There was a pause before the voice on the line said, "Lawyer-client privilege?"

"Exactly. Can't wait to get your bill. One more thing. Can you first do a quick Internet search? I'm looking for a crime story out of Ithaca, New York sometime within the last several weeks. Vicious attack, multiple victims, plenty of blood. Classic tabloid sort of thing."

"Don't you ever pick up a newspaper or go online?"

"I've been a little busy and we don't get the Internet here."

"What year is it in your world?"

"Freddie, I've got no ti-"

"Okay, listen up. Three adults and two kids wiped out in a trailer park or something. Grisly enough for you? The woman was mutilated, they're saying she was pregnant. No suspects. It's a pretty big story, man. Hello?"

Paul stared at the wall. With the police all over it, why hadn't they traced the McConlons back to Babylon yet? Were the residents of the town so untethered to 21st century American life that they left no trail?

"Come on, Paul. Let's go."

It was Mona. He gave her a hand wave and paused, thinking. One part of him wanted to tell his lawyer to bring holy water, sharpened stakes and crucifixes (might as well forget the garlic). But he knew that was just popular culture. Or thought so, anyway. Besides, Freddie would also bring along a psychiatrist if he made that kind of request.

"That's it for now," he finally said. "Just get in your SUV and get here. Okay?"

Mona and Jamey were standing in the living room doorway, facing him. Waiting. Behind them, he could make out Todd's slumped form on the arm of the lumpy-cushioned couch.

"You're leaving?" Mona asked it with no expression on her face or in her voice.

"Not me. My wife and boy," he explained.

"Come on," she said, beckoning with a hatchet that still carried the bar code sticker from wherever it was purchased.

The world as he knew it seemed to be slowly flip-flopping, turning itself inside out. He walked, ramrod straight and graceful with terror, toward whatever awaited him in the room across the hall.

Jamey slapped Dunbar on the knee and said, "Hey!"

He jerked awake. How he could have nodded off at a time like this...

"Here," Mona said as they clustered around the inert vampires on the floor. She handed the hatchet to Paul.

"What?"

"You're stronger than me. You won't be able to take the head completely off with one whack, but it's important to at least cut through the vocal cords in the first swing."

Like she'd read up on dismantling vampires.

The hatchet felt cold and heavy in his trembling hands. This is not real, he said.

And what if it wasn't? What if he'd allowed himself to fall victim to some mass delusion, one person's vivid fancy sparking the imaginations of everyone else? He could see himself on death row, trying to explain to the chaplain how beheading five or six sleeping people had seemed to make such perfect sense at the time.

"I can't," he said. He looked at Jamey to his left, but the younger man backed away in speechless refusal.

"It would have been faster with the chainsaw," Mona said, "but too loud."

"I thought they couldn't hear anything when they're like this?" Jamey whispered.

"Well. Within reason."

Dunbar growled. "For being the expert, Mona, you don't know shit."

"Just because my folks are vampires doesn't mean I've got a lot of experience decapitating them," she replied hotly.

Paul pointed with the hatchet to the huddled figure in the sleeping bag. The one closest to their feet. "What if you're wrong?"

Mona stared at him. "Wrong?" She flipped back a section of sleeping bag with her shoe to reveal a man's head. He looked to be in his late twenties or so. Weak chin, high forehead, prematurely thinning brown hair. "Gary Leckner," she said, as if that explained everything.

Dunbar, rallying slightly, said, "He was one of them at the Dog on Friday night." He rubbed his shoulder, wincing.

"You need proof, do you?" Mona asked.

She moved to the next prone figure and toed aside the garbage bag shroud to expose a tangle of blond, greasy hair. He lay on his belly, one side of his gaunt, white face exposed. "Jason Penney, Purcell's best friend." Her lips curled in a grimace. "Watch this."

It was a large window with a single shade tied down to a radiator. She asked Jamey to hold the shade tightly while she untied the cord. "Don't let it get away from you," she warned.

