“Will you stay with us?” Ophelia asked.
Pedro saw the memory image of the girl’s father, lying broken and dead in their living room. He realized she probably didn’t even know what had happened to him—or wasn’t facing it. “I’ll catch up with you in a little while,” he answered.
Pedro wrestled Yoshida onto his broad shoulders and ran though the rain with Ophelia and her mother to the station-house door, where they were met by Hudson and Deputy Astin, both lugging boxes of ammo. Military-grade guns were strapped across their backs.
“Petey!” Hudson said. “Am I glad to see you. Is Yoshi okay?”
“He’s done his fair share for the night.”
“All right, then. Get these girls and that sexy sack of Kobe beef back there safe in a cell and come with us.”
As Pedro started toward the holding area, Astin stopped him. “Thought you might want to reunite with your old friend.”
Pedro had not seen his scarred ten-gauge in a year.
* * * *
“Okay, Pocky.” DeShaun death-gripped the weight room’s decades-old push broom and set it like a hockey stick. “On three, you open, we’re out, you close it. I’m on defense, Stuart bolts next door to get that backpack, we scram straight back. You open and close it fast.”
Stuart took up a runner’s starting position a few feet back. “If one of ’em gets in…” The other kids raised five-pound plates, dumbbells and short bars. “Right.”
“One…”
Pockets clasped the weight-room doorknob in both little hands.
“Two…”
He swallowed such a deep breath it made his eyes open silver-dollar wide.
“Three!”
Pockets screamed like Debbie Rochon as he jerked the door open. DeShaun went first, with Stuart barely out before Pockets slammed the door behind him.
DeShaun ran to the nearest cluster of baby pumpkins and bulldozed them with the broom, sending a half dozen sliding across the floor.
Stuart jumped over one and hit the office door in one motion, calling, “Behind you!” to DeShaun.
“Got it!” said the other boy, as he sideswiped the creature with a golf swing that sent it into the wall—and into pieces.
Stuart was out the office door with the backpack. “Aaaaagh!” he cried, as he fell to his back to avoid the leaping arc of a screeching squash.
DeShaun intercepted it in a perfectly timed smack with the wooden side of the broom head.
Red blood and white seeds splashed across the weight-room door. Hearing Pockets’s muffled squeal, the boys hoped he hadn’t abandoned his post.
DeShaun helped Stuart up and shoved him toward the door. Pockets was as good as gold, swinging it open as he called, “Hurry up, you guys!”
DeShaun dove in, breaking his fall on Stuart’s back.
More panicked cries rose from the children. DeShaun and Stuart turned to see one of the basketball-sized monsters halfway in the door, its vines flogging at little feet. Pockets pushed the door against it but froze when two vines, then a third, wrapped around his leg.
“You know what to do, Pockets!” DeShaun yelled.
Pockets looked at DeShaun and, in that microsecond, went from terrified to determined. He took a step back with his free leg and thrust it into the door with all the power his fifty-pound frame could muster. The would-be invader was reduced to mush.
“Good job!” praised the big boys. “You’re a hero!”
Pockets stared at the dead strand around his leg. Stuart yanked it off and tossed it behind him with as much nonchalance as he could muster. “This time, everybody’s gonna hafta soldier up.”
Chapter 32
Children of the Damned
The vomited seeds grew to normal-sized pumpkins in less than two seconds.
Realizing what was happening, Timbo quickly loaded and raised his rifle—then screamed to wake the dead, as a volleyball-sized assailant leaped ten feet and clamped onto his shin with its jagged baby teeth.
Kerwin yanked the rifle out of his hands and swatted the thing away with the butt.
Before Timbo could thank him, another had jumped onto his back and wrapped a thorny clothesline-vine around his throat.
Mayor Stuyvesant, a soccer forward in college, caught an incoming monster with a powerful punt that sent it into the wall, where it burst apart in a gory explosion.
Bernard swung a pallet board, hoping to catch his attacker with the same athletic timing and finesse as the mayor. He missed.
The thing bit into his forearm and quickly wound its tendrils around his wrist. The engineer stumbled backward, bumping into McGlazer and knocking him into the waiting, writhing tangles of an adult demon.
It hauled him up to the window with dizzying speed. McGlazer braced himself on either side of the window frame with his feet, immediately feeling his thighs and hamstrings tingle from the stress of fighting the pumpkin thing’s strength. Soon, his legs would fail, and he would be raggedly ripped in at least two pieces, starting from the groin.
The creature’s face appeared in the window—and McGlazer realized, with blooming despair, that he recognized it.
Below, Kerwin crashed to his back—atop a newborn monster—as he caught the next attacker in both hands, just inches from his face. Despite his peril, he felt both disgusted and gratified that he had crushed one of its siblings underneath with his fall.
Thin vines circled his arms, then wound around his throat, generating leverage that brought those awful little square teeth ever closer to his face. Kerwin jutted his false chin up like Stallone, allowing the little monster to bite into it harmlessly. As it applied pressure with its teeth, he did so with his hands. Terrified surprise crossed its face just before Kerwin crushed it into bloody pie filling.
Pain exploded at his ear as a newborn nightmare bit into it—and tore it off.
His sister, the mayor, lined up another big kick right into the thing’s mouth, but this more-mature fiend had faster reflexes. It snapped down on her toes with perfect timing, piercing Doris’s shoes, bringing instant, exquisite agony.
Kerwin rolled behind her to break her fall, coming within grasping range of one of the adult horrors’ flailing tendrils. He wished
