Bad Moon Rising (41 page)

(1)

Crow and LaMastra made it back to the base of the pitch in less than an hour. If it had been a straight run it would have been fifteen minutes, but the terrain was cluttered with roots and rocks. Even so, they hit the pitch at full tilt and the two ATVs swept up the steep hill and leapt over the edge like dune buggies, landing hard and slewing around to kick dust pillars in the parking lot. They didn’t even bother to switch off the bikes, and instead leapt off and ran for Crow’s car, piled in, and went screaming out of the Passion Pit in a spray of gravel, jouncing and bouncing along the rutted length of Dark Hollow Road.

At the crossroads Crow spun the wheel to put them on A-32. There were plenty of cars on the road—some heading toward town, most racing away from it at dangerous speeds. Then a huge rolling
BOOM!
buffeted them from behind and LaMastra twisted around in his seat to see a massive fireball plume up behind the farthest hills.

“What the Christ was that?” Crow demanded, steering in and out of traffic with no regard for blaring horns. Many of the cars on the outbound side of the road were slowing or pulling off onto the verge. There were several rear-end collisions as drivers gaped at the fireball.

“Something big just blew the hell up. What’s down that way?”

“Just the bridge.”

LaMastra turned back around. “Maybe not.”

Before Crow could reply his cell phone rang and he steered one-handed while he dug it out of his pocket.

“Crow! My God…tell me you’re okay!”

“Val, honey, I’m okay. Are you okay? What the hell’s happening? Everyone seems to be trying to get out of town?”

“I don’t know. We keep hearing explosions. I lost count of how many.”

“Where are you?”

“I’m at the hospital, in Saul’s room. We’re all here. I—”

“Val, listen to me,” he interrupted. “Listen really carefully. Frank’s dead.”

“Oh my God! How?”

“Vic Wingate killed him. Vic’s part of this, and—”

“I know about Vic. Mike told me.”

“Mike?”

“Crow…he’s here with us. He’s changed, Crow, he’s—”

There was another explosion, this time well ahead of them, and the cell signal just died.

“Val! VAL!” He yelled, but he was talking to dead air. He hit
RECALL
, but nothing. He looked at his phone. No bars. “My phone just died. Try yours,” he said to LaMastra, who already had his out.

“Nothing. I was trying to call my friend Jerry Head to see if he could give us some backup…and then nothing. As soon as that last explosion hit.”

Crow drove, swerving around a swelling rush of cars racing away from town. “The bridge…and now what? The cell phone tower? Val got cut off, but she said that there were a lot of explosions.”

“Oh man.”

“You’d better reload us, Vince. This is going to be bad.”

“It’s already bad.”

“Then it’s going to get worse.”

(2)

Billy Christmas heard the screams and grinned. “The tourists are really loving this stuff.” He sipped hot mint tea from his travel mug and parked a haunch on the empty flatbed that had just come back. The returning customers were being herded toward the concession stand, a second tractor was pulling a fresh group of victims out, but the third was deep in the attraction. Weird theremin music filled the air.

“Yeah, they’re eating it up,” agreed BK. “Guess no one needs it to actually be dark to get into the mood.”

Thunder rumbled in the sky. “Dark enough,” Billy said.

“Not supposed to rain, though. I checked the weather…it’s clear everywhere else. Probably just a passing system. Lucky us.”

There was more thunder, a shorter burst not preceded by a lightning flash. BK looked east over the miles of waving corn. He saw the glow on the horizon and almost dismissed it as lightning—but the glow was too orange and it didn’t flicker, merely tinted the undersides of the clouds.

“Christ!” BK pointed, but Billy was already climbing up onto the stakebed’s deck.

“Something just blew up real good. Damn! There’s another!”

They watched a small fireball sear its way upward in the distance.

“That’s near the town,” BK said. He pulled his cell phone out and hit the speed dial, calling Jim Winterbottom, his point man for the parade. The phone rang and rang and then went to voice mail. When he tried again, his own phone went dead. “That’s weird…suddenly I get no bars.”

There were four more explosions, none of them close to the hayride.

