by Laura Bickle
“I don’t know how to use these,” I said.
“Set fire to the fuse end,” Alex said. “Throw it. And then I think we run.”
We walked out into the gloom of the evening, our arms and pockets full of artillery. The sun had set, and shadows gathered thick around us. I felt irrationally cheerful at pulling off the fireworks heist . . .
. . . until we stepped out onto the parking lot. A siren sounded, and blue and red strobe lights flashed. I squinted. I could make out the shape of a police car, one that said HIGHWAY PATROL. A figure stood before it.
My heart plummeted into my gut and bounced into my throat. It plunged at the thought of being caught stealing, but soared to think that there was someone human here. That there was law and order in the world.
The silhouette walked toward us. He wore a broad-brimmed hat. His boots crunched in the gravel, and I saw him rest his thumbs in his gun belt as he approached.
“You two wouldn’t be disturbing the peace, would you?” he said. He pulled his gun from his holster. “Breaking and entering?”
I stared down at our cache of weapons. We were caught. But better a night in jail than a night out here.
“Officer, are we glad to see you,” Alex said.
“Not nearly as glad as I am to see you.” He lifted his head and smiled.
In the flash of red and blue light, I saw fangs glint.
“Damn it,” Alex said.
I was rooted in place. I didn’t know which I was more afraid of: the teeth or the gun.
A low growling emanated from our left. The trooper turned, aiming his weapon toward Fenrir.
“No!” I shouted.
Alex threw his box of fireworks at the trooper. It knocked him off balance, and the gun went off with a deafening crack. The bullet sparked on the gravel. Fenrir lunged for the cop’s gun arm, and the vampire hissed.
The gun clattered away. Unthinking, I lunged for it. It came up in my hands, feeling heavy and cold.
The vampire flung Fenrir across the hood of the car. The wolf yelped and rage boiled in me.
“Leave him alone,” I said.
I held the gun on the trooper. I was not unfamiliar with guns; my father had owned a hunting rifle. I assumed that this followed the same principle. But I had been taught never, never to aim a gun toward a person. Never to cause harm. Always to turn the other cheek. My finger sweated on the trigger. Through all the violence I had committed, this seemed like a strange new method. One that I knew I could master.
The trooper snarled. His hat had been knocked off, and he advanced toward Alex.
“Don’t,” I said.
I squeezed my eyes shut and pulled the trigger.
The gun bucked up and over my head, flinging my arms with it. I opened my eyes to see that the bullet had struck the vampire in the shoulder. A black ooze emanated from below his shiny metal epaulets.
He just smiled at me, unfazed. “That’s a felony, girlie. Assault on a police officer will put you away for a long time. Maybe even forever.”
Fear lanced through me. I didn’t know if the vampire cop understood what had happened to him. Was he just fulfilling his pre-death programming of enforcing the law? Or was this part of some sadistic cruelty I didn’t understand?
It didn’t matter.
I pulled the trigger again.
And again.
The gun bucked in my hands, but I forced it down, kept firing. I think I hit the car; I saw glass break. One of the hot casings struck me in the cheek. I couldn’t hear anything else over the roar of the gunshots.
But the vampire kept coming. He had turned away from Alex toward me, his mouth open in a dark leer. The bullets would push him back a step, but he would recover and gain traction.
I wrenched down on the trigger again, flinched, but nothing happened.
I was out of bullets.
The trooper grabbed my arm, hauled me toward the car. I kicked and struggled. The roar had receded in my ears, and I could hear the pounding of my own blood. He slammed me against the back door of the car, lifting me so that my feet didn’t touch the ground. I reached into my pocket for my Himmelsbrief. I got the paper half out of the pocket, and the trooper snarled, dropping me.
“Hey, Smokey!”
I heard Alex’s voice above the ringing. Alex hauled back the trooper’s collar and stuffed a flaming firework down the back of his shirt.
