Vampire$

“I want fifty thousand,” he said after a while.

“Done.”

Felix nodded, looking miserable. Then he stepped to his phone and picked up the receiver. He pushed a button. Faintly, they heard the buzz of the phone at the bar below.

“Where? Felix. You’ll have to take over for a couple of days. Yes. Yes… No, I’m fine. Fine.”

Felix hung up. He stared through the window a few seconds longer. Then he lit a cigarette and put his free hand back in his pocket. When he turned back to them he said, “I meant it about the fifty grand.”

Jack Crow’s laugh was strong and loud and pure. He jumped to his feet and clapped his hands.

“I oughta charge you!” He stepped to the center of the room and raised his fist into the air. “Don’t you feel it? You’re about to go fight evil. Real live goddamned evil. The real stuff. You get to fight for the good side. How many people ever get a chance to do that?” He laughed again, strode to Felix, and shook his fist under his face. “Don’t you feel it?”

Felix stared at him in amazement. He laughed shortly, shook his head.

Damned if I don’t, he thought with astonishment. A little.

“Well, I do!” cried Cat from behind them. And he found himself grinning wildly. The Return of Jack Crow, he thought to himself, starring Jack Crow.

He turned to Carl.

“Rock and roll!”

Carl smiled crazily back. “Rock and roll,” he echoed.

Felix peered incredulously at the other three. “I must be crazy!”

Jack laughed again. “You really think that?”

Felix didn’t answer. But he really did think that. He shook his bead again. This time they didn’t even need that girl, he thought.

And then he thought: I wonder what her name is?

He looked at Crow & Co., still bright and vibrant and ready.

I wonder if I’ll live long enough to find out?

Chapter 12

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