Bad Moon Rising

Chapter 41

(1)

Val went out of the room to see what was going on. There was no sense or order to the melee in the halls. Some of the patients and staff were screaming; some crouched down against the base of the walls, arms wrapped around their heads like kids used to do during air raid drills in school. There were at least three people lying on the floor, either dead or unconscious, and no one seemed to notice or care.

Then the door to the fire stairs opened and a knot of figures dressed in Halloween costumes came creeping out. Immediately they split up and went in different directions, and as Val watched two of the figures leapt at a pair of elderly patients and tackled them to the floor. A nearby nurse screamed, and in the dim light cast by the emergency floods Val couldn’t exactly see what was happening, but she knew.

The screams changed then, transforming from shouts and shrieks of confusion and fear into true screams of pain and terror. More figures came out of the stairwell, and one of them turned in her direction. He was only a silhouette, framed by the weak lights in the stairway, but an icy fear reached into Val’s chest and closed its cold fingers around her heart. Her lips formed a word, a name, and even though she didn’t speak it aloud it soured her mouth like bile.

Ruger.

She wasn’t sure if he saw her, but just the possibility of it—and the reality of his presence here—made the unborn embryo in her womb scream in psychic terror. Val fled back into Weinstock’s room.

“He’s here!” she gasped.

(2)

“Crow! Watch!”

Crow already saw the body lying in the street and wrenched the wheel hard over so the wheels missed the prone figure’s outstretched hand by inches. He skidded to a stop and threw it into Park. The rest of the street was choked with running people and burning debris. Every store along the street had lost its glass to the explosions, the windows yawning wide and black like gasping mouths. LaMastra reached for the door handle.

“What are you doing?” demanded Crow.

“I’m going to see if that person is…”

“No you’re not!” Crow reached past him and hammered down the door lock with his fist. “That person is dead. So’s that one over there. I can see more of them down the street—just look!”

LaMastra did look, seeing what he hadn’t taken in before. There were bodies everywhere. A few moved feebly, but most were clearly dead. People ran by in panic, sometimes pausing to pound on the car’s hood and try the door handles before fleeing into the night.

“Vince, I don’t know what’s happening, but I think it’s suicide to get out of the car before we get to the hospital. We have to get to Val.”

LaMastra stared out at the riot. He saw a white-faced creature leap from the top of a parked news van onto a running man. The two of them rolled over and over in the middle of the street, and then the vampire tore out the man’s throat in a geyser of blood.

“Jesus Christ!” LaMastra cried.

Crow punched him in the arm, hard. “We can’t save them. We have to go!”

Crow put the car in Drive and stepped on the gas, but as he did so LaMastra cranked down the window and laid the barrel of the big shotgun across the frame; as the car passed, the cop fired and splashed the vampire against the side of the van.

“Drive!”

Crow drove.

A naked man staggered out into the middle of the street, his body bleeding from a dozen sets of small punctures. Four children ran after him, their laughing mouths bright with fresh blood. LaMastra shot two of them, but the others fled.

Crow had to weave in and out of the oncoming traffic, blaring his horn, flashing his brights. Cars and people buffeted him and one of his headlights went blind; but with LaMastra maintaining a nearly constant barrage even the panicking people started dodging out of the way. LaMastra fired his gun dry and rolled up the window while he reloaded. He fished Crow’s shotgun out of the duffel and as Crow threaded his way toward the hospital, LaMastra emptied both guns again and again.

“Christ!” he gasped, hastily reloading again. His shoulder ached from the kick of the two guns. “How many of these things are there?”

When they entered the parking lot they saw a pair of vampires holding the struggling body of a young woman in their arms. Her body was naked and crisscrossed with freely bleeding gashes. The vampires moved from victim to victim, first cutting their own skin to dribble their own blood into slack, dead mouths, and then dripping the woman’s blood into the same mouths. At once Crow and LaMastra understood not only the reason for the impossible numbers of the living dead but the overwhelming horror of the invasion. The sheer scope of it was impossible to grasp.

“Get those two bastards!” Crow bellowed as he gunned his engine and raced across the lot. Hearing the roar of the engine, the vampires dropped the woman’s corpse and turned snarling faces at the single headlight of the big Impala. LaMastra crammed his beefy head and shoulders out the window and his first shot took one of them off at the shoulders, but the other—seeing his comrade fall—fled into the darkness with incredible speed and agility. LaMastra fired and missed.