She pulled the shade down slightly, just enough to release the locking mechanism, then took the cord from Jamey and let it slip slowly through her fingers.

As the shade gradually rose, Paul watched a razor-thin sliver of white light pop into existence on the bare floorboards and work its way toward the sleeping man. Paul's stomach crawled with fear, dread, revulsion and something even akin to pity as he watched the bar of light pull flush with and slowly overtake the unwashed blond hair. Penney flinched in his sleep as the razor line grew and moved steadily closer. He shuddered. He issued a nearly inaudible mewling sound from deep in the back of his throat. His eyelids twitched as though in deep REM sleep and dreaming whatever horrors a vampire dreams.

"Now watch this," Mona whispered.

Paul did, as repulsively fascinated as when he'd been a kid watching magnifying glass experiments on ants.

The white light crept steadily over the man's face, setting off a series of twitches and grimaces. The head flopped violently, Penney's face thudding against the floor as he tried to shake off the light and the heat in his sleep. Paul watched a thin wisp of smoke curl skyward as the mewling sound gained volume and pitch.

"Enough," he said hoarsely.

His limbs shaking so hard he could barely walk, he picked his way over the unconscious man-vampire-to take the shade cord from the motel owner and tie it down again. The pitiful cries had died down, but the thing twitched for several seconds more before drifting back to sleep. The sunlight had raised a red welt the size of a half dollar on the creature's cheek.

The scent of burned flesh singed the air.

"Give it to me," Dunbar rasped. He held out his hand and Paul gladly yielded the hatchet. Dunbar kicked more of the sleeping bag cloth away from the vampire Leckner and said, "I need more light."

Mona removed the shade from the room's only light source, tipped and aimed the lamp like a flashlight at their victim's throat. "Remember," she said, "try to cut through the vocal cords in the first swing."

Dunbar straightened. "Where are they?"

"In his throat, of course. I mean...I assume."

"So you don't know."

"I don't know. Just swing the fucker as hard as you can."

"Our expert," Dunbar muttered. He clutched the small ax in both hands and began to experiment with grips and stances.

Paul could see the handle darken with sweat where Dunbar's hands clenched it.

He turned away to study a stained section of wallpaper. The lamplight from the floor hit that wall in such a way as to cast a vivid and oversized shadowplay version of unfolding events. Paul watched the shadow axeman pitch back on one leg, raise both arms high above his head and hold the position for a dreadful period of stasis that gave Paul time to avert his gaze or close his eyes...but he could do neither.

When the blade came down, it made a soft, wet sound that ended in a brief, startled inhalation, as though its victim had time to gasp in wonder before the damage was done. Paul kept his eyes fixed on the wall as he heard the harsh breathing of Dunbar, Mona and Jamey-and probably himself.

Jamey grunted.

With a quick sideways glance, Paul saw the younger man on sentinel duty by the front window, his shotgun cradled. Though several feet removed from the murder in progress, speckles of blood dotted Jamey's face and clothing.

Paul wondered how he looked. He shifted, moved a step away from Dunbar's mad blade, but continued watching the wall where the shadowplay continued.

The ax fell again, the motion ending this time with a disconcerting crunch of metal against bone.

"Ah, Jesus," Jamey mumbled. It sounded like he'd be sick.

Paul heard liquid spurting, hitting floor and walls.

The prone shadow near the baseboard twitched. The hatchet man made a strangled sound in the back of his throat as he raised the blade for a third time and brought it down faster. Finally, the motion ended with the thud of metal biting floorboard and the unmistakable sound of a head rolling across the floor.

Dunbar's shadow remained hunched, all but motionless. Paul could hear his labored breathing. A steady, rhythmic drip.

"How's it going?" Paul asked hoarsely.

"How's it going?" Dunbar's gaze cut like a dagger. "You get the next one, Country Club," he snarled.

"I can't take this," said Jamey from his station by the window. He stared at hands splotched with a flying pattern of blood and gore.

