Horton made a beeline for the first victim he could find, which turned out to be Luke Lind. The unfortunate son of a bitch never even saw the vampire that killed him. One instant Lind was gaping at Boom Catterson’s dead body in horror; the next Horton had him facedown on the viscous floor, his powerful fingers prying open the man’s back like a pair of shutters. Lind’s high-pitched scream devolved into a wet moan. Horton pulled apart Lind’s rib cage and buried his face in Lind’s exposed lungs. Soon, the only thing still moving on Lind’s prostrate body was his right foot, which twitched arrhythmically while Horton fed.
Shots sounded near the foyer. Cody glanced that way and through a shattered window saw that Angela had culled at least two more men with the rifle, while another two or three were now returning fire. Her tenebrous form jolted as the slugs tore into her, but she did not go down. More men joined the assault on the vampire woman serving as their jailer, but before they could surge too near the door, another shape—Price, Cody realized—came knifing out of the shadows to take them down. Cody saw Price knock two of their heads together and watched him take a chomp out of another man’s neck before he returned his attention to the stage.
Where Dragomir Seneslav stood glowering at Cody.
Cody immediately went for Boom Catterson’s gun—not because he knew exactly where it had fallen and certainly not because he’d gotten over his fear of the massive Steve Penders, who was still rampaging in the vicinity of where the gun had fallen. If anything, Cody was far more terrified of the giant than he’d ever been. But Penders’s back was to him—he’d abandoned the severed tongue and was now holding aloft a bellowing, white-haired man who was pretty good-sized himself—and Cody knew if he delayed any longer Dragomir would pounce and begin taking his sadistic vengeance.
In the damnably paltry light he scrabbled under the chairs, praying he’d happen upon the gun. His fingers encountered cigarette butts, spilled ashtrays. He upset a half-full spittoon with an elbow. And despite the lukewarm slime that coated his fingers and made him want to retch, he kept at it, crawling around like a blind toddler and hoping against hope he’d locate the gun before Dragon or Penders found him.
His eyes caught a bluish glint a few feet ahead, right beside someone’s dead body. Oh my God, he thought. There it is!
Cody scrambled forward and had actually slapped his fingers over the handle of Boom Catterson’s Walker when a bootheel stomped down on the back of his hand. Excruciating pain exploded up his wrist, then grew even more severe as the boot made cruel, grinding arcs on his flesh. Whoever owned the boot was putting his whole weight on Cody’s hand, mashing it slowly like it was a cigarette that refused to extinguish. Mouth drawn open in an agonized grimace, Cody pawed at the blue-jeaned leg, exerted what force he could to extricate his hand or at least alleviate the awful pressure on it. Jesus God, he could feel the skin splitting now, the top layer of his hand tearing like wrapping paper.
Grimacing, Cody glanced at the dead body to his right and spotted a huge knife case strapped to the corpse’s ankle. Desperately, Cody reached down and clawed at the case until he got the snap open. It didn’t occur to him until the moment his fingers closed on the handle of the Bowie knife that it wasn’t Penders or Dragomir brutalizing his poor, ruined hand. Neither of them wore jeans.
Cody unsheathed the huge Bowie knife, got a good grip.
And pumped it into the meat of the man’s thigh.
The tormentor immediately stumbled away, the abrupt freeing of Cody’s mutilated hand for some reason accentuating the exquisite pain he felt. Cody howled, grasped the injured hand and gave only a fleeting thought to the Bowie knife he’d left embedded in the thigh of the man who’d hurt him. But of course he knew who it was.
Knew it even before Slim Keeley yanked out the knife, stared venomously at Cody and said, “I’m gonna cut your eyes out with this.”
Cody went for the gun. This time he grasped the Walker before Slim could stop him. Cody dove sideways. The Bowie knife whistled down at him and missed his face by mere inches. Cody raised the gun and squeezed the trigger, but Slim had gotten the knife hand up and deflected Cody’s wrist with it. It was awkward shooting with his left hand to begin with, and the fact that Slim had thrown off his aim made it impossible to hit his target. The shot went wild, pinged against the wall, and then Slim was lunging at him with the knife, crowding him as much as he could so Cody couldn’t get off another shot. Slim swung the knife up and would have gutted him had Cody not staggered backward. Cody’s shoulders bumped something large and smelly and yielding, and when he whirled, expecting to see Penders’s transformed face, he was relieved to find he’d slammed into Grizzly instead. The giant paid Cody little mind.
