Chapter Twenty

Del couldn’t stop crying. He knew it wasn’t doing him any good, and it sure as hell wasn’t helping Bart or Mom. But he just couldn’t stop. C’mon. Tough it out. How long has it been since they dragged them out of here—fifteen minutes? Half an hour? What could have happened since then? Are they alive, or . . .

They’re alive! They’ve got to be alive!

Then you can still help them. You’ve got to try. But you can’t do anything till you stop crying.

I will. I will.

He wiped his eyes, then removed his hand from his mouth, but only when he was sure he wouldn’t sob or gag again. He’d almost given himself away last time, and he couldn’t afford the mistake twice. He massaged his tingling thighs; the alcove behind the furnace and water heater was small and he’d had to scrunch himself into an uncomfortable fetal position to remain unseen. And every minute he stayed there, his muscles cramped a little worse. It took him forever just to inch himself around to where he could peek out through the crack between the heater tank and the wall. He couldn’t make out much. The shadeless bulbs hung widely apart, and they were of low wattage. Their light barely reached to the floor, and that’s where all the bodies were. From his low angle they were indistinct mounds of shadow, entwined in twos and threes to where he couldn’t tell one body from another, the living from the dead from the undead. And with all the oohing and ahhing that reached his ears, the groaning and lip-smacking . . .

What if the plan doesn’t work? What then?

Then everyone you love dies.

The answer was that obvious, and that sobering. He set his jaw and started to prepare himself.

He unrolled the top of the sack very slowly and slid the contents out onto his lap. Amidst the Zagnut bars and the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups and the Teen Titans annual were the things he’d picked up as he stood in the aisle of the drugstore and surveyed the Halloween supplies and wondered, What if? They were the tools of his desperate doomsday plan: two sticks of clown-white facial paint, a pair of Vampire Teeth, and a thick tube of stage blood appropriately titled in dripping letters Tube O’ Gore. He laid them out on his leg like surgical instruments. First the face paint. There wasn’t enough light to read the instructions, but he remembered glancing at them in the store—the sticks needed to be moistened for application. He tried to spit into his hand but nothing would come out. His throat was too dry. He had to work at it, dredging it up with his tongue just like when he used to hocker out the window of the school bus onto passing cars. He finally got a drop or two into his palm, just enough to wet the stick. Then he ran it across the back of his hand. The grease came off thick and lumpy but was the right shade of death, and the lumps looked like the flesh was beginning to decompose. Neat. He covered his hands and then his face, all over, even up into his hairline and down his neck. Then he put the teeth in. If only he had a mirror . . . As a finishing touch, he used the Tube O’ Gore to smear his lips red and dribbled the fake blood from the corners of his mouth, just like they always did in the Hammer films. The stuff had a pungent, plastic taste when he inadvertently licked his lips. He was careful not to do it again.

He was hyperventilating by the time he finished. It has to work, he repeated. It has to, it has to. He took a deep breath and stood up.

No one turned to look at him. The vampires, which he could see more clearly now, were hunched over their prey and much too engrossed to notice him. So far, so good. But how will you ever get past them? It was like an obstacle course and an Indian gauntlet all rolled into one.

He stepped slowly, hesitantly around the furnace. Out into the open.

There was immediate movement to his right. He froze. His neck refused to turn; only his eyes would obey, sneaking to the corners to see.

One of those . . . things had been sitting on the other side of the furnace all the time, feeding contentedly only a few feet away. It was a large woman he had seen many times behind the cash register at the IGA, with her thick glasses and her hair in an ever-present bun. She still wore her smock and her “My Name Is Evie” badge, though both were speckled with red. Her mouth was wet and gleaming; Del knew it was not lipstick. She was sitting cross-legged and there was the limp form of a man draped across her lap but she was no longer looking at him. She was looking at Del.

Oh, God.

