Circus of Blood (5 page)

The vampires charged haphazardly in a burst of calliope music, the Wurlitzer firing up a banshee howl. I stepped forward, meeting the first vampire across the ring.

It was the Pinhead. He lumbered, arms outstretched like deadfall traps. His hands matched his skull. Tiny things at the end of pinched-off wrists. They tried to grab me, scrabbling on my shoulders. Someone screamed from the audience, the shrill sound blending with the demonic calliope.

His arms beat at my upper body, unable to close around me because they kept banging against the knotted slabs of flesh that made his chest. I knocked one away with the sweep of my arm and drove the hatchet into his side. The edge bit deep, tearing out a chunk of undead muscle in a ragged gash that vomited gorelike pudding.

He cried out and fell to his knees. His pinched little face twisted, bucktooth fangs cutting his lips as his too-small mouth gnashed.

Stretching up, I chopped down, the hatchet carving through his stump of a neck. It took two whacks, but the tiny skull popped off his neck in a gush of dead blood. The bloodsucker exploded in a rain of ash and dust.

Stake through the heart or chop off the head. Kills a vampire dead.

A shrieking crashed through the demented pipe organ soundtrack, and I was knocked to the side as the bearded lady thrashed around, her face sizzling and smoking.

Father Mulcahy stepped up, an arc of holy water slinging out of the tube in his hand. It splashed across the bearded vampire’s fleshy arms. She yanked her hands away from her face. The beard had singed down to a patchy mess around fist-sized sores of raw, undead flesh. Holy water is like acid to vampires; it was eating away her face, bone showing through the pits. Smoke billowed off her in a fog of scorched-hair, rancid-bacon stink. She had taken a mouthful of holy water, her fangs dissolving like sugar in hot water.

The priest lunged forward as her hands fell away, the sword licking out in a razored circle of silver light. The edge parted the pouch of flesh under her chins. It was a deep slash. His hand twisted back, slashing again, lopping off her head.

She made the biggest pile of dust I have ever seen a vampire leave behind.

The audience cheered, a glimmer of hope that they might be rescued. It sputtered to life like a candle in the wind, growing stronger as it caught hold.

My shin exploded in a maelstrom of hard, white agony.

I was standing and then I was face down, choking on sawdust.

I shoved up, getting my face out of the suffocating mess. A weight landed on my back, slamming me down to the ground. Air rushed out of me, swirling sawdust up into my eyes. The world went stuttery as my eyelids jerked and convulsed, trying to clean out the grit that skritched itself behind my eyeballs. Tears ran as I choked, blind, on the ground.

My arm wrenched behind me, jerking my shoulder out of its socket. The pain ripped through my chest in a spasm. My head went fuzzy as I was slammed over onto my back.

I dragged a breath into my tortured lungs, the hot tears in my eyes washing them clean enough to see. A shape loomed over me. Narrow shoulders, pigtails, and bows.

I reached up, trying to shove her off.

She reared back, lashing out with her heavy-knuckled claw of a hand. It whacked my arm in a rush of white pain. Her other claw rose in front of my face. Flexing wide, scissoring back and forth, the skin raw and red looking. Her shy schoolgirl smile ripped open into a predator snarl. Fangs burst out of her gums, curving out over a lashing tongue. Her claw came down in a lunge, clamping around my throat.

The skin was rough, calloused, tearing my throat like a band of sandpaper. She flexed, the claw jerking closed. Deep, grinding pain pulsed out from behind my Adam’s apple. I gagged but it was locked deep in my throat, the spasm choked in a rip of fire from sternum to chin.

The vampire on my chest giggled at me.

My hand scrabbled around me, feeling for any kind of weapon, searching for my lost hatchet. They only found sawdust.

Black burned holes in my vision, creeping in from the outside. My lungs were an inferno, starving for oxygen. Lightning bolts of agony shot up the sides of my neck, blasting across my brain.

My vision dimmed as I looked up.

I looked . . . up.

Up.

My hand shook as it pulled the Colt .45 from under my arm and rammed it into the cackling mouth of the Lobster girl.

Two twitches of my finger blew her brains out the back of her skull.

Out the back of her skull and toward the roof of the tent.

Away from people.

Lobster girl jerked up and fell over beside me. The twisted vampire lay there, jerking and twisting, brains raining back down in a sprinkle of gore.

She wasn’t dead, but it would take her a long time to regenerate losing a brain.

I dragged myself to my feet, throat full of glass. My shoulder popped, jamming itself back into its socket.

That was gonna hurt like a bitch later.

Father Mulcahy drove the sword down through the top of Sealboy vamp’s head. The sharpened metal punched through, driving the deformed little bloodsucker face-first to the ground. The blade slid between the mutant tusks that Sealboy had for fangs and bit deep into the ground, pinning the vampire like a butterfly on a board.

