A check to the right showed fifteen or so more of Junior’s army coming up the embankment through the snowy woods. They were in all manner of dress, again some ragged and bloodstained, others more freshly-procured: buckskins, fancy gowns, banker’s suits, the patched clothing of dirt-poor farmers and their wives, little dresses and knickers for the things that had been turned as children.
Lawson had a thought that took hold of him as firmly as a vampire’s claw.
They have come from all points of the Dark Society’s compass. Directed and drawn here by LaRouge, because she wants me.
Me.
I could learn to be a god, he thought.
Of what use is the human world to me anymore? I am beyond it. I am strong and fast and if I pleased I could live forever. My wife and daughter…gone…a painful memory. I have been betrayed by the human kind, led to slaughter and abandonment at Shiloh. What do I owe them? Why should I hold onto that life…and…really…I am tired…so very tired…I cannot hold on.
If I give myself up, they may let Ann and the rest of them go. If I stop trying, they may yet live…
If…if…
A dangerous word.
“Do you want me to take this side or the other?”
He looked into Ann’s eyes and he thought she flinched just a little, because perhaps after their months of working together she could see what he was thinking and she didn’t like the picture.
“This side of the car or the other?” she asked. She cocked her pistol.
They didn’t have very much time left. There was none remaining for introspection, hatred, regret or bitterness. There was only time enough to go down fighting.
With an effort that he hoped wasn’t obvious to her, Lawson said, “Let’s stay on the same side.”
She nodded. “Good enough.”
In silence, Junior’s army charged the broken passenger car.
Ten.
They came fast. Some were faster than others. The most nimble hurtled through the windowframes and the gaping hole the horse-creatures had torn open. Lawson and Ann barely had an instant to take aim. Some moved like the wind, nearly invisible until they were right there, lower jaw unhinging, mouth straining wide, fangs sliding out for the feeding under the crimson glare of the eyes.
The first one Ann shot in the head wore the flesh of a little blond girl about ten years old, but there was caked blood all down the front of her lavender-colored dress and she shrieked like a storm of ravens as she burned. Lawson killed a young male vampire who had a deep jagged scar across his forehead, the testament of a hard human life. The fangs of a red-haired woman in the sackcloth dress of a farmer’s wife came at Lawson before he shot her between the eyes and she fell back hissing like a snake and cracking like old plaster. Ann missed with her next shot at a gaunt male vampire in a filthy mud-colored suit, but Lawson got him in the left temple as he scrabbled toward Eli Easterly.
A female vampire with long dark hair and a nearly-skeletal body had leaped upon Gantt, who tried to fight her off but was no match for her strength. Lawson saw two vampires, a male and female, bearing Rooster down to the floorboards. Eric was firing his pistol, hitting nothing but at least keeping them back. Mathias was fighting a pair of vampires using the Winchester as a club. Lawson suddenly had the grinning rictus of an old white-haired man right in his face, and he shot the thing just below the left eye as it opened its mouth to bite. Ann killed another young female vampire, a golden-haired girl in a yellow dress who was still beautiful and who might have been in another life a stage actress or some celebrated but ultimately doomed soul.
Both Ann and Lawson were running out of bullets and had no time to reload. Then a blurred form fell upon him and a tremendous strength bore him down, and he looked up into the gap-toothed face of Henry Styles Junior, the one-hundred-and-five-year-old vampire boy. Ann was pushed down by a wiry vampire with a thatch of black hair wild with cowlicks. Her gunhand was knocked aside just as her last silver bullet was fired.
“Ssssuch a sssstubborn fool,” Junior said, as delicately as if already tasting him. His mouth opened and the fangs slid out. One hand was on Lawson’s throat. A knee pinned the gunfighter’s Colt. “We win, Trevor,” he said in a whisper. “You ssssee? Firssst we win the battle, and then we win the—”
He blinked.
There had been a disturbance, a movement of something unseen, a something that should not be. Lawson felt it, just as Junior had.
Junior’s head twisted around.
In the splintered mass of the car’s side there appeared a figure, standing over Junior and Lawson.
It was an Indian with a single eagle feather in his braided hair. He was barechested but wore an open cowhide waistcoat decorated with patterns of red, blue and green beads. He held a sawed-off shotgun, the double barrels of which he pressed against Junior’s forehead.
Lawson said to Junior, and afterward never knew why he spoke it: “Merry Christmas.”
The Indian pulled both triggers.
There was no sacred work of the silver bullet in this. There was no butcher knife to cleave off the vampire boy’s head. There was only a double load of buckshot, delivered at flesh-kissing range from a fearsome weapon held by a determined killer.
In the next instant Henry Styles Junior had no head. From the ragged mess of where it had been the black ichor streamed out, and the Indian grasped the neck of the writhing body and drank from it.
Lawson, in a kind of shocked stupor, realized he was seeing something he had never expected to witness: a vampire Indian, probably a Sioux by the look of him. He roused himself and used his last silver bullet to shoot in the midst of its cowlicks the creature who was bearing down on Ann. As that thing convulsed and burned, the Indian had already reloaded two shells and had strode forward to blow the head off one of the vampires who drank from Rooster. Then he grabbed by the hair a female who was gnawing into Deuce Mathias’s back and he threw her through one of the windowframes as if she were made of straw. As the Indian was reloading for another vampire scalp, a second half-seen figure that had been moving with the quickness of the Dead Society slowed enough to come into view: a broad-shouldered, white-bearded mountain man in fringed buckskins and a coonskin cap. With a howl of rage he went to work with the axe he was carrying, causing heads with fanged mouths to fly and ichor to pour thickly from the neckstumps.
The appearance of a third figure, immediately following, was enough to send the remnants of Junior’s army scrabbling from the car. This one was another male, slim of build, dressed in patched but relatively clean clothing and a dark blue jacket, and the axe he wielded did the same quick and violent work as the burly mountain man’s. The bodies of the decapitated vampires continued to thrash, the arms flailing as if seeking the heads they’d lost, but the wound was too severe for the ichor or the lifeforce of the creatures to heal and their motions were slowing. A female vampire in blood-crusted rags showed either extreme hunger, courage or stupidity as she leaped upon the mountain man’s back. Her fangs sank into his shoulder but her head was blown apart by the Indian’s shotgun and all that was left were the curved teeth. The mountain man plucked them out with disdain and flung them away, then he grasped the twitching body to take his own drink.