Bad Moon Rising (Pine Deep 3)

He helped Brinke, who was more scared than hurt, to her feet, and they hurried over to Debbie. There were more of the football players in the tent, and Kramer was throwing chairs at them, hoping for a lucky shot. O’Rear fired as he ran and brought down three more, but it took the rest of the magazine to do it. Kramer grabbed Debbie and pulled her toward O’Rear.

“I’m out!” O’Rear threw the gun in the face of the next closest vampire and the four of them made a dash for the exit. A dozen others followed, but there was nothing more they could do for the people inside except stay alive long enough to get help.

4

The Pine Deep library looked like the old church it had once been. Narrow, with arched gables and a tall bell tower, it sat like an echo of the last century, parked between a New Age candle shop and a computer store.

When the killing began there were forty people in the main room, most of them kids who were listening to spooky stories read by local actor Keith Strunk. When the big explosion hit, Strunk was telling them how the clever creature F. F. Manny Thing escaped from a snorgle-beast. Then the lights went out and the windows blew inward.

Strunk did his best to keep the kids from panicking, but everyone was screaming, some in terror, some in pain. Two little girls, Helena and Rebekah, were seated in the corner with a black-and-white dog named Lady. Before anything happened Lady stood up and the hair along her spine rose as stiff and straight as a brush. He looked toward the front door and started growling very quietly. The girls dragged the dog into the corner to try and quiet her, and that saved their lives, because after the windows blew in, they came in, hungry and vicious.

The screams became much worse. Worse terror, deeper pain.

“Come on!” Rebekah yelled and grabbed Helena’s hand and they bolted for a door set into the corner near them; Lady backed up with them, barking at the snarling things that moved through the room.

Helena pulled the door open and they ducked inside, pulling Lady with them. Rebekah slammed the door and shot the bolt and for a terrifying minute they stood there at the top of the cellar stairs, listening to sounds. Dreadful sounds. Wet and awful.

When

they heard something bump against the door, something that sounded like an elbow or a knee but with a limp, sliding quality, they ran down into the darkness of the basement, trying not to scream, trying not to cry.

When the library had bought the old church property most of the inside of the building had been renovated, but not the basement. Used for storing books and old furniture, it was a warren of stacks of boxes and bags, but even in the dark the girls knew every inch of it. They’d played hide-and-seek here, had invented games of being archaeologists in ancient tombs—and in this they weren’t far off the mark. Beneath the floor of the backmost closet, under a layer of concrete poured by accident during an earlier renovation when the church passed from Baptist to Methodist hands in the 1970s, the centuries-old crypts had been inadvertently hidden. Now that room contained disused file cabinets filled with paperwork no one could even identify. That’s where the little girls went with their dog. They ran in there, stifling their sobs, trying not to think about what was happening upstairs to their friends.

Helena, the taller and stronger of the two, slammed the door and began pushing at the filing cabinets. She was seven and a half and her little body was tough, but not tough enough—not until Rebekah realized what she was doing and threw her weight into it. Between them it was just enough, and the first cabinet slid twenty inches and thudded against the door. They found another and pushed that, and another. It took them fifteen minutes, and all the time the sounds of mayhem continued from above, and Lady kept growling.

When there was nothing else they could push in front of the door, the two girls sank down with their backs to one cabinet, holding each other, and they both broke down into helpless, hopeless sobs.

Much later, when the newspapers were telling the story of what happened in Pine Deep on the night that became known worldwide as “Hellnight,” there would be a number of articles written about two little girls and their dog who hid among the dead and as a result got to live.

5

“Val! I heard shots,” Mike said. “Listen. ”

“Crow!”

They crowded as close to the door as the barricade would allow, Mike and Val pressing against Jonatha and Newton, with Weinstock behind them. Huddled together they could each feel the trembles rippling through each other.

“I think I heard two guns at the same time,” Val said.

Mike closed his eyes, trying to focus on his hearing even though his ears rang from the shots Val had fired through the door. The crawly sensation was constant now and he knew that there were many of them out there. Then the sensation spiked up like someone jabbed a hot electric wire in the back of his neck; he stiffened.

“Mike,” Weinstock said behind him, “what is it?”

“I feel—”

His eyes flew wide and he tried to spin around, but Weinstock was pressing forward too hard. A warning was rising to Mike’s lips and then suddenly Weinstock was whipped backward away from him. White hands seemed to appear out of nowhere and they snatched Weinstock, tearing at his skin.

“NO!” Mike screamed, bringing up his shotgun, but there was no clear shot; Jonatha and Newton seemed to turn in slow motion, but Val lunged forward, grabbing Weinstock’s hand as he fought against the four vampires that had him. A fifth was climbing through the empty window frame—a boy the same age and size as Mike—his friend Brandon.

Val fired two shots and one of the vampires went down, but the others were moving backward so fast and Weinstock was flailing too much. Mike leapt forward and grabbed the doctor by the hand.

“Help me!” Weinstock and Mike screamed it at the same moment. A vampire clamped his hands around Weinstock’s throat and Val fired again; the round clipped Weinstock’s shoulder, but it also caught the vampire in the throat. Weinstock shrieked in pain and suddenly there was blood on his throat and chest.

They were at the window now. Jonatha and Newton beat at them with their fists, Val hammered with the butt of her pistol. She leaned over Weinstock as the whole crowd of them, human and inhuman, hung teetering on the windowsill. She jammed her pistol into a white face and fired, jammed it into a belly and fired. Mike dropped his gun in order to use both hands. Weinstock kept screaming and screaming.

Val shot at Brandon and he fell backward, either hit or falling from loss of balance. He plunged into the darkness.

And then it was over. Two vampires lay dead on the floor. Two others, dead for sure, had been blasted out the window. Mike held Weinstock’s hand, and Jonatha and Newton had handfuls of the doctor’s pajamas. They clung to him, pulling him back from the abyss.