Annie frowned. “Mr. Smith, this is a nation of laws,” she said. “We should at least try to work with the police before we take the law into our own hands, as you seem to be proposing! As you already did, when you took a shot at that boy!”

“Ms. McGowan – I just can’t see how it can work. And it wasn’t a ‘boy.’”

“Ms. McGowan,” Maggie said, startling everyone, “I talked to one of those things last night, on the phone. They aren’t scared of the police. They aren’t scared of anything. The one I talked to said that they were evil incarnate.”

Smith blinked at her. “What?” he asked. This was the first he had heard of this.

“That’s what it said,” Maggie explained. “It said that evil is a real thing, a real force, a… a power in the world, a power that can take on solid form, and live with us without us even knowing it. And it’s done that, throughout history – it’s taken one form after another. Each time, it’s been found out, and its creatures have been hunted down and destroyed, but each time it’s come back again, more powerful than before, in a new form. And it’s been gone, but it’s back, now, and these creatures are its new form.”

His own conversation with the thing in his apartment came back to him. “Vampires,” he said.

Everyone turned to look at him.

“Vampires,” he repeated. “The one I talked to said that the last vampire was killed in 1939, in Los Angeles. Fifty years ago. That must have been… well, if they’re a new form for this force, then vampires must have been the last one, the old form.”

“But vampires were never real!” Sandy Niklasen said.

“How do we know?” Elias asked. “How do we know that? If they’ve been extinct for fifty years, and they must have been rare for years before that, of course no one believes in them now. People thought that dodos were a hoax for years, after they were extinct. Vampires were real, but we finally killed them off – and now we have these new vampires!”

“Except they’re different,” Smith pointed out. “They aren’t vampires. They come out in daylight, or at least they can sometimes. They don’t sleep in coffins – as far as I can tell, they don’t sleep at all.”

“But they’re like vampires,” Elias insisted. “They’re heirs to the vampires – their descendants, more or less.”

“Sort of the next step in supernatural evolution,” Smith suggested.

Elias nodded enthusiastically, and rose to his feet. “They are,” he said, “That’s it exactly! They’re the next step in evolution! The vampires got wiped out, unfit to survive, so something else has come along to fit the ecological niche they left vacant!”

“So if we kill them all,” Maggie said, “Something else will come along and take their place?”

Elias nodded. “Yeah, of course!” he said.

“But not right away,” Smith pointed out. “It took fifty years for these things to appear. If we wipe them out, we might be safe for another fifty years…”

“Safe,” Khalil said. “Safe, like this past fifty years? World war, nuclear bombs, safe?”

“Yeah, safe,” Sandy said. “Which would you rather live with, monsters that’ll eat you in your sleep, or the same stuff we’ve always lived with?”

“I wonder,” Maggie said, “I wonder if there’s a connection? I mean, if these things are made out of evil, doesn’t that evil have to come from somewhere? Won’t it be… I mean, is it the same evil that’s been around loose in the world since 1939?”

“Evil was loose in the world long before 1939,” Annie pointed out.

“But some times have been worse than others,” Maggie said, “And maybe the better times were when all the evil was being used by creatures – so when there were vampires, there wouldn’t be world wars, maybe?”

“Hitler came to power in 1933, honey,” Annie said. “And he was a monster all along. World War II didn’t happen all at once.”

“But how many vampires were left, by then?” Maggie persisted. “Maybe when there were a lot of vampires, we got peace, like… like…” She stopped, puzzled.

“We’ve never had peace,” Smith said. “There have always been wars and atrocities. I don’t think there’s any law of conservation of evil.”

Sandy shifted in his chair. “Look, I don’t care about all this theory,” he said. “I just want to deal with the thing that you say is pretending to be my old lady. You claim that these nightmare people killed her and ate her?”

Smith nodded. “I think so,” he said.

“Then I’m gonna kill the sons of bitches. Now, how do we do that?”

Smith looked at Maggie, who shrugged; he turned toward Elias, but Annie interrupted.

“You all can hold it right there,” she said. “Those things may be monsters, but I don’t want any part of some vigilante attack on them. I won’t stop you, but I don’t want any part of it, and I won’t have you planning it here in my house. I still say it’s a job for the police, and tomorrow morning I intend to call ’em. I’d advise the rest of you to just wait and see whether they can handle this, before you go and do anything foolish!”

Sandy stood up. “Lady, the cops ain’t gonna do a fuckin’ thing.” He marched toward the door.

“Sandy, wait!” Smith called. He turned to Annie. “Ms. McGowan, thanks for your hospitality, but I’ve got to be going now. Is anyone else coming?”

Elias jumped up.

Smith nodded. “Wait for us, Sandy,” he said.

Together, the three men left the house.

“A stake through the heart,” Elias said from the back seat.

“They aren’t vampires,” Smith said again.

“Yeah, I know,” Elias said, “but Ed, a stake through the heart’ll kill anything! Would you be getting up again if we put a piece of wood through your heart?”

“No,” Smith acknowledged, “But I wouldn’t be getting up again after somebody shot me through the throat, either.”

“You got a better idea?” Sandy demanded.

“No,” Smith admitted.

“Then I say we try it,” Sandy said. “The kid’s right; nothing gets up again with a stake through the heart.”

Smith still had misgivings. “Look,” he said, “I think it’ll take more than that.”

“Sure!” Elias said. “Like in the books. Cut off the head and stuff the mouth with garlic.”

“Cut off the head?” Sandy asked.

“Yeah.”

“With what?”

“Uh… doesn’t matter, as far as I know,” Elias said.

“Garlic?” Smith asked. The one in his apartment had said the same thing, about cutting off a vampire’s head and stuffing the mouth with garlic, but it still sounded stupid.

“Well, that’s what worked with vampires,” Elias said, a bit defensively.

“Elias, they aren’t vampires,” Smith said.

“But they’re related!” Elias insisted. He saw the expression on Smith’s face, and said, “Hey, what can it hurt to try?”

“I don’t know,” Smith replied. “That’s what worries me.”

“So what do we need, then?” Sandy asked. “A stake, and a hammer, and a bunch of garlic, and something to cut off the head…”

“An axe, maybe,” Smith suggested. He remembered how quickly the bulletholes had closed up, and he wanted something that would cut fast. “What kind of stake? I mean, just a chunk of two-by-four with a point, or does it have to be some special wood?”

“Oak, ash, or thorn, I think it is,” Elias said.

That sounded more like something to do with druids than with vampires to Smith, but he didn’t argue.

“Hardwoods,” Sandy remarked.

“We can find oak pretty easily,” Smith said, waving at a tree by the roadside. “Just cut a branch and put a point on it.”

“We gonna do this today?” Sandy asked.

Elias and Smith looked at each other. “I don’t know,” Smith said. “I’d want to do it by daylight.”

“It’s three o’clock now, and the sun sets at what, seven thirty? Eight o’clock?” Sandy said. “That’s five hours. What say we get on with it, then?”

Smith looked at Elias; he was a little pale, but he nodded.

“All right,” Smith said, turning the wheel. “An axe first, to cut the stake, and a bunch of garlic; anything else?”