Bad Moon Rising (19 page)

Karl Ruger looked into those brown eyes and gave her a smile of his own, warm, encouraging, and he could see her spirit rise toward it, her hope blossoming as he pressed his fingers to her throat, closing the wound.

“H…help me…” she whispered in what was left of her voice.

He bent close so that his lips were inches from hers. His black eyes filled her vision. “Fuck you, bitch,” he murmured, and then curled his fingers and tore her throat apart.

The last of her spilled out with her blood.

Ruger bent closer still and licked up that last pulse of blood. That final moment of life was as precious as the first beat of an infant’s heart, and it was his to own forever.

He rose, deeply satisfied, powerfully aroused.

Around him there was still some movement, though all of the desperate scrambling was done. A final scream tore through the night but it was cut off and ended with a gurgle, overlapped by someone’s laughter. Six cars were parked in the clearing at Passion Pit on Dark Hollow Road, each tucked under sheltering trees; one old 1980s-style custom van was side-on to Ruger, the driver’s door open and a man’s body, naked from the waist down, lay with head and shoulders hanging limp, arms wide, the backs of the hands touching the ground. The air was heavy with the coppery scent of blood, and Ruger felt intoxicated. Everywhere he looked there was young flesh, much of it bared to the inspection of the moonlight, white skin and red blood and wide, empty eyes. Ruger was hard as a rock.

The young woman and her date had provided some genuine entertainment. The man was stretched across the hood of the Lexus. His fly was open and his limp penis poked like a thick white grub through the folds of his trousers. The dead woman’s blouse was unbuttoned, her white bra pushed up; she wore no panties. Ruger had watched from the shadows as the young couple fumbled in the little shell of the car. It was a real kick to watch the man cajole her into going down on him, sometimes pleading, sometimes browbeating her. It jazzed Ruger to hear the man’s almost feminine shriek as he had come in her mouth, his hands clamped down on the back of her head, ignoring her struggles and gagging coughs. It had been obvious to Ruger that it was the young woman’s first foray into oral sex, and she hadn’t been all that fond of the experience. Ruger had known women who had been spoiled for it forever because some tough guy had held her head down with strong fingers, all the time promising he wouldn’t come in her mouth. Hell, Ruger had done it himself enough times, loving the struggle, loving the fact that the blow job he was getting would be the last one the woman would probably ever willingly give. It made such events rare and special for him, especially the knowledge that he could actually reach into a woman’s mind and leave his own mark, a scar that could never be erased. That was a rush better than the resulting orgasm.

The young woman—teenager actually—he’d watched had been going through that process, and while it was fun to watch, it wasn’t Ruger himself who was leaving the mark but some pimple-faced young jock who was only getting some because he had his daddy’s fancy car. Ruger couldn’t just sit by forever and let the bozo have all the fun. So, just as the jock came, Ruger rose up beside the car and yanked the door open and the jock fell halfway out. Ruger caught him by the hair and jerked him the rest of the way out of the car, handing him back to the hungry ones behind him. The twins and the Carby kids. They didn’t go for the kill right away—they beat the living shit out of him first. Just for fun.

This was not the first hunt for the Carbys, Jilly and Tyler, whose farm had been overrun by Ruger’s first recruits two weeks ago, or for the twins Demian and Adrian, who had been turned a few days later. Each of them had been involved in group hunts and solo kills, but there was always something new to learn from Ruger. Everyone worshipped Ruger. He was like a rock star to them. The actual Cape May Killer and Ubel Griswold’s cold left hand.

The Carbys had brought along their cousin, Chad, whom they had turned last night, and they wanted him to learn the art of the kill from a kickass bloodletter like Ruger. Over the last few nights Ruger had let all the kids make kills, but more than that he’d let them kick the shit out of the victims. Even the twins, who were just grade-school kids, had been fully blooded on Ruger’s field trips. Now it was Chad’s turn, and Ruger had made him watch as twelve of the youngest members of the Red Wave swept through the Passion Pit, kicking ass, taking lives. Having a grand fucking time of it.

Now all the sweating, huffing, moaning young lovers were dead. Ruger snapped his long, thin fingers, the sound firecracker sharp in the cold air. A dozen faces, pale as the watching moon, turned toward him, expectant and silent.

