Chapter Fifty-Seven.

Freddie sat in the white glow of a toppled flashlight, fiddling with a long knife from Paul's butcher block they'd brought with them earlier in the day.

Was that right? Paul thought. Was it still Monday, less than a full day since they'd slipped from the house to audaciously record the sleeping vampires?

The mist held his attention at the window, but the stench of gasoline kept intruding. He glanced at his cell phone time readout even before Freddie said, "What time is it now?"

"Fifth time you've asked in the last hour."

"Fifth time you've looked. It's your looking that leads to my asking. So what time is it?"

Paul sighed. You couldn't argue with a lawyer. "Eleven twenty-eight."

"You could have said eleven-thirty and it would have been close enough."

Freddie was talking too much because he was scared. Paul understood that, but it didn't make it any easier to listen to. He yawned.

"You can sack out if you want," said Freddie. "I'll wake you in an hour."

"It's tempting. But I think whatever happens, it'll happen soon."

Freddie, perched on the shaky desk chair, and Paul, sitting up on the bed he'd dragged over by the back window, guarded front and back views from an upstairs room. Their only firepower came from a half-dozen gasoline-filled beer bottles with torn pillowcase fuses. Their sole flashlight lay on its side and threw a wide, feeble silhouette of light, enough to dispel a little of the darkness without making them much of a target from outside. Paul, also in possession of the unused hatchet, tried picturing himself leading a charge, the blade swinging wildly, a flaming Molotov cocktail also in his grasp, blood in his eye.

Yeah, right.

Freddie said, "So what's with Connie and you?"

Nowhere Paul wanted to be. He said, "What's what?"

Freddie tapped his knife maddeningly on the desk. "She demanded that she come with me because she loves you, make no mistake about that. But the ride up here was a little uncomfortable. A little awkward, maybe, when the subject switched to you."

Paul and Meredith had raised the kids to honor a strict but sensible moral code. Trust, honor, loyalty, integrity. These were all hard, black and white concepts without much room for ambiguity. And yet, as he'd found while his marriage foundered and he'd taken to long lunch breaks with the young, attractive and personable Darby Kinston, life consisted of gray area.

Or maybe he was the one acting like a lawyer, now. Parsing morality itself.

As divorce became more than a fantasy and he suddenly had custodial support, three daughters to put through college and law school and a fourth child on the way, he'd found that it was not a good time to hear bad news about his financial foundation. Especially not from a final-year law student in the compliance department of Anchor/Tatum who just happened to be related to him and pissed off about the direction her father's life was taking.

Connie had tried to warn him that certain transactions looked fishy, the yields too good to be true in a souring economy.

So what if he couldn't compute the numbers to justify his returns? It was a feeder fund, so that was the responsibility of its principal. And who'd complain if it looked like they were making too much money?

"Dad, these returns are so much higher than the market and they have been for years. I've also found SEC complaints about slow settlements."

"Complaints, honey. That's not the same as a formal investigation," he'd told her.

"Dad, I know the difference," she'd shot back.

But what did she know? She wasn't an accountant. She hadn't even passed her bar at that point, and she already had a chip on her shoulder on her mother's behalf. So of course she saw nothing good about the way her father conducted business.

"It's complicated," he told Freddie after a long silence.

Freddie let his blade clunk into the desktop. "It's all complicated. Your life. Mine. Miles Drake's. No one's turns out like you think it's going to."

Drake. Now there was a man who accepted the gray areas in his life. Paul stared out the back window at the red cigarette wink that represented Carl, patrolling the open field. He'd advanced fairly close to the ravine. Paul hoped he didn't get too close to the drop-off.

Freddie said, "What do you think's happened to Dunbar?"

Paul shook his head. After Jermaine had alerted them to the fact that he'd slipped out-even admitting he'd given Todd a brief headstart-Paul and the others had tried calling him back. Joy was okay, though. Still groggily sleeping. Unscathed by the man who'd slept next to her.

Paul said, "Maybe it's just like Jermaine said and he's going after Purcell and the others."