Slim attacked again, his body better balanced this time. But Cody had recovered too, and as an orange shaft of lamplight strobed over Slim’s contorted face, Cody decided what to do. Rather than firing the Walker straight into Slim Keeley’s haughty forehead, Cody tore down at him with a vicious diagonal slash and watched with grim satisfaction as the hard steel barrel dug a ragged trench from Slim’s eyebrow to the bridge of his nose, the eyeball in between popping open with a wet splash. The knife stroke that Keeley had begun ended with the knife tumbling forgotten between them. Cody made a mental note to retrieve it later. If he had time.
Slim clamped a hand over his mutilated eye and wailed like a sow birthing a large brood. The tall deputy reeled toward a wooden pillar but got his legs tangled with an overturned chair and pitched forward onto his belly. Cody followed, cold all over now, and kicked Slim as hard as he could in the ass. Slim flopped over, holding his butt with one hand and his hemorrhaging eye with the other.
“Please don’t hurt me no more,” he was gibbering. “Please don’t—”
“You were quite a big man earlier, weren’t you?” Cody growled. “Blindsiding me in front of Marguerite? Kicking me when I couldn’t defend myself?” Cody knelt next to him, holding the gun well away in case Slim should take it into his head to grab for it. “You live through this, you ain’t gonna be getting much pussy now, are you?”
Raw hope bloomed in the side of Slim’s face that hadn’t been disfigured. “You mean you’re gonna let me go? I’m sorry for what I did to you. I’m sorry for—”
Cody grasped the man’s chin and squeezed. “You’re a coward, Slim. You abused a good woman and got away with it because you’re buddies with that dickweed Bittner, but—” Cody broke off as Slim’s good eye shifted to something behind Cody.
Cody whirled, aiming the gun at whatever it was that had snuck up on him, and in the moment before his Walker fired he saw it was Dragomir Seneslav. The first slug caught the shirtless vampire in the belly. The second got him in the side just below the right nipple. Cody squeezed the trigger a third time but only heard a dull click, and it didn’t matter anyway because neither of the shots had done a damn bit of good.
What did help was that Cody had instinctively fallen to his right as he fired with his left hand. The heavy chair leg Dragomir had raised above his head and brought down with the force of a sledgehammer missed Cody and crushed Slim Keeley’s awestruck face. It staved in Keeley’s skull and made what was left of his head look like a pile of ham someone had doused with ketchup. Some of Slim’s blood spattered Cody’s face, but Cody hardly noticed. He was too busy escaping, crab-walking awkwardly away from Dragomir, whose transmuted vampire face suddenly reminded Cody very much of some fairy tale dragon’s. The creature stalking him wasn’t breathing fire, but dear God, Dragon didn’t need to. The fire was in his lambent orange eyes and in his toothy leer. Cody toppled a chair, got his body wedged between a pair of unyielding objects and finally risked turning his head and losing sight of Dragomir a moment so he could navigate the bottleneck.
The moment he did, he knew he’d made a mistake. Rather than allowing him to get away, Dragomir snagged one of Cody’s pant legs, lifted him a foot off the ground and heaved him bodily toward the stage. The room swirled like some hellish kaleidoscope fo
r an endless instant. Then, just when Cody thought he’d land on the stage and survive mostly unscathed, the side of his head and upper body hammered the edge of the stage and he collapsed, insensate, to the floor.
Groggily, Cody peered up and spied, though the world was doing a slow, sickening leftward lean, Adam Price squeezing a man’s head until the man’s eyes trickled blood. The body twitched in its death throes, but the head that Price clutched remained motionless as Price licked the rivulets of blood from the man’s cheeks. Price inclined his face to the ceiling, savoring the taste of the blood with a look of orgasmic joy. Jesus Christ, Cody thought, unable to look away. Just like a man sampling wine at a fancy restaurant.
