Billy was nowhere to be seen. Hollister had debated bringing one of the lanterns with him, but there was no sense in giving himself away with a light-although he suspected the vampires already knew he was there. He remembered Top Hat and his leap to the roof, so once he heard Chee lock the door behind him, he turned around and backed into the street with both Colts pointed at the top of the building. When he cleared the roof over the walkway, he tensed, but no one appeared there.
He had no idea what to do. These things were so fast he didn’t know where to look first. The moon lighted the street, but there were shadows everywhere and it took every ounce of self-control not to start firing at every flickering image he saw in the corner of his eye.
Where would the kid go? What had possessed him to run in the first place? Maybe he had a father he thought was still out here. Once he was out of the jail, he might have wanted to try and find him. Maybe he wanted to get away from that bitch Rebecca. Kids do all kinds of reckless things.
He slowly moved south along the street, heading toward the saloon. A door slammed and he nearly jumped out of his boots. It had come from up ahead. Could have been the wind, but he doubted it.
He was certain they were watching him now. No way to tell how many, but certainly more than one. There was an alley between the bank and the saloon and he thought he saw movement at the end of it, but he held his fire, reminding himself not to shoot until he had something to aim at. No sense wasting bullets on shadows. Especially when he didn’t know how many of these creatures were out there.
Van Helsing had written that these things turned regular humans into vampires by drinking their victims’ blood, then making the victims drink the blood of the vampires. According to his journal, no one had been able to quite figure out how it worked, but something in the human soul was lost in the transformation. Van Helsing didn’t necessarily believe they were evil by nature, although they had been cursed, it seemed, but rather they were simply made into predators. They hunted and killed, just like a lion or a wild dog.
Reading through Van Helsing’s journal the last few days and having been one of the few humans who had survived an encounter with these creatures, Hollister didn’t believe any of it. They were evil. End of story.
Hollister was not a religious man, though he had grown up in a house run by very devout parents. There was nothing beyond chores and church in the Hollister household when he was a boy. They worked the farm six days a week and Sunday was spent at chapel. His mother and father tolerated nothing else. He remembered the countless hours sitting in the pews of the Presbyterian church in Tecumseh, Michigan, pulling at the starched collar of his shirt. Usually wearing one of his brother’s hand-me-downs, always so tight around his neck he thought he would suffocate.
He’d spent nearly every hour of his days in the house of God daydreaming. Hoping to leave the farm. He wanted to join the army and fight. So he’d never paid much attention to the sermons or the teachings of the good reverend Forsythe who was so old when Hollister was a boy, he and his brothers had wondered if the man might die on the pulpit right in front of them.
He’d been required to attend services at the Point and he’d done his duty. He’d chuckled to himself a few times then, when he’d caught himself pulling at the collar of the dress grays they were required to wear, mimicking the same thing he’d done as a kid.
The truth of it was, none of the religious teachings had stuck with Hollister much, except for one: the existence of evil in the world.
He had seen enough of it firsthand. Men who were born without souls the way some poor child might be born without a hand. They were nothing more than animals, and during the war, Hollister had put down a few. In Leavenworth he’d found even more: men with a gaping emptiness inside where their soul, the human part of them, should be.
That is what these vampires were. Cursed or not, they were evil. Whatever they represented, they would kill as many human beings as they could. And it was his job to stop them.
He stood in the street, the saloon on his left directly in front of him. Going back in was suicide, he told himself. He didn’t know why, but they were in there. At least some of them. And they either had Billy with them or knew where he was. He would keep killing them until Jonas himself was dead, or he found the kid.
Where was the woman? he thought. Wouldn’t they be trying to draw her out as well? The guns felt suddenly heavy in his hands and he realized he was very tired. Nothing he could do about it though.
He moved slowly forward, the saloon door coming closer. He held the Colt in his left hand straight out in front of him and his right hand was cocked at an angle at his waist. Holy water and silver to slow them down, Chee had said. Wood to kill them. Hollister almost laughed. Chee reduced everything to its simplest terms.
The swinging doors were right in front of him. He couldn’t see inside the saloon-it was too dark and not much of the moonlight penetrated the interior. He could sense the vampires inside now, waiting for him. Slowly he reached out with the Colt, pushing on the saloon door. It creaked on its hinges, sounding as loud as a cannon shot in the quiet night.
He was about to step through when, without warning, he was jerked off his feet and pulled backward into the street.
What the hell?