Bad Moon Rising

Chapter 40

(1)

Missy, Crow’s old Impala, rocketed down the black road at seventy miles an hour. Crow was hunched over the wheel, his face set in a grim mask, his eyes intent on the road. Beads of sweat were scattered across his brow. Beside him, LaMastra was as rigid as stone. Only his big fist moved, pounding down repeatedly on his thigh as he muttered, “Go! Go!”

All Crow heard was Val’s name echoing in his head. He wanted to scream.

Several more explosions blew bright red holes in the night. Thunderous echoes buffeted the car as it crested another hill. Crow cried out and jammed on the brakes; the wheels screeched and the car slewed and fishtailed before finally coming to a stop at the top of the last hill before they reached the town proper. Crow and LaMastra felt their minds freezing with shock as they stared at the road and the town. Cars by the hundreds clogged the road, crowding both lanes, clawing along the shoulders as they fled from the town. Behind the mad exodus the town itself was ablaze. Fires whooshed upward from dozens of spots, and the undersides of the clouds writhed with red snakes of reflected fire. Buildings and trees burned vigorously; telephone poles flamed like torches all along Corn Hill.

“Who’s doing all this?” LaMastra punched the dashboard. “This can’t all be Vic Wingate. I mean—these are vampires we’re dealing with! Vampires don’t blow shit up. Do they?”

The flaming debris was raining down onto the rooftops of the houses near the elementary school. Already some of the houses were burning. “They do now,” Crow said in a drum-tight voice. “I guess they do whatever serves their purpose?”

“Purpose? Purpose? What purpose? I mean, why blow shit up if you just want to drink blood? I don’t get it.”

A line of cars three abreast were heading right for them, horns blaring, high beams flashing on and off. “Hold on,” Crow said as he spun the wheel. “This is going to get tricky.” Missy left the road and crunched along on the outside edge of the shoulder, at times clinging to the edge of the drainage ditch that ran parallel to the verge. He reached the line of cars and shot past; the drivers cursed at him and shot him the finger, but Crow spun the wheel back and shot back onto the road, accelerating into an open slot, racing into the burning town.

(2)

Ruger had kill zones set up at each of the big event areas that made up the Festival, using the handy tourist brochures so thoughtfully provided by the borough to locate the right spots. One of them was the Dead-End Drive-In, and that was already a slaughterhouse; another was the Hayride. He had teams hitting the college campus, the two movie theaters, the high school gymnasium, and the banquet hall of the Harvestman—everywhere tourists were gathering in large numbers with some possibility of containment. Vic’s fireworks were keeping things hopping. The bridges were gone, which meant that no one was getting out of Pine Deep. If they fled into the farms and state forest, then that would be a happy hunting ground for later on. By the time anyone on the outside figured out what was happening—if that was even possible—and mobilized any kind of police or military response, it would be way too late. The Man would be up by then.

(3)

Brinke Stevens flashed a bright smile as she handed the signed 8x10 studio portrait of her in a seductive pose. The young man she’d signed it for was blushing so hard he couldn’t speak.

“Don’t forget your candy,” she called, and the guy reached out a sweaty, trembling hand to take the bag of Pine Deep Authentic Candy Corn. Everyone who got a picture got some candy. The fan pressed the picture to his chest and sort of scuttled away, already tearing open the plastic bag.

Brinke cut a look at Debbie Rochon, who was signing her own stack of pictures, and they both cocked a knowing eyebrow.

“Gotta love the fanboys,” Debbie said under her breath.

“Each and every one.”

The seats were all filled with fans who already had their pictures and who were stuffing handfuls of candy corn into their mouths. They all looked strangely happy.

“Ladies?” They turned to see Dave Kramer, one of Crow’s friends, who was the liaison between the Festival and the actresses. “We’re going to run the first film in forty minutes. You need a break from this…?”

Brinke shook her head. “Nah. These guys have been waiting all day.”

“We’re good,” agreed Debbie. “We can do a pee break after the movie’s on.”

That’s when the lights went out. The lines of fans groaned, milled, mumbled. A few of them tittered as if this was all a wonderful kind of fun.

“Someone get the tent flaps!” Kramer yelled, and when nobody moved he hustled over and did it himself, pulling back the pumpkin-colored canvas to let in the pale afternoon light. Thunder boomed over and over again and a wet breeze swept into the tent.

A Pine Deep cop was on post outside and he turned when the flap was opened.

“Everything okay in there?”

“Lights went out.”

“Okay,” said the cop and pushed past Kramer. He turned on his big flashlight and headed right to the signing table, playing the beam over the two actresses. “Hello, ladies…sorry for the inconvenience.”