“Yeah, me too. Try the walkie-talkie.” Sarah Wolfe had arranged for the police department to loan the security force a set of walkie-talkies—older models that had been in storage but which would still work as a backup. The signals were bounced by relay towers and routed through the department’s switchboard.

“No signal,” BK said. “This is too weird for me, Billy. Let’s—”

Two things happened right then. The lights in the whole attraction suddenly went out—and with the murk under the late afternoon clouds, the whole place went very dark—and then the screams began. Not just the screams of the kids out in the field…but screams everywhere.

Billy turned. “What the f—?”

A figure rushed at them. White face, red eyes, fangs—and an orange and black P
INE
D
EEP
H
AUNTED
H
AYRIDE
S
TAFF

T-shirt.

“Mr. Kingsman!” yelled the vampire. “Something’s wrong. All the power’s out.”

“It’s okay, Danny,” BK said. “Get one of the ATVs out of the barn and run the circuit. Everyone comes back here.”

“What’s going on?”

“Don’t know yet, but let’s round everyone up. Come on, Danny, chop chop.”

The kid nodded and dashed for the barn.

Billy said, “I’ll take the haunted house. The emergency lights should have kicked in, but I’ll bring everyone out.” There were more explosions. He ran up the path.

Another white-faced figure in an orange T-shirt was coming around the far end of the tractor. BK waved him over. “Chet, good…listen, something’s going down so we’re pulling everyone in. Do me a favor and—”

Chet, grinning with his mouthful of fangs, just leapt at him and clamped black-taloned fingers around BK’s throat as he drove him back against the flatbed.

(3)

Film actor Ken Foree was nearing the end of his lecture about the allegory and social commentary in the George Romero
Living Dead
films when the drive-in’s big screen changed from an image of a younger Foree dressed like Philly SWAT shooting it out with a bunch of zombies at a rural shopping mall to a flat expanse of silver-gray emptiness.

“In
Dawn of the Dead
the consumerism of the American—” he said, and then his microphone cut out along with all of the lights throughout the drive-in’s big lot. Annoyed, he turned toward the projection booth mounted above the bunkerlike concession stand, but it, too, was dark. Instantly fifty cars started honking their horns and people began to grumble loudly.

Foree held up his hands to try and quiet the crowd. “People, people!” he called, pitching his theater-trained baritone above the din. “Let’s all calm down. Give the man a chance to fix the problem.”

As they quieted down, he continued talking, telling some jokes about mishaps on the sets of the monster movies and TV shows he’d worked on. Folks began to get out of their cars and draw closer, and Foree encouraged them with come-here gestures. Not surprisingly, many of the attendees were dressed in bloodstained clothes and made up to look like the living dead. Foree took it in stride.
Star Trek conventions get Klingons, I get the walking dead,
he mused.

He saw that more people were coming around from the far side of the concession stand, and these new arrivals seemed to be more in the vampire motif: fangs, bloody mouths, dark eyes, though they had the classic zombie vacant expressions and slow, shuffling gait down perfectly. He waved them in, too.

(4)

They’d put Tom Savini in the main house of the theater department and there were two sets of attendees. The general admission crowd sat in the theater seats while the MFA film students were onstage. One by one Savini was transforming them from ordinary college kids into monsters or victims of monsters.

The makeup effects man was a legend in the business and had pioneered many of the wound effects that were now standard in horror and action films. He was describing how latex and other materials were used to create the effect of a zombie tearing a chunk out of someone’s arm when the lights went out.

The theater went totally dark.

Savini sighed. The crowd immediately started getting restive, so he pitched his voice loud enough to carry and said, “Apparently the dean didn’t pay the electric bill.” It had the desired effect of getting the startled students to laugh with him rather than to panic. “Everyone sit tight. There should be emergency lights…ah, there we are.”

The lights came on. The screaming began a moment later. The blood that sprayed the walls was not stage blood.

(5)

The tingling ant-crawly feeling on the back of Mike’s neck intensified and just as the hospital emergency lights kicked on he turned away from Val and Weinstock and looked at the window for what seemed like an hour but was really a fragment of a second.

