By Sunday the thirteenth the nightmare people had no doubt at all of what was happening, but there was little they could do about it. Appealing to higher authorities, hiring lawyers, all the lines of recourse that humans would have were too risky, too likely to expose what was really going on.
Besides, it was already too late to help the ones who had been destroyed.
Phones at Bedford Mills began to go unanswered, however. Traffic in and out of the apartment complex dwindled away to nothing. Police cruisers prowled the parking lot regularly, and went unmolested, but the officers involved generally stayed in their cars, making no attempt to enter any of the four buildings.
After all, in there they would be outnumbered. A raid in force would be noticed, would draw questions that couldn’t be answered very well.
A few small expeditions into now-empty apartments were staged, but without significant results. And there were still ways of luring an incautious creature to its doom.
The menace was contained, but not destroyed.
Meanwhile, at 706 Topaz Court, life settled into a routine. Smith and Khalil slept from early morning until mid-afternoon, while Annie and sometimes Maggie stood guard, ready to scream if anyone got into the house. In the evenings, Smith and Khalil joined Buckley and his men in trapping and killing nightmare people, and searching through the homes of destroyed creatures in hopes of learning more about them. At night, while Annie slept, the two of them rested, planned, and stood guard over Annie and each other. No one was permitted to enter the house without showing a drop or two of flowing blood; Annie’s sewing basket and a bottle of S.T. 37 antiseptic had been moved to an endtable in the living room so as to provide a supply of sterile needles for that purpose. The three full-time inhabitants all had wounds on their fingers that had been opened and re-opened repeatedly.
Khalil had enough vacation time and sick leave accumulated that his job as a garage mechanic was safe until the 21st, and Smith’s job was already lost. They were both able to devote themselves entirely to the fight.
Even so, by Wednesday, August sixteenth, the night of the full moon, Smith knew there were still a hundred and four nightmare people out there.
What was worse, some of them were unaccounted for. Buckley’s men reported only ninety-three still in the Bedford Mills complex. The other eleven were lost.
“Probably scattered across half the country,” Smith said, during a conversation at the breakfast table. It was late afternoon, and he had just gotten up.
“And there’s nothing we can do about them,” Smith continued.
Khalil and Buckley didn’t argue.
“And there’ll probably be twenty-two of them, rather than eleven, two weeks from now,” Buckley added.
“At least,” Smith agreed.
“Do you really think we can stop the others, here, from breeding tonight?” Khalil asked.
Smith shrugged.
“We can try,” he said.
2.
“Just what is it you’re planning, anyway?” Buckley asked from the door of his cruiser as he prepared to depart. The sun was down, the sky grey and darkening; somewhere in the east the moon was rising, but hidden by the haze.
“A distraction,” Smith said. “Something to keep everybody busy.”
Buckley wiped sweat from his forehead, and glared at Smith. “That’s no answer,” he snapped.
Smith ignored that and remarked casually, “There’s a lunar eclipse tonight, did you know that? It should start in just a few minutes. First one in seven years that can be seen around here – except I don’t think we’ll be able to see it. All the same, I figure the eclipse might have something to do with how those things breed. Even if it doesn’t, if I understand how lunar eclipses work, that’s got to be when the moon is fullest. And since it’s just now getting dark, I figure this has got to be when they’ll be able to breed, so that’s when I set my distraction for.”
“What kind of a distraction?” Buckley demanded.
“Believe me,” Smith said, “It’s better if you don’t know. You’re still a cop, after all.”
“Yeah, I am,” Buckley said, “And I don’t like the sound of that. Maybe I’d better go along with you two, make sure things don’t get out of hand.”
Smith smiled, and leaned on the roof of the patrol car. “I thought you might feel like that,” he said. “That’s why I set the main charge up to be completely automatic. I put it together last night and set it up this morning, right before I came back here to sleep. It’ll go off in about five minutes, whether I’m there or not – I rigged a second-hand computer and printer. See, I put sandpaper in the printer and taped matches and a fuse to the print-head, and then programmed the computer to run a full printer test at 8:23 tonight – that’s when the guy on the news said that the eclipse starts. It’s kind of an expensive way to rig a timer, but I’m not that good with mechanical stuff – I figured I should use what I…”
He didn’t finish the sentence; the blast was clearly audible despite the intervening seven-block distance.
In fact, it was very loud indeed, loud enough to rattle windows and echo from the surrounding houses.
Buckley’s head whipped around, and he stared in the direction of the explosion. “Son of a bitch!” he said. “You fucking maniac, what if there were innocent people around? Where was it?” He looked for some sign of what had happened, and wasn’t sure if he could make out a waver in the air that might be heat or smoke – or might just be more of the thick summer haze in the air.
“Apartment C14,” Smith replied calmly. “About a hundred gallons of gasoline, a hundred pounds of flour scattered around or balanced on the printer, some cotton waste, and all the other combustibles I could find. And there’s gas in some of the other basements, too. Took me all night to set it up.”
“Shit!” Buckley slid into the car and slammed the door; Smith removed his elbow from the car’s roof.
As he watched Buckley drive away, Smith asked Khalil, “Shall we go watch?”
In the east, hidden by the haze, the moon was full and round.
3.
It was a very satisfactory blaze as far as it went, Smith thought. The blast had blown out solid concrete walls. Most of C Building had caved in, as he had hoped, and any nightmare people who had been in there were not going to be out roaming around tonight as if nothing had happened.
He supposed that they could slip out easily enough, but not with their disguises intact. By the time they tracked down new victims for their skins, would they have time to find new ones for their larvae, as well?
He frowned. Or might they plant the larvae first?
Not if anyone saw them coming, of course, and without their disguises that meant they could only attack sleeping victims.
And who, around here, would be asleep, with all this going on?
How far could they get, without intact skins, with cops and firemen and onlookers on all sides?
And the fire had spread quickly; D Building was ablaze from roof to basement.
Unfortunately, A and B buildings hadn’t caught. He had stashed open cans of gasoline around empty apartments in both of them, the apartments that had been occupied by the nightmare people he and his comrades had destroyed; he had hoped that a spark would carry, but he hadn’t managed to rig anything more definite.