When he saw Jack Crow striding across the courthouse square - coming to get him - Felix turned and bent his head to light a cigarette and hide his screaming fear.
Crow was wearing full-length chain mail that covered everything from the soles of his boots to the top of his head with just the oval for his face left exposed. Around his waist was a thick black utility belt. Across his chest was a great white cross.
He does look like a crusader, thought Felix. Even if the chain mail was some high-tech plastic instead of steel and even if the cross was an electric halogen spotlight.
A crusader... I've got to get away from this man.
He had actually started to turn and walk away, when he remembered. He had taken the money. He had signed up. He was in.
They had him.
And all those periodic nightmares throughout his young life, thirty years of them, wrapped tight around his brain.
There had been no pattern to their details. Always a different setting and always a different enemy. But the endings were identical. Too many of them coming at him too fast, overwhelming him, besieging him in some claustrophobic no-exit room or with his back to some crumbling cliff or steaming quicksand or...
Or whatever. No way out. Too much evil. Coming too fast.
He would awake screaming with the feel of evil still ripping at his throat. And he would stay up all night drinking and trembling and trying to convince himself it was only a dream.
But he had always known better somehow. Always.
And now he looked down at his own little crusader outfit and he knew the dream had come to him at last and he knew he was going to die and he had never known such utter paralyzing terror.
He had thought he could handle it. It was his time, so what? Everybody dies, right? Right? Be cool. Stoic. That's a good word.
Stoic for shit.
He turned back to face Crow, who stopped a step away and stood and eyed him carefully.
"All set?" he asked.
Felix just stared. What the hell does he expect me to say?
Crow read the look, nodded, dropped his eyes. Then he turned and looked across the street at the shuttered building that was their target.
"Okay," said Crow, still eyeing the building, "we'll be going in in a few minutes."
He paused a moment, then looked Felix in the eye. "Right?"
Felix wanted to spit. Instead he sighed and nodded.
Crow strode over to where Joplin and Cat stood talking to the chief of police and some others on the courthouse steps.
The courthouse steps.
Not even a hundred yards, thought Felix. More like seventy. Or fifty.
And he turned around and around, sweeping over the empty setting where only a handful of people, most of them uniformed, remained inside the police cordon. The shops were all closed up. There was no traffic on the streets. And it was quiet.
And none of that mattered. This place still looked just like what it had always been: the safest place in the world.
Felix had spent most of his life in cities. But he had been brought up in a place just like this one and he knew what it was. It was the place the small-town world came together to buy and sell and laugh and joke and record deeds and vote and pay fines and see each other again today just like the days before and the days to come and it was safe, dammit! Safe! Maybe boring and maybe (certainly) provincial and maybe a lot of other things. But safe is what it was first.
Felix stared at the flagpole atop the courthouse building. As a boy he had been taught to walk toward that if he got lost from his parents while shopping. Taught to go there and go to the front steps and sit down and wait and not cry - don't worry - Mother and Daddy would soon come to find him and "you'll be safe there, son."
During the last three nights at least six people had been slaughtered there in full view of the police, dragged screaming and pleading into the only abandoned building by hulking drooling ghouls. Usually the monsters howled when the worthless bullets and shotgun pellets slammed into them. Sometimes they didn't. But they never stopped, except to turn and hiss, their new yellow-gray fangs glistening red in the squad cars' whirling lights.
The only policemen to go in there after them were still in there.
Felix finished his cigarette and dropped the butt onto the sidewalk and flattened it with a chain-mailed boot and then stood there bent over and staring until the last mote of glowing coal went out.
He sat in the motorhome, at the little table in the motorhome, a cigarette burning in the ashtray next to his chain-mailed elbow, an untouched plastic glass of ice tea next to that, while Cat, also in chain mail, paced clinking back and forth amid the weapons, speaking with his hands and trying to...
Trying to what? Felix wondered idly, as if from a great distance, suddenly realizing that he had been so preoccupied with his own sense of dread and impending doom that he had not really been listening at all. He had nodded a few times when that felt polite, but he could not imagine, quite frankly, what Cat could possibly have to say that mattered. Except...
Except to say they had decided to call it off.
Felix drew out of his horror just far enough to find if that was it.
It wasn't. It was... Well, now, Felix wasn't absolutely sure what it was. But it seemed that Cat was trying to convince him that vampires were real so he wouldn't be shocked or something when he saw them. Something about the difference between knowing something was so in your mind and feeling it was so in your gut.
