Let's just pray we don't have to use them, she thought.
What they most likely would use were the two peanut butter sandwiches on home-baked bread they'd brought along. Somewhere old Mrs. Delmonico had found whole wheat flour and a propane stove.
They left the shotgun in the car, but Lacey carried her pistol at the ready as they hurried across the deserted boardwalk and down to the beach. Lacey stayed in the lead when they ducked under the boards where they'd buried Father Joe, but stopped dead in her tracks with a cry of alarm.
Carole bumped into her from behind. "What—?"
"Oh, no!" Lacey cried. "It can't be!"
Carole pushed her aside and saw what she was looking at. The grave had been disturbed.
"He's already out!" Lacey wailed.
"No. He can't be. The sun hasn't set yet."
She pointed to areas of darker sand atop the light. "But some of the sand's still damp. That means it came from deeper down. And not too long ago."
"Then someone's dug him up. It's the only explanation."
Lacey's eyes were wild. "But who? We were the only ones who knew. And why?"
She glanced around and noticed linear tracks leading out to the beach. "Look. We didn't leave those. Someone's dragged him out."
"They can't have gone too far." Carole heard Lacey cock her pistol as she started back toward the beach. "The sons of bitches..."
Carole followed her out and they stood together, looking up and down the beach and along the gently rolling dunes that eased toward the water. She blinked ... was that someone ... ? Yes, it looked like a man, standing at the water line with a towel draped over his shoulders, staring out to sea.
"Look, Lacey," Carole said, pointing. "Do you see him?"
Lacey nodded and started forward. "You think he did it?"
"Perhaps." Carole fell into step beside her. "If not, he might have seen who did."
But as they approached, the white towel began to look more like a sheet, and the back of the man's head, the color of his hair began to look more and more familiar ...
They were twenty feet away when Carole stopped and grabbed Lacey's arm. "Oh, dear God," she whispered. "It looks like ..."
Lacey was nodding. "I know." Her voice had shrunken to a high-pitched squeak. "But it can't be."
He looked wet, as if he'd gone for a swim. Carole stepped forward, closed to within half a dozen feet of him. Trembling inside and out, she wet her lips. Her tongue felt as dry as old leather.
"Father Joe?"
The man turned. The dying light of the sun ruddied the pitted, ruined dead-white skin of his face.
"Carole," he said in Father Joe's voice. "What's happened to me?"
Shock was a hand against her chest, shoving her back. She dropped the bookbag and stumbled a few steps, then tripped. Lacey caught her before she fell.
"Oh, shit," Lacey whimpered. "Oh, shit!"
"Lacey?" The man, the thing that had once been Father Joe, took a faltering step toward them. "What did they do to me?"
"Wh-who?" Lacey said.
"The undead. They took me to New York. He was going to make me one of them . . . turn me into a feral, he said. I remember dying, being killed ... at least I think I do, but—"
Heart pounding, mind racing. Carole watched him closely, looking for a misstep, listening for a false note.
She found her voice again. "You did die. We found you and you were dead. We buried you back there, under the boardwalk."
"But I'm not dead. And I'm not one of them. I can't be because ..." He pointed west. "Because that's the sun and it should be killing me, but it's not." He raised a scarred fist. "Somehow, some way, I've beaten them."
"But you were dead, Uncle Joe," Lacey told him. Her voice trembled like a wounded thing. "And now you're not."
"But I'm not undead. Standing here in the sunlight is proof enough of that. And I'm looking at you two and I'm not seeing prey. I'm seeing two people I care about very much."
Carole suspected that under different circumstances—any circumstances but these—those words would have made her dizzy. But now ...
She shook her head, trying to clear it, trying to step back from her roiling emotions and think clearly. He sounded like her Father Joe, he acted like Father Joe, he had Father Joe's mannerisms, but something was different, something wasn't quite right. Something terrible had been done to him, and one way or another, she had to find a way to undo it.
She bent forward and snatched the book bag from where she'd dropped it on the sand.
"Carole?" said Lacey from behind her. "Just a minute."
She opened it and reached inside.
"Carole, you're not really going to—"
''A minute, I said!"
Carole's fingers wrapped around the upright of Father Joe's big silver cross. "We've been saving this for you." She yanked it from the bag and held it out to him. "Here."
Father Joe cried out and turned his head, holding up a hand to shield his eyes from the sight of the very cross he used to carry with him wherever he went.
Carole felt something die within her as she watched him and realized what she had to do.
She handed the cross to Lacey who stood dumbstruck, staring at her uncle with wide, uncomprehending eyes. Lacey gripped the cross but never took her eyes from her uncle.
As Carole pulled open the book bag again, she slammed the doors, closed the windows, and drew the curtains on everything she had ever felt for the man this creature had once been. Her hand was reaching into the bag for the hammer and stake when Lacey's voice, a hint of panic in her tone, stopped her.
"Carole ... Carole, something's happening here. Please tell me what's going on."
Carole looked up and froze. The Father Joe thing was edging toward Lacey, his face averted, his hand stretched out toward the cross.
"What's happening, Carole?" Lacey wailed.