He turned on his heels and looked straight into Evie’s face and into those empty, rimless eyes, magnified three times by the thickness of her glasses. His muscles began to quiver and his bladder control slipped and a warmth spread through the crotch of his pants. He started to mumble and in the process bared his plastic teeth. Evie’s brow furrowed and she flashed her own fangs as she pulled her victim tight against her ample bosom. “Get your own,” she snapped. Then she turned away from him and went back to the man across her lap, tilting his face aside so she could go at his neck once again.

Del was numb. It worked, he thought. I can’t believe it worked, she really . . .

He caught himself. Shivered. Stepped closer so that he could look into the slack face of her unfortunate prey. In this dim light the features had looked familiar. The shape of the face. The red hair.

No, please . . .

His jaw began to quiver. The fake teeth fell to the floor. He had to jam a sleeve into his mouth to keep from screaming. It was Bart.

He felt the sting of tears again, rolling through the grease on his cheeks. They were tears of hate this time, of anger. It was the only way the shock could be assimilated, the only way it wouldn’t make him faint or turn to a blubbering, helpless child. It triggered something in him, deep down, that transcended his own sense of self-preservation, stoked a rage that made him forget everything else, that made him search the floor for a stake, a pipe, anything he could use to shatter Evie’s skull and beat to a pulp whatever foul tissue still pulsed beneath. All he could find within reach was the folding knife in his pocket, but that was okay. He’d just use it to stab at her throat and chop at it and saw through it until her head came off in his hands. He stepped toward her with his face twisted and his knife bared and he reached out for that bound-up bun because pulling that would bare the bitch’s throat and he’d aim for between the second and third chin . . .

Bart looked up at him.

He halted. The rage was suddenly gone. It left him hollow, afraid, unsure of what to do next. Bart couldn’t be turning already . . . could he? His skin was pale, drained, almost like Evie’s. But the eyes told him no. They were barely open, just enough to show the dimming sparkle of life, and they spoke to Del. They told him the things that he didn’t want to know, that he was surrounded, that it would be suicide to try to help him and that it was already too late. And when the tears came anew Bart’s gaze stopped them, told him that there wasn’t time for that. That he had a job to do.

But I can’t leave you here, he wanted to say. I can’t leave you. Not like this.

The older boy’s gaze softened, and a solitary tear welled there in the corner. His eyes shifted toward his outstretched hand, which still groped limply for the backpack just beyond his reach. Del nodded. He understood. He picked up the pack, careful that the bottles didn’t rattle, and he hugged it to his chest. When he looked back at his brother, the eyes were closed. They didn’t reopen.

He backed up and slumped against the wall. He did not want to move again. He wanted only to curl into a ball and hide his head. He felt more alone than he’d ever been in his life, and yet—suddenly he didn’t. There was Bart’s voice inside his head, crystal clear, so real that he had to look at the body to be sure it hadn’t moved or spoken. Get moving, Cap, it said. Mom needs you. Get moving.

He pushed off from the wall and walked straight, putting one foot in front of the other, stopping only to retrieve his plastic teeth, until he was past Evie and his brother and he didn’t have to look at them again.

Watching the vampires dine was especially harrowing as he picked his way through the room. The manner of their feeding varied with each; some moaned passionately and stroked their victims like a lover, while others savaged the throats with animal glee and then lapped at the pooling blood or sipped from the ruptured artery like a water fountain. It made his stomach lurch. He fixed his eyes on the door and concentrated.

They’ll sense your fear, he told himself, or maybe it was Bart, reminding him. You can’t let them see that you’re afraid.

He stepped over two bodies. The one on its back, beneath a snorting young man, looked like a wide-eyed Mrs. Helton.

Can’t be afraid.

Ted’s body was almost blocking his path ahead, along with the ample white flesh of his girlfriend sprawled atop him. She was holding his hand tenderly and playing with his fingers like always, even as she murdered him. Del stepped around them. That’s when she grabbed the boy’s ankle. She sat up straddling Ted’s middle, her chest now in plain sight with its one full breast and the other partially collapsed where Charlie Bean’s stake had left two gaping holes. She hissed at him, spitting flecks of blood onto his coat. Her leg muscles tensed for a reflexive spring.

