Vic sipped from the can of Coke she’d bought him from the vending machine. It felt soooo good on his burned throat.
Two vampires came past him, shooting him a brief and uncertain glance as they bent toward the dead nurse. One of them cut his own forearm and moved to hold it out over the nurse’s slack lips.
Vic shook his head. “No. Leave her be.”
The vampire who had cut himself looked up surprised. “She’s meat for the master.”
“Leave her be!” Vic barked, lowering his towel.
The second vampire made a rude sound. “Ruger said—”
Vic’s one good eye was like a blue laser. “Ruger said? Ruger? Who the hell is Ruger to say shit?” The morphine was dulling the pain and giving him some of himself back. “Do you know who I am?”
The vampires said nothing.
“I’m the Man’s right hand, you pasty-faced shitbags. Ruger doesn’t tell you what to do—I do. And if you don’t like it, then why don’t you take it up with the Man?”
Terror blossomed in their faces.
Vic got up and walked over to the closest one and crowded him. Vic’s burned face was a more frightening spectacle than their pale masks, and in Vic’s eyes the vampires could imagine the face of the Man. They shrank back.
“This one stays dead,” Vic told them. “You two had better make sure no one else screws with her or I’ll bury you both down deep and tight and you’ll never be able to feed, never be able to rise. You’ll stay down there and rot—forever!”
The two vampires fled, leaving Vic in the ER waiting room with the dead nurse. There were other corpses there as well, but Vic didn’t give a damn about them. He only wanted the nurse left alone. She had been kind to him. He found the towel and pressed it against his face as he sat.
2
Susco and Gunn watched the slaughter from the stage, the two of them rooted to the boards as the vampires tore into the audience. Each of them wanted to believe that this was some kind of publicity stunt, some elaborate prank being played on them by Crow. But when they saw the reporter from Channel 3 go down with half his face torn away any chance they had for self-deception, and any hope there was of this being a joke, died right there.
There was sound and movement to their right and they turned to see a big man come lumbering onstage, moving with the slow, mindless shuffle of a zombie from one of their own films. This one was real, though, and his face was smeared with bright blood, his eyes not completely vacant, but rather filled with a feral and primitive predatory lust.
Gunn grabbed Susco and hauled him back as the big man swiped at them with black-taloned hands. Susco nearly tripped, but turned the stumble into a crouching run and bolted for stage left, with Gunn—who was taller—catching up with long-legged hustle.
“This way!” Susco yelled, pointing toward the emergency exit, but just as they reached it, the door flew open and two more of the shambling Dead Heads crowded in, moaning with hunger and reaching for them Susco ducked under their grab, but as he dodged out of the way the leading creature caught the shoulder of Gunn’s jacket. Susco kicked at the thing’s knee hard enough to buckle it. It fell and dragged Gunn down with it.
As Gunn fell he rolled onto his back and kicked up and caught the monster’s face, driving it back.
Susco saw a toolbox sitting open on a pair of sawhorses and he snatched a handful of tools and began throwing them as fast as he could; he hit the monster who was grappling with Gunn with a hammer and the other one with a big pair of channel locks. The blows did no damage but made the creature holding Gunn stagger, and that gave his prey the chance to hastily shrug out of his jacket and make a break for it. Susco picked up the whole toolbox and threw it, catching the monster in the face, knocking him backward into the orchestra pit.
Gun caught up to Susco and shoved him toward the far exit. They slammed into the crash bar—and rebounded. The door, against all fire regulations and common sense, was locked.
3
Val kept her gun trained on the door while Newton, Mike, and Jonatha overturned the heavy medical bed and used it to reinforce their barricade. There was still pounding on the door, but it was sporadic now, more a hit and run away teasing. That or the creatures had learned caution.
Weinstock, dressed now but standing in shoes that were filled with blood from the cuts on his feet, stood next to her.
“Crow will come,” he kept saying to her, “Crow will come.”
“I know,” Val said, wanting to believe it.
None of them were watching the window. The open, gaping, inviting window.
4
Terry ran through the streets faster than a galloping horse. At first he dodged from shadow to shadow, but as he changed he grew bolder. The crowds on the street were thinning as the tourists and residents of Pine Deep fled into houses or out into the country, or died. Many hundreds of them wandered around in a drug-induced haze or had become so intensely freaked that they ran screaming into the shadows—victims of Vic Wingate’s psychedelic-laced candy. Terry could smell the drugs in them, could smell how it flavored and distorted their sweat. He ignored them as he ran.
