“Back away from the hatch,” Jerry said.
Matson didn’t move.
“I won’t ask again,” Jerry said.
Matson took three steps backward. Jerry followed him into the torpedo room. He thought again of the drowned men in the tubes and was tempted to shoot Matson here and now. A shot from this close would blow a nice hole his chest. Putting him down was the captain’s plan, and it sure as hell sounded satisfying, but he had another idea.
“You’re coming back with me,” Jerry told him. “I’m going to show you to the others so they can see exactly what you are.”
“And what, exactly, am I?” Matson asked.
“That’s easy,” Jerry said. “A bloodsucking, murdering pile of shit.”
He glanced over at the torpedo tubes. The LEDs on the control panel told him they were locked but no longer flooded.
“Do you have more men in there?” he said,
“There’s always room for one more,” Matson said.
The son of a bitch was smiling behind the hand that shielded his eyes, as if all this amused him somehow. Jerry skirted along the far bulkhead, working his way toward the torpedo tubes. Matson pivoted to face him as he moved. Jerry didn’t take his eyes off him. No more than ten feet separated them, but if Matson tried anything, Jerry would happily put a bullet through his forehead. He wouldn’t feel a second of regret.
“Open the breeches,” Jerry said.
“I can hear your heartbeat, White.”
“Open the goddamn tubes!” Jerry shouted.
“You must be terrified for your heart to beat so fast,” Matson said. “I can take that fear away for you.”
Jerry raised the M1911, aiming it at Matson’s face.
“I can take everything away,” Matson said.
He lunged, hissing and grabbing for Jerry. Jerry fired, hitting him full in the face. The blast knocked Matson’s head back in a spray of blood. Jerry had shot him at point-blank range with a .45-caliber round, but somehow he remained standing. Matson had a dark hole in the side of his face where his right eye had been, oozing blood. He casually reached into his eye socket and pulled out the bullet. It clattered onto the deck.
Jerry stared at Matson in bewildered horror. Not only had the shot not killed him, it hadn’t even inconvenienced him. The damage to his flesh seemed inconsequential to him.
Jerry only hesitated a moment as his mind tried to process what he was seeing, but that was all the time Matson needed. He grabbed the pistol by the barrel, wrenched it from Jerry’s grasp, and tossed it over his shoulder. It skidded across the floor to the far bulkhead. Jerry backed away. Matson swatted the lantern out of his hand, knocking it to the deck with a thud, its beam pointing uselessly up at the ceiling. Shit. Whatever Matson planned to do to him was going to be far worse than getting shot with a handgun.
At that moment, he simply stopped thinking, and instinct took over. The torpedo tubes at his back, and the men who may or may not be in them, were no longer his priority. He was a gazelle in the grasp of a lion. All that mattered was escape.
He broke for the hatch, but Matson caught him and threw him backward. Jerry slammed into the bulkhead, and the back of his head banged against the breech door of a torpedo tube. Matson grabbed him again, pinning him against the tubes. Jerry was too dazed to fight back. Matson’s deathly cold fingers dug into Jerry’s arms and shoulders. His mouth opened wide, revealing two long, sharp upper canine teeth. When Jerry saw them, he snapped out of his stupor and started twisting, shoving, and kicking, but it was no good. He was caught. Matson bent his head toward Jerry’s neck. The sharp tip of a fang brushed his skin.
Something long and narrow burst out of Matson’s chest. Jerry looked down at the crudely fashioned point of a wooden spike, red with blood. Unlike when Jerry had shot him only moments before, this time Matson cried out in agony. He fell to the deck, twitching and seizing, his remaining eye wide with disbelief and pain. He flailed and hissed and snapped his jaws at the air. He tried to roll onto his back, but the two feet of broken mop handle sticking between his shoulder blades kept him on his side.
Oran Guidry stood before Jerry, glaring down at the body. He snarled, “Connard.”
“Holy fucking shit!” Jerry said, rubbing his neck where Matson’s teeth had nearly gone in.
“You okay, White?” Oran asked.
“I shot him in the face!” Jerry babbled. “I shot him in the fucking eye and it didn’t do anything! And then he—he was going to—to…”
“Bite you? Yeah, that’s what they do. One of ’em tried to bite me up in the control room earlier, but I got away. Been hidin’ ever since. That ol’ mop handle’s the only weapon I could find.”
“Well, it worked,” Jerry said in amazement. “My gun didn’t do shit, but a fucking mop handle took him down.”
Of course, he realized. It was the wood. Just like in the stories, a wooden stake could kill a vampire.
He looked down at Matson, who had grabbed the mop handle protruding from his chest and was trying to pull it out. But he was weakening by the moment. His hands fell limp, and he stopped squirming on the deck and lay still.
Jerry just stood there, staring down at the vampire sprawled at his feet. Oran kicked Matson in the head—whether out of hatred or to make sure he was dead, Jerry couldn’t say. He was just glad that Matson didn’t stir. Oran stepped over the dead vampire and approached the torpedo tubes. He grabbed the handle of one breech door and tried to open it, but it wouldn’t budge. Jerry pulled himself out of his bewilderment and went to the control panel.
“Can you unlock it?” Oran asked.
“I think so.”
Normally, working the torpedo control panel would be a cinch, but his mind was still trying to adjust to all that had just happened, and it took him a moment to locate the switches that retracted the safety locks on the tubes. He flipped all four and watched the lights on the control panel change.
“They’re open,” he said.
Oran yanked open the breech door like a man possessed, and Jerry watched in horror as a pale hand dangled out of the tube. Another of Matson’s drowning victims—one he hadn’t flushed out to sea yet. Jerry picked up his lantern off the floor and shined the beam into the tube. Oran grabbed the hand and pulled until a damp sleeve appeared, followed by a head that flopped limply against a shoulder. It was Lieutenant Gordon Abrams. Jerry put the lantern down and helped Oran pull Abrams the rest of the way out of the tube. The lieutenant’s clothes and hair were damp but not soaking wet. Maybe he hadn’t drowned after all.
Drowned or not, Abrams showed no signs of life. They lowered him to the floor, where he drooped like a corpse. His head lolled to one side, and Jerry saw a smear of dried blood and a bite mark on the side of his neck. He shot a look of worry at Oran, who was slapping Abrams’ face lightly, trying to roust him.
“Come on, Lieutenant,” Oran said. “Wake up. You safe now. We got you.”
While Oran was thus occupied, Jerry opened the other three torpedo tubes. Inside, he found more crewmen stuffed into the narrow space, but they were dead, their bodies twisted, their hands frozen into claws, the fingernails broken from trying to dig their way out. Some still had their eyes open, staring sightlessly back at Jerry. Matson had flooded the tubes, drowning them, but hadn’t flushed them out into the ocean yet.
Jerry closed the breech doors and returned to where Oran was still trying to revive his boss. Abrams was dead, surely. Between the bite and being locked in the airless tube, he had to be.
But just then Abrams coughed and groaned, making both men jump. His eyes opened.