"Father Joe?"
The man turned. The dying light of the sun ruddied the pitted, ruined dead-white skin of his face.
"Carole," he said in Father Joe's voice. "What's happened to me?"
Shock was a hand against her chest, shoving her back. She dropped the bookbag and stumbled a few steps, then tripped. Lacey caught her before she fell.
"Oh, shit," Lacey whimpered. "Oh, shit!"
"Lacey?" The man, the thing that had once been Father Joe, took a faltering step toward them. "What did they do to me?"
"Wh-who?" Lacey said.
"The undead. They took me to New York. He was going to make me one of them . . . turn me into a feral, he said. I remember dying, being killed ... at least I think I do, but—"
Heart pounding, mind racing. Carole watched him closely, looking for a misstep, listening for a false note.
She found her voice again. "You did die. We found you and you were dead. We buried you back there, under the boardwalk."
"But I'm not dead. And I'm not one of them. I can't be because ..." He pointed west. "Because that's the sun and it should be killing me, but it's not." He raised a scarred fist. "Somehow, some way, I've beaten them."
"But you were dead, Uncle Joe," Lacey told him. Her voice trembled like a wounded thing. "And now you're not."
"But I'm not undead. Standing here in the sunlight is proof enough of that. And I'm looking at you two and I'm not seeing prey. I'm seeing two people I care about very much."
Carole suspected that under different circumstances—any circumstances but these—those words would have made her dizzy. But now ...
She shook her head, trying to clear it, trying to step back from her roiling emotions and think clearly. He sounded like her Father Joe, he acted like Father Joe, he had Father Joe's mannerisms, but something was different, something wasn't quite right. Something terrible had been done to him, and one way or another, she had to find a way to undo it.
She bent forward and snatched the book bag from where she'd dropped it on the sand.
"Carole?" said Lacey from behind her. "Just a minute."
She opened it and reached inside.
"Carole, you're not really going to—"
''A minute, I said!"
Carole's fingers wrapped around the upright of Father Joe's big silver cross. "We've been saving this for you." She yanked it from the bag and held it out to him. "Here."
Father Joe cried out and turned his head, holding up a hand to shield his eyes from the sight of the very cross he used to carry with him wherever he went.
Carole felt something die within her as she watched him and realized what she had to do.
She handed the cross to Lacey who stood dumbstruck, staring at her uncle with wide, uncomprehending eyes. Lacey gripped the cross but never took her eyes from her uncle.
As Carole pulled open the book bag again, she slammed the doors, closed the windows, and drew the curtains on everything she had ever felt for the man this creature had once been. Her hand was reaching into the bag for the hammer and stake when Lacey's voice, a hint of panic in her tone, stopped her.
"Carole ... Carole, something's happening here. Please tell me what's going on."
Carole looked up and froze. The Father Joe thing was edging toward Lacey, his face averted, his hand stretched out toward the cross.
"What's happening, Carole?" Lacey wailed.
"I'm not sure, but don't move. Stay right where you are."
Carole watched with a wrenching mixture of horror and fascination as the Father Joe thing's fingers neared the cross. She noticed that his eyes were slit-ted and only partially averted, as if he were looking at the cross from the corner of his eye.
The undead couldn't stand to be anywhere near a cross, yet the Father Joe thing was reaching for this one.
Finally his scarred fingers reached it, touched the metal, and jerked back as if they'd been burned. But no flash, no sizzle of seared flesh. The fingers came forward again, and this time, like a striking snake, they snatched the cross from Lacey's hand.
"It's hot!" he said, looking up into the darkening sky as he switched it back and forth between his hands like a hot potato. "Oh, God, it's hot!"
But it wasn't searing his flesh, only reddening it.
Then with the cry of a damned soul he dropped it and fell to his knees on the sand.
"What have they done to me?" he sobbed as he looked at Carole with frightened, haunted eyes. "What am I?"
Carole closed the book bag.
She'd never seen the undead cry. This wasn't a vampire. But he wasn't the Father Joe she had known either. He was something in between. Was this an accident, or some sort of trick, some undead plot to further confuse and confound the living? She'd have to reserve judgment for now.
But she'd be watching his every move.
JOE . . .
Carole took his arm and tugged him toward the boardwalk, saying, "We need to find a place where we're not so exposed."
Joe went along with her, his mind numb, unable to string two coherent thoughts together.
The afterimage of the cross—his cross—still stained his vision, bouncing in the air before him. The blast of light had been intolerably bright, an explosion of brilliance, as if Carole had lifted a white hot star from her book bag. The light had caused him pain, but only in his eyes. It hadn't struck him like a physical blow the way it seemed to affect the undead, staggering them back as if they were being pummeled with a baseball bat. He could look at it as one might the sun, squinting from the corner of his eye.
He could touch the cross but couldn't hold it. He looked down at his palms. The skin was reddened there, but at least it was normal looking. Not like the ruined, thickened flesh on the back of his hands and on his arms and chest. He touched his face and found thickened and pitted skin there as well.
Joe felt as if his world were crumbling around him, then realized that it already had. The life he'd known was gone, ended. What lay ahead?
He pulled the damp sheet closer around him as Carole led him up the steps to the boardwalk. Had this been his shroud? As she turned him right, Joe heard Lacey's voice from behind.
"Aren't we going to the car?"
"Let's see if we can get into one of these houses," Carole said.
She led them past the dead arcades and along the boardwalk leading to the inlet. No one spoke. Lacey looked as dazed as Joe felt. They walked past the beachfront houses, some large with sun decks and huge seaward windows, others tiny, little more than plywood boxes, all nuzzling against the boardwalk. Most of the bigger ones had been vandalized.
Carole stopped before an old, minuscule bungalow that appeared intact. Despite the low light, Joe had no problem making out the faded blue-gray of its clapboard siding. Someone had painted the word SEAVIEW in black on the door and surrounded it with sun-bleached clamshells.
Carole tried the door. When it wouldn't open, she slammed her shoulder against it. When that didn't work, she opened her book bag and began to rummage through it.
Joe turned to the door and slammed his palm against it. The molding cracked like a gunshot and the door swung inward. He stared at his hand. He hadn't put a lot of effort into the blow, but it had broken the molding.
"How did I do that?" he muttered.
No one answered.
In a courteous reflex, he stood aside to let Carole and Lacey enter first. Only after they were inside did he realize that he should have gone ahead of them. No telling what might have been lying in wait there.
As he stepped across the threshold, he felt a curious resistance, as if the air inside had congealed to try to hold him back. He pressed forward and pushed through. The resistance evaporated once he was inside.
As he closed the door behind him, he sniffed the musty air and looked around. Typical beach house decor: rattan furniture with beachy-patterned cushions, driftwood and shells on the mantle, fishnets and starfish tacked to the tongue-and-groove knotty pine walls of the wide open living room/dining room/kitchen combo that ran the length of the house; photos of smiling people sitting on the beach or holding fishing rods. Joe wondered if any of them were still alive.