Oh, God.
He turned on his heels and looked straight into Evie’s face and into those empty, rimless eyes, magnified three times by the thickness of her glasses. His muscles began to quiver and his bladder control slipped and a warmth spread through the crotch of his pants. He started to mumble and in the process bared his plastic teeth. Evie’s brow furrowed and she flashed her own fangs as she pulled her victim tight against her ample bosom. “Get your own,” she snapped. Then she turned away from him and went back to the man across her lap, tilting his face aside so she could go at his neck once again.
Del was numb. It worked, he thought. I can’t believe it worked, she really . . .
He caught himself. Shivered. Stepped closer so that he could look into the slack face of her unfortunate prey. In this dim light the features had looked familiar. The shape of the face. The red hair.
No, please . . .
His jaw began to quiver. The fake teeth fell to the floor. He had to jam a sleeve into his mouth to keep from screaming. It was Bart.
He felt the sting of tears again, rolling through the grease on his cheeks. They were tears of hate this time, of anger. It was the only way the shock could be assimilated, the only way it wouldn’t make him faint or turn to a blubbering, helpless child. It triggered something in him, deep down, that transcended his own sense of self-preservation, stoked a rage that made him forget everything else, that made him search the floor for a stake, a pipe, anything he could use to shatter Evie’s skull and beat to a pulp whatever foul tissue still pulsed beneath. All he could find within reach was the folding knife in his pocket, but that was okay. He’d just use it to stab at her throat and chop at it and saw through it until her head came off in his hands. He stepped toward her with his face twisted and his knife bared and he reached out for that bound-up bun because pulling that would bare the bitch’s throat and he’d aim for between the second and third chin . . .
Bart looked up at him.
He halted. The rage was suddenly gone. It left him hollow, afraid, unsure of what to do next. Bart couldn’t be turning already . . . could he? His skin was pale, drained, almost like Evie’s. But the eyes told him no. They were barely open, just enough to show the dimming sparkle of life, and they spoke to Del. They told him the things that he didn’t want to know, that he was surrounded, that it would be suicide to try to help him and that it was already too late. And when the tears came anew Bart’s gaze stopped them, told him that there wasn’t time for that. That he had a job to do.
But I can’t leave you here, he wanted to say. I can’t leave you. Not like this.
The older boy’s gaze softened, and a solitary tear welled there in the corner. His eyes shifted toward his outstretched hand, which still groped limply for the backpack just beyond his reach. Del nodded. He understood. He picked up the pack, careful that the bottles didn’t rattle, and he hugged it to his chest. When he looked back at his brother, the eyes were closed. They didn’t reopen.
He backed up and slumped against the wall. He did not want to move again. He wanted only to curl into a ball and hide his head. He felt more alone than he’d ever been in his life, and yet—suddenly he didn’t. There was Bart’s voice inside his head, crystal clear, so real that he had to look at the body to be sure it hadn’t moved or spoken. Get moving, Cap, it said. Mom needs you. Get moving.
He pushed off from the wall and walked straight, putting one foot in front of the other, stopping only to retrieve his plastic teeth, until he was past Evie and his brother and he didn’t have to look at them again.
Watching the vampires dine was especially harrowing as he picked his way through the room. The manner of their feeding varied with each; some moaned passionately and stroked their victims like a lover, while others savaged the throats with animal glee and then lapped at the pooling blood or sipped from the ruptured artery like a water fountain. It made his stomach lurch. He fixed his eyes on the door and concentrated.
They’ll sense your fear, he told himself, or maybe it was Bart, reminding him. You can’t let them see that you’re afraid.
He stepped over two bodies. The one on its back, beneath a snorting young man, looked like a wide-eyed Mrs. Helton.
Can’t be afraid.
Ted’s body was almost blocking his path ahead, along with the ample white flesh of his girlfriend sprawled atop him. She was holding his hand tenderly and playing with his fingers like always, even as she murdered him. Del stepped around them. That’s when she grabbed the boy’s ankle. She sat up straddling Ted’s middle, her chest now in plain sight with its one full breast and the other partially collapsed where Charlie Bean’s stake had left two gaping holes. She hissed at him, spitting flecks of blood onto his coat. Her leg muscles tensed for a reflexive spring.
