Despite his earlier blues Vic felt pretty sporty and he couldn’t prevent nasty little smiles from popping onto his lips every few minutes as rolled through the forest toward the Man’s house.
At one point in the trip he stopped on the crest of the last large hill before the road dropped down into the valley beyond which was Dark Hollow. Vic took a sheet of onionskin from his shirt pocket, unfolded and smoothed it out, and then used a drop of spit to stick it to the dashboard. He consulted the row of numbers and checked them against the screen display on the laptop that lay on the front seat next to him. Most of his stuff was on timer, but the timers were inactive until he sent a master signal, which he did now by typing in a password and hitting Enter. The computer whirred for a moment and then returned a message: Completed. A clock appeared in a pop-up window and began counting down.
Vic took his cell phone from his shirt pocket and made the last call he would ever make on that phone. Even though the cellular relay tower would be the last to go because some of Ruger’s team needed their phones to coordinate troop movements, Vic had no one else to call. Lois was with them now. Vic didn’t have any friends left among the living.
It rang three times and then Ruger answered.
“You ready, Sport?” Vic asked.
“Yeah, as soon as your wife’s done blowing me.” Vic heard Lois burst out laughing in the background.
“Yeah, that joke never gets old, asshole,” Vic said. “The clock’s ticking.”
“Don’t worry,” Vic said, still chuckling, “we’re ready.”
Vic clicked off the phone, his good mood suddenly soured. His fist closed so tightly around the cell phone that his knuckles popped and the case cracked. “Yeah, well, enjoy it while you can, asshole,” he muttered, “’cause this town ain’t the only thing that’s going to die today.”
He cranked down the window and threw the phone into the weeds, then threw the truck back in gear and ground down the road toward the Man’s house.
2
Sarah Wolfe did not know her husband was awake though he’d been conscious for almost ten minutes now.
It had taken most of that time for him to realize where he was and what had happened. At first he had been frightened by the strangeness of it all: the intrusion of plastic tubing into his nostrils, the feeling of confinement around his limbs, the restraint of suspension straps, the pounding ache in his head, the small, alien beeps of machines. Then it came to him. He was in a hospital. He was hurt and he was in a hospital.
That realization began the process of looking inside to try and understand why he was in a hospital. Was it a car accident? A heart attack? Then…all at once the memories came to him like a computer coming online. Images flashed onto a movie screen in his head: the face he saw in the mirror, the face that had changed each day, become more horrific, more alien each day. The voice of his little sister, first on the phone, then beside him. In the elevator at the hospital. On the street, in the shadows of his office. In his own home. Mandy’s little bloodstained face, so sad, so frightened, but also so hard and angry. Her words, her desperate pleas for him to kill himself. Then Sarah’s face and Sarah’s pleas that he see a doctor, a psychiatrist. Sarah again, staring at him with pity as he stood amid the broken fragments of mirror in their bathroom. Sarah recoiling in horror as he began to change from man to animal.
He felt the horror surge up in him as he remembered that awful moment when the thing in the mirror had taken control of his own flesh, his very soul. He remembered feeling with the thing’s senses, thinking with its instincts, aching with its lusts, hungering with its passions. For those brief moments he had seen Sarah—his beloved Sarah—as prey. As meat.
There was the memory of how he had torn control back from the thing, back to himself, and the utter horror of knowing that this control was a weak and fragile thing; holding it was like holding an oiled snake. Then there was the memory of the bedroom window, of glass and cold morning air and the pavement leaping up at him. After that it was just darkness and darker dreams.
He lay there in the bed, feeling his body, trying to understand why he was still alive. Why hadn’t the fall killed him? More important, why did he not feel like he had even taken that fall? His head hurt, sure, but nothing else did. He searched his nerve endings, trying to feel for muscles and shattered bones under the two forearm casts, but his limbs felt strong and whole. His skin itched in some places, and felt tight in others, but nothing hurt besides his head. How had he not been hurt? How had he not been killed, not have been at least crippled?
Terry slowly opened his eyes. The room was bright with fluorescent light, though the daylight from outside seemed weak. Sarah sat in an armchair reading a copy of the Pine Deep Evening Standard and Times. It was the early edition. Terry was amazed that he could read the print on the paper from what seemed to be at least twelve feet away. He stared at the blocks of black print and realized that he could read every single word as if the newspaper were only inches away. He could not see Sarah’s face behind the paper, but he could smell her perfume. It seemed strong, far too strong, as if she’d bathed in it. Her sweat seemed strong, too. Terry frowned.
