Half a dozen black-clad forms clustered on the corner ahead, staring at them.
"Got to get out of here!" Bernadette said and hit the gas.
The old car coughed and died.
"Oh, no!" Bernadette wailed, frantically pumping the gas pedal and turning the key as the dark forms glided toward them. "No!"
"Easy, dear," Carole said, laying a gentle hand on her arm. "It's all right. They're just kids."
Perhaps "kids" was not entirely correct. Two males and four females who looked to be in their late teens and early twenties, but carried any number of adult lifetimes behind their heavily made-up eyes. Grinning, leering, they gathered around the car, four on Bernadette's side and two on Carole's. Sallow faces made paler by a layer of white powder, kohl-crusted eyelids, and black lipstick. Black fingernails, rings in their ears and eyebrows and nostrils, chrome studs piercing cheeks and lips. Their hair ranged the color spectrum, from dead white through burgundy to crankcase black. Bare hairless chests on the boys under their leather jackets, almost-bare chests on the girls in their black push-up bras and bustiers. Boots of shiny leather or vinyl, fishnet stockings, layer upon layer of lace, and everything black, black, black.
"Hey, look!" one of the boys said. A spiked leather collar girded his throat; acne lumps bulged under his whiteface. "Nuns!" "Penguins!" someone else said. Apparently this was deemed hilarious. The six of them screamed with laughter.
We're not penguins, Carole thought. She hadn't worn a full habit in years. Only the headpiece.
"Shit, are they gonna be in for a surprise tomorrow morning!" said a buxom girl wearing a silk top hat.
Another roar of laughter by all except one. A tall slim girl with three large black tears tattooed down one cheek, and blond roots peeking from under her black-dyed hair, hung back, looking uncomfortable. Carole stared at her. Something familiar there...
She rolled down her window. "Rosita? Rosita Hernandez, is that you?'
More laughter. " 'Rosita'?" someone cried. "That's Wicky!"
The girl stepped forward and looked Carole in the eye. "Yes, Sister. That used to be my name. But I'm not Rosita anymore."
"l can see that."
She remembered Rosita. A sweet girl, extremely bright, but so quiet. A voracious reader who never seemed to fit in with the rest of the kids. Her grades plummeted as a junior. She never returned for her senior year. When Carole had called her parents, she was told that Rosita had left home. She'd been unable to learn anything more.
"You've changed a bit since I last saw you. What is it—three years now?"
"You talk about change?" said the top-hatted girl, sticking her face in the window. "Wait'll tonight. Then you'll really see her change!" She brayed a laugh that revealed a chrome stud in her tongue.
"Butt out, Carmilla!" Rosita said.
Carmilla ignored her. "They're coming tonight, you know. The Lords of the Night will be arriving after sunset, and that'll spell the death of your world and the birth of ours. We will present ourselves to them, we will bare our throats and let them drain us, and we'll join them. Then we'll rule the night with them!"
It sounded like a canned speech, one she must have delivered time and again to her black-clad troupe.
Carole looked past Carmilla to Rosita. "Is that what you believe? Is that what you really want?"
The girl shrugged her high thin shoulders. "Beats anything else I got going."
Finally the old Datsun shuddered to life. Carole heard Bernadette working the shift. She touched her arm and said, "Wait. Just one more moment, please."
She was about to speak to Rosita when Carmilla jabbed her finger at Carole's face, shouting.
"Then you bitches and the candy-ass god you whore for will be fucking extinct!"
With a surprising show of strength, Rosita yanked Carmilla away from the window.
"Better go, Sister Carole," Rosita said.
The Datsun started to move.
"What the fuck's with you, Wicky?" Carole heard Carmilla scream as the car eased away from the dark cluster. "Getting religion or somethin? Should we start callin you Sister Rosita now?"
"She was one of the few people who was ever straight with me," Rosita said. "So fuck off, Carmilla."
By then the car had traveled too far to hear more.
* * *
"What awful creatures they were!" Bernadette said, staring out the window in Carole's convent room. She hadn't been able to stop talking about the incident on the street. "Almost my age, they were, and such horrible language!"
The room was little more than a ten-by-ten-foot plaster box with cracks in the walls and the latest coat of paint beginning to flake off the ancient embossed tin ceiling. She had one window and, for furnishings, a crucifix, a dresser and mirror, a work table and chair, a bed, and a night stand. Not much, but she gladly called it home. She took her vow of poverty seriously.
"Perhaps we should pray for them."
"They need more than prayer, I'd think. Believe me you, they're heading for a bad end." Bernadette removed the oversized rosary she wore looped around her neck, gathering the beads and its attached crucifix in her hand. "Maybe we could offer them some crosses for protection?"
Carole couldn't resist a smile. "That's a sweet thought, Bern, but I don't think they're looking for protection."
"Sure, and lookit after what I'm saying," Bernadette said, her own smile rueful. "No, of course they wouldn't."
"But we'll pray for them," Carole said.
Bernadette dropped into a chair, stayed there for no more than a heartbeat, then was up again, moving about, pacing the confines of Carole's room. She couldn't seem to sit still. She wandered out into the hall and came back almost immediately, rubbing her hands together as if washing them.
"It's so quiet," she said. "So empty."
"I certainly hope so," Carole said. "We're the only two who are supposed to be here."
The little convent was half empty even when all its residents were present. And now, with St. Anthony's School closed for the coming week, the rest of the nuns had gone home to spend Easter Week with brothers and sisters and parents. Even those who might have stayed around the convent in past years had heard the rumors that the undead might be moving this way, so they'd scattered. Carole's only living relative was an aunt, her mother's sister Joyce, who lived in Harrisburg and usually invited her to spend Easter and the following week with her; but she hadn't invited her this year, and wasn't answering her phone. She had a son in California; maybe she'd gone to stay with him. Lots of people were leaving the East Coast.
Bernadette hadn't heard from her family in Ireland for months. Carole feared she never would.
So that left just the two of them to hold the fort, as it were. The convent was part of a complex consisting of the church itself, the rectory, the grammar school and high school buildings, the tiny cemetery, and the sturdy old two-story rooming house that was now the convent. She and Bernadette had taken second-floor rooms, leaving the first floor to the older nuns.
Carole wasn't afraid. She knew they'd be safe here at St. Anthony's, although she wished there were more people left in the complex than just Bernadette, herself, and Father Palmeri.
"I don't understand Father Palmeri," Bernadette said. "Locking up the church and keeping his parishioners from making the stations of the cross on Good Friday. Who's ever heard of such a thing, I ask you? I just don't understand it."
Carole thought she understood. She suspected that Father Alberto Palmeri was afraid. Sometime this morning he'd locked up the rectory, barred the door to St. Anthony's, and hidden himself in the church basement.
God forgive her for thinking it, but to Sister Carole's mind Father Palmeri was a coward.