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
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
