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The vampire flipped over backwards, heels kicking twin spumes of snow. He sat up. His tongue flopped like an overfed flatworm, a neat hole punched through the center. Skin hung from his cheeks like ripped curtains. He made a noise deep in its throat, a growl of pain and rage.

Oddy shot him again. Orlock went down again.

Well, it’s on,
Zippo thought.
Let’s see who else is at this shindig
. He unleashed a ripcurl of fire that threw the fringing wilderness into sharp relief. “Hail, hail, the gang’s all here…”

They roosted in the trees like crows, hunched low, backs arched, ghostly hands grasping the branches on which they balanced. Their skin was universally white and their eyes universally dark, but otherwise appearances varied wildly. The woman Zippo had glimpsed earlier was perched beside a swarthy man dressed in moldering Middle Eastern garb; a turban unraveled messily from his head like bandages from a mummy’s corpse. In another tree, a surfer-dude wearing board shorts and a Hawaiian shirt hugged a low bough. He looked a little like Eakins, the soldier who’d gotten his legs hacked to shit in that tunnel near Song-Be.

Zippo swept the flamer in a 180-degree arc. On the other side of the clearing a pair of vampires clung to either side of a scabby tree trunk. They appeared to have stepped out of a ’50s sitcom: the woman’s hair was done up in an outrageous beehive, she wore a blue-checked housedress, a frilled apron, and a pair of tortoiseshell glasses, the right lens shattered, strung around her neck on a faux-pearl chain. The man wore a plaid shirt, madras shorts, and beach sandals with a barbecue apron reading KISS THE COOK tied at neck and waist. They’d have looked ludicrous if not for the cold deadness in their eyes and the gaping, pink, fistulous caverns of their mouths. There were others, stewbums and honky-tonks and crewcut military joes, perhaps ten in total.

Orlock sat up. A massive chunk of his skull had been vaporized. His brain, white as cheese curd, glistened in the firelight.
Welcome to my world, you son of a bitch
, Crosshairs thought. The old vampire appeared disoriented. His tongue flapped and flopped. His hands clenched and unclenched in the air. He emitted obscene gargling noises.

The other vampires gawped in surprise. It was the first time they had sensed weakness in their leader. They attacked.

But not the men.

They attacked Orlock.

While living in Thailand, Tripwire once witnessed a feeding frenzy. He’d chartered a fishing boat,
Daydream Believer
, off the island of Phucket. At day’s end, the crew gutted the day’s catch on the deck, casting the offal overboard. Smelling blood, sharks came. Lemontails mostly, plus a few makos and tigers. They churned the calm waters of the Andaman Sea into a froth, snapping at the floating fish guts. When that was gone they fell upon one another, the stronger and faster devouring the weak and wounded. Tripwire was reminded of this brutal spectacle watching the vampires attack Orlock, thinking,
I am witnessing the law of the jungle in its purest form
.

The vampires set upon Orlock like animals, subduing him under the sheer force of their weight and numbers. The old vampire was still gargling. Zippo looked down at him. He was on his hands and knees. The beehive woman straddled his back with his head caught between her hands. She bit
into
his head, into the yawning hole Oddy’s bullet had made. Gleaming clots of brain flecked her fishbelly lips. She smiled. Her glasses were canted at a ridiculous angle. A wet ripping noise as she tore off a patch of hair and scalp. Orlock shrieked. Beehive hooked a finger through the hole in his tongue, twisting and pulling and ripping it out at the root. It looked small in her palm: a tiny white tombstone. She threw it against a tree, where it stuck for a moment before falling to the ground.

These were not the vampires of the men’s understanding. Where was the dark romanticism, the brooding mystery, the gothic beauty? These things were no more refined than a pack of dingoes.

