Congregations of the Dead

by Moore, James A. ; Rutledge, Charles R. ;

  “Did a bit of fencing myself back in the day.” The voice was cold, passionless. The stride of the thing said it was confident that it had the upper hand.

  Carl wasn’t sure it wasn’t right.

  It dropped back into a proper stance, and swept the blade into position. “En garde.”

  Carl didn’t have a sword any more.

  That didn’t stop the thing coming at him. It smiled as it came forward a second time.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Carter Decamp had miscalculated. He had thought the half-ruined buildings of the old granite quarry a possible resting place for Cotton and his vampires, but instead they had been sleeping in the dark waters of the quarry itself. As a result, when the creatures rose and started up the slope toward where Griffin and Price waited, Decamp was on the far side of the quarry. That was bad.

  It wasn’t that Decamp didn’t have faith in the two men. For a couple of guys who had only recently been introduced to the reality of the supernatural they had done amazingly well. The fact that they had survived their encounter with the Moon-Eyes proved them capable. But the Moon-Eyes, at least the majority of them, could be killed with conventional weapons.

  Griffin and Price were gunmen. They knew their way around ordnance, maybe even better than Decamp. Here though, they were out of their depth. Griffin perhaps less than Price because he spent a lot of time training in various martial arts. However, though he was good with hand weapons, he didn’t know how to deal with the nosferatu, and that was half the battle.

  Decamp had seen several run-ins with the undead and they still amazed him sometimes. He still didn’t entirely understand them. No one did. He had spent many hours in discussion with his various colleagues about just what the things were.

  ‘Supernatural’ didn’t really explain it. Some considered them spirits and others thought they were reanimated corpses – not like zombies, but some other form of living dead.

  One occult specialist thought the vampires were a sort of plague. A disease that was transferred by the mixing of a vampire’s blood with that of their victim, but only taking effect after the victim was dead, and going dormant after a while if the victim survived. It was an interesting theory, but it didn’t explain the various folklore elements about what vampires could and could not do or what would and would not kill them. If the vampires were some form of ambulatory virus, then why would iron hurt them but not wood? Why could they do some things that were physically impossible? A virus couldn’t generate the extra matter necessary for the teeth to expand and it couldn’t explain the vampire’s strength, which was beyond anything human muscle mass was capable of.

  Decamp crossed the ground as quickly as he could, skirting the edge of the black water, being careful not to slip on the loose rock. It wouldn’t do to break his ankle at this point. He had just reached the other side of the lake when he caught a flash of movement out of the corner of his eye. Decamp spun away, drawing his sword from the sheath on his back as he moved. A dark blur shot past him, narrowly missing him.

  The blur morphed into the figure of a tall man with straw-colored hair and burning red eyes. “You’re the one that killed Deacon Street at the funeral,” the vampire said.

  “He didn’t give me much choice,” said Decamp.

  “We all have a choice, my friend. You’ve made the wrong one, siding with Satan and reveling in your powers of witchcraft.”

  Decamp said, “As opposed to your choice, which is killing innocent people in the name of your faith.”

  “I do the Lord’s work and His plans are not for the mind of man.”

  “That’s handy isn’t it? Anything you can’t explain is one of those mysterious ways the Lord works in.”

  The vampire looked pained. “Will you add blasphemy to your sins?”

  “Yes, Deacon,” Decamp said, smiling. “I rather think I will.” It had the desired effect. The Deacon leaped forward, again becoming a blur of motion. Decamp had learned the hard way that there was little point in attacking a master vampire. Their speed and reaction time allowed them to evade most attacks with ease. The trick was to get them off balance. To catch them in motion. Not that this was by any means an easy thing to do, but Decamp had been a gold medalist Olympic fencer, and his reflexes, though slowed a bit now that he was in his fifties, were still far better than average. And he had other advantages. As the Deacon leaped, Decamp sidestepped and tossed a handful of powder into the air. He spoke a word in a long-forgotten language. The powder burst into flame as the Deacon passed through it.