Or something. It sounded to Felix like the standard lecture to new recruits and that was okay by him. As long as he was sitting in this motorhome getting a lecture he wasn't stepping into that building across the street. He wasn't in danger. He wasn't fighting monsters or being ripped apart by their fangs, which Felix had no trouble whatsoever believing in from his brain to his gut to his trembling fingers raising a cigarette to his lips.
So he just watched Cat pacing and talking and he looked about the trailer at the simple little meaningless items he might never see again after an hour, a bottle of scotch with the label torn, a fast-food carry-out sack, a cheap ballpoint pen with its cap all chewed up poking out of a rent in the carpet under the driver's seat, and he stared at these things, reveled in these things, rather than think about what was about to happen.
Anything but that.
I-don't-want-to-die-here he mouthed silently without realizing it.
About then Cat wrapped up his agitated presentation with a rousing clap of his hands.
"Okay?" he asked Felix excitedly.
Felix, who had no notion what the question was about, looked the other man in the eye.
"Okay," he replied dully.
Carl Joplin opened the outer door of the motorhome and stuck his head inside.
"Father Adam's ready," he said.
Cat nodded to him. "Okay," he said.
Carl nodded in return and disappeared again, closing the door behind him.
Felix looked questioningly at Cat.
"Mass," Cat explained.
Felix nodded. "Oh."
Felix believed.
He knelt in the courthouse parking lot with the others while Adam, high-mass robes covering his own chain mail, conducted the service and he believed.
In God. In Jesus. In the vampires waiting across the road. In 'most everything around him. He believed the police standing over there in that little group were not going to help them. He believed the crew standing beside their ambulance were not going to save him. He believed this was all a trap, as Jack Crow had told him.
He believed he was going to die.
He even believed in their gear. He figured the chain mail would slow 'em down. A little. And be believed Holy Blessed silver bullets might slow 'em down. A little. And when Carl had ringed the buildings with his little detectors and turned them on, Felix believed the instant clanging alarm was, in fact, caused by the presence of vampires within the building. He believed his radio headset would enable Carl Joplin to hear his death shrieks.
He even believed in the Plan. At least, that it was a good Plan. And he turned his unseeing eyes away from the young priest and focused once more on the electric winch with its huge spool of cable and decided once again that Jack had had an inspired idea here.
Forbidden by the city powers to destroy a downtown building with explosives, which is what he would have preferred, Jack Crow had given up on the idea of trying to kill the goons while they were in the building itself. Too dark in there. Too many teeth. Too much to go wrong too fast.
No. Jack's plan was to get them outside, where the sunlight would do the work, and that's where the winch came in. Jack was going to fire that massive crossbow through a ghoul's chest, wait a second for the barbs to get lodged tight, then holler on the radio for Carl Joplin to start the winch pulling that long cable attached to the crossbow bolt, and with it the ghoul, right through the front doors of the building into the sunlight to burn.
Then Adam was to grab the cable and bring it back inside to attach it to another one of Jack's bolts. It was Cat's job to keep the monsters off Jack in the meantime. Felix was supposed to back up Cat.
Felix believed it was a good Plan.
He didn't believe it was going to work.
And he caught himself mouthing those words again.
Then the mass was over. They stood. It was time.
"Rock and roll!" barked Jack fiercely.
Felix stared at him. Then he took his position beside the others. He took several deep breaths, heard the others do the same. There was a brief distraction when some new cop type, a young redheaded man wearing a different kind of uniform, appeared beside the other cops and began arguing loudly with them.
Too late, thought Felix. Nothing that could be said or argued or written out or screamed was going to stop this thing.
Jack gave the signal and the four men stepped through the doorway into the dark.
Cooler in here, he thought before the stench hit him and he thought God - my God, what is that awful... Oh my God is that them? Is that the vampires? And he started to reach down and turn on the halogen cross so he could see, see what was making that awful smell, but then he remembered they weren't supposed to turn on their crosses because that would drive the monsters back and they wanted them coming, coming at them, for chrissakes, and Felix thought of that idea and wondered if Jack Crow was completely and totally insane - Let's get the hell out of here!
And then the lanterns came on beside him, one in Jack's hand and one in Adam's. Jack moved off to the right to place his and Felix heard his hard voice calmly instructing the priest to place his lantern farther to the left to give a wider range of view and everything seemed to be whizzing around Felix, his ears thumping and throbbing with his pulse and the slightest sound amplified in that cavernous dusty cement floor with the walls all torn out before remodeling and only the fifty-year-old support posts left spaced every dozen paces like a checkerboard and... Oh, yes! There in the dust in front of him he saw the sliding footprints going this way and that and crossing back over one another.
