The hall erupted into a cacophony of angry shouts and competing calls to order. Jules checked his watch, then nudged Doodlebug. “Time for us to take our ‘cigarette break,’ pal.”

“Thank Varney! Any longer in here and I’d have to scrub myself down with lye.”

They waited outside beneath the gloomy shadows of the pine trees. Jules sweated with nervous anticipation; would his setup work as planned? Three minutes later Tiny Idaho proved his worth as a gadget man. The shouting from inside suddenly changed to raucous and deranged laughter. Thirty seconds later the only sounds to be heard were crickets chirping and the rumble of traffic from the highway.

Jules rubbed his hands together with glee. “It worked! Am I a hotshot planner or what?”

They went back inside. Unconscious bodies were grotesquely sprawled across chairs, tables, and the floor, their faces still twisted with the muscle spasms of laughter. To Jules, it looked like the aftermath of one of the Joker’s rampages from a 1940s Batman comic. He felt tremendously proud of himself. He quickly counted the bodies: twenty-three. Then he headed for the door.

“What are you up to now?” Doodlebug asked.

“Wait and see, pal. I got this all planned out to a T.”

He returned a minute later, his arms full of stacks of disposable aluminum baking pans. He set these aside, then began arranging the slumbering bodies on shoved-together chairs, laying out each victim so that the head and neck dangled below the rest of the body.

Jules glanced archly at his companion. “Are you gonna help me, or are you just gonna stand there and watch?”

“Neither, actually,” Doodlebug said as he sat himself down by the door and pulled a folded copy ofThe New Yorker from his purse. “This isyour show. I’m just along for the ride, remember?”

Jules grumbled darkly, but he continued with his work. After twenty minutes he had all the bodies in proper position, aluminum baking pans on the floor beneath their necks. Now came the tricky part. He had to actually drink enough of their blood to ensure that they’d become vampires, but not so much that he’d succumb to the gas’s effects and fall unconscious himself.

One of the women began to stir. It was the reporter from theTimes-Picayune. He’d hoped she would’ve left before the gas went off, but now he had no choice but to do her. He knelt by her side and unceremoniously chomped down on her neck. She moaned quietly. Her blood had the same metallic, off-taste he remembered from his kayaker victim in the cab. He allowed himself to swallow two mouthfuls-any more than two would be pushing his luck-and then he sucked hard but spat the blood into the pan below. He sucked and spat and sucked and spat until he got a good, steady flow going. Then he let gravity do the rest of the work.

The job rapidly turned into a race against time. He hustled from one side of the room to the other, biting, sucking, and spitting as grunts or twitches of wakefulness called to him. Several times he had no choice but to stop and sit for a minute. Even in small individual doses, the cumulative effect of it all caught up with him, and he giggled as the room shifted around his spinning head.

Finally, Jules was done. He slumped against the rear wall, a few feet away from where Doodlebug was still sitting with his magazine. He felt dizzy and more than a little nauseated. But he was very satisfied with himself. He’d planned his work and worked his plan. Now there was nothing more to do but wait a couple of hours, the time it would take for his recruits to reawaken as fledgling vampires. The nucleus of his army of vengeance.

TheTimes-Picayune reporter was the first to stir. Outside, a trucker blasted his air horn. The woman slowly rubbed her face and mumbled. “Honeeee… honey… turn off the alarm, will you? It’sirritating…”

Roughly in the order in which Jules had serviced them, the newly born vampires mumbled and stretched and worked the kinks out of their necks and backs. The ex-moderator was the first to attempt to stand. He clung to the podium and swayed like a drunk on a three-day bender. “What… what the hell happened?” He stared across the room at the other slowly unclouding faces, who in turn glanced about them and looked at each other with wide, surprised eyes.

“We… were we all asleep?”

“I remember laughin‘ like the dickens about somethin’ or other…”

“What’s with theseholes in everybody’s neck?”

“Red gravy in pans all over the floor-?”

“Hey, Waldo, you’re white as a brand-new bedsheet!”

“Boy, am Ithirsty — ”

Jules stepped smartly to the podium and shoved the ex-moderator aside. He beamed with triumph. “Welcome, everyone! Welcome to the happy and growing ranks of the undead!”

The ex-moderator slumped into a chair and rubbed his sore neck. “And who the fat fuck are you?”

“Me? I’m your new leader. My name is Jules Duchon. And I”-he struck his puffed-out chest like a Roman centurion-“am avampire! Now, thanks to me, all ofyou are vampires, too! I can see from your faces that some of you are havin‘ a hard time believing me. Well, just look at the fang marks on each other’s necks. The mark ofmy fangs! You feel thirsty? It’sblood that you thirst for! In just a few minutes, you can exchange pans and have your first drink. Feel each other. Go ahead; don’t be shy. Your skin is the temperature of this room. Since the air conditioner’s been running all night, your hides must be pretty darn cool by now.”

“He’sright!” the pregnant woman shrieked. “I’mcold! I ain’tnever been cold in July in south Louisiana before!”

“You’ll get used to it,” Jules reassured her. “Just drink plenty of hot coffee.”

“But-but wait a minute!” TheTimes-Picayune reporter stared at her white arms with horror. “Ican’t be a vampire! I’m a rabbi’s wife, for God’s sake!”

“Holy mackerel! My skin reallyis white!” The man wearing the Buchanan T-shirt lifted it up and insisted that his neighbors take a look at his alabaster belly. “Look at this! Is this incrediblyexcellent or what? I’m the whitest man on the North Shore!”

Immediately, all members of the audience began comparing each other’s skin tones and arguing over who, in fact, was the whitest of them all. This contest went on for a few minutes, rising in volume and vociferousness, until the ex-moderator grabbed the gavel from the podium and banged it against the seat of his chair.

“Now simmer down, people! Just simmer down!” He waited until the last arguments died away, then turned toward Jules. “I think it’s high time we asked this man why he came here tonight and did this to all of us.”

Jules took a deep breath and expanded his chest to its maximum diameter. “I have recruited all of you to fight in a great crusade! A crusade that all of you will have big-time enthusiasm for. The great city of New Orleans has become infected with the foul, nasty, horrible,foul plague of-Negro vampirism!That fair city, so historic, so important to good white folks everywhere, is practicallyoverrun by colored, bloodsucking hordes! They pollute the air with their so-called rap music and destroy all that is good and pure about white culture! We MUST put an END to this ABOMINATION! Are you allwith me?”

The rousing cheers Jules fully expected to hear never came. Instead, the man wearing the Buchanan T-shirt said, “So you want us to go back over the Causeway with you to New Orleans and clean that place out?”

“Well…sure! ” Jules smiled as brightly as he could.

The self-proclaimed Whitest Man on the North Shore laughed so hard that his dentures, already displaced by his new fangs, flew out of his mouth. “You… wantus… to go back to that cesspool of miscegenation and niggraism? After we spent half our lives making enough money to get the hellaway from there?”

“But-”

Others in the audience vigorously nodded their assent. “Let New Orleansrot!”