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Garlic! All three of them had smeared it on their throats! The realization was like a shot of adrenaline to Crow and as he watched Castle retch in disgust and pain he felt sense and control flood back into him. He twisted sideways and dove for the shotgun. Encumbered by the sword strapped across his back, his tumble was awkward, but he rolled away and came up with the weapon in his hands.
Despite his pain, Castle sneered at him. “I’m going to rip your goddamn heart out!”
Crow raised his shotgun and pointed it at Castle’s heart. Around him all the waxy white faces turned toward him, and all the hungry mouths laughed.
“Go ahead and shoot, asshole!” Castle jeered. “Take your best shot ’cause then I’m going to tear your eyes out and drink from the sockets. ”
“Blow me,” Crow said, and fired.
The blast caught Jimmy Castle in the chest, plucked him off the ground, and threw him ten feet backward. He slammed into Nels Cowan and they both went down. Cowan was up again in an instant, laughing at the joke, reaching down to pull Castle up, sharing the prank Castle had just played on the stupid human with the gun. But Castle’s hand was limp in his grasp and Cowan stared down, still not getting it. Castle lay in a ragdoll sprawl, arms and legs twisted, head thrown back in surprise, his chest a bloody pit of mush.
Crow jacked another round, the sound as distinct as any insult or challenge that’s ever been. Cowan’s snarl started as a whimper of fear, but instantly intensified into a predator’s hunting shriek as he turned and lunged forward at Crow.
The first shot tore away Cowan’s left shoulder and sent his arm spinning back into the shadows trailing a line of blood. For a moment Cowan froze there in a posture of attack, weight on his toes, one arm still reaching, but his face was blank with shock, his mouth agape. Crow’s second round caught him in the throat and Cowan’s body fell straight backward while his head struck the ceiling joist and then landed with a smashed-melon crunch on the ground.
The gunshot echoes boomed like thunder from every wall and then died into a breathless nothing, freezing them all in a monstrous tableau. But just for a second. Then the other vampires swarmed toward Crow from three sides of the cellar. Crow spun, jacking another round, but immediately there was a titanic bang as LaMastra—finally jarred from his shocked stupor—brought up the heavy Roadblocker and opened fire.
One of the vampires went down with a hole as large as a basketball punched wetly through his stomach; the recoil drove LaMastra back against Crow, and from then on there they stood, back to back, shotguns firing, impacts making them collide, the garlic-soaked pellets filling the room as the pale creatures, driven past fear by hunger and hate, rushed at them. Everywhere they looked there were white faces and clawed hands and black eyes and red mouths.
LaMastra fired his gun dry, but Crow kept shooting his, screamin
g all the while, jacking round after round into the breech, jerking the trigger, feeling the kick and hearing the concussion and jacking in the next round, and the next, until suddenly the gun clicked and nothing happened. Crow pumped it again. Click. Pump. Click. Pump. Click. Doing it, over and over again, screaming and dry-firing and pumping and staring into the blackness of shock and death.
And then Vince LaMastra tore the gun from his hands and belted Crow across the face. “Crow!” LaMastra shouted, “STOP IT!”
Instantly Crow sagged to his knees, panting like a dog, mouth working to form words but unable to make any come.
“Crow!” said LaMastra again, this time with less force. “It’s over. Crow, man…it’s over. ”
Slowly, very slowly, Crow came back from that black place to which his mind had fled, back to the shadows of the cellar and to the musty carpet on which he lay, and back to himself. He looked around…and everywhere there was death. White bodies lay sprawled in improbable heaps, mouths thrown wide, eyes open or closed, hands splayed, flesh torn but bloodless. Dead. All of them. Dead.
Jimmy Castle. Dead. Nels Cowan. Dead. By the boiler, that was Carl Jacobsen, who owned a small farm down by the reservoir. Carl, with five kids at home. Dead. Over by the stairs, wasn’t that Mitzie Grant who had just graduated from nursing school? Dead. The others were strangers. Dead. All dead.
Upstairs Frank Ferro was probably dead, too; and down here in the center of it all—Malcolm Crow and Vince LaMastra. Alive. By some miracle, by a chance. Maybe by skill and luck, too. But alive amid all that death. They looked at each other, shaking their heads, unable to speak because how could human speech make any kind of sense of this? They should have been dead, but they had survived. They were alive.
Alive, but still trapped in Ubel Griswold’s house.
Chapter 36
1
Vic’s Ford pickup bounced along the back road, through the tall stands of oaks and pines, his wheels crushing October leaves into fragments. He had a sulfur-tipped kitchen match between his teeth and he was grinning. On the radio Gretchen Wilson was telling him that she needed to get laid. Sunset was hours away, but that didn’t matter. Not to him, not to the Plan, and not to the Man.
Despite his earlier blues Vic felt pretty sporty and he couldn’t prevent nasty little smiles from popping onto his lips every few minutes as rolled through the forest toward the Man’s house.
At one point in the trip he stopped on the crest of the last large hill before the road dropped down into the valley beyond which was Dark Hollow. Vic took a sheet of onionskin from his shirt pocket, unfolded and smoothed it out, and then used a drop of spit to stick it to the dashboard. He consulted the row of numbers and checked them against the screen display on the laptop that lay on the front seat next to him. Most of his stuff was on timer, but the timers were inactive until he sent a master signal, which he did now by typing in a password and hitting Enter. The computer whirred for a moment and then returned a message: Completed. A clock appeared in a pop-up window and began counting down.
Vic took his cell phone from his shirt pocket and made the last call he would ever make on that phone. Even though the cellular relay tower would be the last to go because some of Ruger’s team needed their phones to coordinate troop movements, Vic had no one else to call. Lois was with them now. Vic didn’t have any friends left among the living.
It rang three times and then Ruger answered.
“You ready, Sport?” Vic asked.
“Yeah, as soon as your wife’s done blowing me. ” Vic heard Lois burst out laughing in the background.
“Yeah, that joke never gets old, asshole,” Vic said. “The clock’s ticking. ”
“Don’t worry,” Vic said, still chuckling, “we’re ready. ”
