Carole knew how Bern felt. Who had said religion was an opiate of the people? Marx? Whoever it was, he hadn't been completely wrong. For Carole, sitting in the cool, peaceful quiet beneath St. Anthony's gothic arches, praying, meditating, and feeling the presence of the Lord were like a daily dose of an addictive drug. A dose she and Bern had been denied today. Bern's withdrawal pangs seemed worse than Carole's.
The younger nun paused as she passed the window, then pointed down to the street.
"And now who in God's name would they be?"
Carole rose and stepped to Bernadette's side. Passing on the street below was a cavalcade of shiny new cars—Mercedes Benzes, BMW's, Jaguars, Lin-colns, Cadillacs—all with New York plates, all cruising from the direction of the Parkway.
The sight of them in the dusk tightened a knot in Carole's stomach. The lupine faces she spied through the windows looked brutish, and the way they drove their gleaming luxury cars down the center line ... as if they owned the road.
A Cadillac convertible with its top down passed below; four scruffy occupants lounged on the seats. The driver wore a cowboy hat, a woman in leather sat next to him. Both were drinking beer. When Carol saw the driver glance up and look their way, she tugged on Bern's sleeve.
"Stand back! Don't let them see you!"
"Why not? Who are they?"
"I'm not sure, but I've heard of bands of men who do the vampires' dirty work during the daytime, who've traded their souls for the promise of immortality later on, and for ... other things now."
"Sure and you're joking, Carole!"
Carole shook her head. "I wish I were."
"Oh, dear God, and now the sun's down." She turned frightened blue eyes toward Carole. "Do you think maybe we should . . . ?"
"Lock up? Most certainly. I know what His Holiness said about there not being any such things as vampires, but maybe he's changed his mind since then and just can't get word to us."
"Sure and you're probably right. You close these and I'll check down the hall." She hurried out, her voice trailing behind her. "Oh, I do wish Father Palmeri hadn't locked the church. I'd dearly love to say a few prayers there.
Sister Carole glanced out the window again. The fancy new cars were gone, but rumbling in their wake was a convoy of trucks—big, eighteen-wheel semis, lumbering down the center line. What were they for? What did they carry? What were they delivering to town?
Suddenly a dog began to bark, and then another, and more and more until it seemed as if every dog in town was giving voice.
To fight the unease rising like a flood tide within her, Sister Carole concentrated on the simple manual tasks of closing and locking her window and drawing the curtains.
But the dread remained, a sick, cold certainty that the world was falling into darkness, that the creeping hem of shadow had reached her corner of the globe, and that without some miracle, without some direct intervention by a wrathful God, the coming night hours would wreak an irrevocable change on her life.
She began to pray for that miracle.
* * *
Carole and Bernadette had decided to leave the convent of St. Anthony's dark tonight.
And they decided to spend the night together in Carole's room. They dragged in Bernadette's mattress, locked the door, and doubled-draped the window with the bedspread. They lit the room with a single candle and prayed together.
Yet the music of the night filtered through the walls and the doors and the drapes, the muted moan of sirens singing antiphon to their hymns, the muffled pops of gunfire punctuating their psalms, reaching a crescendo shortly after midnight, then tapering off to ... silence.
Carole could see that Bernadette was having an especially rough time of it. he cringed with every siren wail, jumped at every shot. Carole shared Bern's terror, but she buried it, hid it deep within for her friend's sake. After all, Carole was older, and she knew she was made of sterner stuff. Bernadette was an innocent, too sensitive even for yesterday's world, the world before the undead. How would she survive in the world as it would be after tonight? She'd need help. Carole would provide as much as she could.
But for all the imagined horrors conjured by the night noises, the silence was worse. No human wails of pain and horror had penetrated their sanctum, but imagined cries of human suffering echoed through their minds in the ensuing stillness.
"Dear God, what's happening out there?" Bernadette said after they'd finished reading aloud the Twenty-third Psalm.
She huddled on her mattress, a blanket thrown over her shoulders. The candle's flame reflected in her frightened eyes and cast her shadow, high, hunched, and wavering, on the wall behind her.
Carole sat cross-legged on her bed. She leaned back against the wall and fought to keep her eyes open. Exhaustion was a weight on her shoulders, a cloud over her brain, but she knew sleep was out of the question. Not now, not tonight, not until the sun was up. And maybe not even then.
"Easy, Bern—" Carole began, then stopped.
From below, on the first floor of the convent, a faint thumping noise.
"What's that?" Bernadette said, voice hushed, eyes wide.
"I don't know."
Carole grabbed her robe and stepped out into the hall for a better listen.
"Don't you be leaving me alone, now!" Bernadette said, running after her with the blanket still wrapped around her shoulders.
"Hush," Carole said. "Listen. It's the front door. Someone's knocking. I'm going down to see."
She hurried down the wide, oak-railed stairway to the front foyer. The knocking was louder here, but still sounded weak. Carole put her eye to the peephole, peered through the sidelights, but saw no one.
But the knocking, weaker still, continued.
"Wh-who's there?" she said, her words cracking with fear.
"Sister Carole," came a faint voice through the door. "It's me ... Rosita. I'm hurt."
Instinctively, Carole reached for the handle, but Bernadette grabbed her arm.
"Wait! It could be a trick!"
She's right, Carole thought. Then she glanced down and saw blood leaking across the threshold from the other side.
She gasped and pointed at the crimson puddle. "That's no trick."
She unlocked the door and pulled it open. Rosita huddled on the welcome mat in a pool of blood.
"Dear sweet Jesus!" Carole cried. "Help me, Bern!"
"What if she's a vampire?" Bernadette said, standing frozen. "They can't cross the threshold unless you ask them in."
"Stop that silliness! She's hurt!"
Bernadette's good heart won out over her fear. She threw off the blanket, revealing a faded blue, ankle-length flannel nightgown that swirled just above the floppy slippers she wore. Together they dragged Rosita inside. Bernadette closed and relocked the door immediately.
"Call 9-1-1!" Carole told her.