Or to join up and tell the vampires everything he knew about the Sundown defenses.

With the screen off the window and sashes raised, he could hear crickets shrilly calling out for love even in the rain. He picked up Mona's crackly voice on someone's two-way radio, and then Carl's response.

But there was something funny about that response. Paul heard it coming as though in stereo, both through the radio and the voice itself. Which shouldn't have been the case if Carl had wandered as far off as Paul had thought.

He grabbed the flashlight and arced its beam into the backyard.

There. Carl.

Stationed in the center of the yard and wheeling to face the beam pointing him out. Not eighty yards further upfield, near the ravine where Paul had seen the red ember glow.

Or what he'd took to be a cigarette glow.

"Aw, shit," he said softly. Then louder as the full impact hit home. "Aw, shit!"

Chapter Fifty-Eight.

Paul's cry alerted Carl just as the red eyes charged him.

The mattress bounced as Freddie plopped next to him at the window, shouting "What? What? What is it?"

Paul zeroed in with the flashlight beam again, picking up Carl flailing away, beating the rat off with a tree branch and muttering curses. Off the spotlight, Paul could see more red eyes climbing out of the ravine and charging, maybe a half dozen pairs or more.

"Get inside," Freddie screamed into the night.

Paul grabbed a radio from the desk, stabbed a button and blurted, "They're coming from the woods."

He wasn't sure anyone was monitoring the call or even if he'd used the right channel, but it would have to do.

Loud thrashing from below. Again he aimed his flashlight beam on the night scene out that back window. Carl was holding his own against the one savage rodent and the others hadn't overtaken him yet. From the tree line where the land dropped off, he saw bushes bent as shadowy shapes much heavier than rats thrashed upward. Paul's beam caught a white hand gripping a patch of weeds at the edge of the ravine, and a human body lifting itself topside.

"To your right!" Freddie helplessly warned the Sundowner in the open.+ Carl stopped beating at the vicious rat long enough to take in the larger shape crawling to its feet. The ember at the end of Carl's tightly clenched cigarette grew brighter as he pulled a beer bottle toward his face and lit the cloth fuse. From a quick windup, he flung the homemade bomb. It hit the vampire too soon, before the flame had discovered the fumes. It fizzled and died in the now steady rain.

The vampire had been caught by surprise, though, and he threw himself over the ravine's edge as the bottle bounced helplessly off his elbow.

"He'll be back," Paul muttered.

Three more human shapes bound from the ravine as the door swung open behind them and got backstopped by the wall. Paul and Freddie wheeled to confront whatever was coming at them, a voice saying, "Easy, easy. It's me."

Big Denver Dugan stood in the doorway with his rifle on his hip and a look on his face like he'd seen it all before. He crossed the room, grabbed the bed the two men were perched on, and flung it aside. Freddie and Paul toppled to the floor in an indignant heap and crawled to join the big man at the window.

Denver, who had his rifle barrel poked out and the scope up to his eye, got the bolt action flying. Squeezed off a muffled bark of a round. Expelled a shell with a flick of the bolt and fired twice more, knocking down all three charging vampires.

"Holy shit," Freddie muttered, obviously impressed.

Two more shadowy figures sprang topside. Paul tracked them with his flashlight beam for the benefit of the Sundowner struggling on the ground. While kicking at rats slashing at his ankles, Carl swung a tree limb at one of the charging vampires, thumping him in the ribs and sending him sprawling.

The second one was smaller than the first. The Craven boy Drake had told him about, Paul realized as the young night creature dodged a blow and snapped the air with his teeth.

Carl backed up, still swinging. Denver elbowed himself more room at the window and began steadily pinging lead into the rain. Mud divots flew.

"Noooo," a voice screamed, a bloodcurdling sound.

And now a teenage girl-Patty Craven, Paul decided-charged to the aid of her kid brother.

"Keerist," Denver said softly.

He targeted the girl, but missed. She charged like a wide receiver, running patterns, her dark hair flying wet behind her. She grabbed her brother just as one of Denver's .22s found its mark.

