"Rotten piece of filth!"
He swung the vampire by its neck and let it fly against the cinderblock wall. It impacted with what should have been bone-crushing force, but bounced off, rolled on the floor, and regained its feet in one motion, ready to attack again. Strong as he was, Joe knew he was no match for this thing's power. He turned, grabbed his big silver crucifix, and charged the creature.
"Hungry? Eat this!"
As the creature bared its fangs and hissed at him, Joe shoved the long lower end of the cross's upright into the gaping maw. Blue-white light flickered along the silver length of the crucifix, reflecting in the creature's startled, agonized eyes as its flesh sizzled and crackled. The vampire let out a strangled cry and tried to turn away but Joe wasn't through with it yet. He was literally seeing red as rage poured out of a hidden well and swirled through him. He rammed the cross farther down the thing's gullet. Light flashed deep in its throat, illuminating the pale tissues from within. It tried to grab the cross and pull it out but the flesh of its fingers burned and smoked wherever it came in contact with it.
Finally Joe stepped back and let the thing squirm and scrabble up the wall and out the window into the night. Then he turned to Zev. If anything had happened—
"Hey, Reb!" he said, kneeling beside the older man. "You all right?"
"Yes," Zev said, struggling to his feet. "Thanks to you."
Joe slumped onto a crate, momentarily weak as his rage dissipated. This is not what I'm about, he thought. But it had felt so damn good to let loose on that vampire. Almost too good.
I'm falling apart. . . like everything else in the world.
"That was too close," Joe said, giving the older man's shoulder a fond squeeze.
"For that vampire, too close for sure." Zev replaced his yarmulke. "And would you please remind me, Father Joe, that in the future if ever I should maybe get my blood sucked and become undead that I should stay far away from you."
Joe laughed for the first time in too long. It felt good.
- 3 -
JOE . . .
They climbed out of Morton's basement shortly after dawn. Joe carried an unopened bottle of Scotch—for later. He stretched his cramped muscles and shielded his eyes from the rising sun. The bright light sent stabs of pain through his brain.
"Oy," Zev said as he pulled his hidden bicycle from behind the dumpster. "Look what he did."
Joe inspected the bike. The front wheel had been bent so far out of shape that half the spokes were broken.
"Beyond fixing, Zev."
"Looks like I'll be walking back to Lakewood."
Joe looked around, searching the ground. "Where'd our visitor go?"
He knew it couldn't have got far. He followed drag marks in the sandy dirt around to the far side of the dumpster, and there it was—or rather what was left of it: a rotting, twisted corpse, blackened to a crisp and steaming in the morning sunlight. The silver crucifix still protruded from between its teeth.
"Three ways we know to kill them," Zev said. "A stake through the heart, decapitation, or exposing them to sunlight. I believe Father Cahill has just found a fourth."
Joe approached and gingerly yanked his cross free of the foul remains.
"Looks like you've sucked your last pint of blood," he said and immediately felt foolish.
Who was he putting on the macho act for? Zev certainly wasn't going to buy it. Too out of character. But then, what was his character these days? He used to be a parish priest. Now he was a nothing. A less than nothing.
He straightened and turned to Zev.
"Come on back to the retreat house, Reb. I'll buy you breakfast."
But as Joe turned and began walking away, Zev stayed and stared down at the corpse.
"They say most of them don't wander far from where they spent their lives," Zev said. "Which means it's unlikely this fellow was Jewish if he lived around here. Probably Catholic. Irish Catholic, I'd imagine."
Joe stopped and turned. He stared at his long shadow. The hazy rising sun at his back cast a huge hulking shape before him, with a dark cross in one shadow hand and a smudge of amber light where it poured through the bottle of Scotch in the other.
"What are you getting at?" he said.
"The Kaddish would probably not be so appropriate so I'm just wondering if someone should maybe give him the last rites or whatever it is you people do when one of you dies."
"He wasn't one of us," Joe said, feeling the bitterness rise in him. "He wasn't even human."
"Ah, but he used to be before he was killed and became one of them. So maybe now he could use a little help."
Joe didn't like the way this was going. He sensed he was being maneuvered.
"He doesn't deserve it," he said and knew in that instant he'd been trapped.
"I thought even the worst sinner deserved it," Zev said.
Joe knew when he was beaten. Zev was right. He shoved the cross and bot-de into Zev's hands—a bit roughly, perhaps—then went and knelt by the twisted cadaver. He administered a form of the final sacrament. When he was through he returned to Zev and snatched back his belongings.
"You're a better man than I am, Gunga Din," he said as he passed.
"You act as if they're responsible for what they do after they become undead," Zev said hurrying along beside him, panting as he matched Joe's pace.
"Aren't they?"
"No."
"You're sure of that?"
"Well, not exactly. But they certainly aren't human anymore, so maybe we shouldn't hold them accountable on human terms."
Zev's reasoning tone flashed Joe back to the conversations they used to have in Horovitz's deli.
"But Zev, we know there's some of the old personality left. I mean, they stay in their home towns, usually in the basements of their old houses. They go after people they knew when they were alive. They're not just dumb predators, Zev. They've got the old consciousness they had when they were alive. Why can't they rise above it? Why can't they ... resist?"
"I don't know. I've never had the opportunity to sit down with one and discuss it. Maybe they can't resist. To tell the truth, the question has never occurred to me. A fascinating concept: an undead refusing to feed. Leave it to Father Joe to come up with something like that. We should discuss this on the trip back to Lakewood."
Joe had to smile. So that was what this was all about.
"I'm not going back to Lakewood."