F Paul Wilson - Novel 10 Read online

  "There's a question I'd like answered."

  "All very interesting," Zev said as they climbed the front steps of the retreat house. "Well, I'd better be going. A long walk I've got ahead of me. A long, lonely walk all the way back to Lakewood. A long, lonely, possibly dangerous walk back for a poor old man who—"

  "All right, Zev! All right!" Joe said, biting back a laugh. "I get the point. You want me to go back to Lakewood. Why? What's it going to prove?"

  "I just want the company," Zev said with pure innocence.

  "No, really. What's going on in that Talmudic mind of yours? What are you cooking?"

  "Nothing, Father Joe. Nothing at all."

  Joe stared at him. Damn it all, his interest was piqued. What was Zev up to? And what the hell—why not go? He had nothing better to do.

  "All right, Zev. You win. I'll come back to Lakewood with you. But just for today. Just to keep you company. And I'm not going anywhere near St. Anthony's, okay? Understood?"

  "Understood, Joe. Perfectly understood."

  "I'm not getting involved with my old parish again, is that clear?"

  "That such a thing should ever enter my mind. Feh!"

  "Good. Now wipe that smile off your face and we'll get something to eat."

  * * *

  Later, under the climbing sun, they walked south along the deserted beach, barefooting through the wet sand at the edge of the surf. Joe had his sneakers slung over his shoulder, Zev carried a black shoe in each hand, and acted like a little kid, laughing at the chill of the water as it sloshed over his ankles.

  "I can't believe you've never been to the beach," Joe said. "Not even as a kid?"

  "Never."

  Joe shook his head in dismay and gestured at the acres of sand. "This is Manasquan Beach. You should have seen this place on a summer weekend. Wall-to-wall people. Probably never see that again. Probably be as empty as this even on the Fourth of July."

  "Your Independence Day. We never made much of secular holidays. Too many religious ones to observe. What would people do here besides swim?"

  "Lie in the sun and work on their skin cancers."

  "Really? I imagine that sunbathing is maybe not the fad it used to be."

  Joe laughed. "Ah, Zev. Still the master of the understatement. I'll say one thing, though: The beach is cleaner than I've ever seen it. No beer cans or hypodermics."

  Zev pointed ahead. "But what's that?"

  As they approached the spot, Joe saw a pair of naked bodies stretched out on their backs on the sand, one male, one female, both young and short-haired. Their skin was bronzed and glistened in the sun. The man lifted his head and stared at them. A blue crucifix was tattooed in the center of his forehead. He rolled over, reached into the backpack beside him, and withdrew a huge, gleaming, nickel-plated revolver.

  "Just keep walking," he said.

  "Will do," Joe said. "Just out for a stroll."

  As they passed the couple, Joe noticed a similar tattoo on the girl's forehead.

  "A very popular tattoo," he said.

  "Clever idea. That's one cross you can't drop or lose. Probably won't help you in the dark, but if there's a light on it might give you an edge."

  He noticed the rest of the girl too. Small firm breasts jutting straight up despite the fact that she was on her back, dark fuzz on her pubes. He felt a stir within and looked away.

  "How do you do that?" Zev said.

  "What?"

  "Look away from such a beautiful sight."

  Are you watching me that closely? Joe wondered.

  "Practice, practice, practice."

  "How do you turn it off? Or does it just die?"

  "Believe me, the sexual impulse doesn't die. I've always had one. I remember having crushes as a kid. I remember one girl, Eleanor Jepson, that I was infatuated with. I'd think about her night and day, I'd write poems to her - which I'd immediately tear up for fear someone would find them. I'd ride my bike past her house at least ten times a day hoping to catch a glimpse of her; I learned her schedule at school and I'd run through the halls so I could just happen to be passing her locker when she'd stop there between classes.