  The master vampire fell to the ground, screeching and trying to put out the flames. Decamp watched for an opening, and when the vampire rolled to his back Decamp drove his silver edged sword through the Deacon’s heart. The vampire was still screaming as he fell to dust. Decamp didn’t waste time admiring his work. He turned and started up the slope where he could now see two flares burning. He hoped Griffin and Price were still alive.

  * * *

  The vampire was too close for Griffin to make an effective swing of the ax. There was a long point on the top of the weapon, and he shifted his grip on the haft so he could stab with it like a spear. The point penetrated deeply enough to reach the creature’s heart and it expired with a whispering scream.

  Griffin looked back to where he had last seen Carl and cursed. One of the master vampires, the ones Fry had called Deacons, stood there and he had somehow gotten hold of Carl’s sword. Griffin started cutting his way toward his friend, letting his reflexes take over so that he slashed and cut anything that came across his path. He almost wanted to laugh at his situation. He was trained with virtually every modern piece of death-dealing equipment known, and here he was, chopping his way through a bunch of rotting vampires like someone escaped from an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie.

  He sent the head of a short, fat vampire rolling and then hurled himself toward the Deacon with the sword. The iron blade rang on Griffin’s ax, sending shock waves down his arms and knocking the weapon from his grasp. Griffin snatched the iron spike from his belt and lunged. The Deacon backhanded him and Griffin went rolling across the ground. He came to rest near the water’s edge, and managed to get to hands and knees, but his head was spinning and he was sure at least a couple of ribs were cracked or broken.

  The Deacon smiled, showing his long teeth. “So may all your enemies perish, oh Lord.”

  “Judges, chapter five, verse thirty one,” said Carter Decamp, stepping into the flickering crimson light thrown by the flares.

  “The devil may quote the scriptures, witch,” said the Deacon. “I see you bear a sword. As you can see, the Lord has seen fit to give me an instrument of justice as well.”

  “That blade was blessed by a god, but not yours,” Decamp said.

  “There is no other God!”

  “There’s something else you should know about that sword too, Deacon. It’s made of iron. Cold iron. Ancient iron, forged before the memory of man. Something that a creature such as you should never, ever touch.”

  Griffin heard Decamp mutter some words in what sounded like the same language Charon had used at the funeral. The sword began to glow with a baleful light, and the Deacon started to scream. His scream was cut short as his body went rigid, as if he were caught in the grip of some paralyzing seizure. As Griffin watched, fine lines began to appear all over the vampire’s body like cracks in a volcano. Light glared through those cracks as if the Deacon were burning up from within. The master vampire toppled over and his body, instead of crumbling to dust like the others, shattered as it struck the ground.

  Decamp turned toward Carl and said, “Are you all right, Sheriff?”

  The next instant Decamp seemed to disappear. A moment later Griffin saw him tumbling across the rocky ground as if he had been thrown by some lunatic giant. Then Griffin saw the third Deacon. He was an elegant looking man with iron-gray hair and beard and h
e was standing where Decamp had been only seconds before. Griffin looked back at Decamp. He wasn’t moving and some of the remaining half dozen or so rotting vampires were headed his way. Griffin tried to get to his feet, stumbled, and fell. He began trying to crawl up the slope, but Carl and Decamp might as well have been a thousand miles away.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Carl leaped for the sword that had fallen to the ground. His head was still ringing, his body still felt stiff.

  The dead man in front of him was a different one, but the math was the same: he was about to get his ass handed to him in a very big way.

  “No.” The Deacon caught him by the throat and lifted him from the ground with the greatest of ease. Last time he’d been to the doctor’s office and gotten himself weighed, Carl was a bit over two hundred pounds. He would never, ever be a slender man – he was solid. So he found it a bit annoying that the bastard picked him up with one hand and carried him like he was maybe about as heavy as a house cat.

