"We've got to get him inside!" Carole cried close to his ear.
Other hands grabbed his right arm.
Lacey. Carole. They had him and were supporting him, tugging him forward on his rubbery legs.
They burst through the broken door and into the shady interior.
But even inside the sunlight pursued him through the doorway and sizzled through the big picture window, chased him like a fiery predator, reaching for him with flaming talons of light. He shook off Carole and Lacey and stumbled headlong on into the deeper, shadier areas of the front room.
Not enough. The reflected sunlight, from the glass table top, even the walls and floors, felt toxic, like scalding acid.
More—he needed more protection. No basements in these bungalows. He spotted the alcove to his right and veered for it. The bedrooms. He barreled into the one toward the rear. It faced north and west—the darkest place in the house at the moment. His legs finally gave way and he collapsed in a heap next to the bed. Thank God the curtains were closed. He grabbed the flowered yellow bedspread and rolled it around him, cocooning himself with the stench of his own seared flesh.
The touch of the fabric against his scorched skin sent waves of agony to his bones, but stronger than the pain was the numbing lethargy seeping through his limbs and mind. Only fear kept him from succumbing, fear that his tolerance to sunlight had been only temporary and now was deserting him. Was it a sign that whatever remnants of humanity that had lingered with him last night were ebbing away, leaving him more like the creatures he loathed? He prayed not.
He prayed especially that he wasn't turning feral. He saw the creature's ravaged face now, the one Franco had called Devlin, remembered its mad eyes, devoid of reason, compassion, or any feeling even remotely human, heard its bestial screams as it clawed at the door, remembered its talons sinking into his shoulders, felt its hot foul breath on his throat just before its fangs tore into his flesh.
And worse, he remembered Franco's parting words.
. . . when you look at Devlin you are seeing your future . . . he didn't retain enough intelligence to distinguish between friend and foe . . . sol can't even use him as a guard dog . . . in less than two weeks you'll be just like Devlin, only a little less intelligent, a little more bestial. . .
Was he losing his mind along with his tolerance for sunlight? Was his descent incomplete, still in progress? Was he still changing, devolving further into an even lower life form? Was this another step down the road toward Devlin's fate?
He heard Carole's voice from somewhere in the room.
"Joseph! Joseph, are you all right?"
He could only nod under the bedspread, and even that was an effort. He dared not speak, even if his numb lips would permit it.
"The mattress!" Carole's voice again. "Help me with it."
"Help—help you what?" Lacey said.
"We've got to tilt it up against the window. That way when the sun comes around behind the house it won't shine into the room."
Carole . .. wonderful Carole . .. always thinking ...
The lethargy deepened, tugging Joe toward sleep, or something like it... the deathlike undead daysleep. He tried to fight it. He'd thought, he'd hoped that he'd escaped falling victim to the undead vermin hours, hiding from the sun, slithering around at night. Now that hope was lost. He was more like them than he'd thought or wished or prayed against, and was falling closer and closer to their foul state with every passing hour.
The nightmarish thought chased him into oblivion.
CAROLE . . .
"We almost lost him."
The two of them slumped on the front room's rattan furniture, Carole in a chair, Lacey half stretched out on the sofa.
"I know," Carole replied.
Oh, how she knew. That had been too close. Her insides were still shaking. The sight of his skin starting to smoke and cook as he was walking . .. caused by this same sunlight bathing her now in its warmth .. . she'd never forget it. Worse, the reek of his burnt flesh still hung in the air.
Lacey kicked at the cocktail table, almost knocking its glass top onto the floor. "I don't know what to say, I don't know what to think, I don't know what to do! This is just so awful. It's a nightmare!"
Carole looked down at her trembling hands. How things had changed. Early last evening she'd been ready to drive a stake through his heart. And now she wanted him to survive.
For as the three of them had talked during the dark hours, Carole had begun to sense a plan. Not her plan . . . the Lord's. She thought about all the twists and turns of the past thirty-six hours.
After leaving her partially demolished house, why had she turned left instead of right? If she'd turned the other way she never would have run into Lacey. It was because of Lacey that she'd returned to the church and the convent. And it was there that she'd been staring out her convent room window just at the instant a winged vampire had flown away from the rectory. There were so many other things she could have been doing at that moment, yet she'd been standing at the window, watching the night. She'd been holding Father—no, he doesn't want to be called "Father" anymore ... a hard habit to break—Joseph's cross at that moment. Had that inspired her?
Imagine if she hadn't seen the departing vampire. She wouldn't have searched the rectory basement and found Joseph's body. But what had inspired her to bring him to the beach? At the time she'd thought it a good place because it was deserted and they could dig more quickly in the sand.
But had Divine Inspiration been at work? For if they'd tried to bury Joseph somewhere besides the beach, he wouldn't have been exposed to the first rays of the morning sun. That brief exposure seemed to have partially undone the vampires' work. The purifying rays had healed his wound and burned away some of the undead taint. Not all—a few more minutes in the light surely would have burned away too much, leaving him truly dead—but enough so that he remained Joseph instead of something foul and evil. What had inspired Carole to pull him into the shadows of his grave just in time to save him?
Yes... save him. For what?
The only answer that made any sense was that Joseph had been chosen to become the mailed fist of God, a divine weapon against the undead.
But the poor man was going through the tortures of the damned to become that weapon. Pain, disfigurement, self-loathing, the debasement of blood hunger—why did it have to be this way? Why did he have to suffer so? Were these trials a fire through which he had to pass to be tempered as a weapon?
The thought of fire brought her back to the sun . . .
"How long was Joseph in the sunlight this morning?"
Lacey shrugged. "I don't know. An hour maybe? It's hard to say. Certainly no more than that."
"An hour," Carole mused. "Not much. That's an hour longer than any true vampire can stand, but maybe it's enough."
"Enough for what?"
"For the war the three of us are going to wage."
She placed her hand over the spot where Joseph had touched her shoulder at sunrise. More than an hour ago but her skin still tingled, as if his hand were still resting there. That single touch, that gentle weight of his hand on her shoulder, meant more to her than his embrace outside the church when they'd been reunited a few nights ago.
Despite what had been done to him and how the sun had disfigured him, despite what he had become, she sensed the desperate struggle within him against the undead taint in his flesh, in his mind, in his being, and she admired him more than ever for that refusal to be dominated. He'd win, she knew he would win.