“Down!” he screamed as he spun and dove at Val, tackling her so that they collapsed between the bed and the bathroom wall; even before they landed Mike reached up and grabbed the front of Weinstock’s hospital gown and pulled him right out of the bed. Jonatha staggered back from them as they fell and she bumped into Newton, who tripped backward, dragging her with him—a clumsy move that saved both their lives because in the next fragment of a second a new blast ripped through the town and the big tempered-glass window imploded, sending thousands of flying glass daggers scything through the room. The window side of Weinstock’s bed was shredded, glass needles jabbed into the walls, and the shockwave swept the vase of flowers off the bedside table and smashed them against the wall. Then, as if drawing a deep breath after a scream, the hot air from the blast was sucked back out, leaving Weinstock’s room a darkened and glittering debris field.

There was glass everywhere. They all crouched where they had fallen, more terrified of all the glass than of the blast.

Val was the first to move, and she pushed back against Mike, who still lay half on top of her, his weight on her lower back, pressing her stomach into the floor. “Mike,” she said urgently, “the baby…”

He instantly arched up over her, balancing on fingers and toes while glass tinkled off his back; Val wormed carefully out from under him. Weinstock was tucked into a tight corner, his face contorted in agony as he clutched his wounded arm to his chest. Blood seeped through his bandages, evidence of ruptured stitches, and he curled his body up like he was stuffed into a box of pain.

“Is anyone hurt?” Val asked as she used the edge of the chair to pull herself to her knees.

Jonatha gasped as she sat up. “I think I’m cut.”

Newton scuttled out from under her and fished a keychain flashlight out, playing the tiny beam over her. There were at least a dozen small cuts on her arms, but nothing serious. Newton crunched over glass to the bathroom and returned with a thick wad of toilet tissue and began blotting at the cuts.

Val swept off the seat and sat down, wincing at the pain in her lower back and stomach. Mike helped Weinstock up and stood him against the wall. Weinstock was barefoot.

“What the hell is happening?” the doctor demanded, but nobody had any answers. Instead they each stopped moving and listened to the sounds coming through the empty window. The screeching of car horns. Gunshots. And screams. Lots and lots of screams.

The door opened and a nurse rushed in, her face smeared with blood, clothes littered with glass fragments, eyes wild. She had one hand pressed to her throat. “Doctor! Oh my God…they…they…” Then she sank to her knees and fell forward, her hand slipping away to release an arterial spray.

Behind her in the half-lit corridors, it was sheer pandemonium as patients and nurses and doctors staggered through the shadows, most of them bleeding from the shattered windows.

Jonatha tore the wadded tissues out of Newton’s hand, but as she bent to press it to the nurse’s throat the artery pumped a last feeble splash and then stopped.

“What the hell is going on?” she screamed, turning toward Mike. “What’s going on?”

Mike looked out the window. There was more light spilling into the room from the fires out there than from the emergency lights. “It’s what I was trying to tell you,” he said. “This is what Griswold and Vic have been planning all these years. The Red Wave.”

“But what is it? What does he want? Just to kill us?”

Mike turned. “Don’t you get it? This isn’t about us. It’s never been about us, not really. We’re just in his way. You said it yourself—Griswold is a psychic vampire. Every time someone is killed by those
things
he created, every time someone dies in pain and terror, he feeds on it. Every death makes him stronger. He’s been getting stronger and stronger all these years, and now with this…” He waved at the window. “With this, he’ll be strong enough.”

“Strong enough to do what?” demanded Val, rising.

Mike’s fiery eyes burned in the darkness.

“Strong enough to rise from the grave. That’s what this is all about. He’s using all this raw power to remake himself. He wants to come back, not as a ghost or as a psychic vampire, but with a new body.”

Weinstock stared at him, then looked out the window at the inferno that was Pine Deep. “What kind of body can he make by feeding on pain and death?”

Mike shook his head. “I don’t know. There’s never been anything like this. The Bone Man was sure of that, and I
know
it. Just like I’m the first of whatever I am…when Griswold rises he’ll be the first of what he is. Something really powerful.” He paused as if listening to voices in his head. “I think he wants to be a god.”