was "Roy." He cared only for the smell of living, pumping blood.
The half dozen others looming behind him out of the darkness felt the same way.
The first man to see the horde appear was Adam, sprawled stunned and bleeding on the edge of the light from the other lantern. Still unable to do much more than stumble, he could only moan, "Sweet blessed Jesus! Jack! Look out!"
Jack saw them. He saw - what was it? - six, seven, eight of them? Coming for them, shuffling at them and he couldn't get loose from this little squirt he had already shot, much less save Cat, much less do anything about the others.
"FELIX!!" he screamed and then, in his panic, went into a frenzy of his own.
He grabbed one end of the huge arrow already piercing the monster and began to work it fiercely back and forth in the wound. The monster howled and spat and writhed some more and its gnarled hands began clutching and opening spasmodically and during one of the openings Cat came loose for just a second and Jack kicked his friend brutally to safety with a chain-mailed boot to the chest.
But it still had him, the little spitting fiend still had him and he could see the others shuffling closer, could hear the sound of their dry dead feet in the dust, could almost feel their gnarled hands and gray fangs...
"FELIXGODDAMMIT!" he wailed and grabbed the little monster and rolled over and over and flung it, with every ounce of fear he had, away from him.
There was the sound of chain mail popping, fabric and flesh ripping, and Jack Crow was free.
When he lurched triumphantly to his feet, Roy was there, face to rotting face. Roy hissed. His great black hands closed on Jack's throat.
Jack was helpless and knew it and he hit the switch for his chest cross and the halogen light was blinding to both of them and painful to the vampire. It arched and shrieked from the agony of the cross of light, steam already rising from the surface of its dead skin.
It saved Jack's life when it threw the light, and Jack, away from its body.
Jack smacked the concrete floor chest first and the halogen bulbs exploded into dusty darkness beneath him and suddenly all was as it had been only he had no light and no hope and Felix would not move and that's when Deputy Kirk Thompson, terrified by the sounds he had heard on Joplin's radio, burst into the cavernous darkness with his .44 magnum in hand.
He took one incredulous look then, pure hero type, braced his feet wide, supported his right, shooting, hand with his left, and began to fire. He was a sharpshooter. His first two hollowpoints struck Roy full in the chest. The next one struck the little impaled one, the thrashing one, in the left side of the head. The third shot blew a hole in the shoulder of an old woman, already lame, who had managed to drag herself within one more step of Adam without the young priest having yet seen her.
It was excellent shooting. The shots were dead-on accurate, spaced no more than a half second apart, and worthless against the undead.
They did have some effect. The vampires roared and jerked, the old woman after Adam was flung back briefly out of range, all eyes were turned to the deputy...
All eyes... Felix's eyes.
My God, thought Jack, staring at his gunman, he made a move!
And then Team Crow saw him start to draw.
Part Two Chapter 14
Felix's first two shots, like the deputy's, struck Roy. But while Kirk's hit Roy's chest, Felix's slammed into his forehead. And while Kirk's were .44 magnum hollowpoints, they were only lead. Felix's were nine-millimeter silver blessed by the Vicar of Christ on Earth and they tore half-inch-wide holes through the skull. Roy shrieked and smacked his hands over the wounds and fell writhing to the cement.
But Felix didn't see this. By the time Roy had fallen, Felix had already shot the old woman behind Adam twice, in the throat and the chest, had shot the small one on the crossbow once, in the stomach, and had put one shot each in the next three ghouls to emerge from the shadows: a high school teacher still wearing his shattered glasses, a middle-aged mother of three reported missing for two weeks, and a young drug dealer who waited too late one night to make a buy.