was tumbling forward through the last of the glass and landing on something soft and dead like an old and trusted friend but not to think about it. He rose to his feet and turned for Cat, Cherry Cat, without whom there was no point anyway and - And it was light again for the last time and Cat was out and beside him and lifting him up and there - back there through the window was the priest, Father Hernandez, not nutless at all, stabbing the edge of his huge silver cross right into the fiend's forehead before dying, decapitated, from a backhanded, almost casual, blow..
All blood and horror everywhere back there, on the walls and the ceiling and - And the sheriff, stunned into immobility, stood like a lump in the middle of the parking lot staring at the old battered Cadillac convertible alongside his patrol car pickup.
"Jack, please!" Cat moaned, shoving him along and Crow looked down at him and saw the tears in his eyes and realized that it was fear for his own safety that so terrified his friend.
So he hurried, because he couldn't stand to see Cherry Cat crying.
Crow opened the side door to the pickup Cat shoved him at and climbed in beside the sheriff that somehow Cat had collected from the driver's side. And then Cat was inside too behind the wheel and Omigod! The keys! Where are the... but they were there, the sheriff had just left 'em there in the ignition, why not? Who would steal it?
And Crow found himself laughing at this as they screeched out of the parking lot onto the highway. Because it was better, it was fun, to have something to laugh at besides crying at the continuing thumps of horror from inside the motel or allow himself to actually focus on the slaughtered occupants of the convertible, the whores who had been too late, but not late enough and - "CROWWW!" sounded out in the darkness, piercing through the roar of the engine and the distance and twisting each man in the cab of the truck into a little ball. "CROWWW!" shouted the vampire, as Cat gunned the engine even harder and the truck vaulted forward to sixty, seventy, eighty miles an hour down the two-lane state highway.
"CROWWW!" blasted them as the vampire caught them and leapt onto the back of the truck bed and slammed his hands through the rear window and Crow found that he had the sheriff's huge cannon pistol in his hand and he jabbed it in the monster's face and - why not? - pulled the trigger.
The fiend, all shiny blood-red teeth of his ghastly smile and soul-ripping gleam of intelligence, disappeared backward rolling from the concussion of the cannon-pistol, cracking through the tailgate and slamming it open like it wasn't there and then skidding all asprawl on the sandpaper asphalt.
"Oh! Yes, yes! Ha! Hey!" the sheriff whined delightedly at the sight, the thought that the monster could be killed. But even knowing better, the other two in the cab still crumpled a little more as the sheriff's cry of gasping pleasure changed to a shrill baby-boy whimper at the sight of the monster back on his feet almost immediately, almost before he had stopped kicking, and coming back at them again.
It got close enough for them to see the hole from the cannon pistol already closing up, trapping the trickling black blood left from the priest's stabbing cross and - "Jesus Christ!" screamed Crow as they topped over a hill at over a hundred miles an hour up behind a farm truck doing maybe twenty in the center of the highway.
Cat wrenched the truck to the left and missed the farmer but got onto the shoulder and got sideways and careened back across the center line starting to spin around and around and topping up over another hill so they could see the city square in the distance and Crow thought, Well, at least we almost made it into town. And he mourned the unattainable sight of redemption of that little town square with the morning sun just starting to peek out over...
The sun! The fucking sun! was his last thought before the truck began to tumble, rolling over and over on its sides and then end over end and then sliding forever and ever down the main Street of the little Indiana town.
He awoke first and got himself up. And then he got the other two up. And