There was little else Del could do. He hissed back. He got right back in her face and bared his dime-store fangs and summoned a cat’s guttural warning from deep in his chest. Several heads bobbed up at his response, like cobras rearing. But they just as quickly dismissed him and the female and went back to their business. Even Doreen recoiled. Her snarling face softened and she looked almost apologetic. She let go of his ankle and went back to Ted with her head hung sheepishly.

Your luck won’t hold forever, Cap. Move it. Now.

He picked his way through them at a faster pace, careful not to let momentum overcome his balance. The door loomed closer and closer, a goal that frightened him with its nearness. I can’t be making it, I can’t be, they’re bound to get me before I reach the threshold . . . But then his feet found the hillock of bodies that clogged the doorway and he was climbing over them, stepping on Rusty Sanders, making his way into the fresh night air beyond.

But the job wasn’t finished yet.

He sat the backpack down gently beside the door and lined up the Little Kings bottles, one by one. There were six in all, each sprouting a leaf of linen from its corked mouth.

“Boy,” came a voice from the gloom of the basement. Del glanced inside and saw a figure standing just in front of the second hanging bulb. Only the silhouette was visible, though he could feel the eyes on him. He stood up with one of the Molotov cocktails in his hand . . . but where were the matches? He hadn’t thought of that! He patted his coat pockets, his pants, all the places he knew they would not be.

“BOY!” There were several eyes trained on him now, several dark forms standing in the half-light of the basement. They were coming toward the door.

He grabbed the backpack and turned it inside out and envisioned a book of matches clutched in Bart’s lifeless hand.

Don’t be stupid. Unzip the front pocket.

Sure enough, there was a front pocket on the pack and he fumbled with the zipper and tore it open and his hand found Grandpa’s old Zippo, the one he’d passed on to Bart on his fifteenth birthday (the year he got caught smoking). In triumph, he thumbed the flint wheel and birthed a flame and touched it to the rag fuse of the bottle in his hand. The fabric caught immediately.

When he stepped back into the doorway, he could see them coming at him. They were so close now that the flickering flame played on their sinister faces. He held the firebomb out like a king’s scepter and took grim satisfaction in their changing expressions. “Burn in hell!” he damned them as he threw the bottle at the first open patch of floor he saw, just inside the door. The green glass shattered and spewed flame in three directions, both blocking the doorway and unfurling into the gathering crowd itself. Screams reached his ears, glorious screams that fed a savage glee in his heart. He lit another and threw it into the thick of them, where it made a dull thud and clattered to the floor unbroken. Then the flames reached the gasoline. The bottle exploded in a bright flash, and Del heard glass ping off the walls like shrapnel. One of the monsters was caught in the plume of fire and set ablaze; it ran endlessly, bumping into its brethren and igniting them as well. Del threw the rest of the bombs as hard as he could, lobbing them over the heads of the trapped crowd so they might reach the rear of the basement where Evie and Bart had been. And then he stood back and watched it burn.

The fire spread upward, into the house itself, and he could see the orange glow through the upstairs windows. The roar of the flames was deafening now, drowning out the screams, and the heat forced him back.

The hate and anger bled away from him as he watched. The grief returned, but he would endure it. He had to. “Goodbye, Bart,” he said, wiping the sting of ash from his eye. “Don’t worry about Mom. I’ll find her.”

In his mind, Bart’s voice was no longer there. But he imagined a nodded reply, and that was good enough.

He looked around him. The vampires would not go near the fire, but it might attract their attention. He had to move soon. He ran to the next yard, found the doorway to the basement there. He rapped on it with his fist. “Can you hear me in there?” There was no answer. He pressed an ear to the cold metal. There were sounds from within, though muffled. Someone sobbing fearfully. The cries of an infant, and someone trying to hush it. He could almost feel the fear that emanated from inside, and he knew that asking for their help was useless. They would never open that door. And he couldn’t blame them.