Oh, yeah. Somebody's been walking around in here. A lot of somebodies. A lot of somethings...
Damn-damn-damn, he couldn't seem to get set, couldn't seem to get placed, like he was always leaning backward ready to run but he wasn't going to run, was he? So why not just get set and placed or at least reach down and get your weapon in your hand... ?
But he couldn't even do that. He knew he was wearing guns but he couldn't remember exactly where they were on his body and the notion of taking his eyes off the shadows for even a split second to find them, and having some fiend bolt at him slavering from out of the dark while he was looking down...
No. He couldn't move.
He was frozen, staring wildly into the darkness, gasping dry-mouthed and waiting to die.
Then BEEP... and Felix jumped a foot in the air before he remembered it was the vampire detector Joplin had given them to take inside. The others had bells on them but Joplin had converted this one to have one of those smug little electronic BEEPS.
"Cat!" growled Crow harshly in Felix's headset. "Turn that down."
"Right, bwana" was the calm reply and in the corner of one eye Felix saw the blond silhouette in the right-side lantern bend to work the controls.
"More, dammit!" snarled Crow.
"'More' it is," replied Cat in the same tone. Beep... Beep... Beep...
"How's that?" asked Cat.
"It's okay," said Crow.
Beep... Beep... Beep... Felix hated it.
Beep... Beep... Beep...
Felix hated it because he knew what it meant.
Beep. Beep. Beep.
The faster it beeped the closer came those.
Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep
"Okay, sports fans," whispered Cat, peering into the darkness directly in front of him, "here we go."
She was fresh from the grave and slivers of skin peeled and curled at the corners of eyes glowing a red so bloody and deep they seemed almost black. Not yet a full vampire, but no longer a corpse - and totally unaware of self. She was no longer a she either, Felix knew. She was just a thirst-thing and he could by God feel her smelling the blood pulsing in their veins. And she came at them, came at them and it seemed she moved so damned fast though he knew it was just a lurching, dragging, walk.
Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep.
"Cat," ordered Jack calmly, stepping in front of her and raising his crossbow, "shut that damned thing off."
"Yes, bwana," replied Cat serenely and in a moment all was quiet.
Except for the sound of the creature dragging itself on grave-rotted feet toward Jack.
And then the deep THONG of the crossbow and the awful punching crunch as the massive arrow split the woman's chest cavity and cracked out her back.
The impact drove her backward several feet, arms flung outstretched, but somehow she remained upright.
Felix stared in horror. My God! The damn thing splitting her is as big as she is and it didn't even knock her down!
And for just an instant some deep adult in him was outraged, offended at such defiance. And he saw himself drawing and firing and plunging silver bullets into her throat - But he couldn't move. He was gone. He couldn't handle this.
He just stood and stared and trembled as the woman thirst-thing reacted to the agony of impalement with maniacal frenzy, her eyes bugging, her mouth barking shrieks and howls, her vile matted hair whipping thin cuts into her moldering cheeks. Something oozed thickly from the wound. But even in the uncertain light Felix could tell it wasn't blood. The only blood came from the red flecks that spat forth from the howling, crumpled mouth.
"Hit it, Carl," ordered Jack into his radio headset.
The cable attached to the arrow went instantly taut. The woman, still howling and warping in pain, fell forward onto the dusty cement as the cable began to drag her writhing toward the exit. She didn't want to go. She fought the shaft of the huge arrow, she scratched sparks on the concrete floor. She howled and spat some more. But she went.
"Adam," chided Crow gently, "you want to get the door now?"
The young priest unfroze himself from the sight, nodded, and all but tripped over himself in his hurry to obey.
She went to something beyond hideous when the sunlight struck her. Felix had never heard anything like those screams, had never seen anything like that blurred, vibrating frenzy.
And that fire, those bursting flames that erupted from deep inside her skin as if they were being blown outward by some fierce vindicatory pressure. The flames didn't look real. They looked like dozens of tiny acetylene torches rocketing out of her.
The cable was relentless as it dragged her through the double doors of the building, across the sidewalk, and into the street. Felix hadn't realized he was following her until he saw the others closing in to stare.
They were all there. The cops. The local powers. That mayor, Tammy Something, was there. They had left their police barricades and their whispering cliques and everything else and rushed forward to stare.
The screams abruptly ceased, so suddenly it made every-one jump. And then the flame itself began to shrink, as if curling its fuel into a little circle. The thing in the flame was no longer recognizable as anything but a roaring blue-and-white fire. There came a loud hissing sound, as though gas was escaping.
Then sparks. Then a loud pop.
Then the flame was gone. Everything was gone save for a foot-wide circle of ashes.