The vampire hissed and dropped me. He reached behind himself, trying to claw the back of his shirt, which was sparkling with an unnatural blue fire.
I ran to the horse. Horace was backing away, ears flattened. Alex grabbed his reins, tossed me up into the saddle. From the corner of my eye, I saw Fenrir slink out from behind the police car. Alex swung clumsily into the saddle behind me.
The trooper clawed at his back, ripping his shirt out of his belt. I turned Horace toward the exit ramp, away. Fenrir loped after us.
The firework exploded in a shower of blue sparks. I heard hissing and growling.
“What was that?” I shouted.
“Blue Victory.”
I turned back in the saddle. “Not victorious enough . . .”
The smoldering cop was missing an arm, but he climbed behind the wheel of the cruiser. The car spun out in the lot and turned to pursue.
“We can’t outrun him,” I said. “We should go off the road . . .”
“No,” Alex said. “Go to the bridge.”
He pointed ahead of me, away from the freeway. An old covered bridge useless for heavy traffic crossed a river.
“He can still follow us,” I protested.
“Cross the bridge!”
I bit my lip and dug my heels into Horace’s sides.
The horse ran as fast as he could toward the bridge. Flecks of spittle came back to strike me in the face. Fenrir was a gray blur at the side of the road, struggling to keep up. I flinched, seeing our shadows driven before us by headlights and hearing the rev of an engine. Stray snowflakes shimmered in the darkness.
“Go, Horace,” I whispered into the horse’s flattened ear. “Go!”
The horse’s hooves slammed onto the wood floorboards, and we plunged into the total darkness of the covered bridge. The headlights grew more distant behind us, like stars.
I turned back.
The police car was stopped at the edge of the bridge.
“Why isn’t he following?” I shouted.
“I don’t think he can.”
We thundered across the bridge, onto a dirt road beyond. I pulled Horace up, looked over the black water at the still headlights.
“There’s an old myth that vampires can’t cross running water,” Alex said. “I didn’t know if it was true, if it would apply in this case, but . . . it seems to have stopped him.”
Fenrir paced to the riverbank, howling softly. It was a high, mournful keening. Whether it was in victory or warning, I couldn’t tell.
But no one answered him.
***
We followed the track of the river the rest of the way north. It was slow going, and there frequently was no road.
Fenrir stuck closer to us. He had allowed Alex to touch him after the fight with the trooper. He seemed bruised, nothing broken, as near as we could tell. When Alex and I slept in our tent, we found him curled at our feet in the morning. He didn’t look apologetic in the slightest, and even allowed us to pet him. I knew that he liked me, but he had a special bond with Alex. Maybe, to Fenrir’s way of thinking, Alex was his pack leader.
Funny to imagine animals working with Gelassenheit, in their fashion.
I could tell we were getting close to Lake Erie when there was a change in the air. It smelled and moved differently. Alex said that was often the way of things around large bodies of water. The wind was sharper, stronger, more cutting, slicing through long strands of plants Alex called “sea oats.” We passed over some marshland laced by vacant highway. Herons continued to fish in the gray landscape, the water a mirror to the sky. I saw a pair of white s
wans swimming. I had never seen swans before. I wasn’t sure that Fenrir had, either, but they honked at him before taking flight, leaving him forlorn on the bank.
“They’re wild, the farther you go up north,” Alex said. I could tell he was homesick, the way his eye kept wandering to the horizon.
We passed by boat docks and mini–storage facilities perched on fingers of the river. I felt uncomfortable being this close to civilization, but there was nowhere else to go to move north. According to Alex’s maps, we had to find the turnpike and follow it toward Canada. Maybe many others had tried before us. I wasn’t so sure that anyone else had made it.
We walked along the shoulder of the road. Snow had begun in earnest, and had accumulated about two inches. It showed no signs of abating, and slowed our progress. Alex had wanted to make it farther before dark, but I felt the night fast upon us again.