You’re on your own, he told himself. Where to first? He looked around the yard, hoping for one of those signs, like in the movies, a telltale hoofprint or a broken twig or tramped-down path in the grass that would tell him where they took his mother. But he knew it wouldn’t be that simple. So where to? Who can I get to help me? Or maybe that should be, who’s left to help? Chris and Charlie are God-knows-where and Bart’s gone and Ted too and everyone else is a vampire.

Maybe not everyone . . .

Didn’t Mom say that Mrs. Moore was holed up in her own basement? Maybe she can help . . . that is, if that real estate bimbo hasn’t gotten to her already. Now, which street was it Mom said she lives on? Walnut? Oak? At least in that general direction. It’s a start.

He began to run but that felt too conspicuous for a vampire.

So he had to settle for walking very, very fast.

He harbored a slim hope that most of Isherwood’s undead had been trapped in the inferno back there, but he soon learned other­wise. He had gone just a few blocks, not even to Vernal Avenue, when he saw them, fleeting shadows, skittering from house to house in search of a fix. His immediate impulse was to hide, before they could see through his childish disguise. But again, it would have been too conspicuous. So he kept his reflexes in check. He walked down the sidewalk, in plain view, waiting for them to get closer. And when they grew within fifteen feet and saw the cast of his flesh they would simply pass him by. Del held any sigh of relief; he was not out of this yet.

He crossed Main Street just up from the courthouse and his confidence began to grow. So much so, in fact, that he barely flinched when he turned the corner from Elm Street onto Walnut and found six of them coming toward him.

They were mostly older men, in their late fifties to early sixties, and wore faces that Del had seen only in passing in the drugstore or the town square. There was a girl there too, about Bart’s age. Of the lot of them, it was she who spoke. “Aren’t you coming to the hill?” Her eyes, like all the others he’d seen, were deep and empty and threatened to draw him in unless he averted his own gaze.

“The hill?”

There was genuine surprise in her dead face. “Of course. Haven’t you heard him calling us? He’s there,” she motioned to the north, where the land swelled up and an old house he knew only as the Shady Rest stood. “He needs us. Come.” She took his arm.

Del was panicky. What if she felt his warmth through the coat sleeve? He quickly pulled away. “Uh . . . I’m still hungry. I’ll be there in a few minutes.”

She stared at him and made an odd face. Del finally realized it was meant to be a smile. “You’re a real pig,” she said, reaching out to run a cold finger along his lip and dab at the artificial blood. She tasted it. The boy’s breath caught. She rolled her tongue about, considering, and then grimaced. “No wonder you’re still hungry. But hurry. You don’t want to keep him waiting.” The lot of them stepped around him and continued along Walnut Street, heading north.

“One last thing,” Del blurted after them, even before he realized he was saying it. “What about the Miller woman? Was she taken to the hill?” Oh, Lord, now you’ve done it, they’ll figure you out and then your ass is grass . . .

They looked at him in a dull, unreadable manner for a long time, and he did not dare to even breathe. Then the girl simply replied, “Yes,” and they resumed their trek to the hill.

Del stood there alone in the middle of the sidewalk and felt a shiver of dread wrack his small frame. Danner had his mother—it was his worst nightmare. And they would be surrounded by other vampires. What could he do alone?

Dammit, Stiles, where are you when I need you!

The night air split with the echoes of a gunshot that came rolling up the street. It awakened the boy, shook him from his fearful paralysis. A gunshot—that meant someone was fighting back. Someone was still alive! His mind raced as he ran south on Walnut, straining his ears to sort through the fading echoes, his eyes to make out the names on the mailboxes as he went. It could be anyone, he rationalized. Anyone who had held out that long. But on this street . . .