And still nobody moved. They just stared.
"Supernatural," said Jack Crow gently from just behind Felix.
Felix turned and looked at him.
Crow was smiling grimly. "Supernatural," he said again in the same gentle tone. "Supernatural. Not of this earth." He stepped over to the circle of ashes and looked down. "Evil. Satanic." He looked at Felix, then kicked the ashes with his boot. "Damned, Felix. Big Time Evil." He kicked at the ashes again. They were extremely fine and they scattered easily in the soft breeze. Crow lit a cigarette and stared some more at Felix before speaking in that same easy tone:
"But we can kill 'em, Felix. We can kill 'em. We just killed this one and we're about to go back in there and kill the rest." Crow looked past Felix. "Right, people?" he called.
"Right, bwana!"
"Yes, sir!"
"Hell, yes!" sang out from behind Felix, from Cat, Adam, and Carl Joplin respectively.
Felix turned around to see them all watching him just as: "Go get 'em!" sounded out from an unknown source.
It was the redhead Felix had noticed earlier arguing with the other policemen, the one wearing a different type of uniform. He stood there holding his fist in the air like a cheerleader.
Team Crow stared blankly at him. They were used to being alone. The last thing in the world they expected was local support. The redhead took their stares as hostility - or worse, scorn. His face turned as red as his hair.
Jack saved him. "Who the hell are you?"
The redhead pulled himself up straight. "Deputy Kirk Thompson, sir."
Crow smiled. The kid - he couldn't have been over twenty-five - had managed to give the impression he had saluted without actually doing it.
"Who called the sheriff's department?" asked Crow.
The deputy seemed confused. "No one had to, sir. This courthouse is our headquarters. Nobody called the sheriff," he added meaningfully, looking around at the locals who were watching. "And I think he's going to want to know why when he comes back."
Jack grinned. "Could be. Hang around, deputy. We'll talk later."
"Yes, sir. Is there anything I can do now?"
Jack frowned. Where was this kid yesterday so he would at least have had a chance to train him? Or get him some chain mail anyway. No. He might need him after all, shorthanded as they were. But stupid, criminal, to risk him now.
He shook his head. "Not right now," he told the deputy. "Though I'd appreciate it if you'd stick close to Carl there." And he gestured toward Joplin, who still stood beside his winch.
"Yeah, come over here, deputy," said Joplin with a knowing look to Crow. "We'll talk a bit."
Crow started back to his team but stopped. The spectators, the policemen, and the mayor's people were still standing there watching. Some still hadn't taken their eyes off the pile of ashes at Jack's feet. Some looked a little stunned. The mayor's party looked scared.
Scared we'll lose or scared we'll win? he wondered to himself.
But he had no time for them.
"Something I can do for you?" he asked harshly.
No one replied or even met his eyes. Instead they faded back to the sidewalk across the street under the courthouse. The policemen went back to their barricades, looking uncertain and uneasy.
Crow felt the urge to go talk to those cops, to find out what the mayor had told them, to get them on his side, to.
But his team was waiting. This was no time to take a time out and have them lose their edge. He picked up another arrow for the crossbow and joined Cat, Adam, and Felix, who stood by the curb in front of the target.
"Okay, people," he said, kneeling down to arm his weapon, "huddle up."
And so he set about firing them up to go in again. He made his voice strong and confident and, as always, sounding that way to others made it seem that way to himself. He made a change in the Plan. They were originally supposed to wait inside while Adam fetched out another cable and loaded crossbow, but Felix had led them all outside, staring at the dying monster. Crow made a joke about Felix changing the schedule, but while the others smiled, Felix didn't even seem to get it.
Felix didn't seem to be getting much of anything, come to think of it. And while Crow sounded strong and confident for the others and himself, a gnawing fear tried to grow in him that Felix wasn't going to cut it. He was just going to stand there in a petrified daze and if something went wrong and they needed his gun... Or worse, somebody would have to save him and while they were worrying about Felix they wouldn't be worrying about themselves and...
No, dammit! No! Felix will come out of it. Felix will come through. He will. He will. After a couple of kills, after he sees the fiends aren't invincible, he'll be all right. He will. He will!
He must.
And with that Jack Crow stopped worrying about it and concentrated instead on psyching everyone else up. He did a good job. By the time they re-entered the building and got set up between their lanterns and had the detector going Beep-Beep-Beep again, they were ready. And by the time the second goon appeared, a spindly middle-aged man with his throat still jaggedly gashed from his murder, Crow just knew they could pull this off.
And at first it was just the little things that started to go wrong.