Bad Moon Rising (53 page)

Forty feet away the werewolf was struggling to get to a kneeling position, blood streaming from its wounds; near him, Sarah lay on the ground and shook with palsy. Her face was gashed and bleeding badly and blood dripped onto the mud at her knees. The werewolf began crawling slowly toward her, making low plaintive sounds in its throat. It left a pattern of gore behind it like the trail of a slug.

Crow’s mind could not handle the thought of the werewolf. There was something about it that he did not want to understand even though he
did
understand, so he turned away. He picked up the Roadblocker and patted LaMastra down for the last of his ammunition, then Crow hastily reloaded and went to find Val and Mike.

There were far fewer vampires now. The smoke from the fires was so thick it was hard to see. Crow skirted brush fires and he killed anything that got in his way, though each time he fired the big gun it made his gut hurt. Something was definitely wrong in there. He could taste blood in his throat. Then he heard three pistol shots and angled in that direction, blundering through the smoke.

And there was Val, with Mike beside her.

Around them were mountains of the dead. The last remaining vampires yielded and fled as Crow came screaming into the clearing. Crow staggered toward Val and she cried out his name and ran to him, wrapping her arms around him, weeping and saying his name over and over again as they both collapsed down to their knees.

Mike Sweeney stood above them, searching the smoke for movement, his body crisscrossed with cuts, his face a red and nearly unrecognizable mask. Then he also slumped to his knees, looked blankly at Val and Crow, and fell forward onto the bloody hands that still held the sword. His face was bright with fever and his eyes stared at nothing.

“Ruger’s dead,” Crow whispered as he showered Val’s matted hair with dozens of quick, light kisses. “But he killed Vince.”

“Oh, God…” Val huddled against him. “Is it over?” she asked.

He kissed her lips. “I think so,” he murmured.

Beneath them the ground exploded.

(1)

The whole swamp seemed to lift into the air, propelled by titanic pressure from below. Crow felt himself rising into the night, hurtling through shadows and flame and confusion; he felt Val being pulled away from him, heard her scream. Mike was screaming, too. He pitched end over end and landed in a thick holly bush. The bush softened the impact, but Crow could feel something twist in his lower back. Dirt and wormy mud continued to geyser up, shooting high into the smoky sky before raining down heavily all around him. The corpses of the vampires were thrown around like dolls.

A great roar filled the air. Dirt and mud fell all over Crow; he sputtered and spit it out as he shouted for Val and tried to scramble around to find her. The act of turning sent daggers of pain through his back and stomach, pain darted and sparked along the backs of his legs. Fiery light swarmed like fireflies around his head, but there was a narrow corridor of clear vision and he strained to see what it was that had caused the fearful eruption. The muddy earth in the center of the swamp had been churned and torn away. Huge masses of it were clumped around, displaced and discarded, piled up to create a crater rim like the earthworks of a volcano. A few of the surviving vampires, seared and battered, crawled like grubs away from the hole.

There was another deep rumbling sound, and as he watched something impossibly massive began rising from the mouth of the crater. It rose slowly, unfolding from the mud, assuming a shape like a man’s and yet unlike anything that had ever lived. Legs like Greek columns lifted its bulk, and the colossal torso straightened by slow degrees to raise the gigantic head; vast arms stretched wide and as the monstrosity reached its full height it stood over fifteen feet tall. Its skin was mottled and slimy, covered with a pale and leprous flesh that oozed and glistened with open sores and pustules; its legs were like those of a great towering goat and seemed to be composed of twist upon twist of braided tree root and warped bone, all of it wrapped in layers of raw muscle fiber that shone wetly with blood and mucus. The torso itself was man-shaped, but its wet flesh was a horrifying patchwork of rat and dog skin, splotchy with patches of bloody fur. The shoulders were covered with writhing hair composed entirely of living maggots that were fused into the skin. The neck was as thick as a bull’s and was topped with a face more horrible than any medieval gargoyle: there were two burning red eyes that fumed and smoked and glared out over a boar’s snout on either side of which rose thick tusks. Thinner fangs, like those of a rattlesnake, curled downward on the insides of the tusks and hot venom dripped onto the heaving chest and sizzled on the squirming flesh. The beast’s brow was heavy and sloped, giving the skull a simian cast, but the ears were large and came to sharp points. Writhing atop the head was a gorgon’s nest of twisting snakes.

Crow stared up into the face of pure evil, and he could feel the hope run out of him like water from a punctured barrel. His mind twisted and struggled, trying to accept what he was seeing, and he knew terror on every level of his consciousness, from the coldest facets of his logical mind to the primal instincts buried deep within every cell. This was the face of nightmare defined, this was the dark at the top of the stairs, this was the monster in every child’s closet. This was the darkness of the human soul released and given immeasurable power; this was the human potential taken to the ultimate degree of corruption. This was the fear of death and all the monsters out of legend. This was the devil himself.