I was weary of the dark. I was weary of jumping at shadows, of the terrible things that hunted in it. Part of me was ready for God to simply take us, to sweep us off the face of the earth and wait for the end to come, whether in ice or in blood. I wanted this suffering to be over.
Maybe God heard me.
There was a sudden revving of engines in the distance, muffled by snow and mud and the hissing trickle of water in the drainage ditches.
Alex and I exchanged glances.
“Do you think it’s the trooper?”
“Not unless he’s got friends. That’s a lot of engines. Smaller ones.”
A thin, tinny scream sounded.
I grimaced. “I hope that’s not what I think it is.”
We crept to the edge of an overpass, stared down into the darkness. I could see more than a dozen lights, like headlights, but trained on a patch of the road where a car had stopped. The tiny car had slid sideways in the slush.
“Bikers,” Alex said. His fingers tightened on the rail. “And it looks like they’ve got supper.”
Men were climbing off their motorcycles, descending upon the car. They were dressed in leather, their hair as long as Samson’s in the Bible. The chrome on their bikes gleamed in the low light. So did their eyes.
I saw people moving inside of the vehicle. The engine choked, struggled.
“They will kill them!” I said.
“I don’t think that there’s much we can do to stop it,” Alex said.
Horace’s ears twitched, and Fenrir’s tail slapped my skirt.
“We can’t let it happen.” I reached into my right pocket for the Himmelsbrief. I pinned it to my coat breast with shaking hands. I reached into my left pocket for one of the fireworks.
“We’re gonna get killed,” Alex said, gripping my elbow. “I don’t want that to happen.”
A shriek echoed below, and I heard glass breaking.
He knew what I knew. “We can’t lose our humanity in this,” I told him.
I stood up on tiptoes to kiss him.
He sighed in resignation. “There’s a saying in rock-and-roll. ‘Better to burn out than to fade away.’”
He released me and reached into his pocket for a lighter. He shared the flame with me, and I lit the fuse on my firework.
We hurled the fireworks down to the underpass. The bikers turned from their task of rocking the car and tearing out the broken windshield, startled by the fire that slipped down from the sky like falling stars. Gleaming red eyes turned to us.
We threw the fireworks overhand in glittering arcs. Sparks cascaded down upon the gathered knot of Darkness, exploding in brilliant arrays of yellow, red, and blue. It was beautiful, the whistle and the flash and the sizzle. More than one shadow ignited and ran hissing into the blackness. One redoubled his effort to peel open the car like a can. Others climbed on their bikes, gunned the engines, and turned onto the road.
Coming for us.
I reached for more fireworks and one of my makeshift stakes. We had only a few left. Not enough to battle the dozen men moving toward us in the cacophony of engines and headlights. The army of night had come for us at last.
Alex peeled off his coat and his shirt. His breath steamed, and I could see his gooseflesh under the tattoos. His silver knife glinted in one hand, a firework in the other. I stood beside him, holding one of the last gleaming fireworks in one fist and a sharpened tree branch in the other. Fenrir growled beside us.
One of the bikers gunned the engine. They bore down on us, spooking Horace. I forced myself to hold my ground. I lobbed the firework at one of the bikes. It swerved. I jammed my stake into the chest of one of the bikers that passed. It snapped off—I wasn’t sure if I caught meat or just spokes. Something ripped, and I cried out when I discovered that it was the Himmelsbrief, tearing away from my coat.
My firework whistled and exploded. It was a beautiful gold, the color of sunshine drizzling across the pavement. It was too close. It nearly blinded me.
I heard growling beside me, Fenrir gnawing on a biker writhing on the ground. A line of bikes gathered opposite us for another pass, a deafening game of Red Rover. Alex threw his last firework at them. Red. With some kind of corkscrew spiral that caused them to hiss.
I stood up straight. My hands were open. I was without weapons. I could see the Darkness converging, coming for us, passing before their headlights, past the fire and the light.
I thought I was ready. Ready for the end.
I lifted my chin. The last scrap of my Himmelsbrief scraped under my chin in the cold breeze.
