“Amen to that,” LaMastra agreed.
Down the hall, behind one of the doors, gunfire erupted.
Crow spun around. “Val!”
(2)
BK led the way and Billy Christmas brought up the rear; between them were over a hundred customers and staff. BK had a heavy tree branch in his hands, the jagged end thick with blood. Billy had a piece of rebar he’d uprooted from a fence line. Less than a dozen of their charges carried weapons. Peppered through the group were customers who had eaten some of the candy corn; these were the only ones in the group who didn’t look scared. A few them even sang happy, trippy songs; some were crying and jabbering in invented languages.
“Incoming!” Billy yelled. “On your three.”
BK spun to his right as a group of figures rushed at them from the shadows. He put himself between them and his group, club raised and ready. The lead figure in the other group had a chair leg. Everyone froze.
“BK…?” asked the leader of the other group.
“Jim?”
Jim O’Rear stepped out of the dense shadows beneath a big oak. Behind him Brinke and Debbie fanned out; each of them had clubs. Kramer was at the end of the line, herding the group forward.
“What the hell is going on here?” Brinke asked as Billy trotted up.
“Christ if I know.”
“I think it’s something in the water,” Debbie said. “Drugs or something.”
“Maybe.” BK looked over the newcomers and saw that some of their party were showing the same dazed detachment. He caught Billy’s eye; Billy gave a small shake of his head. Drugs may account for some of it, but some of what they’d seen could not be explained away by drugs. No way.
BK pointed up the hill. “We’re making for the barn. Two doors, plenty of tools. We can hole up there.”
O’Rear nodded. “Outstanding.”
The groups merged together, friends seeking out friends and giving hugs; strangers embracing the way victims of a shared catastrophe will. The night around them seemed to be expanding—there were fewer screams and they were farther away.
Debbie had her head cocked to listen. “I think it’s…stopping.”
“God, I hope so,” BK said. “But let’s get the hell out of the open. Jim, left flank, Kramer on my right. Billy, watch our backs. Come on—let’s go!”
They started running, heading toward the barn, each of them praying that would be the end of it.
(3)
“Shhh,” Foree said, holding a finger to his lips, “let me listen.”
He pressed his ear to the steel door of the projection booth. The terrible screams that had torn the night for the last two hours had quieted. The woman who had first asked him if the monsters could get in still huddled close to him. Her name was Linda—a retired phys ed teacher who had come to hear Foree speak because she had gone to see the original Dawn of the Dead with her husband nearly thirty years ago; now she was trapped in the utter blackness of the booth with the star of the film, and everything was so surreal that she felt like she was in a dream. She touched his arm.
“You…you’re not going to open the door, are you?” Her voice was filled with appalling fear.
He reached for her in the dark, found her shoulder, gave it a reassuring squeeze. “Don’t worry, I’m not opening that door until I know damn sure that the cavalry has arrived. I want to hear bugles blowing.”
She leaned her head against his arm, an act entirely devoid of flirtation. It was based entirely on the need to believe in the solidity of hope. Foree stroked her hair, calming her the way he would soothe a frightened child. The booth was so intensely dark that all that was left to the cowering survivors was patience and prayer.
(4)
“Anything in there?”
“Lotta corpses.”
The vampire who had once been a real estate salesman opened the door to the lecture hall so his companion, who had once been the assistant football coach at Pinelands College, could look inside. The room was awash in blood. It streaked the walls, pooled on the floors, glistened on the faces and bodies of the dead people who lay scattered on the floor or slumped in chairs.
“Someone had fun,” said the real estate man. “Looks like eighty, ninety kills. Shame we missed it.”
The coach smiled. “The cleanup guys should be here soon, then we’ll have eighty or ninety more playing for the home team.”
“Works for me. C’mon, there’s still time to hunt before the ritual. I’m still hungry.”
Grinning like schoolkids, they closed the door and headed out to the campus grounds, where screams and shouts still filled the air.
It was at least five minutes before a voice said, “Everyone stay down.”
One of the slaughtered bodies moved, first raising his head, which moved quite well despite the gaping ruin that was his throat, then getting to his feet. He surveyed the room. There were eighty-seven bodies, but only fifty of them were dead. The others just looked it.
He moved quietly to the door, listened, opened it and looked out, then closed and locked it. “Okay,” he said crisply, “everyone up. We have to move fast.”
Thirty-seven murder victims stood up. All of them looked terrified, but in each of their faces was a spark of hope. The trick had worked. When the attack started the killings had been horrendous. The attackers swarmed in and there had been no warning, no challenge, no hesitation…just slaughter. Panic swept the room and the attackers used that, herding the people back toward the corners, cutting off their lines of escape, killing and moving to the next person packed into the corner.
Then one man—the one who now stood by the door—turned all that around. He grabbed a hot soldering iron from his work table and had leapt at one of the killers, swinging the burning needle over and down onto the back of the monster as he bent over a woman to drink from her throat. The creature screamed once and then went limp. When a second monster saw this and closed on him, the man ripped the soldering iron out of the dead creature’s skull and went straight for the newcomer’s eye socket.
Battles sometimes turn like that. A rout becomes a rally when one person takes a stand and shows how to kill the enemy that everyone else thought was impervious. Instead of a dozen terrorizing several dozen, the survivors became the attackers. One to one the creatures were too strong, but when five or six people tackled them, the physics of overwhelming mass and momentum kicked in. It wasn’t an easy win, and the fifty-nine that had started the counterattack had been stripped down to thirty-seven by the time the last killer went down. Thirty-seven plus the man with the soldering iron.
He tried to lead them outside, but the campus was a war zone. So, he herded his small army back inside and came up with a plan.
Tom Savini had made a career out of making people look dead, look like victims, look like monsters had been at them. He was here in Pine Deep to lecture on that very subject. He had everything to hand. There was enough real blood to reinforce the illusion, and though he had to cajole, browbeat, and, more than once, actually deck one of the survivors to keep them from losing their heads and to encourage cooperation, in the end they all followed his lead.
While Savini was painting wounds on a grad student, the young woman started to cry. “This is real…isn’t it?”
He paused and searched her eyes, then smiled. “I’ve been to ’Nam and I’ve spent my life in the movies. Nothing’s real.”
She gripped his wrist. “Thank you,” she said, her voice low and urgent.
Savini glanced at the door, then back to her. “Thank me when this is over.”
“You got it.”
(5)
Crow pounded his fist on the door. “Val…VAL!”