“Clean it up,” he told them. “No traces.”

They looked disappointed. One of them, one of the newer ones, spoke up. “Why? We can wake them up, get them to clean up their own shit. Why do we have to do it?”

Ruger turned toward Chad and fixed him with the full impact of his stare. “Because I said so, Chad,” he said, inflecting the boy’s name with contempt, smiling like a crocodile, his top row of teeth like a serrated knife.

Chad Carby shrank visibly, but still he held his ground. Some of the others smirked at the speaker’s discomfiture, but Ruger kind of admired the kid’s spunk. It was even okay, in the scheme of things, because this was the way it worked. The alpha teaching the pups how the pack works.

Ruger turned in a slow circle, making brief but scintillating eye contact with each of them. Like a good general he knew how to rally as well as how to chastise, and he laid a cold hand on Chad’s shoulder. “Just be patient, kiddo,” he said with his icy whisper. “A good soldier knows when to go quiet and dark and when to burn the trees. Until Halloween, it’s all about keeping it on the down-low. You with me, pardner?”

“I…guess so,” Chad said, his eyes shifting toward Ruger’s and then falling away.

Ruger pretended to find a drop of blood at the corner of his mouth, dabbed it off, and licked it with a darting tongue. “Tell you boys what we can do,” he said. “Once we clean this shit up…why don’t you wake up the girls first?” He gave Chad a wicked wink, making sure the others saw it, too.

They all laughed, low and mean and hungry.

“Halloween’s coming soon, kids,” he said, and then nodded to Chad. “You know what Halloween is, don’t you?”

Chad Carby lifted his eyes to meet Ruger’s. “You told us it would be trick or treat.”

Ruger chuckled softly. “Lots of tricks,” he murmured, “and lots of treats.” He gave Chad another quick wink. “Now let’s clean this shit up and have some fun.”

(4)

Vic’s cell rang again and this time the display said G
OLUB
. He set down the timing switch he’d been tinkering with and flipped it open.

“This had better be important.”

“Vic? Look, we had a bit of problem out here. Karl had me swing by to check on Dixie McVey. He was doing some car stops near the Black Marsh Bridge. Dix had some of the Dead Heads with him and he faked out a couple of tourists. Young couple from Erie, no local ties, at least as far as I can tell.”

“I don’t give a shit. Get to a point or get off the line.”

“Dix did okay—he took out the guy and we’ve already recruited him—but the Dead Heads jumped the schedule and hit the woman.”

“Meaning?”

“Well, they went all George Romero on her.”

Vic sighed. He hated the fact that every jackass in this goddamned town loved to throw pop-culture references around as if it made them cool. Even recruits like Golub. Vic would love to just push the plunger and nuke the whole frigging lot of them. Fanboy assholes. “What did they do?” he asked, though he thought he already knew.

“Well…they kind of
ate
her.”

“Shit.”

“There’s not enough left to recruit. Tore her arms off, tore her…”

“All right, all right. Son of a bitch.” He rubbed his eyes. “Put McVey on.”

There was a rustle and then McVey spoke. “Hey, boss, sorry for the screwup.” Unlike Golub, who could pass, McVey was a different species of vampire and his teeth had already grown so huge that his voice was muffled by trying to talk around them. Worse than Ruger.

“Where are those assholes now?”

“Dave and I quieted them down, got them sitting in the woods just off the road. We had to cuff them together around a tree.”

“How bad’s the mess?”

“Bad enough, but Dave and I both brought cleanup stuff in our car, like you told us to.”

“I don’t like hearing that you let this get out of hand.” Silence on the other end of the phone. “You understand me?”

“Sure,” McVey said, his voice thick. “But…those Dead Heads are pretty hard to handle. Won’t listen, and sometimes they just go off, y’know? They don’t even drink, not the right way—all they want to do is eat. I’m not even sure they can think, let along take orders—”

“You think you just called 1-800-IGiveAShit? Just clean it up and make damn sure you don’t put a foot wrong again. I don’t want to have to tell you a second time.”

“Yes, sir,” McVey said. The “sir” was a suck-up gambit, but Vic liked it.

“One more thing. Get some body bags and pop a cap in two useless meatheads. Headshots only, and use sound-suppressors. Then bury ’em somewhere quiet. Spread the word about it, too. You step outside of the Plan, you die. Even Dead Heads should be able to process that.” He hung up.