Cody began to turn away, but movement in his periphery drew his attention back to Price. The king vampire had discarded his victim and had snatched the lone waitress from her hiding place under a table. The poor girl shrieked in terror. Cody’s vision was gauzy from his collision with the stage, but he saw clearly enough the way the woman’s yowls nettled Price, as well as the way, a moment later, Price wrenched her head sideways to silence her forever. Price bit into the limp girl’s neck and began to suck.
Cody snapped alert as something clumped down on the floor beside him. It was an arm, but whose arm it was he had no idea. It had been severed so high on the victim’s body that a good part of the shoulder comprised the sloppy, ragged end that, mercifully, lay farthest from Cody’s face. The fingers, only inches away, twitched accusatorily at him.
Cody forced himself to sit up. His head was a hornet’s nest of buzzing, droning agony, but it was preferable to being dead. He knew if he didn’t figure things out quickly, a headache would be the least of his worries.
His bleary eyes swept the crowd. He made out Dragomir and his elongated face watching him motionlessly from fifteen feet away. To Dragomir’s immediate right, Horton had his face buried in the shoulder of a dead man. Cody shivered. At least I know where the arm came from now.
Gunshots exploded from the area near the front door. Cody glanced that way and saw that a desperate band of survivors had marshaled their forces and were pouring lead into Angela and Penders, who were barring egress. Angela was streaming blood, not only from the continual gunshots but from the glass she must have plunged through to get inside the bar. Her jaw was rimed with slick, shiny blood, and Cody understood with faint revelation that she had entered not only to prevent the patrons from escaping, but to get at them as well. Confirming this was a pair of lifeless bodies heaped near where she stood, her body jagging with the impact of gunfire.
When Cody’s gaze fastened again on Dragomir, he was stunned to see the vampire was no longer leering at him in triumph, was instead joining Horton and Price in a sneak attack on the fifteen or so men who were advancing on Penders and Angela. Penders was roaring with pained ferocity, and Angela had lowered to one knee. Both their bodies were leaking from a score of places, Penders’s immense gut a glimmering sack of black and red.
Rather than joining the battle in the foyer, Sheriff Bobby Bittner was retreating toward the bar. The sheriff’s Colt hung forgotten at his side, on the man’s slack face a look of craven stupefaction. Bittner gaped at the trio of vampires approaching the band of survivors, many of whom had stopped to reload. Bittner was close enough to warn them, to at least give the men a chance before they were blindsided by Price and his comrades. But Bittner clearly had no intention of helping anyone but himself.
Cody glanced around, his keen eyes strafing the floor for a weapon. He found it on the hip of a decapitated man. Opening the holster, Cody saw right away that luck had been with him. A double-action Smith & Wesson .38. Damn near new. Cody checked it, found it fully loaded. The poor bastard who owned the thing had gotten his head ripped off without firing a single shot.
The gun at his side, Cody rose and started to run, but it wasn’t toward the gang of shooters or the vampires he hurried.
It was toward Sheriff Bittner.
Chapter Seventeen
Bittner had reached the corner of the bar before he noticed Cody bearing down on him. The sheriff raised his Colt, but he did it gradually, almost like a man in a dream. Cody kicked the gun from his hand, reared back and let loose with a punch to the man’s stubbly jaw that made Cody happy to be alive. Bittner half spun, collided drunkenly with the brass rail and stumbled sideways into the pooled darkness behind the bar.
Cody followed him, the sheriff now clambering away, Bittner’s ratty eyes large and shiny in the murk. Cody had a moment of acute paranoia that Dragomir or one of the others would fall on him while his back was turned, but then he remembered Dmitri Seneslav the night before, the man’s eyes widening in sudden distress. No, they’d not bother him over here, he realized. Not a single one of the devils had ventured near the bar during the entire melee. And they wouldn’t either. Not only because they were engaged in a battle with a gun-toting mob, but because they were afraid of something. If Cody was right…
Bittner lay on his back, his hands outstretched beseechingly. The man’s lips trembled as if he were freezing to death, but no words escaped them. At least, nothing coherent.
