Ruger had backed up to where Vince LaMastra’s corpse lay sprawled in a lake of blood. Ruger’s retreating foot had brushed against the sergeant’s dead, slack hand— and that hand had closed around the ankle. The fingers were clamped as tight as a steel shackle.
It was impossible, of course. LaMastra was dead, and there was no power left in his limbs; he was dead, and his dead brain could not have sent the signal to clutch or to hold.
Ruger’s face was knotted in confusion, and as he gradually raised his eyes to meet Crow’s, there was fear in those dark eyes as well.
“I killed you twice, you miserable prick,” Crow said in a hoarse voice that sounded like Ruger’s own graveyard whisper. “This time, stay dead!” The broken sword rose and fell with all of the dwindling strength in Crow’s battered body. It caught Ruger on the side of the neck and chopped downward into the chest and sliced Karl Ruger’s black heart in half.
Ruger stared at him in disbelief for a long time.
Then he fell. The fierce predatory light in Ruger’s eyes that had burned so brightly for so long, a light that had shone on so much death and destruction, went dark forever.
Crow stood there, unable to grasp the reality of what he had just done. After all of this, Ruger was actually, finally gone. It hit him as hard as Ruger’s punch and for a moment the enormity of it made him dizzy. The invincible, unbeat-able Karl Ruger was gone. Really gone this time, but would anyone ever really know? He looked around, expecting to see death rushing at him, but for the moment he stood alone over Ruger’s corpse.
Then he looked down at LaMastra’s hand and for the briefest moment there was a shimmer in the air that seemed to rise from the dead man’s back, and then LaMastra’s fingers relaxed open and were still.
Forty feet away the werewolf was struggling to get to a kneeling position, blood streaming from its wounds; near him, Sarah lay on the ground and shook with palsy. Her face was gashed and bleeding badly and blood dripped onto the mud at her knees. The werewolf began crawling slowly toward her, making low plaintive sounds in its throat. It left a pattern of gore behind it like the trail of a slug.
Crow’s mind could not handle the thought of the werewolf. There was something about it that he did not want to understand even though he did understand, so he turned away. He picked up the Roadblocker and patted LaMastra down for the last of his ammunition, then Crow hastily reloaded and went to find Val and Mike.
There were far fewer vampires now. The smoke from the fires was so thick it was hard to see. Crow skirted brush fires and he killed anything that got in his way, though each time he fired the big gun it made his gut hurt. Something was definitely wrong in there. He could taste blood in his throat.
Then he heard three pistol shots and angled in that direction, blundering through the smoke.
And there was Val, with Mike beside her.
Around them were mountains of the dead. The last remaining vampires yielded and fled as Crow came screaming into the clearing. Crow staggered toward Val and she cried out his name and ran to him, wrapping her arms around him, weeping and saying his name over and over again as they both collapsed down to their knees.
Mike Sweeney stood above them, searching the smoke for movement, his body crisscrossed with cuts, his face a red and nearly unrecognizable mask. Then he also slumped to his knees, looked blankly at Val and Crow, and fell forward onto the bloody hands that still held the sword. His face was bright with fever and his eyes stared at nothing.
“Ruger’s dead,” Crow whispered as he showered Val’s matted hair with dozens of quick, light kisses. “But he killed Vince.”
“Oh, God . . .” Val huddled against him. “Is it over?” she asked.
He kissed her lips. “I think so,” he murmured.
Beneath them the ground exploded.
Chapter 49
1
The whole swamp seemed to lift into the air, propelled by titanic pressure from below. Crow felt himself rising into the night, hurtling through shadows and flame and confusion; he felt Val being pulled away from him, heard her scream.
Mike was screaming, too. He pitched end over end and landed in a thick holly bush. The bush softened the impact, but Crow could feel something twist in his lower back. Dirt and wormy mud continued to geyser up, shooting high into the smoky sky before raining down heavily all around him.
The corpses of the vampires were thrown around like dolls.
A great roar filled the air. Dirt and mud fell all over Crow; he sputtered and spit it out as he shouted for Val and tried to scramble around to find her. The act of turning sent daggers of pain through his back and stomach, pain darted and sparked along the backs of his legs. Fiery light swarmed like fireflies around his head, but there was a narrow corridor of clear vision and he strained to see what it was that had caused the fearful eruption. The muddy earth in the center of the swamp had been churned and torn away. Huge masses of it were clumped around, displaced and discarded, piled up to create a crater rim like the earthworks of a volcano. A few of the surviving vampires, seared and battered, crawled like grubs away from the hole.
