We Win

Ed Barlou, 60 and cantankerous in a red flannel shirt, was brought to the cathedral. He was bound at the wrists and shuffling, pulled at either elbow by vampires dressed in deacons’ cassocks. He’d been beaten pretty badly, but he’d suffered worse in his bar days in the seventies. He spat a tooth onto the carpet runner.

The overhead candelabra wasn’t lit, but the streetlights glowed through the candle-lined stained glass windows and cast a muddled red-yellow-blue-green bruise across everything, showing all the horrid shapes in relief against black. The colors lit dimly on the edges of an immense carved crucifix that was suspended thirty feet above the altar. The pews were full of devil-eyed congregants. Everywhere the heads turned to watch the man carried in, and the teeth of two hundred smiles flashed silver in the gloom. Priests and bishops lined the pulpit and at their center, standing over some book that surely wasn’t the bible, was the Cardinal.

Cardinal McAnahan wore a kind face the day he’d come to town and first addressed the faithful. In time, Ed Barlou had come to understand that McAnahan wore a different face at night. This, his true face, was pale gray-blue, and the eyes were a jaundiced yellow with red pupils. The wolf teeth jutted so far from his gums that he couldn’t close his mouth, and he drooled on his vestments.

“Barlou. Welcome.” Barlou said nothing in reply, but spat again. McAnahan’s smile faltered. That blood would have to be cleaned. The endless nighttime blasphemies had cleansed this place of its holy power early on, but blood would require the carpet scrubber. “Nothing to say?”

Barlou shrugged.

“Usually there’s something. ‘You won’t get away with this,’ some defiant lunge, or just good old-fashioned screaming and begging. I like the screaming.”

Barlou was silent.

“You’re positively no fun, Barlou.” The congregation giggled in inhuman squeaks. “All right, then I’ll talk. I’m not certain when you realized the truth of what we are, but we take notice of certain things when we move into a town. We kept tabs on the local sporting goods store, where you ordered two hundred wooden arrows.” He held up one long, four-knuckled finger. “That’s a red flag, my friend.” The crowd tittered again. “You even managed to get a few of us before trying to storm the church tonight. That’s where you got greedy.”

A deacon walked up to the altar and placed there a recurve bow, a quiver full of arrows, and an oversized golden key. “He was carrying these.”

McAnahan picked up the key and turned it over in his clawed hands before looking to Barlou, who said “It’s the key to the city. I was awarded it earlier tonight.”

“You were awarded the key to the city? Does the mayor often give pointless civic awards to drunken old hunters from the edge of town?” The vampires chuckled.

Barlou looked away and muttered. “I’m not a hunter. I’m a trapper by trade.”

McAhahan tossed the key to clunk back on the altar. “Well look at that, we have something in common. We’ve also been winning civic awards we haven’t earned. Why, on Wednesday we had a new pipe organ contributed to us by the VFW Ladies’ Auxilliary.” He gestured to the left of the cathedral, where the enormous instrument sat. The gleaming pipes of the organ rose clear up into the shadows of the arched ceiling.

“It’s nice,” Barlou allowed.

“Isn’t it nice? I can’t imagine the expense. Wasn’t that a thankful gesture for our moving into town, defiling your holy house and slowly killing all your inhabitants?” The crowd laughed again, and the sound had a sibilance behind it like a forced whisper through bared teeth. “It doesn’t work, though… we’re having it serviced next week. I can’t wait to hear GLORY TO THE WORM through it.”

“Let’s begin. Untie him.” McAnahan waved a hand impatiently. Two deacons began turning a crank on the wall, and the crucifix began to lower. The parishioners murmured with hissed delight as Barlou was freed and brought behind the altar. The floor here crackled- plastic had been laid to cover the pulpit’s riser. The crucifix’s base touched the ground and the crank was locked in place.

Ed Barlou looked around at the rows of razor-lipped faces staring back at him. “Is this everyone? Are you all here?”

“Yes, we’re all here.” Cardinal McAnahan took up a mallet and three black iron spikes from the altar. “I think you can see where I’m going with this,” he cackled. “You know, I’ve wondered- how did you think an old rummy would conquer an enclave, all by himself?”

Barlou shrugged again. “I’m not by myself. Not really.”

“Oh?”

“It didn’t take much convincing. Enough people had changed or disappeared that it didn’t take very long to get anyone on my side. The big bitch of it was explaining how you can be active during the day. I’m guessing the stained glass handled that somehow, but I dunno.”

“Very good, Barlou, but whom did you tell? I don’t see anyone here.”

“The real clue was that you guys had removed the fonts of holy water. Maybe crosses and sunlight don’t give you too much trouble, but holy water, it’s too dangerous for you to have around. That gave us a lot to go on.” He craned his head to look beyond the vampire to the clock on the wall.

Cardinal McAnahan looked himself and said “Eleven fifty-eight. Almost time for your big escape?”

“No. No one here’s getting out.”

The vampire rolled his maniac eyes. “And how’s that?”

