Jonatha had conjured the story and coached them all in the specifics, clearly explaining what the consequences would be for their lives and credibility if they even breathed the word vampire. After everything that had happened, the people were more than willing to buy her fiction and by the fifth or sixth retelling, most of them actually believed it. It was easier to believe.
Newton was evacuated along with a handful of others who were seriously wounded. A Medivac chopper flew him to Doylestown Hospital and he was in surgery fifteen minutes after touchdown. The doctors had to sew up and reinflate his left lung, reset four ribs, more or less rebuild his sternum, and treat him for countless abrasions, contusions, and a dangerous dose of shock. When they asked him what had happened, he muttered dazedly about vampires taking over the world, and the staff all smiled to each other about that.
Jonatha stayed in town and tried to explain how important it was to send a team immediately out to Dark Hollow. She was ignored at first, but then she found the right spur and dug it deeply into their collective flanks. She told them that Dark Hollow was the base camp of the terrorists, and that the leader of the group might still be there. She told them that a local policeman had gone out there with a detective from Philadelphia, and that a second Philly cop had been murdered out there the day before. They had uncovered the terrorist plot, but by the time they knew what they were up against, the lines of communication had been cut.
It was a good story, something to react to, something to get behind. The SERT teams saddled up, eager for the chance to actually find some of the sick bastards who had committed the atrocities, to rescue some fellow officers, and maybe even to get a little payback.
Seventy minutes after the first choppers had landed in town, three helicopters lifted off—the two SERT Bell Rangers and a heavier medevac bird—and flew southeast at top speed. Fire planes were already ordered from every field in three counties, but the Tac-Teams had to go in while the forest was still ablaze. The closer they got to the fires the more the rescue team began to lose hope of finding anyone alive. They found a big field by a dilapidated old house and set down there. The front porch was charred and as they moved past they saw the remains of a corpse on the porch, and Lieutenant Simons knew that, from Jonatha’s description, they had just seen the body of Detective Sergeant Frank Ferro.
The Tac-Teams were trained to move fast and they passed down the forest trail at great speed but with almost no sound. Night-vision glasses painted the landscape a lurid green, but as they neared the burning swamp area they switched back to standard eyesight—the fires provided more than enough light.
As they enter the clearing, Simons stopped, his troops fanning out to either side of him.
“Oh my God,” he whispered. His shock was reflected on the faces of each officer and medic. This was like nothing any of them had ever seen.
The fires in the clearing had died down from lack of fuel, the bushes having burned down to the mud and sizzled out. Wisps of smoke drifted up from charred corpses and mingled with the predawn mist to create a surreal landscape. There were thousands of corpses. Thousands.
And in the middle of it all, there were four living people.
Val was the only one conscious. She sat in a huddle, clutching a broken and bloated arm close to her body. Crow had passed out and his hands were icy and slick with sweat. Sarah Wolfe looked like she was sleeping, but as soon as the medics touched her she began to scream—her eyes were still closed, but she screamed and screamed for nearly three minutes. Mike was in worse shape. His body was crisscrossed with many deep cuts, each of which was caked with blood and dirt; some of the cuts were already red and hot with infection. His eyes were strangely discolored—blue, flecked with red, ringed with gold—and the pupils were fixed and dilated, his breathing shallow and rapid. One of the boy’s hands was badly broken, and there was evidence of bleeding from his ears.
The medics worked like heroes and two-man teams hustled everyone out on stretchers, running through the woods as fast as safety would allow toward the waiting choppers.
“Will he be all right?” Val begged one of the medics.
“I’m sure he will,” the medic lied.
They found the body of Philadelphia police detective Vince LaMastra lying in a bloody pool, his dead hand clutched tightly around the ankle of another corpse. Simons stared down at the big detective’s body and tried to understand how such a huge hole could have been torn through the man’s muscular stomach. The wound did not look like any kind of gunshot wound, but it was too rough for a knife. Val was standing beside him and she surprised Simons by kneeling and bending forward to kiss LaMastra on the forehead. She did it gently, as if she were saying good night to a sleeping child. The act touched Simons and his eyes burned with tears.
The man whose ankle was caught in LaMastra’s grip had obviously been killed by some kind of weapon, and Simons was startled to find a broken Japanese sword hilt near the body. His surprise doubled and then tripled when he took a closer look at the face of the dead man. As impossible as it seemed, he looked exactly like Karl Ruger, the man who had been the focus of the manhunt the month before, but whose body was stolen from the Pine Deep morgue. Simons had to force himself to shelve his wonderment so he could continue with the search.
When it was clear that there were no additional survivors to discover or identify, Simons ordered a stretcher for Val.
“I’m pregnant,” she said as they secured her to the board. They promised to be careful.
While they worked, Simons squatted down next to her, pulling off his Kevlar helmet. “What in God’s name happened here?” asked the corporal in an awed whisper.
Val looked at him for a moment. She opened her mouth to speak, but then shook her head.
“I don’t know,” she said.
(2)
It took two days to put out all the fires, though water was pumped onto the buildings for much longer. Nearly a week passed before all of the survivors were found and counted. Some of them had been hiding in root cellars under their farmhouses; others in any shelter they could find. A dozen farmers and their families had crowded into a big shed that was piled with huge sacks of garlic bulbs. The entire congregation of a synagogue had boarded themselves up in the sanctuary. Over a hundred people, mostly teenagers, had been herded into the barn at the Haunted Hayride by a couple of actresses and a stuntman. A Bucks County blues band, Kindred Spirit, and their entire audience hid in the pool house at the country club and for some reason no one was even injured. A group of moviegoers had barricaded themselves in a drive-in projection room, and on the college campus a bunch of students from the theater department had survived by covering themselves in fake wounds and hiding among the dead. Those were the kinds of stories that emerged as the days went on.
But not all of these stories ended well. Four stock boys, three checkers, and half a dozen customers had tried hiding in the walk-in refrigerator of a ShopSmart, and though they survived the night, they were trapped in the cold darkness and found two days too late. Several people had apparently fled into the woods but were killed by smoke inhalation. Three teenage girls were found locked in an old 1950s bomb shelter that was sealed by a combination lock they apparently couldn’t open, and they never turned on the air filtration system.
There were other stories of survival and disaster, and with each day the tallies of both living and dead rose. When the official counts were finally checked and rechecked a dozen times, the survivors numbered 6,532. The death toll stood at a staggering 11,641, making it one of the worst disasters in U.S. history. Nearly two-thirds of all the people in town for the festival had died—a mix of residents, tourists, entertainers, and reporters.