There it was just ahead. The side of the Conestoga mailbox was emblazoned with the name MOORE, and as he grew closer he could see that there was a body sprawled on the lawn, just to the side of the front porch. Del crept to the edge of the driveway, until he could see clearer. He’d been expecting to find Giggy Gastineau there, though not quite like this—splayed on her back with eyes staring glassily skyward, speechless for the first time in her life. She was still dressed in her best tweed suit and held her briefcase tighter in death than ever, clutching it to her chest. But it still hadn’t been sufficient to stop a shotgun blast. The silver pellets had simply punched a fist-sized hole in the genuine imitation leather before moving on to more vital regions.

He turned, looked at the house, and saw the shotgun barrels retracting into the basement window. And he thought he heard Mrs. Moore sobbing before the window clamped shut.

The boy hesitantly crossed the ground to where the realtor lay and nudged her with his foot to make sure she was dead—he didn’t want her jumping up while his back was turned. Then he approached the window and tapped the frosted glass with a knuckle. “Mrs. Moore? Don’t shoot. It’s me, Del Miller. I’ve got to talk to you.” There was no sound from within. “Please, it’s urgent.” He could feel the tears returning. “Please. My brother’s dead, and now they’ve got Mom!”

When Sharon spoke, the voice was right behind the glass. She’d been standing there all along. “Back away,” she said warily. The boy complied, and only then would the window open, just a crack, same as before. But from this close Del could see Mrs. Moore’s face, at least part of it. She looked haggard and spent, her expression spiderwebbed with lines of anxiety. The eyes behind her bifocals were puffed and red from crying and lack of sleep. She looked just on the edge, and her knuckles were already white on the trigger of the shotgun pointing his way. “Another trick,” she muttered, aiming right for his chest. Del realized her intent with sudden clarity and his jaw went slack and the false teeth he’d almost forgotten about went tumbling from his mouth. The sight took the woman by surprise, enough that the double barrels lowered a bit. Her finger eased on the trigger.

“It’s not real!” the boy was rattling as fast as he could, smearing the face paint and then showing her the pale smudge on his fingers. He kept at it, rubbing more and more away until his own facial pigment was more obvious. Obvious to him at least. Sharon’s eyes still held that hard glint of mistrust, and the shotgun didn’t lower any further than before. “It’s me!” he said. “I’m alive!”

“It’s another trick,” she said. “You’re trying to trick me.”

“Then here . . . touch my hand.”

“Stay back.” The shotgun barrels looked deeply into his eyes.

“Dammit, how can I convince you? We’re wasting time—they could be killing my mom!”

Sharon’s face remained stony; her tears had all been cried out. “I’m sorry, Delbert,” she said flatly, “if you are really Delbert. But I can’t take the chance. I just can’t.” She kept the shotgun trained on him even as she backed away, and once the barrels cleared the window, she quickly closed and locked it.

“Wait! What do I do now? Where do I go . . .” but it was no use. She was gone. He sat back and started to cry. “I’m sorry, Mom,” he whispered. “I’m sorry.”

You can’t give up on faith, sweetheart . . .

Her words from earlier in the day came back. But why? What had made him think of that now, unless . . . He looked around to confirm his location. The church wasn’t far from there, just at the end of the next street, maybe two or three blocks. But what good would that do? he wondered. The pastor’s done gone cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs, so he won’t be any help, and what’s there for me anyway, I sleep through services and I couldn’t even hold off Danner with a cross and Chris told me—

Can’t give up on faith.

He surrendered with a sigh. All right, Mom. At least it’s a place to go.

He recovered his fake teeth, dusted them off, and put them in, then reached into his coat pocket for the stick of clown-white to fix his face again and . . . oh, God. It wasn’t there, he realized coldly as he patted down all of his pockets. He could almost visualize laying it on the furnace before stepping out into the open basement. Arrgh, he groaned, slapping his own forehead. What am I going to do now? He looked around. There was no one else in sight. No use complaining. Better git now, while the gittin’s good. He walked back out to the street, looked both ways, checking each house as well. And when he was sure the coast was clear, he pulled his collar up around his face, lowered his head, and ran.

