Didn't these crossmultibredintegratedhybrid airheads know anything? "She's a girl, pinhead," Jervis apprised. "Girls don't have d.i.c.ks."

-Oh, the sister said. -Poo!

They sat opposed, staring into each other's face. Wade had told Lydia what he'd seen at the grove. Lydia had told Wade what she'd seen at the second mound. Neither doubted the other.

"Can two people go nuts at the same time?" Wade asked. "Maybe campus utilities is pumping LSD into the water fountains."

"We have to face it," Lydia said. "What we saw was real."

"We can't just sit around. We've got to do something."

"Sure, but what?"

Wade sneered. "You're the one doing the thinking, remember?"

They both jumped when the phone rang.

Who could it be this late? "Uh, h.e.l.lo?" Wade answered.

"Wade! It's me, Jervis! How's it going?"

Wade instantly relaxed. "Fine, Jerv. Where're you at?"

"I'm at the student car shop. Couldn't sleep, so I thought I'd get started on a little body work."

Body work? At night? "Listen, Jerv, a whole bunch of unbelievable s.h.i.t has happened. You've got to get over here and help."

"Sit tight. I'll be right there."

"Oh, and Jerv..." Wade's voice thickened. "Tom's dead."

"Yeah, I know. I..." Jervis paused. "I mean I-"

But Wade was pausing too. The obvious conclusion beat into his head. There was only one way Jervis could know about Tom...

"You're one of them, aren't you?" Wade grimly asked.

"Hang up!" Lydia yelled.

Jervis dispensed with the act. "The Supremate wants you, Wade. It's for something miraculous. Let me bring you in."

Tom had said the same thing. Whatever they'd done to Tom, they'd now done to Jervis. Holy Jesus, Wade thought.

"There's someone here who wants to talk to you. He can explain better than me." Jervis' voice was replaced by another, darker voice. Besser's. "Wade, my boy! How are you?"

"You diabolical fat psychopath!" Wade returned the greeting. "You're the one who's responsible for all this, aren't you?"

"No, no, I'm just a consultant. And Jervis is a laborer, like Tom before his unfortunate mishap... You want answers, rightly so. But it's not something easily rendered into words-you'll have to open your mind. It's a master plan, my boy, wiser than the sum of all human knowledge. Call it a new societal mechanic." Besser's voice softened. "Call it destiny."

"s.h.i.t on societal mechanics!" Wade yelled. "b.u.g.g.e.r destiny! I want answers! Like who were those nutty looking girls in the black capes and sungla.s.ses?"

"Sisters," Besser answered. "They're technicians, in a sense-engineers of the new beau monde. But they come from the dark; they wear cloaks and sungla.s.ses because sunlight debilitates them."

"This was nighttime!" Wade blurted. "The sun's not out at night!"

"No, but the moon is. Moonlight is merely sunlight reflected off the moon. Without protection, even trace amounts cause cellular dissolution. It's their environment, my boy. The dark."

Like vampires, Wade thought.

Jervis was back on the line. "Is that better?"

"No," Wade said.

"Just give it time, Wade, and give it up. One way or another, I'm gonna get'cha. So let's make a little deal."

"No deals," Wade told him. "I'm hanging up."

"Just listen a second," Jervis insisted. "You give me a break and come in willingly, and I'll guarantee that nothing happens to your new girlfriend. But if you try and give me the slip, I'll hand her over to the sisters. You know what that means?"

"What?" Wade dared.

"They'll eat her," Jervis said. "And what they'll do to her first is even worse. So be smart, Wade. Do we have a deal?"

Wade hung up. His head was spinning.

"He knows where we are, and you can bet he'll be coming for us," Lydia said. "Where was he calling from?"

"The student shop."

"That's a good mile away. We've still got time to get off campus. Come on."

They rushed out of Wade's room, but footsteps greeted them not two strides out the door. They both stopped. Stood. Stared.

