Val struggled to her feet and aimed her shotgun at the nearest vampire, who dodged and then rushed her as she pumped in the next round. She aimed at the last moment and pulled the trigger. The hollow click was lost beneath the tumult, but Val felt the weight of it chunk down on her heart. The vampire bowled her over and they went down together. She tried to jam her forearm under its jaw, but it was far too strong, and inch by inch the snapping fangs came closer to her throat. The stink of the garlic slowed the monster, but its desire was murder, not feeding, so he began clawing at her throat with his nails. Abruptly he stopped and blood splashed Val’s face. Spitting the foulness of it out of her mouth, she shoved at the body and it fell away. The grinning head fell to one side and the body to the other.
Val looked up in stunned surprise and saw Mike standing over her, his sword blade trembling from the tension in his hands. He kicked her shotgun toward her and stood over her as she hastily reloaded. A vampire staggered drunkenly toward Mike, the look of fear and confusion on the creature’s pale face tightening into abject terror as he saw the long blood-smeared blade move in a silvery flash. Mike kicked aside the sagging corpse, his face hard and his eyes as cold and sharp as the razor edge of the sword.
Val rose behind him and looked around for Crow. She saw him chasing a trio of vampires with jets of gasoline. Then a shadowy figure slipped up behind Crow, and Val screamed, “RUGER!”
She began running, but a dozen vampires swarmed at her and Mike and suddenly all she could think about was fighting and killing.
Crow heard Val’s cry just as he felt someone behind him. He whirled around to bring the sprayer up, but Ruger was already too close. He caught Crow’s hand, ripped the plastic pistol grip out of his grasp, then backhanded Crow so hard and fast that it was just a blur. Crow spun down to the ground, the torch flying away, and his shotgun slipped from his shoulder.
“Come on, Kwai Chang,” Ruger taunted, “let’s try for round three here.”
Crow shrugged out of the tank straps. He made a play for his holstered pistol, but Ruger kicked it out of his hand and then short-kicked him under the chin so hard it turned the firelight around him to sparkling party lights. Hard hands caught Crow under the armpits and he felt himself pulled roughly to his feet. Through pinholes in his dancing vision he saw Ruger’s leering face, heard his whispering voice.
“I can’t even begin to tell you how much I’m gonna enjoy this.” Ruger licked his lips and grinned.
“Fuck you,” Crow said and kneed him in the crotch, then thumbed him in the throat. That wiped the leer off the killer’s face and Crow iced that cake by hitting him in the face with a hard two-handed shove that sent him stumbling backward. Crow made a dive for his shotgun, which was lying in the dirt, but Ruger beat him to it; he shouldered Crow out of the way, snatching up the weapon, took the shotgun in both hands, and with a grunt of effort bent the barrel to a crooked forty-degree angle. He tossed the ruined weapon to Crow. “Go ahead, asshole, shoot me.”
This time Crow wasted no time on banter. He dropped the useless gun as he pivoted and kicked Ruger in the knee as hard as he could, the crack of bones audible even through the surrounding noise. Ruger cursed and dropped to his good knee. That gave Crow time to reach for his sword and he whipped it out in a fast draw that beat anything he’d ever managed, but Ruger grabbed the shotgun up and parried the blade. The man’s speed was unbelievable, faster by far than when they had first fought in Val’s front yard—and he was plenty fast then—and even faster than Ruger had been when they’d battled it out at the hospital. Both times Crow had tried to kill Ruger; both times he thought he’d succeeded. Now he was up against a Ruger who was pure monster and at the top of his powers. Crow watched in horror as Ruger rose to his feet, no trace of pain on his face; Crow could hear the bones snapping back into place in the killer’s leg.
“Yeah, kickbox a vampire—that’s clever,” Ruger said and swung the shotgun like a cudgel, and though Crow was able to bring the sword up in time to parry it, Ruger was only using the attack as a ruse to step in close. He clamped one icy hand around Crow’s sword wrist and with the other he punched him in the stomach hard enough to knock all the air out of the world. Crow managed to turn enough to deflect most of the force, but what connected was still like a bullet in the gut. Crow felt something tear inside. There wasn’t enough air to scream and Crow sank down to his knees.