There was little else Del could do. He hissed back. He got right back in her face and bared his dime-store fangs and summoned a cat’s guttural warning from deep in his chest. Several heads bobbed up at his response, like cobras rearing. But they just as quickly dismissed him and the female and went back to their business. Even Doreen recoiled. Her snarling face softened and she looked almost apologetic. She let go of his ankle and went back to Ted with her head hung sheepishly.
Your luck won’t hold forever, Cap. Move it. Now.
He picked his way through them at a faster pace, careful not to let momentum overcome his balance. The door loomed closer and closer, a goal that frightened him with its nearness. I can’t be making it, I can’t be, they’re bound to get me before I reach the threshold . . . But then his feet found the hillock of bodies that clogged the doorway and he was climbing over them, stepping on Rusty Sanders, making his way into the fresh night air beyond.
But the job wasn’t finished yet.
He sat the backpack down gently beside the door and lined up the Little Kings bottles, one by one. There were six in all, each sprouting a leaf of linen from its corked mouth.
“Boy,” came a voice from the gloom of the basement. Del glanced inside and saw a figure standing just in front of the second hanging bulb. Only the silhouette was visible, though he could feel the eyes on him. He stood up with one of the Molotov cocktails in his hand . . . but where were the matches? He hadn’t thought of that! He patted his coat pockets, his pants, all the places he knew they would not be.
“BOY!” There were several eyes trained on him now, several dark forms standing in the half-light of the basement. They were coming toward the door.
He grabbed the backpack and turned it inside out and envisioned a book of matches clutched in Bart’s lifeless hand.
Don’t be stupid. Unzip the front pocket.
Sure enough, there was a front pocket on the pack and he fumbled with the zipper and tore it open and his hand found Grandpa’s old Zippo, the one he’d passed on to Bart on his fifteenth birthday (the year he got caught smoking). In triumph, he thumbed the flint wheel and birthed a flame and touched it to the rag fuse of the bottle in his hand. The fabric caught immediately.
When he stepped back into the doorway, he could see them coming at him. They were so close now that the flickering flame played on their sinister faces. He held the firebomb out like a king’s scepter and took grim satisfaction in their changing expressions. “Burn in hell!” he damned them as he threw the bottle at the first open patch of floor he saw, just inside the door. The green glass shattered and spewed flame in three directions, both blocking the doorway and unfurling into the gathering crowd itself. Screams reached his ears, glorious screams that fed a savage glee in his heart. He lit another and threw it into the thick of them, where it made a dull thud and clattered to the floor unbroken. Then the flames reached the gasoline. The bottle exploded in a bright flash, and Del heard glass ping off the walls like shrapnel. One of the monsters was caught in the plume of fire and set ablaze; it ran endlessly, bumping into its brethren and igniting them as well. Del threw the rest of the bombs as hard as h
e could, lobbing them over the heads of the trapped crowd so they might reach the rear of the basement where Evie and Bart had been. And then he stood back and watched it burn.
The fire spread upward, into the house itself, and he could see the orange glow through the upstairs windows. The roar of the flames was deafening now, drowning out the screams, and the heat forced him back.
The hate and anger bled away from him as he watched. The grief returned, but he would endure it. He had to. “Goodbye, Bart,” he said, wiping the sting of ash from his eye. “Don’t worry about Mom. I’ll find her.”
In his mind, Bart’s voice was no longer there. But he imagined a nodded reply, and that was good enough.
He looked around him. The vampires would not go near the fire, but it might attract their attention. He had to move soon. He ran to the next yard, found the doorway to the basement there. He rapped on it with his fist. “Can you hear me in there?” There was no answer. He pressed an ear to the cold metal. There were sounds from within, though muffled. Someone sobbing fearfully. The cries of an infant, and someone trying to hush it. He could almost feel the fear that emanated from inside, and he knew that asking for their help was useless. They would never open that door. And he couldn’t blame them.