The crowd gasped their approval.

The priest stumbled back, falling on his ass. He sat there, shirt soaked through with sweat. Blood ran freely from a gash on his cheek and a hole that had been punched in his forearm. I stepped toward him and he waved me on. Turning, I looked for the remaining vampires.

The Ringmaster had his hand deep inside his stomach. He fished around, face gnarled in pain. One gore-encrusted shuriken lay on the ground at his feet. I assumed the other was still inside him, burning its way through.

The clown fell from the darkness above my head.

He landed in front of me in a crouch of yellow and black stripes and big, ridiculous shoes. Flashing up with inhuman speed, he knocked the gun out of my hand.

He leered at me with his pulled-back grin, slobber pooling in his stretched-out lips.

I punched him dead in the mouth.

My knuckles crashed across his teeth, slicing open in a wash of pain. His clown face jerked to the side on impact. When he turned back to me, his red nose was hanging off his face. It twisted to the left, one nail pulled out of his skull, the other hanging on out of spite. The original nose had been chopped off, leaving just a nasal cavity. Slivers of bone clung to the tip of the nail that had pulled free.

My stomach lurched.

The clown hit me in the chest. I saw it coming, twisting back to soften the blow. It was still like being hit with a cannonball. The impact lifted me off my feet and knocked me back. I hit the ground, rolling, flipping back up into a crouch.

My chest felt like it had caved in. I stayed there, fighting for air. My hand slid back behind me, fingers skimming along my belt.

The clown zipped toward me like he was being pulled in a wagon. His feet didn’t move, he just slid across the ground like magick. A razor-taloned hand whipped back and snapped forward.

Toward my throat.

I jerked back from the fist full of knives. They grazed the air in front of me, tips snagging and slicing through my T-shirt. My arm snapped up holding the garrote. The hair-thin piano wire looped around the clown’s wrist. My fingers clamped on the steel ring at the end of the wire. One swift yank and the wire sliced deep through undead flesh.

The clown’s hand popped off at the wrist, turning to dust as it hit the ground.

The grease-painted bloodsucker danced back, mutilated lips jerking around his shrieks. The audience clapped.

Snapping the garrote between my hands, I held it up so he could see it.

“You’re going down, clown.”

The audience roared.

The clown shook his stump out. As I watched, tendrils stretched out of it, waving around. They grew, thickening, hardening, turning into a hand.

My foot snapped out low. The steel toe cracked across the clown’s knee, knocking it out from under him. It popped wetly, giving out under my kick. The clown dropped.

Vampires spend their whole existence preying on people weaker than they are. They cull from the herd of humanity like jackals, running down the sick, the old, the weak. They pull prey that not only won’t fight back, but can’t fight back.

Standing tall, garrote wrapped around his ruffled neck, I showed that clown what a motherfucking lion can do.

I stepped through the cloud of dust made as his head popped free, looking for my next victim.

There were no cheers from the audience.

An angry fly buzzed by my face, too fast to see. I jerked away. Another one buzzed toward me, slicing deep into my forearm.

I looked down. The pain didn’t strike until after my mind realized what I was seeing.

One of my shuriken had all but disappeared inside the muscle of my forearm.

Just a few pointed metal tips bristled out like a joke. It didn’t look real as blood beaded up along the edge of the gash. It felt real. The metal ground between the bones of my arm, rubbing deep inside. Icicles stabbed up my arm, nerves scrambling to make sense of the input overload.

The garrote spilled from my limp fingers.

The Ringmaster stood, endlessly tall. He seemed to stretch to the top of the circus tent. His skeleton arm rolled forward, snapping the bullwhip. It cracked the sound barrier a split second before hitting me like a gunshot. The tip of it cut my shirt, splitting the flesh underneath open.

Father Mulcahy rose up, sword in hand. The Ringmaster was there before he could get his feet under him. The vampire’s hand flashed out, clipping the priest on the chin.

He dropped like a sack of potatoes.

The Ringmaster turned to me, glee naked on his face.

“The game is over!” His arm lashed back and then out.

Time shrank around me. I had hours to watch the bullwhip cut through the air toward me. Before I could blink, it snaked around my throat. My hands had just started to move when the Ringmaster gave the whip a vicious yank.

The whip became a python around my throat, a twenty-foot anaconda. Constricting. Choking. The Ringmaster danced as he reeled me in, hand over hand. The ground ripped at my knees as I was dragged forward. The pain of my crushing windpipe tore at my sanity. Almost blinded by searing black agony, I had more staticky darkness in my eyes than anything else.

I could barely make out the Ringmaster as he loomed over me. He was a stretched-out shadow, taloned arm pulled back, ready to drop like the sword of Damocles.

My hearing had gone, ears filled with a roar. It raged, climbing higher in volume, crowding everything out of my collapsing mind.