“Shit!” he growled and very nearly hurled his cell phone against the wall.

(1)

Val was discharged the next morning and Crow took her home. His home, not hers.

The nurses wheeled her to the front door and she rode in a brooding silence, the cane lying across her thighs, her face stony and set. Crow walked beside her, holding one hand, and as the automatic doors opened before them he jerked them all to a halt. The parking lot was packed with reporters who surged forward to stick microphones in Val’s face as cameramen jostled each other for the best shot. Crow was only marginally relieved to see that Newton was not among them. There were cops there, too, but none of them were engaged in any visible crowd control. Scanning the crowd, Crow saw Polk leaning against a patrol car, legs crossed at the ankles, arms folded across his chest, a shit-eating grin on his face. When Crow shot him a look of pure loathing, Polk responded by giving him a nasty wink.

Prick,
Crow thought, and filed that away for future consideration.

As the questions thundered around them, overlapping into a rumbling blur of meaningless words, Crow turned and bent to Val and whispered, “Don’t say anything. Let’s just push through.”

The glasses hid her eyes but there was as much hurt in the set of her jaw as there was offense and anger. Crow helped her out of the wheelchair and put one strong arm around her and used the other to push his way through the crowd. Both of them staring stolidly ahead, they headed toward Crow’s car, Missy. Every reporter tried to be the one to break Val’s silence, and over and over again one would shout a provocative question like, “How do you feel about your brother being killed?” or “Are you devastated now that you’ve lost your whole family?” All designed to gouge a comment out of her, but she bit down on her rage and clutched Crow’s supporting arm like a vise and they eventually got to Crow’s car. Even then, even when they were inside and buckled up, with the car in gear and rolling slowly, the reporters knocked on the glass, even tried the door handles, shouting as loud as they could to be heard and to get through to her. Most people crack; most people get mad and shout, or dissolve into tears, all of which makes for great vidcaps; but Val was Val—she wore her grief like armor and carried her rage like a shield, and she endured it.

More than a dozen film crews followed her out of the parking lot, the news teams scrambling like fighter pilots during an air raid, screeching into turns and pursuing them as Polk and his cronies just watched. Crow didn’t try to lose them, didn’t race down the streets. That would be theater, too, and he didn’t want to give them anything. Beside him Val was a statue, looking neither left nor right, just staring out of the window as the blocks rolled past and the circus followed.

When he pulled up to the Crow’s Nest, the news crews double-parked and hustled out to make another run at a sound bite. Again Crow had to shove past them, and again neither he nor Val said a word or even made eye contact with them. They wrestled their way to the front door of the store; Crow unlocked it and ushered Val inside. When some reporters tried to barge in with them, Crow closed the door on them. Slowly, but with force, pushing them back inch by reluctant inch, then turning the locks. Without a pause he and Val went straight through the store, past the counter, through the rear door that opened into Crow’s apartment. He closed and locked that, too.

“The phone,” she said. They were the first words she’d spoken since the hospital. Crow went over to the phone and switched the ringer off. He drew the blinds on the back windows, made sure the back door was locked, and when he turned around Val was gone. He went quickly into the bedroom and found her sitting on the edge of the bed.

It was only then that she started to cry, and she cried for a long time.

(2)

“Where are you, Sport?”

Ruger took a cold cigarette from between even colder lips. “I’m at Carby’s place.”

“Okay. Might as well stay there today,” Vic said. “It’s almost dawn. You don’t want to get caught by daylight.”

“Nope,” Ruger said. Vic knew that sunlight was not fatal to Ruger as it was to some species of vampires; all it did was hurt him. But Ruger was still supposed to be dead and his face had been on every newspaper, magazine, and Internet news feed for weeks now. Staying in the shadows meant staying off the radar. “I’ll keep out of sight, don’t worry.”

“You know about that cluster-fuck out on A-32?”

“Yeah. Friggin’ Dead Heads.”

“We can’t have more of that, Sport. Not now. You could do us both a favor and lock all those assholes up until the Wave.”

“I’ll see to it,” Ruger said, his voice a whisper.

