2

Val and Mike brought Crow and LaMastra quickly up to speed on everything that had happened. Crow took the news better than LaMastra did, but they both remained on their feet even with the enormity of it all.

“Then we have no choice,” Crow said hollowly.

Val met his stare and the fear he felt was reflected in her eyes. She absently touched her stomach.

“We have to do it,” Crow said. “We have to try.”

“Yes.”

LaMastra just stood there shaking his head. Not in refusal of what Crow was proposing, but in denial of a world where such things were necessary.

Crow turned toward Newton and Jonatha. The reporter was lying with his head in her lap. Newton tried to speak, but Jonatha shushed him. Over his head she gave Crow a significant look. “I think he’ll be okay—the bleeding’s slowed down. He can breathe, but it’s hard for him to talk and he’s in a lot of pain. There’s no way he can go with you.”

Crow knelt next to Newton. “Hey, Newt, how’s things?”

The reporter raised a shaky hand and gave it a seesaw shake.

“Hey, buddy, you know what we’re going to do, but listen to me—you two are out of it. Val and Vince will go with Mike and me. You two stay here and hold the fort. Jonatha, if there’s anyone alive on this floor, then round them up and move them all into any room you think you can defend. We’ll leave you plenty of guns and ammo. Just hole up and wait for us to get back.”

Jonatha looked doubtful. “What if you don’t get back?”

“Then as soon as you think it’s safe, go find some way to call the State Police, the National Guard, and anyone else you can think of. They’re probably on their way already anyway. If we aren’t back by then, send someone to look for us in Dark Hollow. After that, you guys get as far away from this place as you can. If we don’t make it back, it’s ’cause we failed. If that happens, then you don’t want to be within a thousand miles of here. Okay?”

They both nodded, looking scared. Crow patted Newt’s leg. “Don’t forget, Champ, we still have a book to write. I’m expecting to go on Oprah and brag about it, so let’s all make sure we’re around come morning.”

Crow rose and joined Val, who was squatting by the open duffel bag reloading her shotgun. Her face still looked pale and sickly.

He kissed her. “How are you doing, babe?”

Her eyes were dark with damage. “About the same as you.”

“You mean you’re boyishly handsome, full of youthful energy, and unbelievably charming and witty?”

“No, I said that I’m about the same as you.”

“Bitch.”

“So they tell me.” She managed a small smile as she finished loading the gun; she picked up a game pouch filled with shells and strapped it on.

“It’s going to be tough,” he said lamely. “You could stay here with them…”

She adjusted the straps. “It’s been tough all along.” She picked up the shotgun again and jacked a round into the breech. “Crow,” she said in a voice that was a strange blend of softness and hardness, “I’m never going to let you out of my sight again.”

“Fine with me.”

“Are you ready?” Mike asked, and Crow turned to look up at the boy. Mike had wiped the blood off his face, but his clothes still glistened with red. Crow had tied his spare sword over Mike’s shoulder and the boy was practicing drawing it. Crow was encouraged by how fast the kid was.

“Let’s go,” LaMastra said. “Let’s kill this evil son of a bitch and have done with it.”

3

From the womb of darkness he called out and they came to him. Tens of thousands of them, seething and scuttling in the shadows, wriggling out of holes, crawling up from forgotten wells, clawing their way out of old cellars. They swarmed into the night and raced toward Dark Hollow. He waited for them, needing them, hungry for them, willing them to come.

Into the forbidden place they swarmed. The rats came first, chittering and squeaking as they scurried on quick feet; behind them came the roaches and beetles, covering the earth like a shiny black carpet, hissing along on their million legs, crawling over each other, driven by the irresistible power of his call. Here and there were a few larger animals: stray dogs with shaggy coats, scarred farm cats, raccoons and opossums and rabid squirrels. There were a few black goats that had been born wild and mean in the deeper reaches of the State Forest. All of them surging forward to answer that compelling call.

Beneath the tons of muddy earth he waited, and as the first armies of vermin flooded into the swamp he sent fingers up through the soil, seeking the surface with limbs made from roots and vines and old bones and maggots. A single finger broke the surface of the swamp; muddy water dripped from its bleached whiteness. The finger rose, reaching up into the moonlight, extending itself until it became impossibly long, jointed in dozens of places like a grotesquely articulated insect leg. It was absolutely without pigment, a limb born in the womb of thirty years’ darkness, and it curled over the bugs and rats and spiders, swaying in the damp breeze. Antenna-like, it sensed the mass of life around it and quivered with expectant agitation. The rats leapt up in frenzy, throwing their bloated bodies at it, driven to madness by the call of the presence of this flesh.

