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The killer smiled. “Trick or treat,” he said softly.
Chapter 42
1
Vic Wingate sat on a plastic chair with his back to a cool concrete wall, a wet towel against his face and morphine dancing in his eyes. On the floor in front of him was a dead nurse with her throat ripped away. She had given him the towel and told him to wait, and she’d smiled at him like he was a real person, not a circus sideshow freak. Not the Incredible Melting Man. She had been nice. Now she was dead. As dead as everyone else in the waiting room.
Vic sipped from the can of Coke she’d bought him from the vending machine. It felt soooo good on his burned throat.
Two vampires came past him, shooting him a brief and uncertain glance as they bent toward the dead nurse. One of them cut his own forearm and moved to hold it out over the nurse’s slack lips.
Vic shook his head. “No. Leave her be. ”
The vampire who had cut himself looked up surprised. “She’s meat for the master. ”
“Leave her be!” Vic barked, lowering his towel.
The second vampire made a rude sound. “Ruger said—”
Vic’s one good eye was like a blue laser. “Ruger said? Ruger? Who the hell is Ruger to say shit?” The morphine was dulling the pain and giving him some of himself back. “Do you know who I am?”
The vampires said nothing.
“I’m the Man’s right hand, you pasty-faced shitbags. Ruger doesn’t tell you what to do—I do. And if you don’t like it, then why don’t you take it up with the Man?”
Terror blossomed in their faces.
Vic got up and walked over to the closest one and crowded him. Vic’s burned face was a more frightening spectacle than their pale masks, and in Vic’s eyes the vampires could imagine the face of the Man. They shrank back.
“This one stays dead,” Vic told them. “You two had better make sure no one else screws with her or I’ll bury you both down deep and tight and you’ll never be able to feed, never be able to rise. You’ll stay down there and rot—forever!”
The two vampires fled, leaving Vic in the ER waiting room with the dead nurse. There were other corpses there as well, but Vic didn’t give a damn about them. He only wanted the nurse left alone. She had been kind to him. He found the towel and pressed it against his face as he sat.
2
Susco and Gunn watched the slaughter from the stage, the two of them rooted to the boards as the vampires tore into the audience. Each of them wanted to believe that this was some kind of publicity stunt, some elaborate prank being played on them by Crow. But when they saw the reporter from Channel 3 go down with half his face torn away any chance they had for self-deception, and any hope there was of this being a joke, died right there.
There was sound and movement to their right and they turned to see a big man come lumbering onstage, moving with the slow, mindless shuffle of a zombie from one of their own films. This one was real, though, and his face was smeared with bright blood, his eyes not completely vacant, but rather filled with a feral and primitive predatory lust.
Gunn grabbed Susco and hauled him back as the big man swiped at them with black-taloned hands. Susco nearly tripped, but turned the stumble into a crouching run and bolted for stage left, with Gunn—who was taller—catching up with long-legged hustle.
“This way!” Susco yelled, pointing toward the emergency exit, but just as they reached it, the door flew open and two more of the shambling Dead Heads crowded in, moaning with hunger and reaching for them Susco ducked under their grab, but as he dodged out of the way the leading creature caught the shoulder of Gunn’s jacket. Susco kicked at the thing’s knee hard enough to buckle it. It fell and dragged Gunn down with it.
As Gunn fell he rolled onto his back and kicked up and caught the monster’s face, driving it back.
Susco saw a toolbox sitting open on a pair of sawhorses and he snatched a handful of tools and began throwing them as fast as he could; he hit the monster who was grappling with Gunn with a hammer and the other one with a big pair of channel locks. The blows did no damage but made the creature holding Gunn stagger, and that gave his prey the chance to hastily shrug out of his jacket and make a break for it. Susco picked up the whole toolbox and threw it, catching the monster in the face, knocking him backward into the orchestra pit.
Gun caught up to Susco and shoved him toward the far exit. They slammed into the crash bar—and rebounded. The door, against all fire regulations and common sense, was locked.
3
Val kept her gun trained on the door while Newton, Mike, and Jonatha overturned the heavy medical bed and used it to reinforce their barricade. There was still pounding on the door, but it was sporadic now, more a hit and run away teasing. That or the creatures had learned caution.
Weinstock, dressed now but standing in shoes that were filled with blood from the cuts on his feet, stood next to her.
“Crow will come,” he kept saying to her, “Crow will come. ”
“I know,” Val said, wanting to believe it.