Jervis was marching lackadaisically down the hall. He was smiling. He was holding the hewer.

"How the f.u.c.k!" Wade yelled. "You said you were at the student shop!

"I extromitted. Saves a lot of time." Jervis stopped for a moment, c.o.c.ked his head. He was looking at Lydia. "You know, Wade, that's a mighty sweet looking girlfriend you got there. It'd be a shame to let the sisters have her. Before they eat her, they'll let some holotypes f.u.c.k her for a couple of days, the ones with the biggest c.o.c.ks. Then they'd core her a.s.s like an apple. You ever see a human chick get gang-banged in the a.s.s by holotypes?"

Wade's mouth fell open to say something, but he could summon no words.

"It wouldn't be pretty, I can tell you that. They'd Bukake the b.i.t.c.h, Wade. You want your girl to go through that? You want the love of your life to have to drink a gallon of holotype j.i.z.z while another gallon's leaking out her a.s.shole?"

A lot of Jervis' terms weren't jiving with Wade, but he got the picture. I can't let anything happen to her, he thought. He knew he'd sacrifice himself in a heartbeat...

"So do we have a deal?" Jervis asked.

"Here's a deal for you," Lydia said. Wade shouted "No!" too late. The gunshots cracked down the hall. Lydia pumped two .357 semi wads square into Jervis' sternum. Jervis went down.

Wade yelled, "What did you-"

"Shut up and come on!" Lydia yelled back.

They fled down eight flights of stairs. It stood to reason that if Jervis could get here that quickly, those girls in black probably could too. But Wade was still shouting through his shock- "You killed him!" -as they stumbled from the outside exit.

"What did you think he was going to do to us?" Lydia hotly reasoned. "Kiss us? Wake up!"

"But he was my friend! You didn't have to kill him!"

The high, echoic voice boomed like thunder through a mountain valley.

"She didn't, Wade."

Halfway to the Vette, Wade and Lydia froze in their tracks. In dreadful slowness, their eyes roved up the front of the eight story dorm.

Leaning out Wade's window was Jervis, his face agrin in moonlight.

"Judas J. Priest," Lydia whispered. "I put two slugs in his chest..."

Jervis smiled down. "Like the old saying goes, Wade," the dead man's voice echoed. "You can run, but you can't hide."

CHAPTER 25.

They checked into Gilman's Motel. Lydia had made Wade park down the street in a used car lot, so as not to give their location away to anyone who might be hunting them. The motel stood quiet in darkness. Lydia turned out all the lights.

They said very little. What were words worth now? Lydia stripped and went to the shower, to wash away the stench of the grove. She must've smelled like death. But no sooner had she turned the spray to her face, Wade was with her. They washed each other in silence; it was like getting new skin. Afterward, they coupled brutally on the bed, not in pa.s.sion this time, but in desperation. Lydia didn't need to be made love to, she needed to be f.u.c.ked, primitively and without endearments. They gave their bodies to the other for use-to release the steeped horrors of the last day. They did it repeatedly, f.u.c.king and coming, coming and forgetting, venting the mad energy of their fear. The complete inappropriateness of s.e.x-after all they'd seen-made it completely appropriate. They used each other's bodies to purge their minds.

Later, Wade lay panting into the crook of her neck. Lydia gingerly unwrapped her legs. Her s.e.x was sore. She could feel his s.e.m.e.n in her, still warm as it trickled. She liked it. She liked the idea of a small remnant left inside of her. An obscure gift.

He rolled off to her side, a hand on her breast. I'm going to tell him I love him, she thought immediately. But what would he say? And would any purpose be served in saying it?

No, she thought. She'd save it for another time, if fate saw fit to grant her one.

Lydia found her senses suddenly sharp. Perhaps the furious s.e.x had given her reason back. "Those women at the graveyard... Besser said they couldn't come out in the daytime?"

"He said sunlight does something to them. They can't even come out in the moonlight without sungla.s.ses and cloaks."