He turned onto Oak at a dead run and saw the shape of the Little Bethlehem Congregational Church looming out of the fog from a block away, its steeple like a finger pointing skyward. As Del drew closer, his flight lost some of its momentum. Something wasn’t right—it looked too . . . ordinary. It was the same back­water church he’d seen countless times, the same white board siding, the same long, thin windows with their dark shutters and frosted panes. It was a singularly plain cottagelike structure that differed from the rest of the neighborhood only in its modest size and needle-like spire. But where was the light, Del wanted to know. Where was the holy aura he’d almost talked himself into expecting, where was the light of God that would surround the place and guard it from the darkness and act as a beacon to all the lost ones out there, the ones who needed His protection? His heart sank as reality came washing in, and it brought with it the memory of his facing Danner, and his use of the cross. And the results. And he suddenly felt very stupid for even coming here. But he approached the church just the same.

Curiosity, perhaps. And where else did he have to go?

The church sat forward on the one-and-a-half acre plot, separated from the street by a semicircle of gravel for parking. Stone walkways led both to the front door and around the side of the building to the even smaller parsonage in the rear. He checked the latter as he approached and found the windows dark, but there was a light burning in the chapel. And there was something else . . . music playing, though not the monotonous groan of the pipe organ. Something familiar and strangely incongruous . . .

Sammy Hagar?

The strains of “Heavy Metal” grew louder as he neared the front door and found it standing open. He stood there on the walkway, staring into the darkness of the vestibule and beyond where the shadows receded and a light burned. A row of pews was in sight, and half the podium. Nothing else. No one.

He stepped into the darkened entryway and through the arch into the church proper. The overhead lights were off; only the track lamps above the pulpit shined, and they cast the lectern and its oversized Bible in a spotlight. The big, impressive crucifix on a pedestal to the rear was nearly as tall as Del and, since it was on the periphery of the light, its shadow was etched dimly on the back wall. The rest of the chapel was in darkness, and an adolescent imagination could easily have peopled those empty pews with twilight faces and parishioners of shadow. But Del’s eyes were focused only on the pulpit as he walked slowly up the center aisle. He saw that Sammy Hagar’s screeching guitar riffs were spilling from a dual-cassette machine sitting on the podium next to the lectern. He was concentrating on it so much that he didn’t see the figure slouched in the first pew until he was right on top of it. Then he shrieked and tripped over his own feet and scrambled crablike across the floor, covering his head.

The figure did not move. Del realized that and jumped to his feet, and every shred of common sense told him to run. It told him that, even as he crept closer.

The position of the body and the circumstance of it were both so outright bizarre that Del could only stand there, gaping. It was male, no doubt about that. It wore a dark T-shirt but no pants or underwear. The legs were splayed wide and one hand was locked around its rigored member while the other clutched a bondage magazine with a big-breasted centerfold and lots of chains and straps. The boy couldn’t identify him; the man’s whole head was hidden beneath a big rubber mask, one which, in the gloom beyond the track lights, looked suspiciously like Tor Johnson. Del knew he would have to lift the mask to be sure. His stomach started doing flips as he crept still closer and looked. The head was tilted just enough to one side that he could see under the edge of the mask. The red puckered impression of a mouth could still be seen on the throat, surrounding two ragged punctures. And a trickle of blood, all that was left, had seeped down to defy the sanctity of the white collar. “Knutson.”

The tape stopped. Midsong. He could hear something behind him. Pages turning. Chuckling. “Shame-y, shame-y. He was a real pee-vert, wasn’t he?”