They shrugged. “Not a problem,” Brinke said. “You know what’s going on?”

“Don’t sweat it…it’s all under control.” The cop kept his light right in their faces.

“Officer,” said Debbie, “you mind with the light?”

The cop grinned, and they could see the white of his teeth even past the harsh glare of the flash. “You bitches are the scream queens…aren’t you?”

A half-dozen bulky figures crowded the tent’s opening; college football team sweatshirts and pasty faces. They shoved Kramer roughly out of the way. At the table, Officer Golub bent toward the actresses, his white grin stretching wider and wider.

“Let’s hear you scream,” he whispered and then snapped his teeth at them.

(4)

Jim O’Rear wasn’t scheduled to give his demonstration of film stunt techniques until that evening. Knowing that Crow was shorthanded he volunteered to spend the afternoon walking the grounds at the Hayride to make sure all the attractions were in top shape. There were reporters from all the big papers as well as from the major horror magazines—the last thing Crow would need was a shot of tourists stuck at, say, the Cave of the Wolfman with no werewolf, no spooky lighting, no smoke effects.

He had just completed the circuit and was heading to the Haunted House to give BK the thumbs-up when he heard screams coming from the Scream Queen tent which, despite its name, was not scheduled for anything loud until the marathon started, and according to his clipboard that was nearly forty minutes from now. He listened. O’Rear had heard a lot of screams—as an actor and stuntman on movies and on dozens of haunted attractions; he knew the difference between canned screams and real. This sounded way too real. Even for a theme park designed by Malcolm “I-have-no-limits” Crow.

He stared in the direction of the tent. The screams kept going, on and on.

“Shit,” he said, and started running.

(5)

The creature hit BK like a missile and together they crashed backward onto the flatbed’s deck. The thing lunged at him, trying to bite him.

“What the fu—?” BK started to say, but the hands around his throat were like steel bands, instantly cutting off his air. Black poppies started blooming at the edges of his vision.

Though he did not understand what was happening, or even recognize the nature of the person attacking him, BK had been in too many fights to go down this easy. He jammed his left fist under the attacker’s jaw and shoved upward, pushing the teeth away from his throat, then hooked a sharp right-hand hooking palm heel into the creature’s ear. BK was a very big, very strong man and the shot should have taken all the steam out of this guy, even if he was hopped up on crack. The open-handed blow should almost certainly have popped the eardrum, but the snarling thing on top of him shook it off with barely a moment’s loosening of its grip.

BK’s mind was going dark from oxygen starvation. So, his next hit was a killing blow, a two-knuckle rising punch into the attacker’s Adam’s apple. He heard the hyoid bone crunch; instantly the pressure slackened and the attacker reeled back, clutching his throat. BK came off the flatbed and was expecting to see the son of a bitch go down dead. Instead he shook itself like a wet dog and raised its head.

That’s when BK got his first real look at him.

His attacker was a teenage boy, maybe seventeen, with a pimply face and shaggy hair. His eyes were dark, his mouth full of fangs…but suddenly BK realized, with a sick and terrible certainty, that this was not another Halloween costume.

The monster rushed him again.

(6)

Screenwriter Stephen Susco was yelling at the projectionist. The power had gone off barely ten minutes into screening of his film, The Grudge 2. The house lights were out and the emergency lights were next to useless. Now there was some kind of fight going on in the back rows of the theater.

The projectionist never appeared; neither did the ushers. Susco turned to fellow screenwriter-director James Gunn, who was scheduled to screen his flick Slither in a couple of hours and in a low voice said, “This is the sort of shit you’d expect in LA.”

Gunn spread his hands. “Small Town, America. What can I tell you?”

“Hey, I grew up near here. Don’t bust on Bucks County.”

A sound made them look up to see a dark, round object come sailing out through the projectionist’s window, arc over the crowd, and land with a wet thud on the stage. Both screenwriters looked at it, smiling at first because this was Halloween and they thought it was a joke. The object rolled toward them and came to a wobbly stop five feet away. The smiles drained away from both their faces as they recognized the face—and head—of the projectionist.

The back doors of the theater burst open with a crash and a dozen pale-faced strangers filled the doorway. Dixie McVey led the way. He pointed at the men on the stage. “Fetch!” he said. The killers rushed past him and the dying began.

(7)

The woman in the party dress staggered out of the firelit shadows with a ragged bundle in her blood-streaked arms. Her dress was torn, and tears had cut tracks through the soot stains on her face. It had probably been a pretty face once, but not now.

“My baby!” she screamed as she lurched toward the hospital entrance. Flaming fragments from the TV station next door fell all around her. “God! Please help my baby!”

