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shivering, brown eyes gazing at him trustingly. Daddy . . . please help me , it said, and Perlman's heart nearly broke.
    His body moved on its own and he began to bend, intending to pull the poor, tiny body into his warm arms. Beneath the pitiful cries swirling in his mind, Perlman sensed a building eagerness that caused his pounding pulse to stutter.
    He stepped forward and reached—
    Another step—
    His right foot cracked into a twenty-pound weight lying just under the front of the wardrobe and he cried out as sanity-bringing pain rocketed up his foot and ankle. His face—which had been only a half foot from the boy's jerked up and away as his fingers fumbled with the tape and slapped it over the creature's face. The agony climbing up his leg was an immense thing competing with the voice that still rang in his head—a voice that had gone from childish cajoling to fading screams of rage as he leaned back against the wall and panted for breath. When he realized that he'd almost become a human pacifier for this miscreation's daytime nap, the sardines and crackers he'd eaten earlier exploded from his throat in a smelly, wet mess across the weights at his feet.
    His leg almost buckled as he took a step and Perlman wondered what damage he'd done to his foot. Moisture trickled into his eyes and he swiped at it with the back of his hand as he pulled out two of the garbage bags and tucked one inside the other; grimacing, he leaned back into the wardrobe and tugged the bags over the vampire's head and skeleton-like torso. As he worked the plastic around the frigid body, the voice tried to squirm into his mind again and he purposely ground his foot into the floor, hissing through his teeth as the pain cleared his thoughts. Even with a busted foot it didn’t take much to lift the boy from the wardrobe and draw the other bags around it from the feet up.
    The child weighed little and normally Perlman could have simply tossed him over a shoulder and gone on his way. As he tied the plastic tightly around the boy he was grateful that he'd brought the two-by-fours, though he'd done so because he'd assumed his captive would be an adult and considerably heavier. Now he placed a wood piece at each side of the creature and ran the thick duct tape around and around, twisting and circling until he was certain the body wouldn't slide down and scrape against the ground as he dragged it. With the extra length of wood at one end, he could pull it down the street like a travois.
    He was never so relieved to see daylight as when he finally hauled his burden down the porch steps of the three-flat. Each time the wood bumped from one riser to the next Perlman felt the vibration run up his arms and travel to his injured foot. His head ached, his stomach churned, and his foot throbbed, and to make matters worse, when he crossed the street and came out from beneath the tree shadows into the sun, the thing in the garbage bags began to try and wriggle free. With the amount of tape and rope wrapped around it, Perlman thought the boy could have undulated for a week and not gotten loose, but it was a spooky thing to witness and he tried to hobble faster and get the vampire back to the hospital as quickly as possible. The way it was writhing it seemed the sun's rays were going through the dark green plastic as though it were mesh. It had felt like hours inside but the sun, springtime bright and strong, had just reached its axis and Perlman relaxed, knowing he could still count on hours of daylight.
    But he wondered what tonight would bring.

5

    REVELATION 6:12
    . . . and the moon became as blood.

    ~ * ~

    Deborah Nole's teeth ached from being ground together for the last three hours, yet every time she tried to relax, her teeth started chattering; in the empty auditorium the sound was machine-gun loud.
    Dammit! Why was she awake? Exhaustion usually made her sleep through the night, oblivious to her usual fear of the dark and the creatures that now owned it.