Her finger was on the trigger. Already the creature who had once been Eva Kingsley was whirling away, long dark hair flying in the wind, but the shade of David Kingsley had stepped forward, both arms outstretched toward her.
“My Annie,” he said, and he sounded to be in terrible pain.
She caught a glimpse of the gore that covered the front of his shirt and his suit coat. She dared not look into his face. She heard the high report of a rifle being fired from amid the rocks to her left. Without flinching she fired her revolver at the same instant as the bullet hit the windowframe beside her.
She didn’t have to wait to know that the bullet had struck the center of his forehead. When the second rifle bullet passed through where her own head had been, Ann was crouched down on the floorboards with the smoking gun pressed to her bosom and her eyes squeezed tightly shut.
Lawson lifted his head and saw the figure burning, breaking apart in red-rimmed fissures, turning to ashes that would be scattered upon the rocks and through the trees of this wild country, a long way from the boardrooms and banks of Louisiana.
The creature that had been David Kingsley perished in silence, but just before his head imploded he looked up into the snowfall though by then he had no eyes.
As he crumbled and the empty clothes fell, there came from the distance a feminine scream that started off as a cry of despair and became a shriek of rage. Lawson at the moment was thankful he couldn’t see Ann’s face.
Something hit the top of the car. Then came the sound of another weight, following seconds after.
“What’s that?” Gantt directed the question to Lawson, but in truth he knew what it must be. And he answered it himself: “One of ’em’s up there!”
“Two,” said Lawson. He was already bracing for what had to be coming next.
A tremendous blow was struck to the roof of the car; the entire car trembled and the boards whined in protest. Another blow was struck…a third, and a fourth, two of the winged shapechangers at work, tearing off the lid of this box to get at the sweetmeats within. The things sounded as if they were using iron hammers, but Lawson figured they only needed their fists and claws.
Rooster dug into his coat, brought out more shells for his rifle and reloaded. He started to stand up. Lawson said, “They’re waiting for that,” and Rooster settled to the floor again.
A third weight landed atop the car. They were near breaking through. The roof was cracking, the boards bending inward. Rooster fired upward…two shots, but the creatures didn’t slow their assault.
“All right,” Lawson said, mostly to himself, because he figured he had about twenty seconds before the things got in. He was up and out the door at the back of the car before Ann or any of the others had fully registered that he’d moved, and so fast that even the vampires hiding amid the rocks with guns were unable to mark him as a target. Outside, he swung upon the metal ladder that gave access to the roof and jumped the rest of the way.
The three winged horrors that were beating the roof to pieces turned toward him as one when his boots hit the surface. There were two males and a female, all of them gray-fleshed and sinewy, dressed in rags, the female with long silver hair and one of the males missing his left arm at the elbow. Lawson had time to think that this male might have been stolen from a battlefield just as he had been, and then he shot the creature between the eyes and the thing screamed as it burned. It fell away, its skull crisscrossed with red fissures, its wings beating holes in the flurry of snow.
Then the other two were upon him.
The female was the faster of the two. She was leaping at him before he could get his Colt trained on her. At the same time, gunshots rang out from the rocks to his left and from the woods to his right. Bullets zipped past as Lawson fought the female’s claws from getting at his eyes. The male swooped at him. Lawson shoved the female away. She went off the top of the car but her claws took most of his waistcoat with her. Along with it went his derringer in its inner pocket. A bullet tore into his right arm just above the elbow, paralyzing his gunhand. He drew his second Colt with his left hand, dodged a claw aimed at his face, felt the stinging pain of a second bullet grazing the back of his neck, and fired into the male creature’s skull.
As the vampire convulsed and burned before him, Lawson was struck in the right side by another bullet. He knew fear. It came to him that this could be the end of the line for both himself and Ann. For all his quickness and power there were too many of them. He could see more of the winged shapechangers coming at him from the woods and the rocks. How they achieved this ability he didn’t know, but at the moment he was sure he didn’t have it.
More shots were fired. Ann, Rooster and Eric were firing from the car. The female vampire came at him once more, with renewed determination. Her claws grasped his shoulders and her fangs yearned toward his throat. She had nearly snapped shut on him when he put the Colt’s barrel under her chin and fired a shot that sent the bullet through the top of her head. Still she held onto him as she began to break apart, and even as her eyeballs sank in and her gaping mouth became a hole in which the fangs melted like candle wax her claws dug deep and her wings were beating, trying to lift him off the roof. She got him up about six feet in the air before her skull sizzled away, her arms fell from the rags of her body and the wings collapsed like burning black paper.
Lawson got off a shot at the creature coming at him from the right but the thing dodged aside in midair and the bullet streaked on over the trees. The female vampire’s hands, both aflame, were still clenched to his shoulders and when he shook them off they flew away in ashes.
There were too many, and too many bullets being fired at him. He holstered his gun and as he scrabbled down the ladder a slug ricocheted off the metal. He got back into the car, slammed the door shut and threw himself onto his belly, where he crawled like a wounded animal between two seats and lay there leaking ichor that smelled of a sulphur pit in Hell.
Nine.
“How many did you take?” Ann was leaning over him. The firing had stopped and for the moment there was just the high sharp cry of the wind.
“A couple.” Lawson winced and touched his hurt side with his left hand. The ichor had turned that part of his shirt ebony, as well as his right sleeve. “Damn it,” he said. The pain was more nagging than severe. His damage would heal in a few hours, though he’d be slowed down until everything had knitted together again. That was part of their aim in shooting him; not to kill, because that was impossible with the plain lead slugs, but to steal his speed and resolve. “I won’t be able to use my right hand for awhile. My arm’s broken.” He reached back and put his fingers against the hot line a bullet had grazed across the nape of his neck. “Lucky there. I wouldn’t like to know what a broken neck feels like.”
“Trevor.” She had spoken his name in nearly a whisper, and though her face was still composed it was a mask, because Lawson saw in her eyes that she was fighting the same fear that had hit him up on the car’s roof. “What are we going to do?”
“We won’t give up,” he said, in answer to what she was really asking.
“Those things have got us trapped!” It was Gantt’s voice from further up front. He sounded at his breaking point. “Lawson! This is your fight, not ours! Listen…listen…all of you…do we deserve to be slaughtered? What have we done to get into this?”
“Steady up, Mister Gantt,” said Rooster.
“Steady up? Do you want to die?”
“No…ain’t what none of us want.”
“It’s his fight, Rooster! We don’t have no damned part in this!”