“Make sure you do. Right now I gotta get going. Mike didn’t come home last night and I need to look into it. If we’re lucky, Tow-Truck Eddie got him.”

“You think so?”

“I should be so lucky…but something sure as hell happened and I need to know what. I’ll be in touch.”

Ruger flipped his phone shut and tapped it thoughtfully against his chin for a moment, still smiling. Dawn was coming, but it was still dark, so he settled into the shadows to wait. The song “Time Is on My Side” occurred to him and he killed some time letting it play in his head. Corny, sure, but fun corny—and this was going to be fun. His smile never faded as the minutes of night dropped like cigarette ash on the ground around him.

At five-twenty in the morning the door across from him opened and Vic stepped out, dressed in a jeans and a big Eagles windbreaker. Ruger didn’t move, confident of the shadows around him. He watched Vic lock his back door, check the street, then climb into his pickup and drive up the alley. Vic’s eyes were human eyes—weak and stupid. Ruger kept smiling as Vic’s careful stare rolled right over him without a flicker.

The truck passed within a few yards of where Ruger stood, arms folded, leaning on one shoulder deep in the mouth of a neighbor’s side yard. Ruger grinned as the pickup turned the corner.

“Asshole,” he whispered in a voice like a dead Clint Eastwood, and crossed the street. He had no key, but the lock was nothing to him. He put a palm flat on the wood next to the door handle and gave a single short shove. Wood splintered and the dead bolt worked like a lever to tear the entire strike plate out of the frame.

“Oops,” he said, grinning like a kid. He pushed the door shut behind him and tilted a chair under the handle to keep it shut.
Have to keep up appearances.

The cellar was dark and silent, but Ruger could hear sounds in the house. He knew that if Vic was up and out, then Lois had to be up. Vic didn’t cook his own breakfast or make his own coffee. He stood at the foot of the stairs and listened to the scuff of her feet on the kitchen floor. Bare feet, no slippers. He liked that. There was a clank of a pan—Ruger caught the whiff of eggs—and then the clink of a bottle. Definitely a gin bottle; he could smell the sharp juniper aroma as she poured. Lois was starting early today.

“Goodie,” he said. And it was. Drunk would work.

He climbed the stairs. It was high time he showed Vic who really was the big dog. More to the point, it was time he showed that sneering prick who was really the Man’s favored son. The door to the kitchen was also locked and it mattered just as little. Ruger wrapped his long white fingers around the doorknob and with no effort at all pulled the whole lock set right through the hole, splintering the wood and snapping wood screws with gunshot sounds. Beyond the door Lois Wingate screamed in shock.

As he pushed through into the kitchen Ruger’s smile grew into a hungry grin. He liked the sound of that scream, his mouth watering with the knowledge that it would be the first of many.

(3)

They slept through the night, but as dawn approached Val woke up. She lay for a long time staring upward into the empty shadows above Crow’s bed, feeling the weight and solidity of his arm and aware that his need to protect her meant so little in the scheme of things. To her heart, sure, it was wonderful, but to her mind—a machine grinding on its own gears—nothing was strong enough to protect her. Not against her own thoughts. There was nothing that Crow could do—nothing anyone could do—to protect her from the truth of her loss. The town was polluted; there was blight on almost all the crops. Except hers, but the Guthrie farm had suffered its share of pestilence. At that moment, if she could have accomplished it she would have razed all of the crops and every building including her own house to the ground and sown the ground with salt. Not for fear of the crop diseases, but in fear of that other plague. The plague that had made Boyd what he was, which was perhaps the same plague that had drawn Boyd and Ruger to Pine Deep in the first place.

Mark’s body was in the morgue. Cold and empty, without Mark’s soul in it. Just flesh, she told herself. Not Mark at all…just an empty shell…and yet Mark had been killed by Boyd. And Boyd was a vampire. It didn’t matter that Weinstock checked on him three times a day; it didn’t matter than neither Mark or Connie showed any signs of being anything more than corpses. In a movie she’d seen once a vampire had said something about outliving his enemies by simply going to sleep for a century and then rising after they were dust. What if that sort of thing was possible? What if Mark, cold and dead as he appeared, was only waiting for some dark call to awaken him?

It was a stupid thought, she knew. Stupid, and fanciful, and utterly terrible. Val lay there and stared out through the lightless window into the blank blackness of the night and thought lots of such thoughts.