Most of the crowd that had been thronged outside of the ER entrance had bolted and fled when the station blew up. Only three people were left—a nurse, an EMT, and a pizza delivery guy with a bloody rag pressed to his face. They stood in a loose knot watching the rain of flaming debris, but they turned as the woman staggered toward them.

“My baby!” The woman’s voice was shrill with anguish, and the watchers could see that the baby she carried in her arms was horribly limp. She stopped walking and just stood there. “Help my baby!”

The pizza delivery guy took a tentative step toward her. “Lady! Come on! Get in here.” A chunk of steaming pipe crashed down only yards behind the woman, but she was too out of it to even twitch.

The pizza delivery guy looked at the EMT and together they sprinting across the parking lot toward her. The nurse lingered by the door, but screamed for all of them to get inside. She tried not to look at the small, slack limbs that hung from the bundle of bloody rags the woman clutched to her chest.

The two men braced her and each took an arm to hurry her along. A flaming shoe slapped down in front of them. “Christ,” growled the EMT.

“My baby’s hurt!” wept the woman as they hustled her along. The nurse came out to meet them, making shushing noises to soothe her, reaching out for the baby. The woman screamed and huddled over the baby, shielding it from the nurse’s touch.

“Get the door,” ordered the nurse, and the pizza delivery guy ran forward to pull open the heavy door. The emergency power did not extend to the hydraulic doors.

The woman stopped outside, jerking back, her face suddenly frightened and suspicious. “No! You’ll hurt my baby!”

“No, no,” the nurse quickly assured her. “We’re going to help you. We’re going to help your…baby. Come on, sweetheart.”

“That’s right, Miss,” said the EMT, trying to urge her on. Still the woman hesitated, clearly afraid of the yawning doorway.

“My baby?”

“There are doctors in here,” said the nurse. “They’ll take care of your baby. They’ll fix you both up good as new.” The lie burned like acid on her tongue.

The woman turned and looked at the nurse, her eyes almost blank except for haunted shadows. “Doctors?”

“Yes, Sweetheart. Very good doctors. The best. Now come on in so we can help you.”

“Come inside,” the pizza guy called, half watching her and half watching the seemingly endless fall of flaming debris.

Reluctantly, the woman began moving again, letting the driver and the nurse guide her inside. They crossed the threshold and left the danger of the falling debris behind. There were other people milling around in the ER entrance now, including a young resident from Pakistan who was already moving toward them with a look of deep concern on his face. The woman stopped just inside the entrance and slowly lowered her arms. The tattered blanket fell from her hands onto the floor, and a limp form flopped out into the light. The nurse and the driver stared. The pizza delivery guy and the resident stared. All of them wore identical frowns of surprise and confusion.

On the hospital floor lay an ordinary child’s doll, with a plastic smiling face and soft rubber arms and legs. The driver was the first to lift his eyes from the doll to the bloodstained woman. She was no longer staring wide-eyed with shock. She was smiling. Her smile was wide and white and impossible.

Lois Wingate threw back her head and laughed as behind her the doors were yanked open by powerful hands. All of the vampires who had been hiding in the shadows behind parked cars in the lot now came howling into the hospital to share in the fun. They swarmed past Lois. Last of all came Karl Ruger, twirling Lois’s tiara on a long white finger.

“Now that was just plain mean,” he said with a grin.

Lois flew into his arms and their kisses tasted of blood.

(8)

Vic stumbled away from the open door of the pickup toward the weak lights that spilled through the glass doors of the Emergency Room entrance. Twice he tripped and fell. A thin whimpering cry bubbled from his lips as he tottered toward the doors, one hand pressing a greasy rag against the melted skin of his face and the other batting at invisible nothings that he believed flew around him. He was deep in shock and his shoulders twitched every few steps.

He pulled the door open, screaming in effort and pain, oblivious to the carnage around him. The vampires looked at him but did not dare approach. They knew who he was, and even if he was burned and out of his mind with pain, not one of them dared to attack him.

At times during the nightmare drive from Griswold’s house to the hospital Vic thought that his skin was still on fire—it felt like it was still blazing—and he beat at his skin. But that only made the pain worse. He wept and mumbled and cried out for the Man to help him, but the darkness in his head was silent except for the roar of open flame.

Inside the hospital he reeled and lurched toward the ER. He didn’t know if any doctors would still be alive or not. He didn’t care. There would be morphine.

All the way to the hospital he kept calling the Man, using that old mind connection to try and reach him…but it was like shouting into a well. The Man didn’t answer, didn’t say a word.

The silence burned him far worse than the damage to his skin and he had to will himself not to sob. It wasn’t right…it wasn’t fair. None of this was fair.