“Leave it!” Crow yelled as he pulled around to the ER entrance. The car rounded the corner and burst into the main section of the parking lot. There were more bodies, and more vampires laboring at their task of increasing Griswold’s army. Crow stamped down on the accelerator and rammed the closest one who almost—but not quite—managed to leap out of the way. The vampire thumped across the hood and landed behind the car, but he was up again in a moment and running after them, spitting with fury. LaMastra leaned out the window and blew his legs off.

Crow squealed to a stop a dozen yards from the hospital entrance and they gaped at the carnage. There were bodies everywhere, lying twisted and dead, littering the opening and strewn about in the lobby.

“Everyone’s dead,” he said, gagging on it.

But as they watched, the bodies began to rise.

“Oh, shit!”

The corpses stirred and rolled over, jerking back into a new and terrible wakefulness. There were at least twenty of them, and as they rose some of them wandered off into the hospital, but many of them turned toward the front door, staring past the single remaining headlight of Crow’s car.

“This is not good,” said LaMastra as he hurried to reload.

There was a thud and the whole car shook as something heavy landed on the roof. Crow could see white fingers hooked around the edge of the door. He drew his Beretta and put two slugs up through the roof. A white body fell past his window.

Crow made a low, feral noise, his lip curling. He said, “Hold on to your ass!”

LaMastra stared in horror as Crow began gunning the engine. “Oh…no, don’t even think about it!”

“This ain’t the blues anymore, partner, this is rock and roll!” Crow slammed the car into drive and kicked down on the accelerator. Missy shot forward, the hot engine ready for the challenge, and with a howling cry of rage, Crow plowed into—and through—the big double doors, tearing metal and glass and slamming into the crowd of newly risen vampires.

(3)

“Are you sure it was him?” Weinstock demanded. The shock of what Val had seen was worse than the agony in his arm. He was dressed in pajamas and the dress shoes he had worn down to the morgue. The others pushed the chairs and the bedside table in front of the door.

Val didn’t answer; instead she yanked open the big clothes closet and started pulling out the duffel bags of weapons that Crow and Ferro had left behind. Sweat was pouring down her face despite the cold air blowing in through the window and her hands shook visibly as she passed the bags to Mike, who laid them on the bed.

“Jonatha, Newt…can either of you use a gun?” Val asked as she ripped the zippers down. She and Mike emptied the contents fast and sloppy.

“Not well,” Jonatha said dubiously, “but I know how to pull a trigger.”

Newt shook his head. “Somebody will have to show me.”

“Learn fast.” Val handed each of them a 9mm pistol and half a dozen magazines.

“I can shoot,” Weinstock said. “One hand still works.”

Val gave him a pistol. “Saul, get dressed fast. Newt, help him. You’ll need pockets for ammo.” She began stuffing her own pockets with shotgun shells and 9mm mags. Her eyes were fever bright as she looked at Mike.

“Let me have a gun,” Mike said. “I used a shotgun once. I went skeet shooting with my friend Brandon.”

“Take it.”

“And…can I have one of Crow’s swords?”

Despite her haste, Val hesitated and gave him a searching look.

“He’s been teaching me how—”

“I know. That doesn’t mean you’re good enough.”

“Doesn’t mean I’m not, either.”

They held that stare for a moment, then Val gave him just a flicker of a smile. She looked down at the weapons and grabbed more shells. “Take whatever you want. Crow took his good sword with him, and he told me that he was going to coat the blade with garlic oil.”

Mike shook his head. “I don’t have to worry about that.”

Her gaze flicked up again. “What do you…oh.”

The dhampyr’s eyes were like torches. “I just hope I have some superpowers after all.”

Right then a heavy fist began pounding on the door.

Val stiffened and turned. The pounding was so hard it shook the heavy institutional door in its metal frame. A wave of sickness twisted in Val’s stomach.

“Come owww-owwt!” someone called in a singsong. There were screams outside, but even through that they could hear the snickering laugh of whoever was beating on the door. “Come owwwwwww-owt!”

Val snatched a pistol off the bed and took a step toward the door.

“No, Val—don’t!” Newton cried. He was holding Weinstock’s pants and the doctor had a leg poised to step into them.

“Shut up,” Val snarled, and it wasn’t clear if she was talking to Newton or the monster outside. Then she racked the slide and put four rounds through the center of the door.