The vampires flipped Orlock onto his back. Some held him down while others tore his clothes off. His body was cadaver-pale, limbs like splits of bleached wood, flesh hanging off the bones like bread dough off a dowel. His penis, childish in proportion, hung between quivering thighs. Tripwire watched the pretty blonde vampire reach between his legs and stretch it to excruciating tautness before snipping it off between her teeth. The old vampire howled.

Tripwire edged beside Oddy. “Got that holy water?”

Oddy pulled the vial from his pocket. Tripwire held his hands out. A white phosphorus grenade was cupped in each palm. “Douse ’em.”

Freeing an arm, Orlock raked his nails across surfer-dude’s face. They sank into surfer-dude’s left eye, slitting the retina open. Surfer-dude’s hands flew to his face like flame-stung moths. Surfer-dude’s burst open eye drooled out of its socket. Surfer-dude’s eye-jelly, black and syrupy, poured down his cheeks. Orlock slashed again, opening up surfer-dude’s neck, digging inside the wound, yanking the esophagus out. It dangled to surfer-dude’s breastbone like an obscene necktie.

The turbaned vampire clamped his teeth over Orlock’s nose. It tore free with a dreadful splintering noise. Turban spat it into the snow and went back for more.

Oddy spilled holy water over the grenades. The other men assembled in a loose battle formation behind Tripwire. Answer pulled a stake from his pack and the others followed suit.

The man wearing the KISS THE COOK apron was pulling Orlock’s stomach apart. The ancient vampire’s flesh tore with sickening ease and a sound like old newspapers. He laid the skin-flaps across Orlock’s ribs and dipped his hands into the chest cavity, squeezing and mashing as Orlock bucked like a bug on a pin. The organs KISS THE COOK tore free were desiccated, like withered pieces of fruit. He crushed one in his fist and it burst apart in a cloud of dust.

The holy water froze around the grenades, encasing them in a thin glaze of ice. Tripwire pulled the pins, whispered, “Fire in the hole,” and lobbed them at the massed vampires.

They landed softly: Beehive’s attention was drawn to the fist-sized holes in the snow for a brief moment before returning to the matter at hand. A white vapor-trail rose from the holes and a heartbeat later—

B-Ba-BOOM.

A momentary radiance followed by a lethal hailstorm of whizzing metal. The men shielded their mouths and noses against the deadly phosphorus fumes. The noise of the explosions gave way to a wild and horrified screaming, a sound so shocking in its intensity it seemed as though the screamer’s lungs must surely burst from the strain.

The vampires, almost every one of them, had been struck by shrapnel. The effect was violent, bizarre, and instantaneous. Thick, green-tinted smoke poured out of every wound. It was as if a tiny woodsman had kindled a fire inside of them, stoking it heavily, until the resultant smoke was forced from any vent it could find. Smoke hissed from bloodless slits in chests and arms and legs; smoke billowed out of mouths and—cartoonishly, horrifically—from noses and ears; smoke surged out of a gash in surfer-dude’s forehead with a steam-whistle’s shriek.

The vampires spun in pain-maddened pirouettes. The internal combustion was so fierce that the hair of their heads and underarms and even their crotches burst into flame, crackling and glowing like piles of burning twigs. The pretty blonde vampire hacked up gobs of her lungs, the black, smoking clots spattering the snow.

Ironically, only Orlock avoided the shrapnel, on account of his position at the bottom of the pile. Amazingly, he stood.

“He’s not going to be the next Barker’s Beauty,” Zippo said.

Indeed he would not: all that remained of Orlock’s face were his eyes and upper palate, a few lonesome teeth, half an ear. The flaps of skin that had once sheltered the inner workings of his mouth caught the breeze like freakish sails. Viscera spooled out of the hole in his gut in petrified spaghetti loops.

He pointed at the men. A good many of his fingers had been bitten off, somewhat spoiling the effect. He said, “Glaaa…”

The monosyllabic moan acted as a rallying cry.

The vampires came at the men.