One rat, older and fatter than the others, waddled through the press toward the swaying finger, crying out with an imploring trill. The exploring finger became aware of it, and the tip of the finger turned slowly toward the rat. A long nail, sharp as a talon, tore though the fingertip, forming as it grew. The finger trembled with anticipatory delight and then snapped forward and downward, piercing the fat body with a single powerful thrust. Blood exploded from the wriggling body as the nail stabbed deep into the rat’s belly and wormed its way toward the heart. The rat screeched in a death ecstasy that made its entire body shiver. It rose up as the finger lifted its weight and shook it, then the rat’s empty corpse was hurled aside. Blood dripped from a tiny mouth that had formed on the finger’s pad; the finger immediately plunged down into the press, impaling another rat, splashing the ground with blood. Another finger tore through the surface, spearing a raccoon as it rose out of the ground; another appeared, and another. Within seconds the entire clearing was a writhing mass of white stalks of maggot flesh and fossilized bone. Dozens of articulated fingers rose and fell, tearing and rending, piercing and slashing, crushing as the vermin of the forest flooded in and crowded forward to die. Living bodies of dogs and goats and cats were torn to bloody rags and the pieces dragged beneath the surface, down to where Griswold’s new body was forming. Their torn meat was added to his, lending mass, sheathing his skeleton with new muscle, new flesh.

Still the creatures poured in, denuding the forest of all life except for the birds, who stayed in their trees and watched with black, emotionless eyes.

It did not take long, perhaps an hour, and then the frenzy of slaughter was done. The bone-white fingers missed nothing, overlooked nothing. Each dead form, each insect, each rat and goat was dragged down into the dirt. The ground swelled with all of the thousands of pounds of matter, the whole surface of the swamp trembled and bubbled like a hot cauldron over a fire, and in that cauldron a witch’s stew was brewing.

One by one, the articulated fingers slithered back into the mud, whipping downward like tongues sucked into well-fed mouths. A terrible silence fell down and smothered the swamp.

Chapter 46

1

LaMastra hotwired Sarah Wolfe’s H1 Alpha—there was no sign of the Hummer’s owner, a fact that twisted the knife in Crow’s heart by another full turn—and they headed out of the hospital lot. The skeletal remains of a burning building lay sprawled across Corn Hill, totally blocking it. “Cut through the school yard,” Crow said. “We can use the side streets to cut over to A-32.”

LaMastra spun the wheel and scraped sparks off his left quarter-panel as he squeezed through the narrow gap in the chain-link fence and cut through the empty school yard.

Mike gave the school a bleak stare but felt no real sense of loss. He had never been happy there, and he’d not expected to ever go back. In his heart, he did not expect to live through the night. He gripped the handle of the sword tightly and said nothing.

As LaMastra reached the far side, he glanced by force of habit into the rearview mirror. “Uh oh,” he said softly. “We have company.”

They all turned to see several cars following.

Val and Mike turned to watch. “Vampires? In those cars?” Val asked.

The detective grunted. “That’d be my guess.”

“They’re after me,” Mike said.

LaMastra glanced at him in the mirror. “I thought they couldn’t kill you.”

“No, but they can run us off the road, kill you guys, and just tie me to a telephone pole or something.”

“Vince,” Crow said, “this would be a good time for reckless driving, wouldn’t you say?”

“Way ahead of you, Boss.” LaMastra scraped through the gate and made a hard right, kicked down on the pedal, and shot down the street at sixty miles an hour. Crow yelled out the turns and Val and Mike watched the dark street behind them. The pursuing cars had vanished into shadows now that they were on streets unlit by fires, but they all knew they were there.

They reached A-32. To their right the road led fifty yards to a twisted tangle of smoking metal that had been the Crestville Bridge; to their left the hardtop cut through shadows toward the farmlands and the forest. LaMastra made a hard left.

As they left the town proper the moonlight bathed the road in a cold light. Far behind them the first of the cars emerged from shadow.

“There’s five of them now,” Val said,

“Persistent sonsabitches!” LaMastra groused. He pressed his foot down even harder and the H1 seemed to laugh with the freedom of speed and power. The big car shot up the hill, gathering speed despite the steep climb. The pursuit cars fell behind. “Crow, this is pretty much a straight run from here to Dark Hollow. I doubt I can lose ’em.”