  "But as a priest I'd do just the opposite. As soon as I felt an attraction starting I'd turn away from it. You learn to do that—to not think about something. It's different from saying, 'Don't think about a pink unicorn.' Instead you turn your mind away, you learn to not think about what you don't want to think about. Trust me, it can be done. And instead of looking for 'chance' meetings, you avoid contact except in the most public of situations. No tete-a-tetes or in-depth, one-on-one meetings, no lingering glances, no touches on the arm or shoulder. The key is to recognize the spark and douse it before it can ignite."

  "Such a way to live. Pardon me, but it's unnatural."

  "Tell me about it."

  Celibacy hadn't been easy. How he'd ached for one particular woman, but he'd put his calling above that longing. Besides, she'd had her own vows. And nestled within him had been the hope that the new Pope might lift the ban on marriage for priests. But no one had heard from the Pope since last year.

  Zev laughed. "The woman two nights ago, the one dressed like a prostitute who saved this sorry hide, for an instant there I thought, Father Joe and a prostitute ... ?"

  "What did she look like?"

  "Short dark hair, blue eyes, might have been prettier if she hadn't looked so haggard. I sensed she knew you. In fact I'm sure she did. The only way she knew me was because she'd seen me with you." He touched his chin. "Oh, yes. And she had a little scar right here. A tiny crescent."

  Joe stopped walking. No. It couldn't be. "You could almost be describing ..." He shook his head. "No. Not dressed like that."

  "Who were you thinking of?"

  "One of the nuns. Sister Carole. She was.. . special."

  Oh, was she ever. His heart lightened at just the thought of her.

  "What? Someone was special to you and I know nothing? I thought we discussed everything."

  Almost everything, Joe thought. But not this. Not Carole.

  "She wasn't special just to me, she was special to everyone who knew her, or met however briefly. You would have taken to her, I know it. She was one of those people who lights up a room simply by entering it."

  "Then your Sister Carole this was certainly not. Darken a room, that's what this one would do. This woman was very grim, frightening in a way; the only time she brightened was when she mentioned your name."

  "No. My Carole—" He caught himself. "St. Anthony's Sister Carole, would have been out of town when the undead struck—back with her family in Pennsylvania."

  He'd thought about her countless times since Good Friday.

  She's safe ... I pray she's safe. She's too delicate, too sensitive for that kind of horror. She never would have survived.

  "Since the mystery woman wasn't your paramour or your Sister Carole," Zev said, "I assume we can get back to priestly celibacy. I read once where priests had been allowed to marry until sometime during the Middle Ages. Why was that changed?"

  "For financial reasons. Priests were accumulating wealthy estates and leaving them to their families instead of the Church. So one of the Popes instituted the no-marriage rule. It came around and bit the Church on its ass."

  "Oy, did it ever."

  "Yeah. The priesthood became attractive to too many who were ambiguous about their sexuality or to those who saw the Church as a sanctuary from their darker impulses; it wasn't. The impulses only became stronger. Seems to me that early entrance to a seminary interferes with normal maturation, and because of that you wind up with a percentage of priests with arrested sexual development."

  Joe thanked God that he'd yielded to his vocation later in life. The love of God had always been strong in him, but he hadn't seen himself as a priest until after his graduation from Brooklyn College. The idea took hold and wouldn't let go. He'd entered the seminary at age twenty-three, but not as a virgin.

  "The arrested types," h
e said, "they're the ones who became pedophiles, and their presence tainted the rest of us. We all got smeared with the same brush. Look at me. I'm a prime example."

  "No one who knows you," Zev said, "believed a word of that."

  "Didn't matter. As soon as something like that gets out, you're ruined. Guilty or innocent, who you are and whatever good you've done is canceled out." He ground his teeth. "The only feeling I've ever experienced looking at a child was the desire to see him or her grow into a God-loving adult."

  Zev put a hand on his arm. "I know, Joe. I know."

  They walked on in silence.

  ZEV . . .

  Eventually they turned west and made their way inland, finding Route 70 and following it into Ocean County via the Bridle Bridge.