I saw, beyond the Darkness, something in the hillside. Something that glowed like the mannequins in the department store. My brow wrinkled before I could resolve what they were, both in my eyes and in my brain.
People. People that shone with a green light like foxfire. I could see their outlines coming over the hills.
My indrawn breath scraped my throat, and I whispered:
“Angels.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The angels came down from on high to fight the Darkness.
This truly was the end of days.
The vampires hissed at the sight of them, at their light and their loveliness. They moved to attack the angels, seething toward them. But the vampires could not touch them. Their skin smoked and singed where they tried to lay hands on the angels.
The angels held out their hands to drive them back.
And one of them had a gun.
I think it was what is called a flare gun. It shot a lurid red light across the air and embedded itself, burning, in the chest of the vampire nearest me. The creature fell to his knees and tried to tear it out, but the red light scorched his hands so badly that he could not grasp it. He howled like a piteous beast.
The angel reloaded the flare gun and fired again, at a vampire astride a motorcycle. The red light slammed him off the bike, and the motorcycle careened across the road, sliding into the concrete berm with a crash.
The others began to flee as the flares arced into the air. I saw Alex pick himself off the pavement and hurl a broken headlight after them.
Trembling, I fell to my knees. I laced my hands together and prayed. Tears of gratitude streamed from my eyes. Salvation was at hand.
The pale green glow stopped before me. I could not look up. I was too overwhelmed.
An angel reached down for me. “Honey, get up.â€
The angel had a peculiar drawl. I had heard a southern accent once before, from a tourist near the town where I used to live. I blinked and looked up.
I gazed into the face of a softly glowing woman. She shone as if there was a light pulsing beneath her skin. I could see it moving, in the veins and capillaries of her face, even in the vessels of her eyes. It was utterly inhuman, alien, but also strangely beautiful.
“Are you . . . Mary?†I asked, in the tiniest voice I could muster. “Or Gabriel?â€
Her brow creased, and she said, “My name’s Judy.â€
“Are you an angel?†I squeaked.
She threw back her head and laughed. “No, swe
etie. I’m the farthest thing on earth from an angel.â€
She pulled me to my feet. I could see that she wore English clothing—jeans and a sweater. The glow of her skin pushed through the knit of the fabric to glimmer in the light. Her ears were pierced multiple times, glittering under short hair.
“I don’t understand,†I said.
She pushed a string of hair away from my face. “Don’t worry, hon. Come with us, and you will.â€
Numbly, I gathered Horace. Fenrir had glued himself to Alex’s side. The shining people circled us and we followed them to the water.
I could hear the lake before we saw it. I had never seen a body of water larger than a river before. But when we walked down the paved and darkened street of the little town, a great expanse of water came into view. The lake was as black as the sky, and pieces of moon were broken up in it, like shards of glass. The waves rushed in and crashed up against the rocks. I couldn’t see the horizon. Viciously cold wind scraped over us, and I tied a double knot in my bonnet strings with shaking fingers to keep the cap from being torn from my skull. It took me three tries, but I got it done.
The only light other than the moon came from our guides. As I looked more closely, they seemed like ordinary English people, except for the glow. There were two teenagers, three middle-aged men, and two women. They had left behind their coats when they’d come to rescue us, and the light dimmed as they put their coats back on, like a shade over a lantern. That reminded me a bit of Alex and his tattoos. They incandesced softly as we walked, and I checked to make sure that their feet made contact with the ground. They had also gathered the two young women attacked in the car. They had been cut badly with the glass. Bleeding, they walked with us, arms wrapped around each other.
Alex had initially been stunned as I was. But his intellectual curiosity seemed to propel him to speak. “How did you find us?â€
One of the men jabbed a thumb over his shoulder. “None of us have seen fireworks since July. That was a nice bit of improvisation, by the way.â€
“Um, thanks,†Alex said.
“We just use these.†He lifted the flare gun.