999 (21 page)

“Perhaps we should pray for them.”

“They need more than prayer, I’d think. Believe me you, they’re heading for a bad end.” Bernadette removed the oversized rosary she wore looped around her neck, gathering the beads and its attached crucifix in her hand. “Maybe we could offer them some crosses for protection?”

Carole couldn’t resist a smile. “That’s a sweet thought, Bern, but I don’t think they’re looking for protection.”

“Sure, and lookit after what I’m saying,” Bernadette said, her own smile rueful. “No, of course they wouldn’t.”

“But we’ll pray for them,” Carole said.

Bernadette dropped into a chair, stayed there for no more than a heartbeat, then was up again, moving about, pacing the confines of Carole’s room. She couldn’t seem to sit still. She wandered out into the hall and came back almost immediately, rubbing her hands together as if washing them.

“It’s so quiet,” she said. “So empty.”

“I certainly hope so,” Carole said. “We’re the only two who are supposed to be here.”

The little convent was half empty even when all its residents were present. And now, with St. Anthony’s School closed for the coming week, the rest of the nuns had gone home to spend Easter Week with brothers and sisters and parents. Even those who might have stayed around the convent in past years had heard the rumors that the undead might be moving this way, so they’d scattered south and west. Carole’s only living relative was a brother who lived in California, and he hadn’t invited her; even if he had, she couldn’t afford to fly there and back to Jersey just for Easter. Bernadette hadn’t heard from her family in Ireland for months.

So that left just the two of them to hold the fort, as it were.

Carole wasn’t afraid. She knew they’d be safe here at St. Anthony’s. The convent was part of a complex consisting of the church itself, the rectory, the grammar school and high school buildings, and the sturdy old, two-story rooming house that was now the convent. She and Bernadette had taken second-floor rooms, leaving the first floor to the older nuns.

Not
really
afraid, although she wished there were more people left in the complex than just Bernadette, herself, and Father Palmeri.

“I don’t understand Father Palmeri,” Bernadette said. “Locking up the church and keeping his parishioners from making the stations of the cross on Good Friday. Who’s ever heard of such a thing, I ask you? I just don’t understand it.”

Carole thought she understood. She suspected that Father Alberto Palmeri was afraid. Sometime this morning he’d locked up the rectory, barred the door to St. Anthony’s, and hidden himself in the church basement.

God forgive her, but to Sister Carole’s mind, Father Palmeri was a coward.

“Oh, I do wish he’d open the church, just for a little while,” Bernadette said. “I need to be in there, Carole. I
need
it.”

Carole knew how Bern felt. Who had said religion was an opiate of the people? Marx? Whoever it was, he hadn’t been completely wrong. For Carole, sitting in the cool, peaceful quiet beneath St. Anthony’s gothic arches, praying, meditating, and feeling the presence of the Lord were like a daily dose of an addictive drug. A dose she and Bern had been denied today. Bern’s withdrawal pangs seemed worse than Carole’s.

The younger nun paused as she passed the window, then pointed down to the street.

“And now who in God’s name would they be?”

Carole rose and stepped to the window. Passing on the street below was a cavalcade of shiny new cars—Mercedes Benzes, BMWs, Jaguars, Lincolns, Cadillacs—all with New York plates, all cruising from the direction of the parkway.

The sight of them in the dusk tightened a knot in Carole’s stomach. The lupine faces she spied through the windows looked brutish, and the way they drove their gleaming luxury cars down the center line … as if they owned the road.

A Cadillac convertible with its top down passed below, carrying four scruffy men. The driver wore a cowboy hat, the two in the back sat atop the rear seat, drinking beer. When Carole saw one of them glance up and look their way, she tugged on Bern’s sleeve.

“Stand back! Don’t let them see you!”

“Why not? Who are they?”

“I’m not sure, but I’ve heard of bands of men who do the vampires’ dirty work during the daytime, who’ve traded their souls for the promise of immortality later on, and for … other things now.”

“Sure and you’re joking, Carole!”

Carole shook her head. “I wish I were.”

“Oh, dear God, and now the sun’s down.” She turned frightened blue eyes toward Carole. “Do you think maybe we should … ?”

