she might never be able to return to her sophomore students—and watched Bernadette as she drove through town, working the shift on the old Datsun like a long-haul trucker. Her dear friend and fellow Sister of Mercy was thin, almost painfully so, with large blue eyes and short red hair showing around the white band of her wimple. As she peered through the windshield, the light of the setting sun ruddied the clear, smooth skin of her round face.

  “If His Holiness said it, then we must believe it,” Sister Carole said. “But we haven’t heard anything from him in so long. I hope …”

  Bernadette turned toward her, eyes wide with alarm.

  “Oh, you wouldn’t be thinking anything’s happened to His Holiness now, would you, Carole?” she said, the lilt of her native Ireland elbowing its way into her voice. “They wouldn’t dare!”

  Carole was momentarily at a loss as to what to say, so she gazed out the side window at the budding trees sliding past. The sidewalks of this little Jersey Shore town were empty, and hardly any other cars on the road. She and Bernadette had had to try three grocery stores before finding one with anything to sell. Between the hoarders and delayed or canceled shipments, food was getting scarce.

  Everybody sensed it. How did that saying go? By pricking in my thumbs, something wicked this way comes …

  Or something like that.

  She rubbed her cold hands together and thought about Bernadette, younger than she by five years—only twenty-six—with such a good mind, such a clear thinker in so many ways. But her faith was almost childlike.

  She’d come to the convent at St. Anthony’s two years ago, and the two of them had established instant rapport. They shared so much. Not just a common Irish heritage, but a certain isolation as well. Carole’s parents had died years ago, and Bernadette’s were back on the Old Sod. So they became sisters in a sense that went beyond their sisterhood in the order. Carole was the big sister, Bernadette the little one. They prayed together, laughed together, walked together. They took over the convent kitchen and did all the food shopping together. Carole could only hope that she had enriched Bernadette’s life half as much as the younger woman had enriched hers.

  Bernadette was such an innocent. She seemed to assume that since the Pope was infallible when he spoke on matters of faith or morals he somehow must be invincible too.

  Carole hadn’t told Bernadette, but she’d decided not to believe the Pope on the matter of the undead. After all, their existence was not a matter of faith or morals. Either they existed or they didn’t. And all the news out of Eastern Europe last fall had left little doubt that vampires were real.

  And that they were on the march.

  Somehow they had got themselves organized. Not only did they exist, but more of them had been hiding in Eastern Europe than even the most superstitious peasant could have imagined. And when the communist bloc crumbled, when all the former client states and Russia were in disarray, grabbing for land, slaughtering in the name of nation and race and religion, the vampires took advantage of the power vacuum and struck.

  They struck high, they struck low, and before the rest of the world could react, they controlled all Eastern Europe.

  If they had merely killed, they might have been containable. But because each kill was a conversion, their numbers increased in a geometric progression. Sister Carole understood geometric progressions better than most. Hadn’t she spent years demonstrating them to her chemistry class by dropping a seed crystal into a beaker of supersaturated solution? That one crystal became two, which became four, which became eight, which became sixteen, and so on. You could watch the lattices forming, slowly at first, then bridging through the solution with increasing speed until the liquid contents of the beaker became a solid mass of crystals.

  That was how it had gone in Eastern Europe, then spreading into Russia and into Western Europe.

  The vampires became unstoppable.

  All of Europe had been silent for months. Officially, at least. But a couple of the students at St. Anthony’s High who had shortwave radios had told Carole of faint transmissions filtering through the transatlantic night recounting ghastly horrors all across Europe under vampire rule.

  But the Pope had declared there were no vampires. He’d said it, but shortly thereafter he and the Vatican had fallen silent along with the rest of Europe.

  Washington had played down the immediate threat, saying the Atlantic Ocean formed a natural barrier against the undead. Europe was quarantined. America was safe.

  Then came reports, disputed at first, and still officially denied, of vampires in New York City. Most of the New York TV and radio stations had stopped transmitting last week. And now …

  “You can’t really believe vampires are coming into New Jersey, can you?” Bernadette said. “I mean, that is, if there were such things.”

  “It is hard to believe, isn’t it?” Carole said, hiding a smile. “Especially since no one comes to Jersey unless they have to.”

  “Oh, don’t you be having on with me now. This is serious.”

  Bernadette was right. It was serious. “Well, it fits the pattern my students have heard from Europe.”

  “But dear God, ‘tis Holy Week! ‘Tis Good Friday, it is! How could they dare?”

  “It’s the perfect time, if you think about it. There will be no mass said until the first Easter Mass on Sunday morning. What other time of the year is daily mass suspended?”

  Bernadette shook her head. “None.”

  “Exactly.” Carole looked down at her cold hands and felt the chill crawl all the way up her arms.

  The car suddenly lurched to a halt and she heard Bernadette cry out, “Dear Jesus! They’re already here!”

  Half a dozen black-clad forms clustered on the corner ahead, staring at them.

  “Got to get out of here!” Bernadette said, and hit the gas.