Zippo was a loner. Zippo was self-centered. Zippo did not have friends, he had business associates. Zippo knew who he was, and was generally comfortable in his skin. Hearing Grosevoir’s proposal, he’d secretly hoped to be the only survivor left to collect the bounty. He didn’t hate the other men. He wouldn’t try to kill them, or see them abandoned. Yet, at the core, all they represented was a million dollars that could be his.

This mindset persisted up until the very moment the vampires came for his old unit members. Then it all changed. Suddenly he was twenty again, back in the jungles of Vietnam. Suddenly these men’s lives had a value beyond mere dollar signs. A moment ago they’d meant nothing to him; now he would willingly go through hell for them. It was the kind of knee-jerk reaction he might make spying a child playing on the street in a speeding car’s path—unpremeditated, almost thoughtless. It had little to do with friendship, or love, or compassion. It was something different altogether, and it functioned under the understanding that they were all in this together. Live or die, they did it together.

Zippo was unable to comprehend his feelings on such a profound level. What he thought as he stepped in front of his fellow mercenaries, shielding them, preparing to take the first hit, was elementary in its simplicity:

I will die for you.

Now. Here. This moment.

“Come get it,” he whispered, and pulled the trigger.

The vampires hurled themselves at the wall of holy-water-laced flames with the heedless abandon of moths at a lit candle. Those who made it through were little more than flaming skeletons on the other side. Flesh sloughed off their bones in fiery gobbets, scattering their wake like glowing breadcrumbs. Fire licked from their eye sockets and shot from their mouths. Some retreated into the woods to lick their hideous wounds. Others were undeterred.

Beehive, her hair alight in a flaming spire, advanced on Tripwire. He backed away, fist clutching a stake. Flames gathered on Beehive’s shoulders; her outspread fingers, webbed with fire, resembled blazing gloves. Tripwire stumbled on a rock and went down on his back. Beehive grabbed at Tripwire’s neck; blisters swelled and burst on his throat. He screamed. She bent over him, mouth hot and necrotic …

Surfer-dude zeroed in on Oddy. His esophageal cord hung like a horrid pendulum, teeth very long and very white amidst the flaming wreckage of his face. Oddy snapped off a shot that spun him sideways. The vampire swayed like a three-sheets-to-the-wind drunk, left arm hanging cockeyed, bone shattered at the elbow.

Oddy cocked the Webley and fired again. The slug blew a flaming wedge out of surfer-dude’s shoulder. He took a knee. He got up again. Oddy drew a killing bead. Surfer-dude dove, tackling Oddy at the knees, driving him to the ground. Surfer-dude’s burning dreadlocks writhed like a ball of quarrelsome snakes atop his head. His nails punched through Oddy’s pants, into the soft meat of his hamstrings. Bellowing, Oddy jammed the Webley into surfer-dude’s mouth. The shot blew him upright, straightening his spine. Oddy saw the purpling night sky through the softball-sized hole in the vampire’s throat and thought of Dade…

Zippo ran the flamer’s tank dry. He shrugged it off and drew the Berettas. Answer flanked him; they stood back-to-back.

“Boy,” Zippo said fiercely, “any of these blood-suckers get their teeth into me, I want you to put me down before I start changing.”

“You got it.”

“Knew I could count on you.”

Turban and KISS THE COOK stalked in on them. Zippo pumped shots at Turban, slamming slugs into his belly and knees, bullets exiting in a spray of splintered bone. Answer’s silenced Kirikkales made a
snick-a-snick
sound. A daisy chain of dime-sized holes spread across KISS THE COOK’s throat.

Turban grabbed Zippo. His strength was immense: Zippo felt himself in the grip of a grizzly. The vampire’s headwear unwound in flaming spirals around his head, burning with the smell of raw spices. Zippo brought his knee up into Turban’s crotch. The vampire laughed, lips melting in ropy strings, hugging Zippo tighter. The hitman’s ribs cracked. He angled one Beretta into Turban’s crotch and squeezed off three quick shots…