Robert McCammon - Last Train from Perdition

“Lemme go! Hear me? I said I gotta—”

Rooster pulled to get loose; he was strong, but to the vampire it was like restraining an infant. “You’re not going. Neither of you are. I told you…he’s finished.”

The cry started up again, only now it sounded further to the right and closer.

“ Help me … please … help me …”

“They’re moving him. Come on, we’re getting back inside.”

“No sir! No sir !” Rooster tried to push Lawson away but it was like one man trying to move the biggest boulder on the track. He said fiercely, “Mr. Tabberson’s hurt and he needs help!”

“You can’t help him. I can’t either. Gantt, start back. You follow him. Go on!” In spite of the Winchester, he gave Rooster a shake when the fireman didn’t obey. “I’ll carry you if I have to! Or I’ll knock the hell out of you first! Move !”

“ Help…Jesus…help me …”

And again the voice faded away.

The Winchester’s barrel went up under Lawson’s throat.

Rooster’s face was right up in the vampire’s, and if he saw anything fearsome at close range to that visage he did not flinch.

“I’ll move, Mister Alabama,” he said through gritted teeth as the snow whitened his cap. “For now, I won’t pull this trigger. But when we get inside there…I don’t care where you’re from, who you fought for or what the damned hell you are…you’re gonna tell everybody straight what you know to be true ’bout this. Are you hearin’ me ?”

“I am. Now do what I’m telling you.”

Rooster peered down the embankment again. Once more Lawson thought the young man was going to try to go after Tabbers, but then the rifle’s barrel left Lawson’s throat and Rooster followed Gantt and his lantern back toward the locomotive and the passenger car.

The vampire gunfighter stood alone.

But he was not alone for very long.

He sensed rather than saw the movement behind him, and in a blur he whirled around with the Colt full of silver angels ready to fire.

“You don’t want to do that,” said the little boy who sat atop the biggest boulder.

Seven.

The boy was maybe twelve years old, but Lawson knew that was only in appearance. He had been taken and turned young, that was for sure. The boy wore a white shirt with a ruffled collar and ruffles down the front; at least it had been white once, before it had become matted with dried blood. He wore gray short pants and cream-colored leggings, with old-fashioned buckled shoes. Above the pallid and grinning face the mass of curly, touselled hair was straw-colored, and the boy’s eyes were light. Except now they held centers of crimson, and they were aimed at Trevor Lawson with not only malicious intent but a touch of true merriment. The boy was thin and awkward-looking; he had not been given time to fill out his bones.

“Hello,” he said, in his high-pitched, childish voice. “I’m Henry.”

Lawson nodded. His gun was ready. “I imagine you know my name.”

“I do. We all do. Let me introduce myself a little better. I am… was… Henry Styles, Junior. You can call me Junior, if it pleases you.”

“Nothing pleases me right now.”

The little boy cackled and clapped his hands together. The fingernails were long, dirty claws that Lawson figured could rip the head from a human being in a matter of seconds.

When he was done laughing, Henry Styles Junior said, “Do you know how many there are of us out here?”

“Many,” was Lawson’s answer.

“We— I ,” he corrected, “brought an army. After what you did to LaRouge and the others at Nocturne…I kinda figured we needed to be more careful.” The grin widened, so much that the fangs almost slid out. “I always liked the snow,” he said. “Makes me think of Christmas in Philadelphia.”

“Oh? That’s where you’re from?”

“Born in Philadelphia in the year…” Junior paused. “What year is this?”

“1886.”

“Hm. Born in Philadelphia in the year 1781. That makes me—”

“Older than you look.”

“ Smarter than I look, too,” Junior said. “They say you’re smart too, Mr. Lawson.”

“Nice of them to say.”

“Are they correct?”

“I’d like to think so.” While he was speaking, Lawson was scanning his surroundings; at any second he expected some monstrosity—similar to the shape-changing vampire he’d faced on a rooftop in New Orleans last summer—to attack from any direction.

“Ease yourself,” said Junior. “We want to be gracious.”

“Grace from one of you ? I doubt you understand that concept.”

The thing that looked like a boy laughed. A black tongue that might have been forked slid out from the mouth and caught some snowflakes before it withdrew.

“Your situation,” the creature said, “is hopeless. You do realize that.”

Lawson was about to deny it, but in truth he could not…at least not yet.

“And there you are. The truth of the matter. Let me tell you what we desire: yourself and Ann Kingsley. When you give yourselves up to us, we’ll clear the track. The others can go on to wherever they’re going, and long life to them.”

“Does that include the man who’s lying down in that brush? Or have you already drained him and torn him up?”

“Tut, tut,” Junior said, with the fixed grin upon his warped mouth. “Sacrifices must be made, for the good of the many. I believe I recall President Washington saying such a thing.”

“He’s dead.”

“Regrettably so. I wish we’d gotten to him first. What a leader he would’ve made for us!”

“I doubt that LaRouge would like to share the honor. Is she here?”

“As much as you would like her to be…no. She is at a distance, but you can be sure she’s with us, in her own way.”

It was disconcerting to Lawson, talking this way to a creature who looked like a little boy, spoke like an older man and thought like a monster. He had to get away, calm himself, and try to reason things through.

“Our terms,” said Junior. “Give yourself and your lady friend up, or we take everyone. We’ll take you and Miss Ann anyway, but I know you’ll bring some of my tribe to harm and I dislike that certainty.” He swung his legs back and forth on the boulder as any rambunctious tyke might, who didn’t mind the wind temperature in the single digits. “We won’t wait very long, Trevor. So for the sake of your newfound—”

“You won’t have to wait at all,” Lawson said, but even as he was squeezing the trigger to send a silver bullet through Junior’s skull the creature whirled away so fast it was a white blur…then only empty space and a ripple in the snow where the body had been. Lawson had never seen one of them move so quickly as that, and he was both shocked and in awe of Junior’s speed; so much so that his finger had not had time to depress the Colt’s trigger to its firing point.

And then when Lawson turned away the thing that was crouched on top of the locomotive behind him sprang into the air, and from the rags of its shirt two ebony wings that had been folded in wait now exploded into their span of ten feet width.

The thing resembled a human being only for its having two legs, two arms, a torso and a head in addition to the wings; everything else was, as Easterly had said, an abomination. It was dark-fleshed and muscular and gnarled and greedy, and as it swooped in silence down from its perch upon Trevor Lawson the mouth gaped wide open to ready the curved fangs. Above it the eyes with their crimson pupils were hypnotically horrific, and the claws at the ends of the long fingers twitched in anticipation.

It came at him so fast that, again, Lawson was stunned and mostly for the fact that he had let himself be beguiled by Junior as this shapechanged vampire had crouched atop the engine. His Colt fired with a sharp crack but his aim was off. The bullet streaked past the thing’s left side and continued on into the night like a small blue-flamed meteor. Lawson’s own fangs slid out. He threw up his free arm to protect his face and throat. The claws reached for him and were only inches away, but the desire to survive sped Lawson’s actions.