“Lock up? Most certainly. I know what His Holiness said about there not being any such thing as vampires, but maybe he’s changed his mind since then and just can’t get word to us.”

“Sure and you’re probably right. You close these and I’ll check down the hall.” She hurried out, her voice trailing behind her. “Oh, I do wish Father Palmeri hadn’t locked the church. I’d dearly love to say a few prayers there.”

Sister Carole glanced out the window again. The fancy new cars were gone, but rumbling in their wake was a convoy of trucks—big, eighteen-wheel semis, lumbering down the center line. What were they for? What did they carry? What were they delivering to town?

Suddenly a dog began to bark, and then another, and more and more until it seemed as if every dog in town was giving voice.

To fight the unease rising within her like a flood tide, Sister Carole concentrated on the simple manual tasks of closing and locking her window and drawing the curtains.

But the dread remained, a sick, cold certainty that the world was falling into darkness, that the creeping hem of shadow had reached her corner of the globe, and that without some miracle, without some direct intervention by a wrathful God, the coming night hours would wreak an irrevocable change on her life.

She began to pray for that miracle.

*  *  *

The two remaining sisters decided to keep the convent of St. Anthony’s dark tonight.

And they decided to spend the night together in Carole’s room. They dragged in Bernadette’s mattress, locked the door, and double-draped the window with the bedspread. They lit the room with a single candle and prayed together.

Yet the music of the night filtered through the walls and the doors and the drapes, the muted moan of sirens singing antiphon to their hymns, the muffled pops of gunfire punctuating their psalms, reaching a crescendo shortly after midnight, then tapering off to … silence.

Carole could see that Bernadette was having an especially rough time of it. She cringed with every siren wail, jumped at every shot. She shared Bern’s terror, but she buried it, hid it deep within for her friend’s sake. After all, Carole was older, and she knew she was made of sterner stuff. Bernadette was an innocent, too sensitive even for yesterday’s world, the world before the vampires. How would she survive in the world as it would be after tonight? She’d need help. Carole would provide as much as she could.

But for all the imagined horrors conjured by the night noises, the silence was worse. No human wails of pain and horror had penetrated their sanctum, but imagined cries of human suffering echoed through their minds in the ensuing stillness.

“Dear God, what’s happening out there?” Bernadette said after they’d finished reading aloud the Twenty-third Psalm.

She huddled on her mattress, a blanket thrown over her shoulders. The candle’s flame reflected in her frightened eyes and cast her shadow, high, hunched, and wavering, on the wall behind her.

Carole sat cross-legged on her bed. She leaned back against the wall and fought to keep her eyes open. Exhaustion was a weight on her shoulders, a cloud over her brain, but she knew sleep was out of the question. Not now, not tonight, not until the sun was up. And maybe not even then.

“Easy, Bern—” Carole began, then stopped.

From below, on the first floor of the convent, a faint thumping noise.

“What’s that?” Bernadette said, voice hushed, eyes wide.

“I
don’t know.”

Carole grabbed her robe and stepped out into the hall for a better listen.

“Don’t you be leaving me alone, now!” Bernadette said, running after her with the blanket still wrapped around her shoulders.

“Hush,” Carole said. “Listen. It’s the front door. Someone’s knocking. I’m going down to see.”

She hurried down the wide, oak-railed stairway to the front foyer. The knocking was louder here, but still sounded weak. Carole put her eye to the peephole, peered through the sidelights, but saw no one.

But the knocking, weaker still, continued.

“Wh-who’s there?” she said, her words cracking with fear.

“Sister Carole,” came a faint voice through the door. “It’s me … Mary Margaret. I’m hurt.”

Instinctively, Carole reached for the handle, but Bernadette grabbed her arm.

“Wait! It could be a trick!”

She’s right, Carole thought. Then she glanced down and saw blood leaking across the threshold from the other side.

She gasped and pointed at the crimson puddle. “That’s no trick.”

She unlocked the door and pulled it open. Mary Margaret huddled on the welcome mat in a pool of blood.

“Dear sweet Jesus!” Carole cried. “Help me, Bern!”

“What if she’s a vampire?” Bernadette said, standing frozen. “They can’t cross the threshold unless you ask them in.”

“Stop that silliness! She’s hurt!”

