Then she went to the bedroom. Soon it would be time to go out and she had to dress appropriately. She stripped to her white cotton underpants and laid out the tight black skirt and red blouse she'd lifted from the shattered show window of that deserted shop down on Clifton Avenue. She slipped her small breasts into a heavily padded bra, then began squeezing into a fresh pair of black pantyhose.
<You're getting into THOSE clothes again, are you? You look cheap, Carole! You look like a WHORE!>
I know, she thought. That's the whole idea.
JOE . . .
Father Joe Cahill watched the moon rise over the back end of his old church and wondered about the wisdom of coming back. The casual decision made in the full light of day now seemed reckless and foolhardy in the dark.
But no turning back now. He'd followed Zev to the second floor of this three-story office building across the street from the rear of St. Anthony's, and here they'd waited for dark. It must have been a law office once. The place had been vandalized, the windows broken, the furniture trashed, but an old Temple University Law School degree hung askew on the wall, and the couch was still in one piece. So while Zev caught some Z's, Joe sat, sipped a little of his Scotch, and did some heavy thinking.
Mostly he thought about his drinking. He'd done too much of that lately, he knew; so much so that he was afraid to stop cold. So he was allowing himself just a touch now, barely enough to take the edge off. He'd finish the rest later, after he came back from that church over there.
He'd been staring at St. Anthony's since they'd arrived. It too had been extensively vandalized. Once it had been a beautiful little stone church, a miniature cathedral, really, very Gothic with all its pointed arches, steep roofs, crocketed spires, and multifoil stained glass windows. Now the windows were smashed, the crosses that had topped the steeple and each gable were gone, and anything resembling a cross on its granite exterior had been defaced beyond recognition.
As he'd known it would, the sight of St. Anthony's brought back memories of Gloria Sullivan, the young, pretty church volunteer whose husband worked for United Chemical International in New York; he commuted to the city every day, trekked overseas a little too often. Joe and Gloria had seen a lot of each other around the church offices and had become good friends. But Gloria had somehow got the idea that what they had went beyond friendship, so she showed up at the rectory one night when Joe was there alone. He tried to explain that as attractive as she was, she was not for him. He had taken certain vows and meant to stick by them. He did his best to let her down easy but she'd been hurt. And angry.
That might have been that, but then her five-year-old son Kevin had come home from altar boy practice with a story about a priest making him pull down his pants and touching him. Kevin was never clear on who the priest had been, but Gloria Sullivan was. Obviously it had been Father Cahill—any man who could turn down the heartfelt offer of her love and her body had to be either a queer or worse. And a child molester was worse.
She took it to the police and to the papers.
Joe groaned softly at the memory of how swiftly his life had become hell. But he had been determined to weather the storm, sure that the real culprit eventually would be revealed. He had no proof—still didn't—but if one of the priests at St. Anthony's was a pederast, he knew it wasn't him. That left Father Alberto Palmeri, St. Anthony's fifty-five-year-old pastor.
Before Joe could get to the truth, however, the bishop had stepped in and removed Joe from the parish. Joe left under a cloud that had followed him to the retreat house in the next county and hovered over him till this day. The only place he'd found even brief respite from the impotent anger and bitterness that roiled under his skin and soured his gut every minute of every day was in the bottle—and that was sure as hell a dead end.
So why had he agreed to come back here? To torture himself? Or to get a look at Palmeri and see how low he had sunk?
Maybe that was it. Maybe seeing Palmeri wallowing in his true element would give Joe the impetus to put the whole St. Anthony's incident behind him and rejoin what was left of the human race—which needed all the help it could get.
And maybe it wouldn't.
Getting back on track was a nice thought, but over the past few months Joe had found it increasingly difficult to give much of a damn about anyone or anything.
Except maybe Zev. The old rabbi had stuck by him through the worst of it, defending him to anyone who would listen. But an endorsement from an Orthodox rabbi hadn't meant diddly in St. Anthony's.
Yesterday Zev had biked all the way to Spring Lake to see him. Old Zev was all right.
And he'd been right about the number of undead here too. Lakewood was crawling with the things. Fascinated and repelled, Joe had watched the streets fill with them shortly after sundown.
But what had disturbed him more were the creatures he'd seen before sundown.
The humans. Live ones.
The collaborators. The ones Zev called Vichy.
If there was anything lower, anything that deserved true death more than the undead themselves, it was the still-living humans who worked for them.
A hand touched his shoulder and he jumped. Zev. He was holding something out to him. Joe took it and held it up in the moonlight: a tiny crescent moon dangling from a chain on a ring.
"What's this?"
"An earring. The local Vichy wear them. The earrings identify them to the local nest of undead. They are spared."
"Where'd you get it?"
Zev's face was hidden in the shadows. "The previous owner ... no longer needs it.
"What's that supposed to mean?"
Zev sighed. He sounded embarrassed. "Some group has been killing the local Vichy. I don't know how many they've eliminated, but I came across one in my wanderings. Not such a pleasant task, but I forced myself to relieve the body of its earring. Just in case."
Joe found it hard to imagine the old pre-occupation Zev performing such a grisly task, but these were different times.
"Just in case what?"
"In case I needed to pretend to be one of them."
Joe had to laugh. "I can't see that fooling them for a second."
"Maybe a second is all I'd need. But it will look better on you. Put it on."
"My ear's not pierced."
A gnarled hand moved into the moonlight. Joe saw a long needle clasped between the thumb and index finger. "That I can fix," Zev said.
* * *
"On second thought," Zev whispered as they crouched in the deep shadows on St. Anthony's western flank, "maybe you shouldn't see this."
Puzzled, Joe squinted at him in the darkness.
"You lay a guilt trip on me to get me here, you make a hole in my ear, and now you're having second thoughts?"
"It is horrible like I can't tell you."
Joe thought about that. Certainly there was enough horror in the world outside St. Anthony's. What purpose did it serve to see what was going inside?
Because it used to be my church.
Even though he'd been an associate pastor, never fully in charge, and even though he'd been unceremoniously yanked from the post, St. Anthony's had been his first parish. He was back. He might as well know what they were doing inside.
"Show me."
Zev led him to a pile of rubble under a smashed stained glass window. He pointed up to where faint light flickered from inside.
"Look in there."
"You're not coming?"
"Once was enough, thank you."
Joe climbed as carefully, as quietly as he could, all the while becoming increasingly aware of a growing stench like putrid, rotting meat. It was coming from inside, wafting through the broken window. Steeling himself, he straightened and peered over the sill.