Since he'd stood even closer than Jamey to the revolting act, Paul would be even more spattered by the messy death, but he couldn't bear to look.

"Here," Dunbar said as he bumped Paul's hip with the blunt edge of the blade.

He was supposed to take it. It was fair, but Paul kept imagining his wife and toddler son watching him decapitate a sleeping stranger.

"Here," Dunbar repeated, sharper this time.

"I can't take no more," Jamey said.

"We have to," Mona said thickly. "Paul, take the hatchet. It's your turn."

Paul, it's your turn. What his mother used to say when it was his week to do dishes. If Mom could see him now.

"I know a faster way."

Later, Paul would try to examine Jamey Weeks' words. I know a faster way. He'd hear Jamey in his sleep or at odd times and wonder why he hadn't acted sooner. Why he couldn't have predicted what was to follow. In those dreams or fantasies to come he'd see Jamey reach for the shade cord where he'd tied it to the radiator, Jamey always moving as slow as the action sequences in a Sam Peckinpah film. Paul always having time to stop him-or, if it was a particularly gruesome nightmare, to stare in frozen horror, knowing exactly what was to come.

But that wasn't the way it really happened.

I know a faster way.

A blur of movement. Jamey untying the cord, fingers flying.

Mona shouting, "No!"

Too late. The shade flying skyward.

And then, of course, all hell breaking loose.

Chapter Forty-Two.

What happened next could never be retold with absolute certainty. Whenever Paul tried reviewing it, or when it plundered his sleep, the facts as well as the sequence of events would get snarled up. Or some details taking on greater significance in one nightmare, less in another.

Sometimes he'd recall the blood spraying the room like a fountain that began under Jamey's chin, while at other times it seeped.

But the way it really went down was like this. Something like this...

The shade shot upward with cartoonish speed and white-hot sunlight poured in, pierced the room like a brilliant death ray. Someone screamed: the body wrapped in a grimy bedsheet. It rolled across the floor, picking up speed like a cockroach in full retreat. The vampire Jason Penney howled. Still wrapped in garbage-bag plastic that seemed to be melting on his hot body, he-it?-scrabbled to his feet and stumbled for cover. He crashed into Dunbar in the suddenly too-small space and jarred loose the hatchet. Sent it skidding across the floor.

Mona yelped. She sidestepped the frenzied creature and stuck out a foot to upend it as Dunbar stuttered clumsily out of reach. The Sundowner lost his balance and fell into the garage sale couch with a thick arm dangling grotesquely under its cushion.

The vampire in the bedsheet proved to be another female, a girl with greasy black hair. Shrieking, she pawed the air with an arm that blistered as soon as it came in contact with the sunlight. Her damaged hand wrapped around the base of the lamp and she flung it.

The lamp struck Mona in the forehead, the bulb shattering with a hollow pop as it knocked the motel owner off her feet.

The cocooned Jason Penney lay writhing like a worm caught on pavement after the rainclouds had cleared. As the plastic bag melted onto his seething body, the thing rolled over the hatchet on the floor where Dunbar had dropped it. When it rolled away, the hatchet was gone. As if devoured. The creature rose with a cry that contained equal parts frenzied fury and agony. Shielding his face with a sizzling hand, Penney peeked between blistered fingers to take dead aim at Dunbar.

The Sundowner sat glassy-eyed on the couch he'd stumbled onto, seemingly oblivious to the hand that twitched convulsively from under the cushion between his legs.

"Todd! Look out!" Paul screamed.

He snapped out of it as Penney came at him, the bloody hatchet dangling at the end of one ashen arm. Leaping to his feet, Dunbar snatched up the cushion and held it to his chest like the world's least dependable shield.

His attention seemed immediately diverted by the wide shoulders, deep chest and thick, flailing arms he'd exposed by removing the cushion.

"Zeebe," Dunbar said. Dazed.

"Look out," Paul shouted.

Flinching, Todd resumed his defensive stance, cushion held high, just as Penney brought down the blade.