I was drowning in that roar.

Dying.

I was shoved out of the murkiness by a chorus of screams and the familiar oil-and-gasoline smell of an American hot rod.

I didn’t come up easily. I had to claw my way to consciousness. White light washed over my eyelids, popping them open.

The Comet was roaring toward me.

I threw myself backward as the car crashed into the Ringmaster. He crumpled under the wheels, driven to the ground and pinned by nearly two tons of America’s finest manufacturing.

His fanged mouth opened and closed without sound. His upper body stuck out to the side of the car, the tire pinning him across the stomach. A foot was twisted up behind his head, and one long arm was spiraled like a wreath beside him. Everything looked broken and crushed except his face; that was intact. The red had bled out of his eyes with pain, fangs retracted.

The Comet jerked into reverse as I stood to my feet, lurching backward. The Ringmaster rolled as the car backed off him, leaving him on his stomach. Everything about him was broken. Arms and legs twisted into kindling, spine bent wrong. If he wasn’t already dead, there was no way he would survive.

The door swung open and Sully stepped out, grin on his face. “Somebody call a cab?”

“What the hell are you doing?”

“I couldn’t just run away. I wanted to, but I couldn’t. So I hot-wired your car and drove it in here to rescue you and the Father.” He looked sheepish.

Well I’ll be damned.

“You did good.”

“Thanks.”

I pointed over to Father Mulcahy. He was sitting up, looking dazed and confused but awake. He was a tough old bastard; if he was conscious, he would probably be okay. “Help him in the car and then come help me.

He nodded and got moving.

My arm pulsed, sending a throb of agony shooting from fingertip to shoulder. My arm seized up. I looked down. Blood had stopped pouring, the wound sealing around the shuriken embedded in my arm, but it still leaked. It took me a second to rip a strip of my T-shirt off with one hand and my teeth. I fumbled with it.

“Hey, mister.”

I looked around. Realized I was standing just a few feet away from the bleacher. A few feet away from the captive audience. I had forgotten they were there. The Girl Scout troop leader sat with her girls still huddled together. She pulled her arms free, reaching out toward me. “Let me help with that.”

I stepped over. “We’ll get you folks free in a few minutes.”

“Of course you will, you didn’t save us to leave us chained up as a cruel joke.” Her laugh at her own humor was weak, choking out and twittering away. Her eyes were red, puffy from crying but calm now. Her hair was long around a pretty, round face. “Give me your arm; we’ve studied first aid.”

I held it out.

Her hands were soft, gentle. Her fingers hovered around one of the points that stuck up from my skin. “Take a deep breath.” I did. The shuriken vibrated a stomach-churning roll through my guts as her fingers clamped down on it. She gave a hard, swift yank, sliding the wheel of blades out of my arm.

Everything blinked in a hot flash, my whole body washed weak. Bright new blood bubbled to the surface of the wound. The woman twisted the piece of shirt around it, pulling the edges together. Her fingers were sure as she tied the knot.

It felt better immediately. Not good. It still hurt like a bitch, but now the pain was a step away, instead of sharp and immediate.

Her hand touched mine. “Thank you. I don’t know your name.”

“Deacon Chalk.”

“Thank you, Deacon Chalk.” Her smile was nice. Shy, but inviting.

Grateful.

I turned and walked away.

Father Mulcahy was in the passenger seat. A bruise blossomed on his square chin and he was hollow-eyed from exhaustion, but he was smoking a cigarette.

Yep, he’d probably be alright.

Sully stood outside the door. He nodded toward the troop leader. “She give you her digits, man?”

“No.”

“She didn’t give them or you didn’t take them?”

“Neither; nothing happened.”

“More’s the pity.”

“Not really.” I popped the trunk on the Comet with a button on my key fob. “Get the bolt cutters out of there and get these people free so they can go home and start to forget what happened.”

“They won’t forget what happened, man. Not something like this!”

“Not completely, no, but they got mind screwed by a vampire. They’ll forget the truth and the rest will become bad dreams and a fear of the circus. Vampire powers work that way.”

“How do you know they were mind screwed?”

“Do you think they would be this calm if they hadn’t been? Look at them.” I gestured around. “They just watched a bloody battle with vampires. They should be screaming. Instead they’re sitting, docile as Hindu cows.”

“Good point.”

I waved him away. He went to the trunk, rummaged around, came out with the bolt cutters, and started going around to the chains.

I looked at the priest. “How are you?”

He held up his cigarette. “Fine now. You?”

“Arm hurts like a bitch, throat’s on fire, but I’m about to chain up this vampire asshole and drop him in the trunk, so it hasn’t been all bad.”

“Sounds like a plan. I’ll be along in a minute to help.”

“Relax, Padre, I got this.”

He nodded and I turned away to look for my gun and my hatchet.