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A nurse started yelling for everyone to go back to their rooms, for visitors to help get their family members back to their beds, while down the hall a doctor was yelling for everyone to get out of their rooms and away from the windows. Suddenly terrified for Terry, Sarah began to fight her way through the darkness toward his room. The whole hospital shook as blast after blast rocked the town. People staggered into her, and twice she tripped and fell in the darkness. Just as she reached for the handle to his door there was a tremendous shattering crash from inside and she screamed and shoved her shoulder against the inrush of wind. She fought her way inside and then stopped, hand to her mouth to stifle a scream.
The window was an empty hole through while the night air blew with stinging coldness. Shredded curtains whipped and danced in the breeze. On the bed the blankets were torn to ribbons, and the IV stand lay on the floor in a puddle of solution.
Sarah stood in the doorway and screamed again.
The room was empty. Terry was gone.
11
The Bone Man stood on the roof of the hospital and watched the town burn. His guitar hung from his limp right hand and his left palm was pressed to his chest as if his heart could actually beat. It felt like it was breaking nonetheless.
Two floors below he could feel the thing that had been Mike Sweeney, could feel the energies surging and flowing in him like tidal waters. Above him the cloudy sky was dense with thousands of circling crows. Down there in the streets he saw the thing that had been Terry Wolfe racing through the flickering shadows. Out beyond the edge of town, down in the Hollow, he could feel that other thing twisting and writhing in the muddy darkness. This is what that poet must have meant, he mused, when he wrote about a beast slouching to town to be born.
Chapter 41
1
Val went out of the room to see what was going on. There was no sense or order to the melee in the halls. Some of the patients and staff were screaming; some crouched down against the base of the walls, arms wrapped around their heads like kids used to do during air raid drills in school. There were at least three people lying on the floor, either dead or unconscious, and no one seemed to notice or care.
Then the door to the fire stairs opened and a knot of figures dressed in Halloween costumes came creeping out. Immediately they split up and went in different directions, and as Val watched two of the figures leapt at a pair of elderly patients and tackled them to the floor. A nearby nurse screamed, and in the dim light cast by the emergency floods Val couldn’t exactly see what was happening, but she knew.
The screams changed then, transforming from shouts and shrieks of confusion and fear into true screams of pain and terror. More figures came out of the stairwell, and one of them turned in her direction. He was only a silhouette, framed by the weak lights in the stairway, but an icy fear reached into Val’s chest and closed its cold fingers around her heart. Her lips formed a word, a name, and even though she didn’t speak it aloud it soured her mouth like bile.
Ruger.
She wasn’t sure if he saw her, but just the possibility of it—and the reality of his presence here—made the unborn embryo in her womb scream in psychic terror. Val fled back into Weinstock’s room.
“He’s here!” she gasped.
2
“Crow! Watch!”
Crow already saw the body lying in the street and wrenched the wheel hard over so the wheels missed the prone figure’s outstretched hand by inches. He skidded to a stop and threw it into Park. The rest of the street was choked with running people and burning debris. Every store along the street had lost its glass to the explosions, the windows yawning wide and black like gasping mouths. LaMastra reached for the door handle.
“What are you doing?” demanded Crow.
“I’m going to see if that person is…”
“No you’re not!” Crow reached past him and hammered down the door lock with his fist. “That person is dead. So’s that one over there. I can see more of them down the street—just look!”
LaMastra did look, seeing what he hadn’t taken in before. There were bodies everywhere. A few moved feebly, but most were clearly dead. People ran by in panic, sometimes pausing to pound on the car’s hood and try the door handles before fleeing into the night.
“Vince, I don’t know what’s happening, but I think it’s suicide to get out of the car before we get to the hospital. We have to get to Val. ”
LaMastra stared out at the riot. He saw a white-faced creature leap from the top of a parked news van onto a running man. The two of them rolled over and over in the middle of the street, and then the vampire tore out the man’s throat in a geyser of blood.
“Jesus Christ!” LaMastra cried.
Crow punched him in the arm, hard. “We can’t save them. We have to go!”
Crow put the car in Drive and stepped on the gas, but as he did so LaMastra cranked down the window and laid the barrel of the big shotgun across the frame; as the car passed, the cop fired and splashed the vampire against the side of the van.
“Drive!”
Crow drove.
A naked man staggered out into the middle of the street, his body bleeding from a dozen sets of small punctures. Four children ran after him, their laughing mouths bright with fresh blood. LaMastra shot two of them, but the others fled.