“Well, I talked to Chief Hobbs first. He saw things my way real quick and we happened on an idea. He introduced me to the mayor and today I was awarded the key to the city, as you know.” McAnahan stared, saying nothing. “One of the things we noticed, along with the holy water,” Barlou continued, “was that you couldn’t enter homes without an invitation. That part of the stories holds true. It’s funny how stories work. Legends. They’re real open to interpretation.”

McAnahan picked up the key and studied it. It was just a big gold-painted metal key. Nothing special about it. “How is this hunk of tin going to help you, Barlou? Tell me.”

“Well, this may well be your house, but the rest of the city… it’s mine now. And none of you are invited.”

A vampire at the front of the church lurched toward the doors and flung them open. It tried to walk through and couldn’t. “I… I can’t leave!”

“None of you can,” Barlou said. “Doors, windows, nothing… you’re stuck.”

McAnahan placed Barlou’s back to the cross and hefted one wrist into position. “It doesn’t matter. Trapped or not, you’re stuck here with us, and once you’re dead the city is public domain once more.”

“I talked to a few other people too. I talked to Charlie Gintall down at the AC repair shop, I talked to the nice young man who sold us some equipment from Global Gas & Chemical, I talked to Father Weissman from four towns over. You know who else I talked to? It’s the darndest thing.”

McAnahan stared. The muscles worked under his cabbage-like neck.

“I talked to the VFW Ladies’ Auxiliary.” Over the vampire’s shoulder, the second-hand of the clock hit twelve. The bell in the steeple began to ring its deep rolling gongs. Inside the pipe organ, a timer clicked on and two industrial vaporizers from Global Gas & Chemical began to process a fifty-gallon drum of holy water. White vapor shot up the pipes and billowed out into the air, making every pipe sing at once in a howling, atonal moan.

Once the first vampires began screaming and melting in clotted ice cream clumps, the others panicked. They crowded the doors and flew to the ceilings. They turned to mist and tried to escape through cracks in the masonry, but the holy water vapor found them crowded there as well and they sizzled in agony. The air grew foggy.

Cardinal McAnahan fell back, clutching his throat and breathing in whooping gasps. Barlou strode across the pulpit. “And of course I didn’t need to be here at all,” he took an arrow and nocked it in his bow. “But I couldn’t miss this. I like the screaming, too.” He fired the arrow into the chest of a panicking vampire and it was engulfed in flames. He fired another into one cowering along the wall, and it burst into ash. Another turned to black sludge that splashed in unsettling ways. Another still exploded in chunks.

Barlou turned back to a writhing McAnahan and leveled his bow. The noise of the screaming and the organ was deafening, but he had rehearsed this next bit, so he shouted as best he could. “If you guys were better than us you’d have taken over the planet long ago. You’re good, but we’re humans. We’re the smartest god damn thing on the planet. We’re the thing that finally beat the mastodons, the jungle cats, the sea and the slow pace of our own evolution. We win. That’s what we do. You’re just a virus we ain’t cured yet.”

With that he plugged the arrow into McAnahan’s chest and the Cardinal doubled over. His flesh whitened and poured into itself in loathsome lumps, taking on a furred look that was no less liquid for the bristly hairs that waved from it. The mass of veined and churning fur grew, pulsed, quavered, grew again, shivered, burbled and folded on itself. Red eyes peeled from the white and a fanged mouth opened. The head extended from the bulging form and wings unfurled from the body. The wings beat downward and McAnahan rose into the air as a sickly albino bat with a twenty foot wingspan. Ash and orange cinders swirled in cyclones toward the walls.

Barlou stepped back a few paces. So far as he had expected, a wooden arrow to the chest should have done the trick. It had been working so far. He put another into the creature as it rose and screamed, and then another. All three arrows slipped from the burbling, frothy body and clattered to the plastic sheeting beneath.

“Virus?” it bellowed. “Virus?!” It swept low toward him and he ducked. It turned back at the front of the cathedral. “We have fed on you for seven hundred years, and still, you brilliant apes don’t even agree that we exist!” It flew for him again and he rolled away, dodging the swooping claws by inches. A trail of what seemed like bubbling sour milk dribbled the carpet in its wake. It wheeled above the altar and screamed its keening roar again. “You’re nature’s lucky, bewildered child-idiots!”

“Smart enough to know you shouldn’t be flying there,” Barlou called out. He aimed to the side and fired. The arrow struck the lock mechanism and the crank in the wall spun wildly as the counterweights fell. The giant crucifix rocketed upward and plunged into the liquid heart of the bat. Great gobs of boiling white snot burst through its back and sprayed the ceiling. Cardinal McAnahan choked and died before melting into a vague bat-shaped flop of foam hung over the cross. The foam yellowed and dried, withering, hardening, cracking, and finally falling away in a puff of flakes.

Barlou stared around. “Ayup, look at that, it worked.” He arched his back and felt it pop. He was going to pay for that somersault in the morning, and pay dearly. “Nnngh. Son of a bitch.”

He shuffled through the mist, kicking up a blanket of ash that was now several inches deep, and paused at the door to look back.

“Told you no-good rotten bastards. Told you. We win.”

He closed the door behind him and limped back into his city.