“Don’t move,” Cody commanded. Moving low, he hurried over to the door leading to the kitchen, but it was just as he’d figured, locked tight. He could use the .38 to blow holes through the lock, and that’d get him through the door, but the moment he fired, the devils would be swarming over here—or at the very least, they’d be aware of his position.
No, Cody thought, rushing back to where Bittner still lay, his round body encased in a debilitating fog of terror. He had to see if his hunch was correct.
Cody’s eyes flicked to the cobalt vase poised between two bottles of gin. He kept the Smith & Wesson trained on the sheriff while with his free hand he reached out and clutched the bouquet of bluebell flowers. When he knelt before Bittner, the gun in one hand and the bouquet in the other, the sheriff stared at him uncomprehendingly.
“Don’t worry,” Cody said, “I ain’t gonna ask you to marry me.”
Bittner’s stupid eyes blinked, then shot wide when the shrieks began.
Cody didn’t even need to rise and turn around to see what was happening. The vampires had attacked the shooters. An ugly, jeering doubt grabbed hold of him then, told him he’d missed his chance to thwart the vampires, that he could’ve made a difference in the battle.
But that was bullshit, and Cody knew it. Had he joined the fray, he’d be dying as surely and as violently as the rest of them were dying.
Trying to block out the wails and the gunfire, Cody said, “Sit up.”
But Bittner wasn’t listening, was staring at the ceiling beyond Cody, perhaps imagining the scene of indescribable horror unfolding just forty feet away.
Cody raised the butt of the .38 and cracked the sheriff on top of the head. Not hard enough to knock him out—no, that wouldn’t do at all—but with just enough force to make him stop gaping like a dead carp.
Bittner blinked at him, his expression dumber than ever, but Cody seemed to have his attention. Or at least as much of it as was possible under the circumstances.
“Sit up,” Cody growled.
This time Bittner complied.
Cody dropped the flowers, their green stems still dripping from the vase water, in the sheriff’s lap.
Bittner said, “What do I want with—”
“Eat them,” Cody said.
Bittner’s wet mouth trembled, then formed itself into a weird parody of a smile. “The hell you talkin’ ’bout, boy? A man don’t eat flowers.”
The gunshots were infrequent now, the gargling death wails and earsplitting screeches of terror winning out.
“I told you to eat ’em,” Cody said. “Now do it.”
There was only an occasional gunshot now, the whole bar resounding with the stomach-churning noises of the vampires feeding.
Bittner chuckled, a good deal of his former haughty manner returning. “You really did lose your mind, didn’t you? And here I thought you
were gonna kill me.”
Cody cocked the hammer, placed the barrel between Bittner’s thick eyebrows. The man became absolutely still except for the little weasel eyes, which crossed slightly as they stared up at the barrel of the .38.
“Eat,” Cody repeated.
Automatically, Bittner reached down and found the flowers. He brought them up to his open mouth and began taking hesitant nips at them. He started to cry.
“Faster,” Cody demanded. There were no gunshots at all now, but there was still the screaming. Plenty of it.
“I can’t!” Bittner moaned, little specks of blue and green dotting his blubbery lips. “Stuff is so bitter I can’t even breathe.”
Cody seized what was left of the thinning brown hair on the man’s crown. He pressed the gun against Bittner’s temple and spoke in a ragged hiss. “You’re gonna eat these flowers or I’m gonna put one in your brain. You think I won’t do it, you perverted piece of shit?”
Very little of what Cody said seemed to register in Bittner’s horror-struck mind, but the sheriff understood the seriousness of Cody’s tone adequately enough. Bittner began cramming the bluebells into his mouth and munching them like a cow at pasture.
“Now swallow,” Cody commanded.
With a jerking gulp, Bittner obeyed. The fat sheriff was weeping freely now.
Cody reached down, gathered another clutch of stems and slapped them against the chest of Bittner’s sodden shirt. He immediately regretted it because it set off a coughing spell that made the man lean into him, regurgitating some of what he’d ingested. Cody waited, lips compressed in frustration, until the episode ceased. Then, pitilessly, he crammed several flowers into the man’s quivering mouth.
“I can’t,” Bittner mumbled around the flowers. “I need sumpin’ to wash it down.”
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