You’re on your own, he told himself. Where to first? He looked around the yard, hoping for one of those signs, like in the movies, a telltale hoofprint or a broken twig or tramped-down path in the grass that would tell him where they took his mother. But he knew it wouldn’t be that simple. So where to? Who can I get to help me? Or maybe that should be, who’s left to help? Chris and Charlie are God-knows-where and Bart’s gone and Ted too and everyone else is a vampire.
Maybe not everyone . . .
Didn’t Mom say that Mrs. Moore was holed up in her own basement? Maybe she can help . . . that is, if that real estate bimbo hasn’t gotten to her already. Now, which street was it Mom said she lives on? Walnut? Oak? At least in that general direction. It’s a start.
He began to run but that felt too conspicuous for a vampire.
So he had to settle for walking very, very fast.
He harbored a slim hope that most of Isherwood’s undead had been trapped in the inferno back there, but he soon learned otherwise. He had gone just a few blocks, not even to Vernal Avenue, when he saw them, fleeting shadows, skittering from house to house in search of a fix. His immediate impulse was to hide, before they could see through his childish disguise. But again, it would have been too conspicuous. So he kept his reflexes in check. He walked down the sidewalk, in plain view, waiting for them to get closer. And when they grew within fifteen feet and saw the cast of his flesh they would simply pass him by. Del held any sigh of relief; he was not out of this yet.
He crossed Main Street just up from the courthouse and his confidence began to grow. So much so, in fact, that he barely flinched when he turned the corner from Elm Street onto Walnut and found six of them coming toward him.
They were mostly older men, in their late fifties to early sixties, and wore faces that Del had seen only in passing in the drugstore or the town square. There was a girl there too, about Bart’s age. Of the lot of them, it was she who spoke. “Aren’t you coming to the hill?” Her eyes, like all the others he’d seen, were deep and empty and threatened to draw him in unless he averted his own gaze.
“The hill?”
There was genuine surprise in her dead face. “Of course. Haven’t you heard him calling us? He’s there,” she motioned to the north, where the land swelled up and an old house he knew only as the Shady Rest stood. “He needs us. Come.” She took his arm.
Del was panicky. What if she felt his warmth through the coat sleeve? He quickly pulled away. “Uh . . . I’m still hungry. I’ll be there in a few minutes.”
She stared at him and made an odd face. Del finally realized it was meant to be a smile. “You’re a real pig,” she said, reaching out to run a cold finger along his lip and dab at the artificial blood. She tasted it. The boy’s breath caught. She rolled her tongue about, considering, and then grimaced. “No wonder you’re still hungry. But hurry. You don’t want to keep him waiting.” The lot of them stepped around him and continued along Walnut Street, heading north.
“One last thing,” Del blurted after them, even before he realized he was saying it. “What about the Miller woman? Was she taken to the hill?” Oh, Lord, now you’ve done it, they’ll figure you out and then your ass is grass . . .
They looked at him in a dull, unreadable manner for a long time, and he did not dare to even breathe. Then the girl simply replied, “Yes,” and they resumed their trek to the hill.
Del stood there alone in the middle of the sidewalk and felt a shiver of dread wrack his small frame. Danner had his mother—it was his worst nightmare. And they would be surrounded by other vampires. What could he do alone?
Dammit, Stiles, where are you when I need you!
The night air split with the echoes of a gunshot that came rolling up the street. It awakened the boy, shook him from his fearful paralysis. A gunshot—that meant someone was fighting back. Someone was still alive! His mind raced as he ran south on Walnut, straining his ears to sort through the fading echoes, his eyes to make out the names on the mailboxes as he went. It could be anyone, he rationalized. Anyone who had held out that long. But on this street . . .