(4)

Mike knew that everything was broken, but he didn’t care. He didn’t know how to care anymore. The impact with the tree had smashed almost every thought out of his mind, and filtered what little remained into a single piece of understanding. “I’m dying,” he said in a wet voice.

He coughed and felt blood splash out of his mouth onto his chin. There was pain. Of course there was pain, but it was a remote island way off on the horizon of his perception. It had been there for hours, ever since he’d crashed, and it had done all the harm to him that it could. Now it was just
there.
He didn’t care about that, either.

“I’m dying,” he said again, smiling. It was the safest he’d felt in years.

Time, as meaningless as the rest of it, had long ago ceased to move…and yet the sky had changed. Mike couldn’t move his head and had been staring at the featureless black above him forever. Maybe he slept at times, maybe he just stared, but now the sky was less pervasively black, now there was just the faintest hint of color. A brick-red tinge dabbed here and there on the underside of the clouds.

The wind stirred, pushing some leaves around. One leaf blew against his cheek and stuck to the blood, quivering as if struggling to escape. Mike turned his eyes to look at it, saw its jagged brown edges vibrating, and it took him a few seconds to realize that he could see the color. He tried to lift one hand, wanting to see if there was enough light to see his fingers and was surprised when his hand moved. When he had tried to move his hand before it had not so much as trembled; there hadn’t been a single flicker of sensation from anything below his shoulders. That had changed now, but Mike still didn’t care. He was too busy trying to die.

There was the rustle of more leaves off to his left, not in the path of the wind, and Mike turned his eyes that way—and his whole head turned, too. His neck was no longer locked into immobility. Over there, just beyond where his bike lay, there was a man.

Mike looked at him, trying to pick out details in the gloom, but the light was still bad. At first Mike thought he was looking at a scarecrow, because the man was dressed in filthy rags whose tatters flapped in the breeze, but there was no post, no fence to support a scarecrow. And then the man took a step toward him. Such a strange step, and even in his semidaze Mike thought it was odd. A stiff and staggering step, more like the Tin Man from Oz than the Scarecrow. That thought flitted through his mind and Mike almost smiled at the absurdity of it. Another step, managed with equal awkwardness, as if the man’s knees were inflexible or unused to walking.

The dawn was filling in the world with colors, defining shapes, painting the day, and as he lay there Mike could see more of the man. He frowned. The stranger was truly a raggedy man, his clothes nothing but mismatched castoffs. A soiled pair of patched work pants, two different shoes—a sneaker and a woman’s low-heeled pump—a checked shirt that was torn in a dozen places. Heavy cotton work gloves. And some kind of mask, but it was still too dark to make out what it was. It was dark and shiny and the material it was made from rippled in the wind.

Daylight swelled by another degree and though the cloud cover kept any rays from touching the man, the quality of light increased but still the mask made no sense to Mike. There were no holes for eyes. It was just a swirling complexity of wrinkles that writhed and twisted with the steady breeze. The man took another jerky step forward. Mike had no urge, no desire to ask for help. The dying don’t need help to die, and if this guy wanted to be a witness, then that was on him. Mike felt removed from thoughts of help and safety, even of right and wrong.

He just wanted to die and he didn’t care if anyone—especially a raggedy man—stood by and watched. Another step and now the man was no more than twenty feet away. Two more steps, another, another. Ten feet now and the rosy glow of the dawn washed him in crimson from his shoes to his face.

To his…face? Suddenly terror struck Mike like a fist over the heart. In a single moment all of his detachment fractured and fell away. His whole body convulsed, arching belly-up to the sky like a heart attack patient getting the paddles. Every wound, every splintered bone, every inch of torn flesh, every nerve ending screamed in desperate, howling agony and terror. The shriek burst from his throat in a spray of bloodstained spit. If someone had sprayed him with gasoline and tossed a match on him the pain could not have been more comprehensive or intense. His scream went on and on and on. Hordes of crows exploded from the trees and raced in panic across the sky above him, sweeping in vast circles above the field. The sparse green grass that patched the dirt around him withered into sickly yellow twists and curled in on themselves to die. In the soil beneath him the sleepy October worms swelled and burst as if boiled.