  The old car coughed and died.

  “Oh, no!” Bernadette wailed, frantically pumping the gas pedal and turning the key as the dark forms glided toward them. “No!”

  “Easy, dear,” Carole said, laying a gentle hand on her arm. “It’s all right. They’re just kids.”

  Perhaps “kids” was not entirely correct. Two males and four females who looked to be in their late teens and early twenties, but carried any number of adult lifetimes behind their heavily made-up eyes. Grinning, leering, they gathered around the car, four on Bernadette’s side and two on Carole’s. Sallow faces made paler by a layer of white powder, kohl-crusted eyelids, and black lipstick. Black fingernails, rings in their ears and eyebrows and nostrils, chrome studs piercing cheeks and hps. Their hair ranged the color spectrum, from dead white through burgundy to crankcase black. Bare hairless chests on the boys under their leather jackets, almost-bare chests on the girls in their black push-up bras and bust
iers. Boots of shiny leather or vinyl, fishnet stockings, layer upon layer of lace, and everything black, black, black.

  “Hey, look!” one of the boys said. A spiked leather collar girded his throat, acne lumps bulged under his whiteface. “Nuns!”

  “Penguins!” someone else said.

  Apparently this was deemed hilarious. The six of them screamed with laughter.

  We’re not penguins, Carole thought. She hadn’t worn a full habit in years. Only the headpiece.

  “Shit, are they gonna be in for a surprise tomorrow morning!” said a buxom girl wearing a silk top hat.

  Another roar of laughter by all except one. A tall slim girl with three large black tears tattooed down one cheek, and blond roots peeking from under her black-dyed hair, hung back, looking uncomfortable. Carole stared at her. Something familiar there …

  She rolled down her window. “Mary Margaret? Mary Margaret Flanagan, is that you?”

  More laughter. “ ‘Mary Margaret’?” someone cried. “That’s Wicky!”

  The girl stepped forward and looked Carole in the eye. “Yes, sister. That used to be my name. But I’m not Mary Margaret anymore.”

  “I can see that.”

  She remembered Mary Margaret. A sweet girl, extremely bright, but so quiet. A voracious reader who never seemed to fit in with the rest of the kids. Her grades plummeted as a junior. She never returned for her senior year. When Carole had called her parents, she was told that Mary Margaret had left home. She’d been unable to learn anything more.

  “You’ve changed a bit since I last saw you. What is it—three years now?”

  “You talk about change?” said the top-hatted girl, sticking her face in the window. “Wait’ll tonight. Then you’ll really see her change!” She brayed a laugh that revealed a chromed stud in her tongue.

  “Butt out, Carmilla!” Mary Margaret said.

  Carmilla ignored her. “They’re coming tonight, you know. The Lords of the Night will be arriving after sunset, and that’ll spell the death of your world and the birth of ours. We will present ourselves to them, we will bare our throats and let them drain us, and then we’ll join them. Then we will rule the night with them!”

  It sounded like a canned speech, one she must have delivered time and again to her black-clad troupe.

  Carole looked past Carmilla to Mary Margaret. “Is that what you believe? Is that what you really want?”

  The girl shrugged her high thin shoulders. “Beats anything else I got going.”

  Finally the old Datsun shuddered to life. Carole heard Bernadette working the shift. She touched her arm and said, “Wait. Just one more moment, please.”

  She was about to speak to Mary Margaret when Carmilla jabbed her finger at Carole’s face, shouting.

  “Then you bitches and the candy-ass god you whore for will be fucking extinct!”

  With a surprising show of strength, Mary Margaret yanked Carmilla away from the window.

  “Better go, Sister Carole,” Mary Margaret said.

  The Datsun started to move.

  “What the fuck’s with you, Wicky?” Carole heard Carmilla scream as the car eased away from the dark cluster. “Getting religion or somethin’? Should we start callin’ you ‘Sister Mary Margaret’ now?”

  “She was one of the few people who was ever straight with me,” Mary Margaret said. “So fuck off, Carmilla.”

  The car had traveled too far to hear more.

  “What awful creatures they were!” Bernadette said, staring out the window in Carole’s room. She hadn’t been able to stop talking about the incident on the street. “Almost my age, they were, and such horrible language!”

  Her convent room was little more than a ten-by-ten-foot plaster box with cracks in the walls and the latest coat of paint beginning to flake off the ancient embossed tin ceiling. She had one window, a crucifix, a dresser and mirror, a worktable and chair, a bed, and a nightstand as furnishings. Not much, but she gladly called it home. She took her vow of poverty seriously.

  “Perhaps we should pray for them.”

  “They need more than prayer, I’d think. Believe me you, they’re heading for a bad end.” Bernadette removed the oversized rosary she wore looped around her neck, gathering the beads and its attached crucifix in her hand. “Maybe we could offer them some crosses for protection?”

  Carole couldn’t resist a smile. “That’s a sweet thought, Bern, but I don’t think they’re looking for protection.”