There it was just ahead. The side of the Conestoga mailbox was emblazoned with the name MOORE, and as he grew closer he could see that there was a body sprawled on the lawn, just to the side of the front porch. Del crept to the edge of the driveway, until he could see clearer. He’d been expecting to find Giggy Gastineau there, though not quite like this—splayed on her back with eyes staring glassily skyward, speechless for the first time in her life. She was still dressed in her best tweed suit and held her briefcase tighter in death than ever, clutching it to her chest. But it still hadn’t been sufficient to stop a shotgun blast. The silver pellets had simply punched a fist-sized hole in the genuine imitation leather before moving on to more vital regions.
He turned, looked at the house, and saw the shotgun barrels retracting into the basement window. And he thought he heard Mrs. Moore sobbing before the window clamped shut.
The boy hesitantly crossed the ground to where the realtor lay and nudged her with his foot to make sure she was dead—he didn’t want her jumping up while his back was turned. Then he approached the window and tapped the frosted glass with a knuckle. “Mrs. Moore? Don’t shoot. It’s me, Del Miller. I’ve got to talk to you.” There was no sound from within. “Please, it’s urgent.” He could feel the tears returning. “Please. My brother’s dead, and now they’ve got Mom!”
When Sharon spoke, the voice was right behind the glass. She’d been standing there all along. “Back away,” she said warily. The boy complied, and only then would the window open, just a crack, same as before. But from this close Del could see Mrs. Moore’s face, at least part of it. She looked haggard and spent, her expression spiderwebbed with lines of anxiety. The eyes behind her bifocals were puffed and red from crying and lack of sleep. She looked just on the edge, and her knuckles were already white on the trigger of the shotgun pointing his way. “Another trick,” she muttered, aiming right for his chest. Del realized her intent with sudden clarity and his jaw went slack and the false teeth he’d almost forgotten about went tumbling from his mouth. The sight took the woman by surprise, enough that the double barrels lowered a bit. Her finger eased on the trigger.
“It’s not real!” the boy was rattling as fast as he could, smearing the face paint and then showing her the pale smudge on his fingers. He kept at it, rubbing more and more away until his own facial pigment was more obvious. Obvious to him at least. Sharon’s eyes still held that hard glint of mistrust, and the shotgun didn’t lower any further than before. “It’s me!” he said. “I’m alive!”
“It’s another trick,” she said. �
�You’re trying to trick me.”
“Then here . . . touch my hand.”
“Stay back.” The shotgun barrels looked deeply into his eyes.
“Dammit, how can I convince you? We’re wasting time—they could be killing my mom!”
Sharon’s face remained stony; her tears had all been cried out. “I’m sorry, Delbert,” she said flatly, “if you are really Delbert. But I can’t take the chance. I just can’t.” She kept the shotgun trained on him even as she backed away, and once the barrels cleared the window, she quickly closed and locked it.
“Wait! What do I do now? Where do I go . . .” but it was no use. She was gone. He sat back and started to cry. “I’m sorry, Mom,” he whispered. “I’m sorry.”
You can’t give up on faith, sweetheart . . .
Her words from earlier in the day came back. But why? What had made him think of that now, unless . . . He looked around to confirm his location. The church wasn’t far from there, just at the end of the next street, maybe two or three blocks. But what good would that do? he wondered. The pastor’s done gone cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs, so he won’t be any help, and what’s there for me anyway, I sleep through services and I couldn’t even hold off Danner with a cross and Chris told me—
Can’t give up on faith.
He surrendered with a sigh. All right, Mom. At least it’s a place to go.
He recovered his fake teeth, dusted them off, and put them in, then reached into his coat pocket for the stick of clown-white to fix his face again and . . . oh, God. It wasn’t there, he realized coldly as he patted down all of his pockets. He could almost visualize laying it on the furnace before stepping out into the open basement. Arrgh, he groaned, slapping his own forehead. What am I going to do now? He looked around. There was no one else in sight. No use complaining. Better git now, while the gittin’s good. He walked back out to the street, looked both ways, checking each house as well. And when he was sure the coast was clear, he pulled his collar up around his face, lowered his head, and ran.
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