“Wait a minute, wait a damned chicken-pickin’ minute!” Rebinaux said, and he too was on his feet. “What the hell is a vampire? I thought you said you was from Alabama!”
Lawson grunted. This was going to take a little demonstration.
“Mathias,” he said, “do you have a coin?”
“Yeah, why?”
“Take the coin and throw it as hard as you can against the front wall.”
“Huh?”
“Just do it. As hard as you can.”
Mathias removed from his trouser pocket a small coin. He shook his head as if he thought Lawson utterly insane, and then he reared his arm back and threw the coin with all his strength a distance of a little more than twelve feet.
“Pitching is not your game,” said Lawson, as he leaned against the front wall next to the door. He opened his right fist to show in his palm the Liberty Seated ten-cent piece.
They had not seen him move. He had been standing several feet behind Mathias one instant, and in the next he was at the far wall, waiting there at his leisure. He had gone along the aisle past Rooster and the Winchester hardly leaving a swirl of disturbed air. Rooster’s back was still to him when Lawson spoke, and when he spun around he brought the rifle’s barrel up again aimed at the other man’s chest.
“Easy, Ann,” he said, because she’d drawn her gun once more and it was levelled at Rooster’s head. “It’s not me you have to fear,” he told the group. “It’s those things out there. Lead bullets can hurt me, but they can’t kill me or my kind. There are two ways to do that: a consecrated silver bullet through the skull, or cutting the head off. I’m sure you have questions, but be brief. We have to figure out a plan of—”
“A vampire,” said Reverend Easterly. He had risen to his feet from Blue’s side. “I’m not an uneducated man. I’ve even read Polidori’s book. I would say you are a lunatic, sir, but I’m afraid I know better.”
“Good. That advances us somewhat.”
“Of all the Satan-spawned garbage on this earth and in the world beyond…I never thought I’d see the likes of you. I’ve heard of your kind for years, but to see one…” Easterly had the crucifix between his hands again and held onto it as if to dear life itself. “They have been the subject of legends in Europe for hundreds of years,” he told the others, but his eyes never left Lawson. “Spawn of the Devil, the very worst disciples of evil under the sun.”
“Under the moon, to be exact,” said Lawson.
“I thought them fiction,” the reverend went on. “A figment of a mad imagination. But now…seeing you…knowing you. Why don’t you tell them what you drink to give yourself a so-called eternal life?”
“I’ll do better. I’ll show them.” He decided to put on a display of his speed again, and within an eyeblink he had passed Rooster once more and was opening the large canvas bag that Ann had brought aboard holding his clothes, his protective black shroud, and other items. From the bag he took another of the Japanese bottles. He uncorked it, held it over his open mouth and poured. The blood ran out onto his tongue, which fortunately had not yet become forked nor turned black but it was the color of gray ash. He closed his mouth and felt the blood being absorbed by the hollow fangs in their pits in his upper jaw. It was a delicious taste, though it had somewhat of a stockyard flavor; nothing could come close nor was nearly as satisfying or as strength-giving as the real thing.
Lawson corked the bottle again and said with gore on his lips, “Cattle blood, gentlemen. A priest friend of mine in New Orleans secures it for me. What Reverend Easterly is trying to tell you is that vampires drink human blood. And yes, this is true.” He dropped the bottle back into the bag with a smile.
Then he propelled himself at Eli Easterly. His smile was gone.
Human eyes could not follow him at his half-speed; the human mind could not comprehend his full speed. He was there and then he was not, as if he’d abruptly vanished. In the next heartbeat he was in Easterly’s terror-stricken face, and the terror was intensified when Lawson’s mouth opened wide, the lower jaw unhinged and from the upper jaw the fangs slid out. Easterly’s crucifix came up; with no effort Lawson knocked the man’s hand aside and the Cross flew away across the car.
Lawson grasped the man’s collar and spun him around, standing behind him to face the rifle Rooster held and—yes—the pistol the soul-shaken Eric aimed at him too.
“Lisssssten to me, every one of you!” he said, as he allowed the fangs to retract and his mouth to properly arrange itself. “You can think of me as a monster, that’s fine. There’s a war going on, and Ann and I are in it. You are too. I’m sorry for that but it can’t be helped. Now…together, we’ve got to figure a way out of this. We could try to wait them out, until sunrise, but they won’t allow that. You’re going to have to follow my directions or before this night is over you’ll either be dead or you’ll be on the way to being turned…which will make you like them. Or me. And gentlemen, just look at what I am. You have no damned idea what this is like. I am a dead man walking…but by God I won’t be destroyed by them. Or taken by them, and I’ll protect Ann and all of you as best I can.” He looked from face to face. It might have been a trick of the lamplight, but everyone seemed to have gone a few shades gray. Even Rooster.
“Any questions?” Lawson asked.
The wind shrieked and the snow was blown in white gusts past the windows. Otherwise there was silence.
Then: “They must want something. What is it they want?”
“They want me,” Lawson said to Mathias. He released Easterly, who to his credit did not cringe nor fall to his knees in terror, but simply lowered his head and went over to retrieve his crucifix. “And they want Ann. I spoke to one out there who I think is their leader. He looks like a twelve-year-boy but he’s far from it. He said if Ann and I give ourselves up, they’ll let all of you go.”
“Well…hell…” said Rebinaux, but he sounded as if his mouth was stuffed with cotton bolls.
“If you want to save us,” said Presco, who was near jabbering, “then…that’s the only way, ain’t it? Lord Jesus and Holy Joe, I don’t want to be et up or turned into no blood-sucker!”
“Unfortunately,” Lawson answered, “they lie. As soon as they had us, there would be nothing to stop them from going through this car like a roomful of flying knives. And if you think you could get outside and outrun them…I’m twenty-five years turned, gents. Some of them will be eighty…ninety…a hundred years or more. They get faster with age.”
“Shit creek,” Gantt muttered. His eyes were wild. “We’re up shit creek, ain’t we? I mean…I can’t hardly believe what I’m—”
The conductor was interrupted when something came out of the woods on the right.
It slammed against the window between Mathias and Eric with a force that nearly shattered the glass. Even so, the window cracked with a gunshot noise along the diagonal. Stuck there for a few seconds was a bloody mass that had an eyeless face and a flame-red beard. The mouth was open, but there was nothing inside the mouth but the darkness of the night beyond.
The naked skin of Jack Tabberson slid down the glass, leaving thick scrawls of gore to mark its slow passage. Then it fell away, into the snow.