There was another deep rumbling sound, and as he watched something impossibly massive began rising from the mouth of the crater. It rose slowly, unfolding from the mud, assum-ing a shape like a man’s and yet unlike anything that had ever lived. Legs like Greek columns lifted its bulk, and the colossal torso straightened by slow degrees to raise the gigantic head; vast arms stretched wide and as the monstrosity reached its full height it stood over fifteen feet tall. Its skin was mottled and slimy, covered with a pale and leprous flesh that oozed and glistened with open sores and pustules; its legs were like those of a great towering goat and seemed to be composed of twist upon twist of braided tree root and warped bone, all of it wrapped in layers of raw muscle fiber that shone wetly with blood and mucus. The torso itself was man-shaped, but its wet flesh was a horrifying patchwork of rat and dog skin, splotchy with patches of bloody fur. The shoulders were covered with writhing hair composed entirely of living maggots that were fused into the skin. The neck was as thick as a bull’s and was topped with a face more horrible than any medieval gargoyle: there were two burning red eyes that fumed and smoked and glared out over a boar’s snout on either side of which rose thick tusks. Thinner fangs, like those of a rattlesnake, curled downward on the insides of the tusks and hot venom dripped onto the heaving chest and sizzled on the squirming flesh. The beast’s brow was heavy and sloped, giving the skull a simian cast, but the ears were large and came to sharp points. Writhing atop the head was a gorgon’s nest of twisting snakes.
Crow stared up into the face of pure evil, and he could feel the hope run out of him like water from a punctured barrel. His mind twisted and struggled, trying to accept what he was seeing, and he knew terror on every level of his consciousness, from the coldest facets of his logical mind to the primal instincts buried deep within every cell. This was the face of nightmare defined, this was the dark at the top of the stairs, this was the monster in every child’s closet. This was the darkness of the human soul released and given immea-surable power; this was the human potential taken to the ultimate degree of corruption. This was the fear of death and all the monsters out of legend. This was the devil himself.
Here was the architect of all their grief, all of their loss.
Here was the cruel intellect whose awful desires had conceived the campaign of hurt against the town and its people.
This was Ubel Griswold reborn, the god of the dark new world to come.
2
Griswold looked slowly around at the devastation he wrought. He stood in a fiery temple whose smoky pillars seemed to lift the entire heavens. Beneath his skin the vermin of the earth writhed in constant agony so that his skin appeared to shimmer. When he looked out upon what his hand had made, he was well pleased.
Crow lay nearest, groaning, hands clamped to his stomach; Val was fifty feet away, slumped against LaMastra’s corpse. Ruger’s dead body lay over the rim of the crater and near it the werewolf crouched, still weak and bleeding, its yellow eyes filled with fear and hate. Mike was the farthest away, his sword hilt inches from his hand; his eyes were wide and staring and all hope was struck from his face.
Ubel Griswold threw back his head and laughed. It was a sound too deep, too loud, too jarring to be real. Crow jammed his fists against his ears and cried out as blood burst from his nostrils.
Griswold took a single step forward and the whole clearing shook; another step and the sound was like the fall of an artillery shell. Crow felt his body lift and thump down with each cloven footfall, and his mind rebelled against such a creature. The world was never meant to endure the weight of such a thing as this, and Crow knew that if it was here, if had been allowed to manifest itself, then everything was lost, that all sense and order were gone from the world.
Griswold eyed them all with amused contempt. “What a collection of useless shit,” he said in a voice that boomed like thunder.
Crow remembered that voice, that thick accent, from a million years ago.
“Did you really have the conceit to think you could stop me? That you could stop my Red Wave?” He stamped down a yard from Crow’s head and the shock wave threw Crow five feet into the air. “I was leading armies before this sewer of a country was even born! I was with the Aryan hordes that burned Rome! I’ve walked a thousand battlefields, ten thousand!” He spat, and the spittle was alive with beetles and maggots. “You all deserve death just because you’re too stupid to be allowed to live.” Griswold said all this in a voice filled with contempt, but his face was bright with pleasure.
He was enjoying this on a profoundly sexual level; this was better than anything he’d felt in thirty years. To smell blood on the air, to taste the richness of pain on his tongue—it was wonderful.
He bent toward Crow and pointed one taloned finger, and as Crow watched in helpless horror the finger extended, became one of the multijointed limbs that had sprouted earlier from the mud. The claw stretched toward Crow and touched him, but the touch was light, a caress. “Yesss. I know you. I know your blood. Your brother squealed like a little girl when I gutted him.”