  He’d have made comments to that effect, but the bastard with the impossible strength was choking off his air supply. “Kkk. Hllg.” His argument did not seem to sway the Deacon’s feelings on the matter of strangling him.

  “You and your filthy friends are abominations in the eyes of the Lord. You could have sought forgiveness, but instead you have killed the faithful. It is time for you to die.” The vampire’s fingers were squeezing and Carl grabbed hold of the man’s hand with both of his and tried to break the grip. It wasn’t going to happen. Instead of trying to pry a finger back he decided to go with physics and hope that helped. He still had his iron spike. It was currently pinned against the bastard’s hand by Carl’s fingers. He let go with one hand as his vision started to gray a bit around the edges and he drove the spike into the Deacon’s hand at the spot where his thumb joined the wrist. It was the only spot he could really hit and even then he felt the iron scraping his own flesh as it punched into the Deacon.

  He couldn’t hope to break the grip, but he could aim for a single digit. In this case the one that held him in place. The Deacon hissed in pain and tried to squeeze harder. Carl grunted and pushed with both hands, working the iron spike with as much of his weight as he could manage.

  He got lucky. The Deacon’s thumb broke before the bastard could break his neck. Carl fell on his ass as the vampire screamed. That was about all the luck he figured he was good for, and the iron spike was stuck properly in the monster’s wounded hand.

  The Deacon expressed his disapproval by trying to punt Carl’s head across the quarry. Carl blocked with his leg and let out a scream of his own as the meat of his leg was nearly pulped by the impact. Christ, but his leg was howling in pain.

  On the bad news front, he wasn’t sure if he could stand. On the good news front the nice monster kicked him twenty feet with the one blow. That was far enough to let him go for another weapon.

  Now and then you just have to improvise. Carl figured there was a damned good chance he was going to get stuck in a clinch with one of the dead things, and to that end he’d done what he could with what he had lying around the house. The high tension copper wire wasn’t iron, but it was strong, and the two dowels he’d wrapped it around were good pieces of oak. Hopefully strong enough to do the job.

  The Deacon whipped his hand around and screamed a second time as the iron spike broke away from his hand and sailed into the air. An instant later he was grabbing Carl again, both of his hands wrapping into Carl’s shirt as he was hauled into the air. As the Deacon brought Carl up, Carl moved his arms over the vampire’s head in a mockery of a close embrace. It might have looked to anyone close by as if he were trying to put his hands around the vampire’s neck to pull him in for a kiss.

  Instead of trying for a little love, he wrapped the makeshift garrote around the elegant man’s neck and crossed the dowels from one hand to the other: left dowel to right hand, right dowel to left.

  The Deacon was leaning in to take a very large bite of Carl’s neck, or maybe his face. It was hard to tell as the mouth opened wider and wider and the teeth grew impossibly long.

  Carl yanked his arms in opposite directions as hard as he could and felt the copper wire saw into the Deacon’s neck.

  The vampire’s face pulled back a bit, his expression growing puzzled for a moment before he realized what was going on. The wire cut deep, would surely have drawn blood from a living man, but that wasn’t enough and Carl knew it. The hands on his shirt released and the Deacon reached for Carl’s hands, but as he did, Carl raised his legs and pushed his feet against the vampire’s chest.

  Had the Deacon needed to breathe, the fight would have been over, but the vampire had no need of air. Powerful fingers scrabbled, trying to get hold of Carl’s wrists but Carl moved as best he could, slipping the attempted grip with a twist of his hands. And he pushed with all of the strength in his legs, shoving off again from the Deacon’s torso. The wire cut deeper, and the Deacon let out a strangled screech as his vocal chords got hacked apart by the copper wire.

  Carl let out a screech too, his arms felt like they were getting torn from their sockets and his battered leg was threatening to buckle. Carl Price worked out regularly and could leg press something in the neighborhood of twelve hundred pounds. The dead man’s neck should have given out, should have been severed with ease, but the damned thing was tough, and it was fighting back as best it could.