Bernadette’s good heart won out over her fear. She threw off the blanket, revealing a faded-blue, ankle-length flannel nightgown that swirled just above the floppy slippers she wore. Together they dragged Mary Margaret inside. Bernadette closed and relocked the door immediately.

“Call 911!” Carole told her.

Bernadette hurried down the hall to the phone.

Mary Margaret lay moaning on the foyer tiles, clutching her bleeding abdomen. Carole saw a piece of metal, coated with rust and blood, protruding from the area of her navel. From the fecal smell of the gore Carole guessed that her intestines had been pierced.

“Oh, you poor child!” Carole knelt beside her and cradled her head in her lap. She arranged Bernadette’s blanket over Mary Margaret’s trembling body. “Who did this to you?”

“Accident,” Mary Margaret gasped. Real tears had run her black eye makeup over her tattooed tears. “I was running … fell.”

“Running from what?”

“From
them
. God … terrible. We searched for them, Carmilla’s Lords of the Night. Just after sundown we found one. Looked just like we always knew he would … you know, tall and regal and graceful and seductive and cool. Standing by one of those big trailers that came through town. My friends approached him but I sorta stayed back. Wasn’t too sure I was really into having my blood sucked. But Carmilla goes right up to him, pulling off her top and baring her throat, offering herself to him.”

Mary Margaret coughed and groaned as a spasm of pain shook her.

“Don’t talk,” Carole said. “Save your strength.”

“No,” she said in a weaker voice when it eased. “You got to know. This Lord guy just smiles at Carmilla, then he signals his helpers who pull open the back doors of the trailer.” Mary Margaret sobbed. “Horrible! Truck’s filled with these …
things!
Look human but they’re dirty and naked and act like beasts. They like
pour
out the truck and right off a bunch of them jump Carmilla. They start biting and ripping at her throat. I see her go down and hear her screaming and I start backing up. My other friends try to run but they’re pulled down too. And then I see one of the things hold up Carmilla’s head and hear the Lord guy say, ‘That’s right, children. Take their heads. Always take their heads. There are enough of us now.’ And that’s when I turned and ran. I was running through a vacant lot when I fell on … this.”

Bernadette rushed back into the foyer. Her face was drawn with fear. “Nine-one-one doesn’t answer! I can’t raise anyone!”

“They’re all over town,” Mary Margaret said after another spasm of coughing. Carole could barely hear her. She touched her throat—so cold. “They set fires and attack the cops and firemen when they arrive. Their human helpers break into houses and drive the people outside, where they’re attacked. And after the things drain the blood, they rip the heads off.”

“Dear God, why?” Bernadette said, crouching beside Carole.

“My guess … don’t want any more vampires. Maybe only so much blood to go around and—”

She moaned with another spasm, then lay still. Carole patted her cheeks and called her name, but Mary Margaret Flanagan’s dull, staring eyes told it all.

“Is she … ?” Bernadette said.

Carole nodded as tears filled her eyes. You poor misguided child, she thought, closing Mary Margaret’s eyelids.

“She’s died in sin,” Bernadette said. “She needs anointing immediately! I’ll get Father.”

“No, Bern,” Carole said. “Father Palmeri won’t come.”

“Of course he will. He’s a priest and this poor lost soul needs him.”

“Trust me. He won’t leave that church basement for anything.”

“But he must!” she said, almost childishly, her voice rising. “He’s a priest.”

“Just be calm, Bernadette, and we’ll pray for her ourselves.”

“We can’t do what a priest can do,” she said, springing to her feet. “It’s not the same.”

“Where are you going?” Carole said.

“To … to get a robe. It’s cold.”

My poor, dear, frightened Bernadette, Carole thought as she watched her scurry up the steps. I know exactly how you feel.

“And bring your prayer book back with you,” she called after her.

Carole pulled the blanket over Mary Margaret’s face and gently lowered her head to the floor. She waited for Bernadette to return … and waited. What was taking her so long? She called her name but got no answer.

Uneasy, Carole returned to the second floor. The hallway was empty and dark except for a pale shaft of moonlight slanting through the window at its far end. Carole hurried to Bern’s room. The door was closed. She knocked.

“Bern? Bern, are you in there?”

Silence.

Carole opened the door and peered inside. More moonlight, more emptiness.