to come and it was safe, dammit! Safe! Maybe boring and maybe (certainly) provincial and maybe a lot of other things. But safe is what it was first.
Felix stared at the flagpole atop the courthouse building. As a boy he had been taught to walk toward that if he got lost from his parents while shopping. Taught to go there and go to the front steps and sit down and wait and not cry - don't worry - Mother and Daddy would soon come to find him and "you'll be safe there, son."
During the last three nights at least six people had been slaughtered there in full view of the police, dragged screaming and pleading into the only abandoned building by hulking drooling ghouls. Usually the monsters howled when the worthless bullets and shotgun pellets slammed into them. Sometimes they didn't. But they never stopped, except to turn and hiss, their new yellow-gray fangs glistening red in the squad cars' whirling lights.
The only policemen to go in there after them were still in there.
Felix finished his cigarette and dropped the butt onto the sidewalk and flattened it with a chain-mailed boot and then stood there bent over and staring until the last mote of glowing coal went out.
He sat in the motorhome, at the little table in the motorhome, a cigarette burning in the ashtray next to his chain-mailed elbow, an untouched plastic glass of ice tea next to that, while Cat, also in chain mail, paced clinking back and forth amid the weapons, speaking with his hands and trying to...
Trying to what? Felix wondered idly, as if from a great distance, suddenly realizing that he had been so preoccupied with his own sense of dread and impending doom that he had not really been listening at all. He had nodded a few times when that felt polite, but he could not imagine, quite frankly, what Cat could possibly have to say that mattered. Except...
Except to say they had decided to call it off.
Felix drew out of his horror just far enough to find if that was it.
It wasn't. It was... Well, now, Felix wasn't absolutely sure what it was. But it seemed that Cat was trying to convince him that vampires were real so he wouldn't be shocked or something when he saw them. Something about the difference between knowing something was so in your mind and feeling it was so in your gut.
Or something. It sounded to Felix like the standard lecture to new recruits and that was okay by him. As long as he was sitting in this motorhome getting a lecture he wasn't stepping into that building across the street. He wasn't in danger. He wasn't fighting monsters or being ripped apart by their fangs, which Felix had no trouble whatsoever believing in from his brain to his gut to his trembling fingers raising a cigarette to his lips.
So he just watched Cat pacing and talking and he looked about the trailer at the simple little meaningless items he might never see again after an hour, a bottle of scotch with the label torn, a fast-food carry-out sack, a cheap ballpoint pen with its cap all chewed up poking out of a rent in the carpet under the driver's seat, and he stared at these things, reveled in these things, rather than think about what was about to happen.
Anything but that.
I-don't-want-to-die-here he mouthed silently without realizing it.
About then Cat wrapped up his agitated presentation with a rousing clap of his hands.
"Okay?" he asked Felix excitedly.
Felix, who had no notion what the question was about, looked the other man in the eye.
"Okay," he replied dully.
Carl Joplin opened the outer door of the motorhome and stuck his head inside.
"Father Adam's ready," he said.
Cat nodded to him. "Okay," he said.
Carl nodded in return and disappeared again, closing the door behind him.
Felix looked questioningly at Cat.
"Mass," Cat explained.
Felix nodded. "Oh."
Felix believed.
He knelt in the courthouse parking lot with the others while Adam, high-mass robes covering his own chain mail, conducted the service and he believed.
In God. In Jesus. In the vampires waiting across the road. In 'most everything around him. He believed the police standing over there in that little group were not going to help them. He believed the crew standing beside their ambulance were not going to save him. He believed this was all a trap, as Jack Crow had told him.
He believed he was going to die.
He even believed in their gear. He figured the chain mail