Outside in the hallway someone chewed noisily on the plastic cap of a pen. The sound was crashingly loud and it annoyed him, but worse were the grunts of someone defecating in a bathroom farther down the hall. It smelled, too.
Fear wrestled with wonder as he realized that he could hear everything, smell everything. Not just strong odors, but subtle ones, distinct and sorted in his nostrils, identified and labeled by some strange new part of his brain. As much as the strangeness of it terrified him, the naturalness of it felt so deliciously right.
He turned his head toward the wall and there was Mandy. Terry almost screamed, but he didn’t. For some reason he did not want Sarah to know he was awake. Mandy stood there in her tattered green dress, with her wan face streaked with dark lacerations and bright blood.
“I know you tried,” she said sadly. “I know you tried to do the right thing. But you waited too long.”
Terry did not say a word.
“Now it’s all too late.” She looked over to the window beyond which purple-black clouds poised like fists above the skyline of the town. “It’s going to be awful, Terry. So awful. I tried to help, but I messed it all up and now they’re going to win. I’m sorry, Terry.”
Terry did not trust himself to speak. He didn’t know who “they” were, and he didn’t much care. He was tired of ghosts and their cryptic messages, tired of madness and possession and curses. All he cared about was Sarah, and he knew that he would never be able to touch her again.
Mandy moved closer to him. “I love you, Terry. I never wanted to hurt you, you know that, don’t you?” She searched his face for a long time, but he never let her see his feelings, and she slumped with an even greater sadness. “He’s taken everything from us, Terry. And even though he’s won, he won’t let it end, won’t let it be over for us.” She touched his face and he flinched. “There are so many ghosts in this place, Terry. We’re lonely, and we can’t rest. Not while he lives, and he’ll live forever.”
Tears fell like rain from her blue eyes. “I thought God would save us. I thought that’s why I was able to come back, because God wanted me to help you stop the curse. That was stupid.” Her voice was crushingly bitter. “What does God care?”
Terry felt a tear form in the corner of his own eye.
Mandy seemed paler, less substantial as if she was fading away like morning mist. “I know that you don’t want to do this, Terry, but you won’t be able to help yourself. You’re a monster now, Terry. His monster. He owns you, Terry, and he’ll make you do terrible things. It’s not your fault. No one is strong enough to stand up to him. I wanted to help, but I can’t even do that anymore. There’s not enough of me left.” She bent forward and kissed him. “I love you, Terry,” she said again and then faded completely from his sight.
Terry almost cried out as she vanished. The single tear rolled down across his cheek. Sarah rustled the newspaper as she opened to a new page. Outside the room the world ticked another second toward the Red Wave; inside his body Terry could feel the beast clawing to be unloosed.
3
“Come on, come on,” she muttered into the phone, urging Crow to pick up. It rang once and then went right to voice mail. “Shit, still no signal!”
Over the last couple of hours Mike had told them the whole story as he knew it. The whole story, including the parts with Tow-Truck Eddie—which none of them could explain.
“Eddie’s a religious nut,” Weinstock observed, “but even Crow always said he was a stand-up guy. He’s about the last person on earth I’d pick as someone likely to side with Ruger.”
“He’s not,” Mike said. “Not exactly. The Bone Man told me that for years now Griswold has been talking to him in his thoughts. Maybe it’s a kind of telepathy, but Griswold has been pretending to be the voice of God, and he’s basically brainwashed the guy into thinking I’m the Antichrist. He calls me the Beast.”
“Beast of the Apocalypse, sure,” agreed Jonatha. “That makes a kind of twisted sense. Think about it—if this tow-truck guy is really a devout believer, then he is, by that definition, neither corrupt nor evil. That means that if he were to kill Mike then it would have the opposite effect of, say, Vic or Ruger killing him.”
Newton looked from her to Mike. “Which is what?”
She shrugged. “Mike would just be dead. None of the qualities he has as a dhampyr would be infused into the local landscape.”
Weinstock grunted. “So…he’s a sick, twisted, murderous bastard but a good guy sick, twisted and murderous bastard?”
“More or less, yes.” She held up an emphatic finger. “That doesn’t make him any less dangerous. If he’s been this badly brainwashed, then he’s on a par with a suicide bomber…a total fanatic.”