Here was the architect of all their grief, all of their loss. Here was the cruel intellect whose awful desires had conceived the campaign of hurt against the town and its people. This was Ubel Griswold reborn, the god of the dark new world to come.

(2)

Griswold looked slowly around at the devastation he wrought. He stood in a fiery temple whose smoky pillars seemed to lift the entire heavens. Beneath his skin the vermin of the earth writhed in constant agony so that his skin appeared to shimmer. When he looked out upon what his hand had made, he was well pleased.

Crow lay nearest, groaning, hands clamped to his stomach; Val was fifty feet away, slumped against LaMastra’s corpse. Ruger’s dead body lay over the rim of the crater and near it the werewolf crouched, still weak and bleeding, its yellow eyes filled with fear and hate. Mike was the farthest away, his sword hilt inches from his hand; his eyes were wide and staring and all hope was struck from his face.

Ubel Griswold threw back his head and laughed. It was a sound too deep, too loud, too jarring to be real. Crow jammed his fists against his ears and cried out as blood burst from his nostrils.

Griswold took a single step forward and the whole clearing shook; another step and the sound was like the fall of an artillery shell. Crow felt his body lift and thump down with each cloven footfall, and his mind rebelled against such a creature. The world was never meant to endure the weight of such a thing as this, and Crow knew that if it was here, if had been allowed to manifest itself, then everything was lost, that all sense and order were gone from the world.

Griswold eyed them all with amused contempt. “What a collection of useless shit,” he said in a voice that boomed like thunder.

Crow remembered that voice, that thick accent, from a million years ago.

“Did you really have the conceit to think you could stop me? That you could stop my Red Wave?” He stamped down a yard from Crow’s head and the shock wave threw Crow five feet into the air. “I was leading armies before this sewer of a country was even born! I was with the Aryan hordes that burned Rome! I’ve walked a thousand battlefields, ten thousand!” He spat, and the spittle was alive with beetles and maggots. “You all deserve death just because you’re too stupid to be allowed to live.” Griswold said all this in a voice filled with contempt, but his face was bright with pleasure. He was enjoying this on a profoundly sexual level; this was better than anything he’d felt in thirty years. To smell blood on the air, to taste the richness of pain on his tongue—it was wonderful.

He bent toward Crow and pointed one taloned finger, and as Crow watched in helpless horror the finger extended, became one of the multijointed limbs that had sprouted earlier from the mud. The claw stretched toward Crow and touched him, but the touch was light, a caress. “Yesss. I know you. I know your blood. Your brother squealed like a little girl when I gutted him.”

He sneered with malicious delight as he turned toward Val. “I know you, too. I had your uncle. Very tasty. He screamed for mercy, did you know that? He begged and screamed and pissed in his pants, and I took him anyway. Weak, cowardly piece of garbage. But his blood was oh so sweet. And when Boyd killed your brother…I
tasted
that, too. It was delicious.”

He turned again, this time to the werewolf, who tried to stand erect, but failed and slipped back down to all fours. The werewolf snarled at him and Griswold shook his head slowly. “You disappoint me,” he said. “You were supposed to be at my side, and yet you turn on me. I even brought your woman here to be my sacrifice—a sacrifice I would have shared with you, and yet you kill my servants. That will cost you.”

Finally Griswold turned to Mike. “And you. My son. My betrayer.
Dhampyr
indeed! I may not be able to kill you, but I can hurt you. I can make your world a screaming hell until you take your own life. I will delight in finding ways to torment you,
dhampyr
. Perhaps I’ll lock you and your
other
father in the same cellar and see what happens. He isn’t evil, it seems, and that means he can kill you and it won’t harm me at all. Very droll, don’t you think? Yesss, I will lock you away together and wait until he gets hungry enough. That will be sweet.”

Crow saw Mike stare across the clearing to where the werewolf crouched, saw the sight of the creature register on Mike’s face, and Mike scrambled into a defensive crouch.

“I used his body once. I wore it like a suit of skin and in it I used your mother. Oh…she was sweet, my little
dhampyr
! Would you like to know the things she did? Would you like to know the things she liked? Would it shock you? Would it make you scream the way I made her scream?”

Mike snatched up his sword and rushed at Griswold. The sword flashed and Griswold reached down from his towering height and simply smashed the boy into the mud. The sword fell from his hands and he lay gasping in the muck, his eyes wide and staring from the enormity of the pain.

Griswold sighed. “God! I’ve wanted to do that since you were born, you worthless waste of blood.”

