Billy rubbed his hands across his face. “I tried to, you know, stake him through the heart.” He shook his head. “Sternum’s a bitch.” He coughed, spit blood onto the floor, wiped his mouth with his uninjured arm. “Eye socket,” he said, nodding emphatically, “works.” He dropped to his knees and threw up.
“Note to self,” BK said softly while he stood over his friend.
(5)
Crow and LaMastra stood amid the carnage in the entrance hall to the ER. Everywhere around them was death. There had been over a dozen vampires—newly risen—in the hospital entrance; now there were only corpses. The air was thick with a gunpowder stink and the two of them were nearly deaf from the gunfire.
Crow covered LaMastra while the big detective reloaded both of his guns, and then did his own as LaMastra’s Roadblocker tracked up and down the hall. Crow bent into the car and fished out his
“Once we find your lady and the others,” LaMastra said, “we’ll need new wheels.”
Crow nodded. His car was a smoking wreck. “I saw Sarah Wolfe’s Hummer out in the lot. If we can find the keys—”
“I can hotwire anything with wheels,” LaMastra said. “Benefits of an inner-city education.”
“Good to know.” Crow took out his last bottle of garlic oil and smeared half of it on his throat and wrists before handing it to LaMastra. As an afterthought he licked some off his wrist so the taste would be in his mouth. “You ready?”
“No. You?”
“No,” Crow said. “Let’s go. Elevator’ll be out. Stairs are over there.”
“What now?” LaMastra asked. “We seem to be alone for the moment.”
The lobby led to a hall that ran the whole length of the building, and they followed it as fast as good sense would allow, Crow walking point, LaMastra back-walking to cover their asses. The hall broke to their left in three places, toward the ER triage rooms, to the main bank of elevators a hundred feet farther along, and then jagged off into the labs and X-ray department. They saw nothing moving at all. There were corpses everywhere, but they didn’t know if they were truly dead, waiting to rise, or shamming it as part of some kind of trap. If anything had so much as moved they’d have blasted it to red slush.
“Well, we have two choices, as I see it,” LaMastra said quietly as they came to the fire tower.
“They being?”
“Val and the others are either upstairs in Weinstock’s room or down in the morgue. She’s your fiancee, so you pick.”
“Shit. What would your choice be?”
Crow took a few paces down the hall and looked briefly into the triage rooms. There was a dead nurse on the floor of the waiting room and a few corpses slumped into the chairs, but no one else. “My first guess would be the morgue. It has the strongest door and that’s where we left all the ammunition and the rest of the garlic. Given a choice of where to make a stand, I’d hole up there.”
LaMastra pursed his lips. “Given a choice. Look around…this all happened fast. You think Val had time to go down there?”
Crow felt his stomach lurch. “No.”
“Then we go up.” They moved to the first stairwell. LaMastra said, “Okay, the same game plan? If it’s pale and we don’t like the way it looks, shoot it?”
“What if we shoot a patient by mistake?”
LaMastra’s face was wooden. “If we live through this we’ll light a candle.”
They fanned out and flanked the doorway to the fire stairs. To both of them it seemed as if their whole lives consisted of going through doors with fear and violence playing tug-of-war in their hearts.
The fire door had a heavy crash bar and Crow raised his leg and pressed his right foot on the steel bar. They did not have to worry about booby traps now, but an ambush was a real possibility. With a quick glance at LaMastra, Crow gave the door a powerful kick and it flew inward, and they rushed through, Crow aiming straight and then up, LaMastra aiming straight then low, but the stairwell was empty. The dim emergency lights flickered and the two men listened to the rasp of their own breathing magnified by the acoustics of the stairwell. They started climbing, moving as quietly as they could. There were bloody handprints smeared along the walls, very fresh, droplets worming their way down to the floor. Crow led the way, taking each step with great caution, eyes barely blinking despite the stinging sweat that trickled down from his forehead. He was moving on the razor edge of awareness, his senses tuned and focused, ready for anything. And yet, he was still surprised when Karl Ruger stepped out from around the corner.
They jerked to a halt and brought their guns up fast, barrels pointing at the killer, but Ruger just grinned at them and tickled his black talons along the slender, unmarked throat of the young child he held in front of him.
Behind Ruger, and below them on the steps, there came the whispering footsteps of vampires hurrying to close the trap.
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. “
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