  It might well have killed him, but physics once again proved his savior. The Deacon reacted instinctively and tried to push Carl away. Both of those impossibly strong arms braced against Carl’s chest and the Deacon shoved him backward.

  Carl let out a scream as several muscles in his left hand stretched further than they should have, and the dowel ripped free from his grip. It was just possible he’d broken a few fingers, too, but he really couldn’t tell. All he knew was that it hurt, goddamn it, it hurt a lot!

  He screamed hard, and he sailed back as the force of the Deacon’s brutal shove knocked him away from the undead thing. And the wire that had wrapped around the vampire’s neck finished its task, and cut through the vertebrae, beheading the Deacon.

  Carl soared. He didn’t mean to, and he surely couldn’t control it, but oh, my, he flew through the air and hit the ground hard, rolling, scraping and finally coming to a stop with his left leg in the water of the quarry and his ass in the air.

  He looked at the Deacon’s body as it fell to its knees and began to decompose. He wanted to get up, to help Wade or even just to cheer the fact that he had survived the fucking nightmare trying to eat his face. Instead he faded into darkness for a moment.

  Only a moment.

  Just a second to rest. That was all he needed. Just a moment to catch his breath.

  Damn. Everything hurt.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  The important thing now was not to pass out. Griffin was tumbling toward the water. Damn, the Deacons were treating them all like rag dolls. No, make that had been treating them that way. Carl had managed to take out the third Deacon. Griffin hoped he had survived the effort. He would check on him as soon as he could, but there were still five of the rotting vampires in action and they were closing on Carter Decamp, who still lay where he had been thrown.

  Griffin took a slow breath, feeling his damaged ribs grinding. He pushed the pain aside, the way he had been taught, and got to his feet. For a moment the world swam in his view, but he managed not to keel over. He spotted the ax and limped toward it. Grunting, he stooped and retrieved the weapon. It seemed to weigh about twice as much as it had earlier in the evening.

  He stumbled forward, hefting the ax. One of the vampires was far too close to Decamp, and Griffin knew he wasn’t moving fast enough to head him off. At the same moment he realized this he also spotted Decamp’s sword a few feet away. Griffin took a deep, painful breath, lifted the ax above his head, and with an explosive grunt of effort, hurled it
end over end. It struck the vampire in the back of the head, cleaving the skull and sending the creature sprawling. Even as he released the ax, Griffin caught up Decamp’s sword and used it to run through another of the creatures who had its back to Griffin.

  Two down, but the other three had abandoned Decamp and were heading Griffin’s way. He angled to the right of the closest of the trio, trying not to let them surround him. But his movements were hampered by pain and exhaustion.

  The closest vampire, a thin balding man, stopped moving forward and stared at Griffin. He said, “You’re Wade Griffin, aren’t you?”

  Griffin nodded. The other two vampires had stopped, perhaps wondering how their companion knew him.

  “I’m Ron Phelps. You used to keep the other football players from beating me senseless when we were in high school.”

  Griffin had thought the guy looked familiar. He said, “I don’t suppose you’d care to repay the favor.” Anything to buy a little time.

  “I would, Wade. I truly would. But the reverend says you’re evil. A tool of the devil.”

  Griffin shook his head. “Reverend Cotton thinks anyone who isn’t one of his flock is evil, Ron.” The other two vampires were getting restless. Griffin could see them looking at each other, wondering if they should just run right over their comrade.

  “He’s not like that. Reverend Cotton is a good man. He wants to do the Lord’s will.”

  Griffin said, “It’s his interpretation of the Lord’s will I have issues with.” Behind the three vampires, Carter Decamp was sitting up and looking directly at Griffin. Griffin was careful not to let his expression change.

  “I’m sorry, Wade,” said Ron. “I really am. You were good to me when everyone else treated me like shit, but Reverend Cotton, he saved my soul.”

  “Saved? Ron, you’re a fucking vampire.”