already.
Castle set down his backpack, knelt, and rummaged until he found one of the maps. He gave it to Pete, but Jenny promptly snatched it away. “You couldn’t find your ass with both hands and a flashlight,” she said.
“There’s only one major trail on the north side,” Castle said, looking at a point between them, where a large balsam pine towered over the rocky outcropping, its gnarled roots gripping the soil of the bank as if afraid of being set adrift. “Do you have a compass?”
Pete shook his head, and Jenny ran out her lower lip as if wondering what else he’d forgotten. She unfolded the map and said, “Straight north on foot and we’ll be in Atlantic City just in time to retire.”
“You can’t miss the trail. The sun’s heading west, so stay ninety degrees from its path across the sky and you’ll be okay.”
Pete cast a dubious glance overhead. “But the sun’s nearly straight up.”
Castle pointed north. “Just go that way, then.”
“‘Go that way,’ he says, Mr. Big Shot Cop,” Jenny said. “And if we don’t, are you going to write us a ticket?”
“Stop with it,” Pete said.
“I’m sorry, but I have to go,” Castle said. It was always possible that Goodall could have had an accident or spilled the canoe. If his traveling companion were a fraction as annoying as Jenny, then the Bama Bomber might have a short fuse already. Or had pushed her overboard.
“Thanks for the map,” Pete said. “This guy who robbed us? Is he big trouble?”
“Let’s just say, with any luck, you might be called as a witness in one of the biggest federal trials since the DC snipers. Assuming we all make it out of here alive.”
“The man’s an optimist,” Jenny said to Pete. “You should pay attention, you might learn something.”
Castle was already heading downstream, following the shore, watching the slick, wet stones at his feet, when he wondered if he should warn the couple about giant flying creatures with dishrag wings that could swoop down and carry them away. Nope. That was nuts.
Not “nuts,” said The Rook, who was apparently determined to ride mental shotgun for the duration of the journey. You’re just a person of psychological difference. A momentary case of schism, a delusional-disorder poster child, a shrink’s wet dream. Nothing to worry about.
“I’m beginning to worry about you,” Castle replied aloud. “Because you sound crazier than I am. And you’re probably dead.”
Why would you go and hold a little thing like that against me?
“Because I have a feeling I might be joining you soon.”
No shit, Sherlock.
Behind Castle, Pete and Jenny were arguing over the map, and Jenny appeared to be winning. Castle hoped, if those weird, bloodthirsty nightmare creatures really existed, they would find her. She probably tasted bad, but at least Pete would get the pleasure of watching her being dragged away across the sky. If he lived long enough to enjoy being a widower.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
The Rook wasn’t quite dead, though the distinction made little difference to him.
In the pitch darkness, he couldn’t tell how many of the creatures had put their faces to his neck and chest. It could have been a dozen, or it could have been two or three repeating the act. It wasn’t the soft sipping sounds they made that was most disturbing; it was the lack of their breath on his skin, the coldness of the lips that nipped at his upper body, the occasional teasing of lazy teeth.
He was completely immobile. Not paralyzed, for he still had some feeling in his limbs and still sensed some motor control, though his lack of action was giving the lie to that belief. A deeper, more primal part of him was enjoying the surrender, perhaps in the same way a rabbit’s brain released relaxing chemicals when the animal was caught in the fox’s jaws. His erection hadn’t faded in the slightest during his fourteen hours of captivity, though it had long since stopped affording him any pleasure. Now it ached, persistent, throbbing, and promising no release.
He’d tried to speak a couple of times, wondering if the creatures were intelligent. As far as he could tell, he’d been conscious the entire time, though parts of the last few hours had taken on a surreal quality that pushed aside the initial shock. Perhaps, he was simply losing his mind, the most likely and most acceptable conclusion. During his master’s program in behavioral psychology at Stanford, he’d arrived at a personal rule: If you wondered if you were insane, then you were insane. All that remained was the elimination of any lingering doubts.
In the program, his specialty had been aberrant behavior. Like any kid growing up with Stephen King and bad horror movies, he knew all about vampire myths, with the living dead arising from their graves at night to suck the blood of innocents, in turn changing the victims into like-minded, eternally thirsty monsters. And like most sane (or formerly sane) people, he found them a bit laughable, though the psychology behind the public’s attraction to the myth was fascinating. It seemed anybody could stamp a pale, pointy-toothed European bisexual on a paperback novel cover or a movie poster and the product would achieve success, however little deserved.
Even more fascinating than the eternal appeal of these fictional tropes were the actual, flesh-and-blood people who believed themselves vampires. They drank blood as a ritual and slept during the day, fearing they might turn to ashes upon exposure to the sun. Some even managed to induce a conversion reaction that caused them to break out in hives or boils if presented with the Christian cross, garlic, or sterling silver, all weapons used against the vampires of popular lore. To Derek Samford’s trained and modern mind, such behavior was as explainable and legitimate as the religious hysteric who spontaneously bled from palms and feet in a sympathetic imitation of Jesus Christ. Aberrant, certainly, but not necessarily harmful.
So vampires were out of the question, and these cold-blooded creatures that were using him as a sacrament couldn’t be aberrant humans, given their lack of breath. But rational explanations had failed him long ago, shortly after he had been dangled upside down like a side of beef on a slaughterhouse hook and whisked away to this hidden hole in the world.
Samford’s exposure to the so-called “hard sciences” was limited. He’d been through basic chemistry and physics, but preferred a realm where the rules were more flexible, thus ensuring that no theory or opinion could ever be completely wrong. Or at least not proven wrong.
But he doubted if even a PhD in biology would have allowed him to stamp a name or genus on these creatures. Through the long night of susurrant licks and soft scratching sounds, Samford had attempted to distract himself with speculative ruminations.
Anything to keep himself from thinking about — the blood on his shoulder, wounds still wet and oozing, wounds that weren’t allowed to crust and dry because moist tongues kept at them -
— the probability that he was dying, a fuel tank being drained to the dregs, liquid sand pouring through the tight tube of an hourglass, hours shrinking to minutes and eventually seconds and finally to a full forever.
Samford, an agnostic since the age of seven, wished he had a potential afterlife from which to draw comfort. Heaven, purgatory, or reincarnation held no special appeal to him, but at the moment, he would prefer even the most fiery and punishing Baptist hell over the possibility that he might return from the dead, as depraved and unnatural as the beasts that now took turns with his flesh.
If he could have belatedly summoned faith, he would have prayed hardest of all for some higher power to wipe the rigid smile from his lips.
Instead, he waited, and he served.
One of them pulled away from his shoulder, and despite the general numbness that infected his entire body with the exception of his penis and the open sores on his torso and neck, he was glad for the respite, because for the space of a heartbeat (and a tiny gush of blood that pulsed out along with it), he could pretend the whole encounter had been a bad dream caused by the hard ground beneath his sleeping bag, that he’d soon awaken, make coffee, and discuss with Jim Castle whether or not they were really going to capture Robert Wayne Goodall and what it might mean for their careers.
Then another tongue laid into him, with gentle teeth around it, and he knew there was no more career, no