The next scream they heard was inhuman.

And Val Guthrie smiled.

(4)

Even though his guts were turning to gutter water, BK stood his ground as his attacker rushed him. Three times he’d nailed this psycho son of a bitch with crippling blows to the head and throat. Three times the attacker just shrugged them off. BK was not a spiritual guy, and he didn’t much believe in the boogeyman, but he wasn’t an idiot either. Something was way off the sanity radar here and whether he wanted to believe it or not he had to accept the fact that this guy was not acting human. No, he corrected himself in the microsecond between the time the guy sprang and when he leapt, not acting human, this weird-ass motherfucker was not human.

Belief and acceptance are sometimes very different concepts.

The teenager jumped from too far away and yet still covered the distance between them—and the impossible reality of that nearly got BK killed—but BK was a fighter and he’d been in hundreds of scrapes from schoolyard scuffles to extreme martial arts bouts to back-alley knife fights. His conscious rational mind was not always allowed to be in the driver’s seat; reflexes and gross motor skills are better for the battlefield.

As the attacker slammed into him, BK shifted slightly to one side, accepted the grab with one of his own, pivoted, and let the killer’s mass and momentum do all the work. The pounce turned into a pirouette and then the killer was falling with BK’s bulk on top of him. They hit the ground hard and fast, with BK’s muscle and mass driving downward to smash the attacker’s bones with the impact. BK didn’t stop there, didn’t even pause; as soon as his hands were free of the need to steer the attacker’s body, he let go of the teenager’s trunk, grabbed him by the chin and the hair, and then threw himself into a tight roll through the air. BK’s bulk, plus the twisting grip, created a savage torque that more than just snapped the neck—it wrenched the killer’s head around more than two hundred degrees.

The attacker went limp in an instant.

BK rolled all the way to his feet but froze in a crouch, staring at what he had just fought, and what he had just done.

“Oh my God…” He dropped to his knees, gagging at the taste of the bile in his throat. The moment was unreal; he could feel his pulse pounding like a muffled surf in his ears.

He heard screams off to his right and rose and he turned. A woman ran out of the cornfields, her blouse torn and bloody, and two men chased her. Both of them were as pale-faced as the teenager he’d just killed. The woman reached the Haunted House and got inside, slamming the door; immediately her pursuers began hammering their fists on the door. It buckled and splintered and they tore the flimsy wood away and went inside. There were more screams.

BK was running with no awareness of having wanted or intended to. He pelted across the lot, noting with strange detachment that many tourists were milling around, some of them singing and others dancing in the unstructured way mental patients will. They all looked stoned. He recorded that, but couldn’t deal with it now.

He reached the Haunted House just as one of the pursuers came hurtling back out through the doorway with a short length of broken wood rammed up under his chin, his shirt-front glistening with blood. The man fell flat on his back and didn’t move, so BK vaulted his body and dashed inside. Billy had gone in there.

Just inside he saw the young woman huddled in a corner by a bandstand that had instruments but no musicians—they weren’t scheduled to play until eight that night and it was just turning six now. There were bodies on the floor. One was a younger teenager whose throat had clearly been torn out; the other was a red-haired woman dressed in a den mother’s uniform. Her mouth was smeared with blood and there was a drumstick jammed into the socket of her right eye.

On the far side of the bandstand the second of the two pursuers was locked in a mutual stranglehold with Billy Christmas, and they rolled over and over, their feet kicking out to send guitars and high hats crashing to the floor. Billy’s face was streaked with blood and his shoulder was slashed from the deltoid to the elbow.

BK rushed over and grabbed the attacker by the hair and hauled backward with all his weight, pulling him away from Billy, whose face had started to turn purple. BK kicked the man in the back of the calf, dropping him to his knees, then grabbed hair and chin and, standing wide-legged, he wrenched the man’s head over and up. The vertebrae popped like a drumroll, and BK let the body flop to the ground.

Billy was already climbing painfully to his feet, eyes dancing with shock, and yet he was smiling the weirdest smile BK had ever seen.

“You okay?” BK asked.

“Dude,” he gasped, the blood on his face mingling with sweat and tears, “I killed a v—vam—” He couldn’t quite get the word to fit into his mouth.

“What the hell is going on here?”