  "I remember nightmare traffic jams right here every summer," Joe said as they trod the bridge's empty span. "Never thought I'd miss traffic jams."

  They cut over to Route 88 and followed it toward Lakewood. Along the way they found a few people out and about in Bricktown, furtively scurrying between houses. They walked a gauntlet of car dealerships, the stock sitting dirty and idle in the lots beneath waving pennants, the broken showroom windows carrying signs promising deals that would never be closed.

  Zev noticed how Joe's steps seemed to grow heavier with every mile. But he had to show him something that would make his steps—and his heart— even heavier.

  At the corner of New Hampshire Avenue, he turned them south.

  "But it's shorter this way," Joe said, pointing down 88.

  "I know. But we'll end up in the same spot, and along the way there's something you must see."

  They trod the undulating pavement until they came to a baseball field, the former home of the Lakewood Blue Claws.

  Joe smiled. "This brings back memories. Remember the games we used to go to?"

  "I do," Zev said. The Blue Claws, a class-A minor league team, maybe, but those games had been fun. The stadium even served Kosher food. "But what I want to show you here, baseball's got nothing to do with."

  "I don't think I like the sound of that." Joe pointed to the unusual number of gulls and crows circling the field. "And I know I don't like the look of that."

  Zev knew as they climbed the grassy slope to the fence that whatever uneasy premonitions Joe was feeling, even the worst he could imagine would leave him unprepared for the sight that awaited him on the other side.

  He remembered his recent look onto the playing field. At first he hadn't been sure what he was seeing: a huge pile of blackened debris occupying most of the diamond and spreading into the outfield. Then he'd started picking out limbs and torsos, and there, piled high where home plate used to be . .. skulls. Innumerable skulls.

  Joe stared at the charred, rotting mounds for maybe ten seconds, then closed his eyes and swallowed.

  "What in the name of God .. . ?"

  "Hardly in the name of God," Zev said. "On those first few nights of the invasion they committed wholesale slaughter. They loosed a horde of bestial creatures—undead, yes, but only vaguely human—who beheaded their prey after drinking their blood. A way to keep down the undead population, I assume. It makes sense that they wouldn't want too many of their kind concentrated in one area. Like too many carnivores in one forest—when the herds of prey are wiped out, the predators starve. And just to make sure none of those early victims would be rising from the grave, they brought their bodies and their heads here, soaked them with kerosene, and struck a match."

  "Jesus".

  "Him I doubt had much to do with it either. They fed the fire for days, the smoke dirtied the sky. And when the wind blew the wrong way—oy. Even now ..." He sniffed the air. "Luckily we're upwind."

  "But they were also killing off their future food supply."

  "Enough of us they left to hunt down and feed on, but far too few to offer resistance of any consequence."

  They walked the rest of the way into Lakewood in silence. When they entered the town . . .

  "A real ghost town," the priest said as they walked Forest Avenue's deserted length.

  "Ghosts," Zev said, nodding sadly. It had been a long walk and he was tired. "Yes. Full of ghosts."

  In his mind's eye he saw the shades of his fallen brother rabbis and all the yeshiva students, beards, black suits, black hats, crisscrossing back and forth at a determined pace on weekdays, strolling with their wives on Shabbes, their children trailing behind like ducklings.

  Gone. All gone. Victims of the undead. Undead themselves now, some of them. It made him sick at heart to think of those good, gentle men, women, and children curled up in their basements now to avoid the light of day, venturing out in the dark to feed on others, spreading the disease ...

  He fingered the cross slung from his neck. If only they had listened!

  And then he heard the grating sound of a heavily distorted guitar. He grabbed Joe's arm.

  "Quick. Into the bushes!"

  They ducked behind a thick stand of rhododendrons along the foundation of the nearest house and watched a convertible glide by. Zev counted four in the car, three men and a blond woman, all scruffy and unwashed, lean and wolfish, in cut-off sweatshirts or denim jackets, the driver wearing a big Texas hat, someone in the back with a red Mohican, all guzzling beer. The thumping blast of their music dopplered in and out. Thank God they liked to play it at ear-damaging levels. It acted as an early warning system.