Del turned to Tommy Whitten, who sat on the edge of the podium platform. His sallow flesh all but glowed in the stark light of the overhead lamps. Behind him was “Fat Larry” Hovi, and Doug Baugh was there as well, cigarette grafted to his lip as always. They were dressed the same as when Del last saw them. Only their throats differed. Whitten had wrapped electrical tape around his neck, while Baugh’s had been stitched shut with a shoestring. Hovi had simply stuffed the ragged tear with a piece of black plastic from a garbage bag. They crowded around while Tommy looked at one of the pastor’s magazines with a smirking, gap-toothed grin, tsk-tsking as he flipped the pages. “Check this bitch,” he said to them, then turned it over so Del could inspect the spread-eagled female. Then he laughed and spit a stream of Knutson’s blood through his teeth.

“You can’t be here,” Del tried to sound firm. “This is a church. Holy ground.”

“Holy ground,” Fat Larry repeated, though in a dead teenager’s mocking tone. He tore a picture of a naked girl from a magazine and dangled it in the air and made it dance and gave it a falsetto voice. “Beat me, whip me, tie me up. It’s okay, we’re on hallowed ground.” He laughed. “You’ve gotta be kidding. You think beating the bishop’s a sacred ritual or something? Look at that fucker. It wasn’t holy to him. Why should it be to us?”

Del thought about making a run for the door but his eyes betrayed him. Before he could even convince himself to move, Doug Baugh jumped ahead of him into the central aisle. His teeth were showing now, a horrific set that made his jaws seem double-jointed. “It’s funny,” Tommy Whitten said, his own teeth bared and lips trembling. “No matter how much I take, person after person, it’s never enough. You’d think you’d get full after a while, wouldn’t you? But I don’t. I just want more. Always more.”

Del backed over to the podium and put the lectern between them. But Tommy growled, knocked it aside, and the three of them came forward, forcing him back even further. He turned, staggered into the pedestal behind the pulpit, heard the base crack under his weight, and the whole thing came loose in his hands. The solid wooden cross, fully four feet tall and three feet wide at the crossbar, was heavy and unwieldy but he still lifted it and held it out against his enemies.

Their response was like Danner’s. They giggled.

“You’ve got to have faith for that to work, Mr. Vincent!” Tommy quoted dramatically. “Didn’t you see Fright Night on HBO last week? Oh, I forgot. You hilljacks don’t have cable. Too bad. Then you would’ve known. You gotta believe, you little dick.”

“I believe.”

“Yeah, sure.” Larry’s jaws unhinged like a feeding snake. The teeth grew larger. He took a step.

“Hold it,” Del ordered. “Three against one isn’t very fair. What the matter, Tommy? Afraid to face me alone?”

Whitten arched an eyebrow. “Say what?”

“C’mon, Tommy. Just you and me. What’s the matter, you afraid?” The three snickered at that, but Delbert didn’t bat an eye. “Well, you should be. Because you know what, Tommy? I do believe. I believe, ’cause there has to be more to this. What kept me going when there wasn’t nowhere else to turn? What brought me in here, even when I knew something was wrong? There has to be more to it.”

Doug rolled his eyes. “Hitch up them pantlegs, buckaroos. The shit’s getting deep.”

“C’mon, Tommy. Put your money where your god-awful mouth is. Touch the cross.”

Whitten’s smile thinned, grew cruel and serious. “I’m gonna make you suffer, punk—”

“Touch the fucking cross!”

Tommy came toward him until they stood an arm’s length apart and only the wooden crucifix separated them. A seed of doubt sprouted in the pit of Del’s stomach—How is he standing so close to it? How?—and he tried to override it by flushing his mind with prayers, any and all that he could dredge from memory. Now I lay me down to sleep . . .

Tommy’s face split in two, and the fissure filled with teeth. “You’re dead.”

The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want . . .

“Take him, Tommy. But save some for us, okay?”

Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death . . .

Whitten moved with the abruptness of a viper. His hands snaked out and caught the crossbar of the symbol. Held firm. And nothing happened. Tommy’s smile grew even larger. The others laughed.

A moment later, the screaming began.