Billy rubbed his hands across his face. “I tried to, you know, stake him through the heart.” He shook his head. “Sternum’s a bitch.” He coughed, spit blood onto the floor, wiped his mouth with his uninjured arm. “Eye socket,” he said, nodding emphatically, “works.” He dropped to his knees and threw up.

“Note to self,” BK said softly while he stood over his friend.

(5)

Crow and LaMastra stood amid the carnage in the entrance hall to the ER. Everywhere around them was death. There had been over a dozen vampires—newly risen—in the hospital entrance; now there were only corpses. The air was thick with a gunpowder stink and the two of them were nearly deaf from the gunfire.

Crow covered LaMastra while the big detective reloaded both of his guns, and then did his own as LaMastra’s Roadblocker tracked up and down the hall. Crow bent into the car and fished out his katana and slung it across his back.

“Once we find your lady and the others,” LaMastra said, “we’ll need new wheels.”

Crow nodded. His car was a smoking wreck. “I saw Sarah Wolfe’s Hummer out in the lot. If we can find the keys—”

“I can hotwire anything with wheels,” LaMastra said. “Benefits of an inner-city education.”

“Good to know.” Crow took out his last bottle of garlic oil and smeared half of it on his throat and wrists before handing it to LaMastra. As an afterthought he licked some off his wrist so the taste would be in his mouth. “You ready?”

“No. You?”

“No,” Crow said. “Let’s go. Elevator’ll be out. Stairs are over there.”

“What now?” LaMastra asked. “We seem to be alone for the moment.”

The lobby led to a hall that ran the whole length of the building, and they followed it as fast as good sense would allow, Crow walking point, LaMastra back-walking to cover their asses. The hall broke to their left in three places, toward the ER triage rooms, to the main bank of elevators a hundred feet farther along, and then jagged off into the labs and X-ray department. They saw nothing moving at all. There were corpses everywhere, but they didn’t know if they were truly dead, waiting to rise, or shamming it as part of some kind of trap. If anything had so much as moved they’d have blasted it to red slush.

“Well, we have two choices, as I see it,” LaMastra said quietly as they came to the fire tower.

“They being?”

“Val and the others are either upstairs in Weinstock’s room or down in the morgue. She’s your fiancée, so you pick.”

“Shit. What would your choice be?”

Crow took a few paces down the hall and looked briefly into the triage rooms. There was a dead nurse on the floor of the waiting room and a few corpses slumped into the chairs, but no one else. “My first guess would be the morgue. It has the strongest door and that’s where we left all the ammunition and the rest of the garlic. Given a choice of where to make a stand, I’d hole up there.”

LaMastra pursed his lips. “Given a choice. Look around…this all happened fast. You think Val had time to go down there?”

Crow felt his stomach lurch. “No.”

“Then we go up.” They moved to the first stairwell. LaMastra said, “Okay, the same game plan? If it’s pale and we don’t like the way it looks, shoot it?”

“What if we shoot a patient by mistake?”

LaMastra’s face was wooden. “If we live through this we’ll light a candle.”

They fanned out and flanked the doorway to the fire stairs. To both of them it seemed as if their whole lives consisted of going through doors with fear and violence playing tug-of-war in their hearts.

The fire door had a heavy crash bar and Crow raised his leg and pressed his right foot on the steel bar. They did not have to worry about booby traps now, but an ambush was a real possibility. With a quick glance at LaMastra, Crow gave the door a powerful kick and it flew inward, and they rushed through, Crow aiming straight and then up, LaMastra aiming straight then low, but the stairwell was empty. The dim emergency lights flickered and the two men listened to the rasp of their own breathing magnified by the acoustics of the stairwell. They started climbing, moving as quietly as they could. There were bloody handprints smeared along the walls, very fresh, droplets worming their way down to the floor. Crow led the way, taking each step with great caution, eyes barely blinking despite the stinging sweat that trickled down from his forehead. He was moving on the razor edge of awareness, his senses tuned and focused, ready for anything. And yet, he was still surprised when Karl Ruger stepped out from around the corner.

They jerked to a halt and brought their guns up fast, barrels pointing at the killer, but Ruger just grinned at them and tickled his black talons along the slender, unmarked throat of the young child he held in front of him.

Behind Ruger, and below them on the steps, there came the whispering footsteps of vampires hurrying to close the trap.

The killer smiled. “Trick or treat,” he said softly.