Henry Styles Junior for all of his one hundred and five years was the quickest vampire Lawson had ever seen. Even as Ann’s pistol cracked and the silver angel blasted from its barrel, Junior had hurled himself headlong at the window to his right. He was smashing through the glass as the consecrated slug passed his blurred shape and smacked into the wall. Then he was gone, leaving the wind to blow snow through the broken window and small bits of glass to fall with the sound of tinkling chimes.
At once Lawson was at the window with his vampire-killing Colt drawn. He scanned the night, seeing rocks and wind-twisted trees but no trace of movement from the Dark Society.
“That was not very smart,” he said to Rooster, and he did not fail to note that the rifle was now aimed at his own midsection. “Please, let’s not be really foolish.”
“Hell, what do you expect?” Rebinaux’s voice had gone as high as a flute. “We just gonna sit and wait here to get killed? I’m for runnin’ for it! Get my ass outta here while I can! Deuce…Keene…you with me?”
“Yeah,” said Presco. “I’m with you. I ain’t stayin’ here and waitin’ to be et!” He gave a brief glance at Ann’s pistol. “You can shoot me if you please, but I’m gettin’! Deuce, how about it?”
Mathias was a few seconds in answering. “You won’t make it fifty feet from this train. Look what they did to that engineer.” He shivered. “Can somebody draw the curtain on that window? It’s going to get real cold in here, real—”
Quick, he was about to say, but it came more quickly than he’d thought.
A shot rang out. The bullet broke through the next window and knocked a chunk from the seatback in front of Eric. A second and third bullets finished the job on that window. More gunfire erupted from the other side of the train. “Get down!” Lawson shouted, as the glass began to be shattered from every window along the car. A slug shrieked past Lawson’s head and broke the glass behind him. One of the oil lamps was hit and spilled its burning fuel upon the floorboards. As Ann dove for the floor to cover Blue, a bullet ricocheting off the edge of a window clipped the brim of her cap and knocked it off her head. Gantt cried out in pain as wood splinters pierced the side of his face. Mathias felt a bullet pass so close to his skull he thought it might have left a part in his hair. Rooster was firing back, standing in the aisle shooting from one side to another and seemingly oblivious to being hit though the slugs were zipping by him to the left and the right. “Get down!” Lawson hollered at him, and at last the fireman seemed to realize the danger he was in. One last shot into the night and he threw himself down between two seats just as a couple of hornets passed through where he’d been standing.
The barrage of bullets went on for maybe fifteen more seconds. When it ended every window had been opened to the bitter cold and the walls of the passenger car had been pierced by at least twenty slugs.
In the aftermath of the gunshots there was the noise of the wind shrieking through the splintered frames and the crackling of the fire gnawing at the floorboards. Lawson crawled to the puddle of burning oil, took his coat off and mashed the flames down. It occurred to him that in short order the freezing temperatures would make the humans long for the warmth of a fire, but for now they couldn’t be forced out into the open any more than they already were.
“Jesus! Jesus!” Rebinaux was saying, from his huddled position on the floor.
Lawson could smell fresh blood; someone had taken a slug. “Who’s hit?”
“Took a faceful of splinters,” Gantt croaked. “Damn close.”
“I’m all right,” Ann said. “Lost my cap.”
“The girl?”
“She wasn’t hit.”
“Anyone else? Eric?”
“I’m okay.”
“Easterly?”
“Untouched,” he answered.
“I’m good,” said Rooster.
“Mathias?” Lawson prodded.
“All right…for the moment.”
“Lord…God…I’m hit,” said the rusty sawblade voice of Keene Presco. “Busted my damn collarbone…left side.”
“How bad?”
“Hurts somethin’ awful…bleedin’…but I don’t think I’m dyin’.” Another shot was fired into the passenger car, followed by a second and a third, but there were no cries of pain or panic. Lawson figured the bullets had come in one glassless window and out one opposite. Wanting us to keep our heads down, he thought. Particularly my head and Ann’s. He took a moment to dump the lead from his second Colt and arm it with the silvers.
“Alabama?” Rooster called from further along the car. “You got any ideas?”
“Keeping from being shot is the first one.”
“If you’re like that thing,” said Mathias, “you don’t have much to worry about.”
“It would be an inconvenience I’d rather not endure.”
“You gotta get us outta this!” Rebinaux piped up. “You and me, we’re brothers from Dixie, ain’t we? You can’t let me die!”
Lawson didn’t know how to answer that, so he remained silent.
“Gettin’ mighty cold in here,” Gantt said.
And then, from outside, a voice called that at first seemed to be part of the wind.
“Annie?” it said. “Annie, come to a window!”
Lawson heard her make a choking sound that wrenched at his heart.
“Annie? Eva’s here with me! Eva’s here!”
“You know one of those monsters?” Easterly asked.
“Her father and sister,” Lawson said, so Ann wouldn’t have to. “Both taken and turned.”
“Annie? Baby? Look out here at us!”
“You know what they mean to do,” said the vampire.
“Shoot me in the head as soon as I raise up. They’ve likely got a rifle already aimed.”
“Ann? Sssspeak to me, ssssister!”
That voice was the worst; it was at once both a fierce demand and a pitiful entreaty, and Lawson knew it must be repulsing Ann and pulling at her in equal measures. She had not seen her father or sister in months; did she dare now to lift her head over the bullet-riddled sill to lay eyes upon what her family had become?
“I love you, Ann! I sssstill love you!”
“I’ve got the direction fixed,” Ann said quietly, but enough to reach Lawson. “Standing about eight feet apart, maybe twenty…twenty-five feet from the window next to me.”
“Come to us, Annie! We can all be together again!”
“Lawson?” Ann called.
“Yes?”
“I can do it.”
“I know you can,” he said. “Do you want me to—”
“No.”
He heard the hammer of her pistol being cocked, even though she was muffling the noise under her coat.
From where he crouched on the floor he couldn’t see her toward the rear of the car, but he knew she was readying herself for what she needed to do. He started to say Careful but he did not, for he knew she would be…and this she had to do alone.
“We’re waiting for you, Ann,” Eva called. “Come join ussss…join ussss.” The eerie voice was whipped away by the wind.
Ann had to strike while she could still locate them by sound.
She lifted her head.
Through the falling snow she saw their shapes, standing about eight feet apart but maybe thirty feet away instead of twenty; the wind had done that trickery. She had the impression of ragged figures, like a pair of impoverished beggars. She could make out no facial features and she didn’t want to. All she could tell was that one was taller than the other though they both were sickeningly thin. She brought her gun up and took a fraction of a second to eyeball where she wanted the silver slug to go.