The right side of his face looked normal, but the left was a horror show. If a waxwork dummy had been worked over with a blowtorch, the effect would have been about the same. Skin sagged in melted folds, drooping over one eye, hanging loosely from the bone on withered strings of damaged muscle. His left eye was not blind, but all he could see was a milky whiteness shot with threads of scarlet. Most of his black hair had burned away to reveal a worm-white scalp splotched here and there with lurid red marks. His clothes had burned, too, but they had kept his body from the worst of it. He had rolled around in the tall grass near the house to extinguish the burning jacket and jeans before the flames could do crippling damage to his body, but his face was ruined. His hands were puffed with leaking blisters from swatting at the flames.

Thirty feet inside the ER he tripped over a kid’s rag doll and went down in a sprawl, cracking his chin against the marble floor. He bellowed for help, unable to work out the mechanics of how to get back to his feet. His bladder let go and Vic Wingate lay sprawled in his own piss, his face a Picasso mask, wheezing air in and out through a seared throat.

And Vic Wingate started to cry.

(9)

They all heard the screams change from shock to terror to pain. Val ran out into the hall with Mike behind her just as the door to the fire stairs opened and half a dozen white-faced vampires came dashing out, laughing and yelling like frat boys on rush night.

(10)

Terry could feel everything that was happening to him. He was acutely aware of the shift in body temperature as his system jumped into a whole new dimension of cellular activity. His respiration quickened and his pupils dilated as hormones were pumped furiously into his system. In his brain new glands formed and old ones faded away; his heart hammered with tremendous force, sending his blood coursing through his veins to carry strange new chemical mixtures to organs and bones. His entire nervous system was like a supercomputer running a massively complex program and redesigning itself as it functioned, expanding its memory, discarding useless files, accessing new and bizarre data.

Terry could feel his body shifting, altering as mass was reassigned. His bones became heavier to support muscle tissue that had thickened and grown more dense. His skin tingled as new hair follicles formed and began sending stiff red shoots through the flesh. His jaw ached horribly as the configuration of his teeth changed; his molars shifted forward to allow the growth of strong new carnassial teeth, and the incisors and canines became decidedly more pronounced. Externally his face looked no different. If Sarah had been looking at him instead of out in the hallway trying to get answers about the noise and confusion, she would not yet have seen anything beyond the last of the fading bruises that marked his face, but inside Terry, nothing was the same.

When the first explosions rocked the hospital, Terry’s mind registered them but did not focus. His window faced east and only rattled as the shock waves hit, and Terry’s reforming senses did not register any immediate threat. He remained submerged in his internal world of physical change, but Sarah had leapt to her feet and gone rushing into the hallway. She was out there for a long time, and when the changes in Terry’s body began to affect his surface anatomy, he was distantly glad that she was not in the room. There was just enough of him left to care.

When the windows on the other side of the hospital blew inward, the changes were starting to accelerate. His window only shuddered in its frame and its dark surface reflected the chameleon changes taking place on the bed.

Outside, Sarah, the staff, and scores of patients choked the hallway. Every third person had a cell phone and people were shouting into them as if it would do some good. Rumors buzzed back and forth like agitated flies. There were screams and yells, and the sound of bodies colliding in the poorly lit halls.

A nurse started yelling for everyone to go back to their rooms, for visitors to help get their family members back to their beds, while down the hall a doctor was yelling for everyone to get out of their rooms and away from the windows. Suddenly terrified for Terry, Sarah began to fight her way through the darkness toward his room. The whole hospital shook as blast after blast rocked the town. People staggered into her, and twice she tripped and fell in the darkness. Just as she reached for the handle to his door there was a tremendous shattering crash from inside and she screamed and shoved her shoulder against the inrush of wind. She fought her way inside and then stopped, hand to her mouth to stifle a scream.

The window was an empty hole through while the night air blew with stinging coldness. Shredded curtains whipped and danced in the breeze. On the bed the blankets were torn to ribbons, and the IV stand lay on the floor in a puddle of solution.

Sarah stood in the doorway and screamed again.

The room was empty. Terry was gone.

(11)

The Bone Man stood on the roof of the hospital and watched the town burn. His guitar hung from his limp right hand and his left palm was pressed to his chest as if his heart could actually beat. It felt like it was breaking nonetheless.

Two floors below he could feel the thing that had been Mike Sweeney, could feel the energies surging and flowing in him like tidal waters. Above him the cloudy sky was dense with thousands of circling crows. Down there in the streets he saw the thing that had been Terry Wolfe racing through the flickering shadows. Out beyond the edge of town, down in the Hollow, he could feel that other thing twisting and writhing in the muddy darkness. This is what that poet must have meant, he mused, when he wrote about a beast slouching to town to be born.