The Narrows(99)

Ben kicked open the door, shoving his gun straight into the darkness with one hand while his other hand went quickly for the light switch beside the door. The lights jumped on, stinging Ben’s eyes. He swatted blindly at the air then gripped the gun again in both hands. Shirley’s fingernails dug deeper into his back.

The noise came from the bell-shaped birdcage. It had fallen to the floor and scraped along the concrete as the small bat inside beat frantically against the bars of the cage. It unleashed a series of aggravated screeches that cleaved through the center of Ben’s skull.

“Oh,” Shirley sighed at his back, her breath warm along the pockets of sweat that had broken out across the back of Ben’s shirt. The relief was evident in her voice. She managed it a second time. “Oh…”

Despite the insanity all around them, Ben felt a burst of laughter borne on the waters of his own stark relief, threaten his throat. “I forgot that thing was in here,” he said.

“It’s going berserk,” said Shirley.

The bat raged against the bars of the cage with enough force to drag it several inches across the floor. It screeched and tittered, its clawed wings and scrabbling feet clanging against the cage. At one point, it hooked a pair of fangs around one of the bars and hung suspended by its snout.

“Looks like it wants to get out,” Shirley said. She took a step closer to the cage, still clinging to the back of Ben’s shirt with one hand.

A nonspecific disquiet settled around Ben like a shroud. Piping up in his head was Brandy Crawly’s voice, whispering, The bats go wherever he goes. I mean, I think so, anyway. And on the heels of that, He isn’t dead. He’s just…changed. He’s some kind of…vampire now.

Again, the lights blinked off then back on. Very soon, the storm would knock the power out for good.

“It wants to get out, all right,” Ben said, crouching down beside the bat’s cage. Its beady little eyes stared at him. Its fangs, still clinging to one of the bars, looked like the fangs of a rattlesnake. “It knows something. It wants to get somewhere.” Ben stood. “I want to know where it wants to go.”

“What are you talking about, Ben?”

“This thing’s a homing device.” I mean, I think so, anyway, Brandy added in his head. “If I let it out, I bet it takes me straight to…”

“To where?” Shirley asked.

You have to kill the head vampire, Ben.

Yet he couldn’t bring himself to speak the words aloud. Despite all that had transpired in Stillwater in the past two weeks, it was still too ridiculous to think about…still too insane…

“To whatever has been going on in this town,” he said at last. It was the best he could do to speak the truth of it. He holstered his handgun and found that his hands shook terribly. “How do you follow a goddamn bat, Shirley?” He wondered if Eddie would know—Eddie, with all his ridiculous horror magazines, Stephen King novels, and beloved gory vampire films. When was the last time he’d heard from Eddie? Ben’s mind raced. He couldn’t think straight.

“Ha!” Shirley cried, startling him. When he faced her, he found a surprising grin stretched across her otherwise bleary face. Her eyes were alight. “You don’t follow a bat, Ben. You track it.”

“Yeah? And how do you do that?”

Shirley released her grip on the back of Ben’s shirt then went immediately to one of the two-by-four shelves that were hammered straight into the drywall. She rummaged through stacks of boxes until she found what she was looking for—a plastic case roughly the size of a laptop. Shirley set the case on an overturned five-gallon bucket and opened it. Pressed into the foam padding was a GPS screen, a jumble of wires, and four nondescript black boxes, each one approximately the size of a silver dollar.

“What is that?” Ben asked.

Shirley picked up one of the black boxes and examined it more closely in the palm of her hand. “A tracking device. Don’t you remember? Cumberland sent them over to us, in case we ever needed to track a vehicle. Mike laughed.”

“You don’t mean…I mean, you think…”

“Why not?”

Ben peered down at the tiny black box in the center of Shirley’s hand. “Holy crap, Shirl. You’re a goddamn genius.”

“I want a raise when this is all over,” Shirley said.



2



Her mother took a Valium, poured a glass of red wine, and fell asleep on the living room sofa. Once Brandy was confident her mother was out, she went up into her mother’s bedroom and opened the bottom drawer of the dresser. There was a pink shoebox in there and it was filled with her grandmother’s belongings—various trinkets and bits of costume jewelry that the woman had left to Wendy, her only daughter, just before she died many years earlier. Brandy had very few memories of her grandmother but she knew about the shoebox. On occasion, whenever her mother felt nostalgic, they went through the ancient and tarnished relics together. There were large, spangled rings and great looping necklaces, and earrings that looked as though they’d been made from the shells of tortoises. But those were not the items Brandy concerned herself with on this night.

Brandy’s grandmother had been a devout Catholic. Inside the box, Brandy located a silver crucifix, nearly seven inches long. It was heavy and cold and felt strangely powerful in Brandy’s hand. There was also a rosary in the box. Brandy didn’t know if rosary beads harbored the same power against vampires that crucifixes did but she didn’t think there was any harm in taking that, too.