  "Chazzers," Zev muttered.

  When they'd passed, Joe stepped out of the bushes and stared after them.

  "Who the hell were they?"

  "Scum of the earth. They like to call themselves cowboys. I call them Vichy."

  "Vichy? Like the Vichy French?"

  "Yes. Very good. I'm glad to see that you're not as culturally illiterate as the rest of your generation. Vichy humans—that's what I call the collaborators. They should all die of pox." He looked around. "We should get off the street. I know a place near St. Anthony's where we can hide."

  "You've traveled enough today, Reb. And I told you, I don't care about St. Anthony's. I'll get you situated, then head back."

  "You can't leave yet, Joe," Zev said, gripping the young priest's arm. He'd coaxed him this far; he couldn't let him get away now. "Stay the night. See what Father Palmeri's done."

  "If he's one of them he's not a priest anymore. Don't call him Father."

  "They still call him Father."

  "Who?"

  "The undead."

  Zev watched Father Joe's jaw muscles bunch.

  Joe said, "Maybe I'll just take a quick trip over to St. Anthony's myself—"

  "No. It's different here. The area is thick with Vichy and undead. They'll get you if your timing isn't just right. I'll take you."

  "You need rest, pal."

  Father Joe's expression showed genuine concern. Zev was detecting increasingly softer emotions in the man since their reunion last night. A good sign perhaps?

  "Rest I'll get when we reach where I'm taking you."

  CAROLE . . .

 

  "But I won't be going alone," Carole muttered.

  She had to turn her head away from the kitchen sink now. The fumes stung her nose and made her eyes water, but she kept on stirring the pool chlorina-tor into the hot water until it was completely dissolved. She wasn't through yet. She took the beaker of No Salt she'd measured out before starting the process and added it to the mix in the big Pyrex bowl. Then she stirred some more. Finally, when she was satisfied that she was not going to see any further dissolution at this temperature, she put the bowl on the stove and turned up the flame.

  A propane stove. She'd seen the big white tank out back last week when she was looking for a new home; that was why she'd chosen this old house. With New Jersey Natural Gas in ruins, and GPU no longer sending electricity through the wires,
propane and wood stoves were the only ways left to cook.

  I really shouldn't call it cooking, she thought as she fled the acrid fumes and headed for the living room. Nothing more than a simple dissociation reaction—heating a mixture of calcium hypochlorate with potassium chloride. Simple, basic chemistry. The very subject she'd taught bored juniors and seniors for years at St. Anthony's School.

  "And you all thought chemistry was such a useless subject!" she shouted to the walls.

  She clapped a hand over her mouth. There she was, talking out loud again. She had to be careful. Not so much because someone might hear, but because she worried she might be losing her mind.

  Maybe she'd already lost it. Maybe all this was merely a delusion. Maybe the undead hadn't taken over the entire civilized world. Maybe they hadn't defiled her church and convent, slaughtered her best friend. Maybe it was all in her mind.

 

  Yes, she truly did wish she were imagining all this. At least then she'd be the only one suffering, and all the rest would still be alive and well, just as they'd been before she went off the deep end.

  But if this was a delusion it was certainly an elaborate, consistent one. Every time she woke up—she never allowed herself to sleep too many hours at once, only catnaps—it was the same: quiet skies, vacant houses, empty streets, furtive, scurrying survivors who trusted no one, and—

  What's that?

  Sister Carole froze as her ears picked up a sound outside. Music. She hurried in a crouch to the front door and peered through the sidelight. A car. A convertible. Someone was out driving in—

  She ducked when she saw who was in it. She recognized that cowboy hat. She didn't have to see their earrings to know who—what—they were.

  They were headed east. Good. They'd find a little surprise waiting for them down the road.

  As it did every so often, the horror of what her life had become caught up to Carole then, and she slumped to the floor of the Bennett house and began to sob.