It had wilted them. The horror, the losses, the sense of total naked impotence.
Wilted.
And it was only going to get worse.
So what, he thought next, are you gonna do when it's over, gents? When your town has seen you as worthless and craven and you feel your manhood has been stomped?
Are you gonna do what others have tried?
Are you gonna take it out on us?
When it's over, are you going to cheat us to show you're still men?
Because it really is gonna get worse. That was just the first one.
"All right," he barked abruptly, clapping his hands sharply together.
"Let's get on with it. Rock and roll."
And they did. And it did get worse. The second eruption was a howler and a screecher, again vile and terrifyingly fast, and the black bloody flecks fountained when the bolt struck it and slammed it back down and still it would not die until long seconds after one of the crew had punctured its skull with his pike.
It was horribly gruesome.
It was a broad-daylight nightmare.
It was a woman each townsman had known for over forty years.
After the schoolteacher came the local postmaster, the prom queen and her fullback fiancé, some hapless young college girl with the irreversible misfortune to blow a tire on a country lane that actually was dark and long but only appeared empty.
The usual. But there was something wrong with the proportions.
"Nine in all, counting the leader," said Anthony reading from Cat's clipboard an hour and a half after the last appearance. "But only three goons." He looked up from the page at his boss. "They weren't very busy, were they?"
Crow took the clipboard from his hand and glanced at it. "Nope," was his only response.
Both men looked up at the sound of the Jeep returning up the driveway bearing Cat and the graveyard team. One of the townsmen approached them while they unloaded empty cans of soil coagulant and tossed them into the back of the semi.
"Do you think there's another pit somewhere?" asked Anthony after a few seconds.
Crow looked at his questioner, whose bull neck and massive shoulders remained taut from the pressure of the day. Crow decided he looked awful after five hours of slaughter, decided that was probably good.
"No," he answered. "This is it. I never heard of them keeping goons somewhere else. New ones need to be around the leader anyway."
"Then how come - "
"Dammit, Anthony! I don't know why they didn't turn more recently. Maybe they had something else to do."
"Like what?" Anthony wanted to know.
Crow sighed. They always came to him with questions like this. He was the elder veteran, three years at it now, and probably had, in fact, the longest career of this type in the world. But that didn't mean he knew shit about vampires. Nobody knew shit about vampires. Nobody lived long enough to learn, and it pissed him off the way they all looked at him to know all the answers. What right did they - he caught himself, took a deep breath. He looked again at Anthony, who had been an all-pro outside linebacker with the Seattle Seahawks when Crow had hired him. A man who was deeply loyal, sharply intelligent, and one of the bravest human beings he had ever seen, and who goddamn well deserved an answer from the man who claimed to be his boss and leader.
"I'm sorry, buddy. I just don't know."
Crow told the pikemen to stand at ease, brought the demo bunch in to punch the last of the charges deep into the rubble and went over to talk to Cat who still stood chattering away with the townsmen. On the way he passed the local priest, Father Hernandez, stepping dully forward to turn his trick over the nine piles of ashes. Crow swallowed the resentment the old man's sighing gait brought up in him.
"Priests call it Joplin juice on account of Carl Joplin, the guy who put it together for us," Cat was saying to the mayor and another man whose name Crow didn't recall. "It just makes it hard to climb up out of. Even without it, y'know, it's too hard for most of 'em. Getting the damn coffin open at all is most of it. Remember - "
"Cherry Cat!" Crow called abruptly, not being able to stand it any longer. The townsmen, who just hours before had been too frightened to speak, were now full of patronizing pretend-interest questions about procedure. It was the kind of transition Crow