  “Sure, and lookit after what I’m saying,” Bernadette said, her own smile rueful. “No, of course they wouldn’t.”

  “But we’ll pray for them,” Carole said.

  Bernadette dropped into a chair, stayed there for no more than a heartbeat, then was up again, moving about, pacing the confines of Carole’s room. She couldn’t seem to sit still. She wandered out into the hall and came back almost immediately, rubbing her hands together as if washing them.

  “It’s so quiet,” she said. “So empty.”

  “I certainly hope so,” Carole said. “We’re the only two who are supposed to be here.”

  The little convent was half empty even when all its residents were present. And now, with St. Anthony’s School closed for the coming week, the rest of the nuns had gone home to spend Easter Week with brothers and sisters and parents. Even those who might have stayed around the convent in past years had heard the rumors that the undead might be moving this way, so they’d scattered south and west. Carole’s only living relative was a brother who lived in California, and he hadn’t invited her; even if he had, she couldn’t afford to fly there and back to Jersey just for Easter. Bernadette hadn’t heard from her family in Ireland for months.

  So that left just the two of them to hold the fort, as it were.

  Carole wasn’t afraid. She knew they’d be safe here at St. Anthony’s. The convent was part of a complex consisting of the church itself, the rectory, the grammar school and high school buildings, and the sturdy old, two-story rooming house that was now the convent. She and Bernadette had taken second-floor rooms, leaving the first floor to the older nuns.

  Not really afraid, although she wished there were more people left in the complex than just Bernadette, herself, and Father Palmeri.

  “I don’t understand Father Palmeri,” Bernadette said. “Locking up the church and keeping his parishioners from making the stations of the cross on Good Friday. Who’s ever heard of such a thing, I ask you? I just don’t understand it.”

  Carole thought she understood. She suspected that Father Alberto Palmeri was afraid. Sometime this morning he’d locked up the rectory, barred the door to St. Anthony’s, and hidden himself in the church basement.

  God forgive her, but to Sister Carole’s mind, Father Palmeri was a coward.

  “Oh, I do wish he’d open the church, just for a little while,” Bernadette said. “I need to be in there, Carole. I need it.”

  Carole knew how Bern felt. Who had said religion was an opiate of the people? Marx? Whoever it was, he hadn’t been completely wrong. For Carole, sitting in the cool, peaceful quiet beneath St. Anthony’s gothic arches, praying, meditating, and feeling the presence of the Lord were like a daily dose of an addictive drug. A dose she and Bern had been denied today. Bern’s withdrawal pangs seemed worse than Carole’s.

  The younger nun paused as she passed the window, then pointed down to the street.

  “And now who in God’s name would they be?”

  Carole rose and stepped to the window. Passing on the street below was a cavalcade of shiny new cars—Mercedes Benzes, BMWs, Jaguars, Lincolns, Cadillacs—all with New York plates, all cruising from the direction of the parkway.

  The sight of them in the dusk tightened a knot in Carole’s stomach. The lupine faces she spied through the windows looked brutish, and the way they drove their gleaming luxury cars down the center line … as if they owned the road.

  A Cadillac convertible with its top down passed below, carrying four scruffy men. The driver
wore a cowboy hat, the two in the back sat atop the rear seat, drinking beer. When Carole saw one of them glance up and look their way, she tugged on Bern’s sleeve.

  “Stand back! Don’t let them see you!”

  “Why not? Who are they?”

  “I’m not sure, but I’ve heard of bands of men who do the vampires’ dirty work during the daytime, who’ve traded their souls for the promise of immortality later on, and for … other things now.”

  “Sure and you’re joking, Carole!”

  Carole shook her head. “I wish I were.”

  “Oh, dear God, and now the sun’s down.” She turned frightened blue eyes toward Carole. “Do you think maybe we should … ?”

  “Lock up? Most certainly. I know what His Holiness said about there not being any such thing as vampires, but maybe he’s changed his mind since then and just can’t get word to us.”

  “Sure and you’re probably right. You close these and I’ll check down the hall.” She hurried out, her voice trailing behind her. “Oh, I do wish Father Palmeri hadn’t locked the church. I’d dearly love to say a few prayers there.”

  Sister Carole glanced out the window again. The fancy new cars were gone, but rumbling in their wake was a convoy of trucks—big, eighteen-wheel semis, lumbering down the center line. What were they for? What did they carry? What were they delivering to town?

  Suddenly a dog began to bark, and then another, and more and more until it seemed as if every dog in town was giving voice.

  To fight the unease rising within her like a flood tide, Sister Carole concentrated on the simple manual tasks of closing and locking her window and drawing the curtains.

  But the dread remained, a sick, cold certainty that the world was falling into darkness, that the creeping hem of shadow had reached her corner of the globe, and that without some miracle, without some direct intervention by a wrathful God, the coming night hours would wreak an irrevocable change on her life.

  She began to pray for that miracle.

  * * *

  The two remaining sisters decided to keep the convent of St. Anthony’s dark tonight.