Around him the people of the town—of the town, no longer his town—died in the thousands. Corpses littered the ground or slumped over wrecked cars or drifted through the night with red smiling mouths. Fires burned everywhere, raging in some places with inferno fury. The air was thick with the mingled smells of smoke and blood.
No one tried to stop him as he ran. A few people saw him and ran screaming into the darkness, the very sight of him tearing apart what little sanity they still possessed after the explosions and the mass killings. One or two just stared at him with eyes that were filled with nothing, reflecting the emptiness of minds blown dark by too much horror.
The pale-faced ones shrank away, yielding to him, letting him pass.
Through the city streets he ran on two feet, even though those feet were not structured for the job, but if he kept his weight far forward, then the very speed at which he moved kept him balanced, and every once in a while he would tap the ground with his hands to steady himself. As the burning stores and houses thinned out and he broke out into the clearer, cleaner country air, he finally dropped to all fours and ran along at an amazing speed, his powerful muscles rippling and bunching under his tough new hide. Moonlight shone down on him, sparkling on the silvery tips of each of the hairs in the fur along his shoulders and back. His claws left crescent-shaped divots in the blacktop as he raced along the dark road.
Far overhead a flock of night birds had begun to follow him. They began riding the lofty thermals, but he was moving too fast for that, and so they dropped lower and began flapping their ragged wings to keep pace.
Mile after mile unfolded beneath him as he ran, and the manor houses gave way to the long stretches of farmland. Vast avenues of blighted corn and wheat rustled in the breeze; knobbed rows of diseased pumpkins watched as what was no longer Terry Wolfe passed on its way to Dark Hollow.
5
There was no Pine Deep Police Department during the Red Wave. By the time the first explosions had rocked the town, the only living members of the department were Gus Bernhardt, Ginny—who ran the switchboard—and Jim Polk.
Now it was just Polk. Well, maybe Tow-Truck Eddie, too, but Polk didn’t care much about him either way.
The volume of the screams was fading now as the tide turned from the hundreds with Ruger against the thousands in town for the Festival, to the thousands with Ruger hunting the hundreds who were trying to flee. The math was working out the way Vic had planned. All of the explosions had gone off. The bridges were gone, along with the power plant, the gas lines, the cable, phone lines, cell towers, all the police cars, and the TV and radio stations. All exactly according to plan, and it was getting a bit quieter in town—not that Sergeant Polk noticed. When it had all started he’d clamped earphones over his head and waited it out with the Grateful Dead screaming in his ears. He thought the irony would amuse him, but it just made his stomach feel worse.
He sat in Gus Bernhardt’s oversize swivel chair, crossed ankles propped on the chief’s desk, a nearly empty bottle of Wild Turkey cradled against his crotch. On the computer table that jutted out from the desk, Polk’s pistol sat gleaming in the light from a pair of candles. The gun was fully loaded with hollow points and ready to hand. He’d already replaced the two rounds he’d used on Ginny. Her plump body law sprawled under the desk, but some of her was splashed all over the front of the dispatcher’s console. As for Gus, the vampires had taken him in the first minute. The fat bastard probably fed a dozen of them.
Polk looked up at the clock. 7:33 P.M. Just a little over three hours since it all started.
He took a long pull on the Wild Turkey and stared out the windows at the havoc. Some people still ran by screaming, some in Halloween costumes, some in funeral dress with horror-movie faces. In the distance, against the darkness, he could see the glow of fire molded around the soft edges of the twisting column of smoke rising from the phone company building. The front window of the chief’s office had a long jagged crack that ran crookedly from upper left to lower right. Polk had watched in fascination as the original blasts had sent that crack skittering across the glass. He was amazed that it held, even when the power station blew. It still might go, he figured, since the wind was picking up outside. He knew that he should move, that he was dangerously close to the glass, but he just sat there and took another sip of bourbon.
Out of the corner of his eye he saw the doorknob jiggle, and he turned to watch Jennifer Whitelaw from the CVS down the block desperately trying to work the handle. There was a long line of blood trickling down from her scalp and it ran alongside of her nose. A few drops had splashed onto her blouse. She beat on the door and even kicked it. Polk watched as her face changed from hope to confusion to anger and then to a revelatory mask of accusation. Then she was gone. A white hand appeared out of the gloom and snatched her away. Two tiny droplets of blood had flown from her face as she was jerked back and they splattered against the glass. The splashes were head-high to the door and Polk thought they looked like red, condemning eyes.