Ruger bent down and leered at him. “Ooo—where’s all the fancy kung-fu moves now, dickhead?”
Ruger raised his fist to punch again and hesitated as the ground beneath them suddenly trembled with the rumbling thunder of an earthquake. Crow stared stupidly down, trying to decide whether it was really happening or if he was going into some kind of convulsion. The tremor passed and Ruger’s smile returned as he reached down and once more jerked Crow to his feet, slapped him twice across the mouth, and then pulled him close.
“You know what I’m going to do, asshole? I’m going to break your arms and legs and while you’re lying there in the mud I’m going to strip that broke-nose bitch of yours and take her in every hole she’s got. Right in front of you. I’m going to split her open and make you watch it. Maybe I’ll let all my boys here pull a train on her, ass-hump her until she’s begging me to kill her and screaming at you for being a cowardly, ineffectual little small-town piece of shit. Then, when we’ve used her all up—I’m going to
Crow’s mouth was filled with blood and he gagged on it. All Crow could do was hock up the blood in his mouth and spit it at Ruger. The garlic was all but gone, but there was just enough to make Ruger wince and cough.
“Yo! Asshole!”
Ruger looked toward the sound and right into the swing of the stock of LaMastra’s shotgun. It caught him across the mouth and the vampire’s face seemed to disintegrate as he whirled down to the ground. Crow sagged, too, but LaMastra caught him with one hand and kept him up.
“Come on, man, we got to fall back and regroup.” LaMastra’s face was crisscrossed with scratches and cuts, his clothes were torn, and he looked nearly spent. “Gotta find some space to reload. I’m dry.”
Crow felt the ground firming under him and he started to say something, but then something punched him in the stomach again. It was impossible with LaMastra standing face-to-face with him just inches away, but Crow looked down and when he saw what it was the whole world twisted sideways into madness. It was a fist. A fist covered with blood that steamed like soup, a fist wrapped in coils of purple intestine and red strings of muscle fiber, a fist that seemed to have sprouted like magic from LaMastra’s stomach. Crow looked slowly up from that fist to LaMastra’s face. The detective seemed confused; he frowned, gave Crow a weary half-smile, and then coughed up a dark pint of blood onto Crow’s chest. The detective’s big body sagged down and Crow saw Ruger standing close behind him, smiling. Always smiling.
With a grunt, Ruger yanked his fist out of LaMastra’s body and let the big man slump all the way to the ground. Ruger raised his fist to his mouth and licked off some of the blood.
“
“And now it’s your turn,” Ruger whispered and took a single step forward.
Instantly a thunderbolt flashed across the flame-torn darkness and struck Ruger in the side, barreling him over, and he went down in a fighting, hissing ball with something monstrously huge and immensely powerful. The impact knocked Crow back a few steps and he stared in shock as the two bodies came to rest against a heap of sword-slashed and fire-burned corpses.
Ruger was pinned under something that was bigger and far stronger—something whose body was packed with knotted cords of muscle and whose hide rippled with a pelt of coarse red hair. Four vampires—survivors of Ruger’s elite guard—rushed in and tackled the thing and it went down as Ruger scrambled out from underneath. He rose to his feet, visibly shaken and slashed to the bone in a dozen places, but even as Crow watched the wounds began to close, the skin knit.
One of the other vampires was less fortunate, or perhaps less powerful, and he flopped onto his back with a head that was connected by a few grisly strands of meat. A second vampire catapulted back with a smashed skull. The creature just shook off the other two as it rose into a fighting crouch, facing Ruger. Instantly they began stalking one another, circling, snarling. The thing that had attacked Ruger was gigantic as it rose onto its hind legs, and even with its hunched back and misshapen legs it towered above Ruger. It had large piercing yellow eyes with
