CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Carl leaped for the sword that had fallen to the ground. His head was still ringing, his body still felt stiff.

The dead man in front of him was a different one, but the math was the same: he was about to get his ass handed to him in a very big way.

“No.” The Deacon caught him by the throat and lifted him from the ground with the greatest of ease. Last time he’d been to the doctor’s office and gotten himself weighed, Carl was a bit over two hundred pounds. He would never, ever be a slender man – he was solid. So he found it a bit annoying that the bastard picked him up with one hand and carried him like he was maybe about as heavy as a house cat.

He’d have made comments to that effect, but the bastard with the impossible strength was choking off his air supply. “Kkk. Hllg.” His argument did not seem to sway the Deacon’s feelings on the matter of strangling him.

“You and your filthy friends are abominations in the eyes of the Lord. You could have sought forgiveness, but instead you have killed the faithful. It is time for you to die.” The vampire’s fingers were squeezing and Carl grabbed hold of the man’s hand with both of his and tried to break the grip. It wasn’t going to happen. Instead of trying to pry a finger back he decided to go with physics and hope that helped. He still had his iron spike. It was currently pinned against the bastard’s hand by Carl’s fingers. He let go with one hand as his vision started to gray a bit around the edges and he drove the spike into the Deacon’s hand at the spot where his thumb joined the wrist. It was the only spot he could really hit and even then he felt the iron scraping his own flesh as it punched into the Deacon.

He couldn’t hope to break the grip, but he could aim for a single digit. In this case the one that held him in place. The Deacon hissed in pain and tried to squeeze harder. Carl grunted and pushed with both hands, working the iron spike with as much of his weight as he could manage.

He got lucky. The Deacon’s thumb broke before the bastard could break his neck. Carl fell on his ass as the vampire screamed. That was about all the luck he figured he was good for, and the iron spike was stuck properly in the monster’s wounded hand.

The Deacon expressed his disapproval by trying to punt Carl’s head across the quarry. Carl blocked with his leg and let out a scream of his own as the meat of his leg was nearly pulped by the impact. Christ, but his leg was howling in pain.

On the bad news front, he wasn’t sure if he could stand. On the good news front the nice monster kicked him twenty feet with the one blow. That was far enough to let him go for another weapon.

Now and then you just have to improvise. Carl figured there was a damned good chance he was going to get stuck in a clinch with one of the dead things, and to that end he’d done what he could with what he had lying around the house. The high tension copper wire wasn’t iron, but it was strong, and the two dowels he’d wrapped it around were good pieces of oak. Hopefully strong enough to do the job.

The Deacon whipped his hand around and screamed a second time as the iron spike broke away from his hand and sailed into the air. An instant later he was grabbing Carl again, both of his hands wrapping into Carl’s shirt as he was hauled into the air. As the Deacon brought Carl up, Carl moved his arms over the vampire’s head in a mockery of a close embrace. It might have looked to anyone close by as if he were trying to put his hands around the vampire’s neck to pull him in for a kiss.

Instead of trying for a little love, he wrapped the makeshift garrote around the elegant man’s neck and crossed the dowels from one hand to the other: left dowel to right hand, right dowel to left.

The Deacon was leaning in to take a very large bite of Carl’s neck, or maybe his face. It was hard to tell as the mouth opened wider and wider and the teeth grew impossibly long.

Carl yanked his arms in opposite directions as hard as he could and felt the copper wire saw into the Deacon’s neck.

The vampire’s face pulled back a bit, his expression growing puzzled for a moment before he realized what was going on. The wire cut deep, would surely have drawn blood from a living man, but that wasn’t enough and Carl knew it. The hands on his shirt released and the Deacon reached for Carl’s hands, but as he did, Carl raised his legs and pushed his feet against the vampire’s chest.

Had the Deacon needed to breathe, the fight would have been over, but the vampire had no need of air. Powerful fingers scrabbled, trying to get hold of Carl’s wrists but Carl moved as best he could, slipping the attempted grip with a twist of his hands. And he pushed with all of the strength in his legs, shoving off again from the Deacon’s torso. The wire cut deeper, and the Deacon let out a strangled screech as his vocal chords got hacked apart by the copper wire.

Carl let out a screech too, his arms felt like they were getting torn from their sockets and his battered leg was threatening to buckle. Carl Price worked out regularly and could leg press something in the neighborhood of twelve hundred pounds. The dead man’s neck should have given out, should have been severed with ease, but the damned thing was tough, and it was fighting back as best it could.

It might well have killed him, but physics once again proved his savior. The Deacon reacted instinctively and tried to push Carl away. Both of those impossibly strong arms braced against Carl’s chest and the Deacon shoved him backward.

Carl let out a scream as several muscles in his left hand stretched further than they should have, and the dowel ripped free from his grip. It was just possible he’d broken a few fingers, too, but he really couldn’t tell. All he knew was that it hurt, goddamn it, it hurt a lot!

He screamed hard, and he sailed back as the force of the Deacon’s brutal shove knocked him away from the undead thing. And the wire that had wrapped around the vampire’s neck finished its task, and cut through the vertebrae, beheading the Deacon.

Carl soared. He didn’t mean to, and he surely couldn’t control it, but oh, my, he flew through the air and hit the ground hard, rolling, scraping and finally coming to a stop with his left leg in the water of the quarry and his ass in the air.

He looked at the Deacon’s body as it fell to its knees and began to decompose. He wanted to get up, to help Wade or even just to cheer the fact that he had survived the fucking nightmare trying to eat his face. Instead he faded into darkness for a moment.

Only a moment.

Just a second to rest. That was all he needed. Just a moment to catch his breath.

Damn. Everything hurt.