The Craven siblings fell. Paul winced at the sight of the two bullet-torn bodies, but that was before they rolled and rose to groggy seated positions.

Three more shadows disentangled from the vegetation at the ravine's edge.

The boy and his sister regained their footing.

"Hit them in the heart," Paul advised.

"Try it sometime," Denver replied as he twisted, pushed and pulled the bolt and squeezed off two more rounds. The second, time, all that could be heard was a metallic clack.

The old guy cursed. He tossed aside the long-barreled weapon and backed up to the middle of the motel room as he pawed at his clothing.

"Hope I got a cigarette," he said before finding one.

Paul swung his flashlight at every shadow that moved out there. Carl was swinging away with his tree stump, screaming "Someone do something" as he made a slow retreat to one of the lower floor windows.

He'd raised a screen beforehand for just such an emergency escape, but Paul saw that he'd never be able to wiggle through the small opening and into the relative safety of a room without exposing his back.

One bite was all it took.

Downed shadows on the field were clambering to their feet, and more climbed out of the ravine. One of the newcomers had flowing blond hair that instantly identified him at Jason Penney.

The air rushed out of Paul's lungs with the force of a hiccup as he was suddenly knocked aside. Freddie, next to him, sprawled in similar upended fashion as Denver cleared even more room at the window.

"Take this, you bastards," he shouted before dropping the flaming bottle into the night.

Paul got back to the window just in time to see it shatter, splashing gasoline all over the Craven boy and giving Carl time to duck into the first-floor room.

The young vampire looked up, his eyes gleaming with white-hot hunger.

No explosion. No eruption of fire. Not like in the movies at all.

"Son of a bitch," said Denver.

He filled his lungs with cigarette smoke, turning half the remaining butt to ember. He removed it from between his lips, stared at it for half a second, then flung it out the window.

Patty Craven screamed even louder than her little brother as his drenched clothing erupted in flames. The boy ran, a fireball, a beautiful streaking meteor of light and anguish.

Denver already had another smoke fired up. He used it to light another pillowcase fuse. He tossed the bottle farther out the window than the first one. It missed the roving shadow, but smashed on the ground in front of its feet, lighting the vampire's ankles. The flames grew as the creature made every effort to outrun it.

Freddie grabbed Denver's cigarette from his mouth and jammed it between his own lips. It crackled as he inhaled, and the ember grew. Beginner's luck, his first flaming missile taking out two of the night creatures.

Jason Penney's face turned skyward, contorted in agony and fury as his clothing blackened and drew tight around him. The vampire fell and rolled. Still smoldering in the rain, he crawled to the ravine lip and let gravity pull him from view.

But not before throwing Paul a glare of rage and pain that made him shudder.

"Listen," said Freddie.

All three froze in position. Paul could hear Carl slamming the window and stomping around in the room directly beneath them. Under that sequence of sounds, he heard the deep rumble of an engine of impressive size. He felt it in his feet as the motel trembled. They heard D.B. throwing out orders, his voice without its usual tight control.

"Everyone back, dammit," he shouted. "Jermaine, pick 'em off!"

"Stay here," Paul ordered the others before bolting from the room.

"Sweet Jesus," he heard Jermaine cry out.

He was crouched behind a metal balcony rail, his Smith & Wesson pointed at the night sky. The gun in his hand looked forgotten, useless.

Which it was, Paul admitted. Might as well have been a magnet-tipped dart against the monstrous vehicle roaring straight at the cars barricading the top of the driveway.

Paul fell back into the motel room he'd vacated just as he heard the other two crying out and flinging themselves to the floor. What buzzed past his face sounded like a hornet before it whacked a wall and buried itself into plaster that turned instantly to dust. The flashlight fell and threw wild, rolling patterns of light and shadow at the wall and ceiling.

In the next moment, more bullets zinged through the air and punched holes in the plaster, shattered the mirror and turned the cheap wall art to splinters. Outside, metal squealed and crashed against metal, glass broke and voices carried.