The healing slowed visibly. The mocking smile vanished. The thing looked almost worried.

“Who goes first?” Smith asked, uneasily.

Khalil shook his head. Sandy started to say something, but then the thing brought a knee up from behind, and he was too busy fighting this sudden attack to waste his breath on words.

Holding his own breath, Smith thrust his head down, between his hands, mouth open, and bit. A chunk of the thing’s flesh tore free in his mouth, a chunk that felt like hard rubber in his mouth.

And Maggie had been right; it tasted like shit.

Only worse.

The thing screamed, and Smith bit again, and chewed, trying hard to ignore the taste, which was the taste of foulness and corruption, like the stink of rotting meat, oily and vile. He ignored the screaming, though it hurt his ears, and he ignored the lights coming on in neighboring houses, and he ignored the churning in his belly, and he sank his teeth into that stinking grey flesh again, and hit something harder, something like clay, something that gleamed black and wet, and he bit into that, too, his teeth scraping through it.

The thing let out the loudest shriek yet, a howl like nothing Smith had ever imagined, like a damned soul in torment, and he almost gagged just from the sound of it.

Then he took another bite, and the scream trailed away into a breathy hissing.

Smith gnawed, and chewed, and forced himself to swallow, and didn’t worry about the clawed fingers scraping his side, or Sandy’s struggles to hold the thing’s legs, or Khalil leaning forward to push the thing’s head back down so it couldn’t bite. The taste and the stench seemed to get worse and worse, and he could only force himself to go on by refusing to think about anything except working his jaws, about biting and chewing and swallowing.

And then he finished the black stuff, and the struggling stopped, and the thing’s hands and head fell back, and Smith dared to rise up for a faceful of fresh air. He opened his eyes – he didn’t remember closing them, but they were tightly shut – and looked down.

The thing was utterly lifeless, a gaping hole in its chest, a hole through thick gray flesh, a hole smeared with viscous, milky fluid, a hole that was no longer trying to heal itself.

It still wore Elias’s skin on its face, but the boy’s features were twisted into a feral, inhuman expression of hatred and terror, the skin pulled back from around the mouth, revealing thin black lips and shining metallic teeth.

Its curled hands still wore Elias’s skin, but long black claws had thrust out from the fingertips. The left, that Khalil had held, was unmarked beyond that; the right, which had raked Smith’s side, was smeared with blood, the skin scraped back from two of the fingertips.

But the creature was dead.

In fact, the creature was rotting away.

That hole that his teeth and the knives had made in its boneless chest was blackening at the edges and growing; reeking black liquid was oozing from the decaying flesh, spilling across the gray gunk, flowing down and filling the bottom of the cavity.

Smith turned away and vomited on the grass, choking up the thing’s substance as best he could, spitting it all out on the lawn.

Khalil rose and stepped away, watching. Sandy fell back off the thing, onto the grass.

When Smith turned back the creature was visibly falling in upon itself; its head was flattening out like a deflating ball, oily black liquid dripping from the nose and mouth and seeping out around the eyes. The limbs had gone limp, and as Smith watched one shoe fell off. The foot that had worn it had withered away to nothing.

The stench of death and decay was overpowering, and Smith’s nausea returned. He gagged, then retched, but had nothing left to bring up.

Sandy got to his feet, staring down at the thing. He spat onto the rotting corpse, spat a gobbet of sputum mixed with blood.

“That’s for Mary, you son of a bitch,” he said, as he wiped his mouth.

Khalil hissed and pointed, and Smith and Sandy looked up to see the beam of a flashlight shining across the bushes in front of the house across the street.

A siren sounded in the distance.

“We better get out of here,” Smith said.

Sandy nodded, and the three of them ran for the car. Sandy limped slightly; Smith ran bent over, trying to minimize the pain from the gashes in his side.

Behind them the shapeless mass and stinking black puddle that had been the nightmare person, the false Elias, were beginning to steam.

Chapter Nine:

Tuesday, August 8th

1.

“One down,” Sandy said, smiling.

“And a hundred and forty-three to go,” Smith responded glumly, closing his hand around his coffee cup.

“Hey, that’s not so many!” Sandy said. “At least we know how many there are!”

“Do we?” Smith asked. “How do we know they don’t reproduce somehow? Vampires could make more vampires, couldn’t they?”

“I don’t know,” Sandy said, “Do you? Could they?” He scowled. “And besides, these things aren’t vampires.”

“Yeah,” Smith said, “and we don’t know what they really are, either. Yeah, we know how to kill them now, but people knew how to kill vampires hundreds of years ago, and they still didn’t get the last one until 1939.”

“That’s what that creep told you,” Sandy said. “You can’t believe the creeps.”

“You killed one?” Annie asked from the doorway. “You’re sure?”

Smith turned. Their hostess was standing there in a pale pink housedress and fuzzy blue slippers. “Good morning,” he said. “Yes, we’re sure. It rotted away to nothing.”

“Not nothing,” Sandy objected. “The skin was still there.”

“That wasn’t part of it,” Smith pointed out.

Sandy shrugged.

“But I thought you intended to… ah…” Annie said.

“Eat it?” Sandy asked.

“We did,” Smith explained, “But we didn’t need to eat all of it. There’s a part where the heart should be that’s black and harder than the rest, and when I ate that it began to melt away.”

“I wish we hadn’t left it there,” Sandy said.

Smith shrugged. “What were we going to do? I mean, its screaming woke up the neighbors, and would you want to explain to them that we were killing monsters on their lawn at three in the morning?”

“Yeah, and what about when the neighbors find Elias’s skin lying there empty?”

Khalil, who had been sitting silently staring at his coffee, shook his head. “The others, from the house,” he said. “They got there first.”

Smith turned and blinked at him. “How’d you know that?” he demanded.

“I saw,” Khalil replied.

“Damn,” Sandy said. “They know we know, then.”

“They’d know anyway,” Smith said.

“Where’s Maggie?” Annie asked, looking about the kitchen.

“Asleep on the couch,” Smith replied.

“Oh.” Annie finally left the doorway and entered.

“I hope you don’t mind,” Smith said, a little belatedly remembering his manners, “but we made ourselves some coffee. We’ve been up all night.”

“Oh, that’s fine,” Annie said. She looked around, somewhat puzzled, then went to fetch the corn flakes from a cabinet.

“Can I get you a cup of coffee?” Smith pushed back his chair.

“Oh, no, that’s all right,” she said, “I’ll just have orange juice.”

“Okay.” He settled back down.

Sandy looked at his watch. “I’ll have to call in sick today and then get some sleep,” he said.

Smith nodded. “Me, too,” he said.

“I’d better be getting home.” Sandy pushed back his chair and stood up.

“Hey, wait,” Smith said. “What about the others? We’re going to kill them, right?”

“Yeah, of course,” Sandy agreed.

“When?” Smith asked. “I mean, they seem less active in daylight; shouldn’t we go at it right now?” He waved at the sunlight pouring in through the kitchen window; the clouds had broken up not long after the three men had fled the Samaan house, and the day outside was bright, the sky blue.