Daytime, Lydia thought. Sunlight. "Maybe they're-"

"Vampires, I know," Wade picked up. "I was thinking that too."

"They had fangs," Lydia remembered.

"And in the second grove, the girl pointed to that thing on the hill-it looked kind of like a coffin on end."

Vampires. Any other time she'd have laughed at the suggestion. But now after all she'd seen Lydia might not ever laugh at anything again. "Sunlight," she said.

Wade had drifted to sleep. She got up and dressed. She wrote him a note, got his car keys, and quietly left the room.

She drove Wade's Vette straight to the station. But where were Porker and Peerce? A bag of Red Man and several Bavarian cream horns sat on the desk. Wherever they'd gone, they'd left in a rush. And hot coffee sat on White's desk. Hmmm. She felt silly removing the portable spotter from her locker. Dr. Van Helsing gone high tech, she thought. Sure, this was a long shot, but so what? She also took a couple of cordon stakes and a hammer.

It seemed logical to return to the grove, where they'd last seen the women. But details bothered her. Why had Jervis told Wade he'd made his phone call from the shop?

Lydia drove to the shop.

"d.a.m.n it all!" she yelled. Her pa.s.skey didn't fit the padlock on the garage. Someone had put a different lock on. No choice, she reckoned. She aimed her Colt Trooper and looked away. One round blew the lock off its hasp.

Inside, she turned on her SL and looked around. The little used shop existed only for the handful of students who liked to tune up their Jaguars themselves. No one was here now, but in the back she noticed three cars covered by tarps.

She was not surprised when she hauled the first tarp off. A red 300ZX, Penelope's car. "And would this be Sladder's security car?" she wondered aloud, hauling off the second tarp. A white Escort, campus security seals on the doors. And the third tarp slid away to reveal a spray painted black '68 Camaro with a bashed in grille.

She checked the trunks, knowing they would contain no bodies. The ZX and Camaro were clean. It was the trunk of the security car, however, that released death's meaty stench into her face. Her stomach lurched. She held her breath, roving the flashlight through the trunk s.p.a.ce. Christ! Maggot fat and lying in a puddle of coagulated blood was a severed human arm, chopped just above the elbow.

One pulse short of vomiting, Lydia slammed the trunk shut. Behind her stood a row of jugs, like those big metal milk cans with wide mouths and large handles. But these felt like plastic and scarcely had any weight at all. She shined the SL in one. A layer of some off whitish slime covered the bottom, and she remembered the gunk they'd seen in the sump hole at the gravesite. Like lard, she thought. Or wet plaster.

A sudden humming sounded in her ears. She felt it more than heard it, a vibrato in her head. Then the lights snapped on.

She jerked, turned.

Jervis stood before her, a lit Carlton in his mouth. He was grinning. "Welcome to my parlor," he quipped.

Lydia drew her Trooper, aimed, and- Jervis slapped it out of her hand.

She kicked him in the b.a.l.l.s, cracked the SL over his head. Jervis laughed. Then the merry chase began.

She ran madly through the shop. Jervis madly followed. Lydia grabbed the largest, heaviest things she could lay hands on: piston rods, brake drums, torque converters. They all either bounced off her attacker's head or were swatted away like gnats. Last, she heaved an intake manifold, which must've weighed fifty pounds, directly at Jervis' face. He caught it one handed and tossed it aside as though it were Styrofoam.

"Let me save you some time," he suggested, "and show you who you're f.u.c.king with." He picked up an entire dismounted engine, which weighed four or five hundred pounds. He held it under one palm, like a shot putter. "Understand now?" he asked. "You know many guys who can lift a Chevy 427 with one hand?"

"Can't think of any right now," Lydia droned.

He shot putted the engine across the shop. It bounced loudly, pounding cracks in the cement floor.

Jervis smiled, toking his Carlton. "Where's Wade?"

"I don't know," Lydia said.