“Leave him alone!” yelled Crow as he lurched to his feet, took one decisive step toward Mike, and immediately fell flat on his face. He coughed and blood flecked his lips.

Griswold’s laugh shook the world. In the air above tens of thousands of crows screamed as the echo assaulted the sky. Around him the forest was ablaze.

Then Griswold bent down and from behind the ridge of the crater he lifted the limp, sagging body of Sarah Wolfe. Crow looked up and tried to call her name, but his voice was only a faint croak. Sarah stirred in Griswold’s grasp, but did not wake. Blood trickled from both of her ears; her eyes were half-open and sightless with shock.

“Ah, my sweet,” Griswold murmured, stroking her with a long talon. He sniffed at her, smelling her blood, and his eyelids fluttered as if he had just inhaled the most potent of opiates. “You are a gift for a god. Just a little sip, just a taste, and then I can leave this place. Just a tiny drop of your blood and I will leave here forever and this world will be
mine
.” He sniffed her again and then caught sight of Crow worming his way brokenly through the mud. “Did my son tell you what is going to happen? Oh, I know he looked into that
schwartze
musician’s mind—do you think he could have done that without me letting him? It amused me to have him look and to feel his pain at what he saw. Do you know what he saw? Shall I tell you? He saw the end of your world. He saw the coming of a new Dark Age. I will darken your skies and your lives forever. I will build my armies and spread out across the face of this world, and every nation will fall because they will not know how to fight what I am. Do you think the cross will stop me? I piss on your cross! Do you think garlic and rosewood will stop me? Weeds and garbage! I’m above such nonsense. There is
nothing
in your world that can stop me, and my army will be vast and powerful. How can your armies hope to stop mine with guns and tanks? I can raise all of the dead across the whole of the world. Every cemetery is a fresh battalion for me, and as I kill my enemies they will become my newest recruits. Nothing can stop me. Not now, not ever again.”

He closed his flaming eyes for a moment and drew in a deep lungful of air through the dripping nostrils of his porcine snout. “Can you smell the fire and blood? That is the perfume of Armageddon.” He opened his eyes and raised Sarah once more to his mouth. A fat, mottled tongue lolled out and licked her throat. Even unconscious she gagged and shifted instinctively away. Griswold looked down at the werewolf, his voice filled with mockery. “To think I was going to share her with you. I was going to let her death be the bond between us. I would have made you a general in my army, equal to Wingate and Ruger. Together we would have washed all the nations of the world in blood. But you are too stupid, too small of mind to understand or appreciate those gifts. Well, see your woman die! See how her blood will set me free, set me on the road to conquest!” His mouth yawned wide and the serpent’s fangs dripped with venom and Sarah’s eyes snapped open and she shrieked with such a deep and overwhelming terror that it filled the whole world and lifted up into the smoky air.

The werewolf’s shriek was almost human as it leapt at Griswold.

If Terry’s mind was still in that hulk of a body, then at that moment, hearing those words, it snapped. Hate can sometimes transcend everything, even injury and fear of the grave. Love is a powerful a force than can move mountains.

As Griswold bent to consume Sarah, Terry Wolfe threw himself at Griswold, slashing and tearing and biting in an insane frenzy of murderous need; his talons opened great rents in the diseased hide and instead of blood it was a torrent of ants and spiders and roaches and slugs that poured from the wounds.

But love and hate were not enough and in the perverse scheme of things on which the universe was built this was not Terry’s fight to win; as powerful as he was, he was no match for the thing that Ubel Griswold had become.

Griswold bellowed in pain and struck out at the werewolf, knocking it dozens of feet through the air; his monstrous hand opened reflexively and Sarah dropped to the torn mud by the massive goat legs, and she lay there as still and silent as the dead. Griswold bent toward her and then recoiled when new pain flared in his chest as Val knelt by the edge of the crater with Crow’s Beretta held in both hands firing spaced shots, punching dark holes in Griswold’s flesh, trying to hit a heart that didn’t exist. There was no blood for the garlic to pollute, no nervous system for the oil to disrupt—but Griswold’s flesh was alive and he could feel pain, even if he could not be killed. He swiped angrily at Val and she scrambled backward, but not fast enough. Just the edge of Griswold’s massive hand struck her forearm, but it was enough. There was a loud
crack!
and the pistol dropped into the mud. Val screamed as she fell, clutching her broken arm to her stomach.

“Val!” Crow yelled. “Look out!”

Val looked up as Griswold took another thunderous step forward and reached for her, but she was already slithering away through the mud, pushing herself backward with her heels. The huge cloven hoof came down right where she had been and the whole floor of the Hollow shook. Val stumbled to her feet and ran.