Free F Paul Wilson - Novel 10 by Midnight Mass (v2.1)

people for being
cautious, but this seemed overly so. The sun was in the west and shining full
on his back; he was all but silhouetted in it. What more did they want?
                 I
should maybe take off my clothes and dance naked?
                 He
gave a mental shrug and savored the salt tang of the sea air. The bulk of this
huge Tudor mansion stood between him and the Atlantic , but the ocean's briny scent and rhythmic
rumble were everywhere. He'd bicycled from Lakewood , which was only ten miles inland from here,
but the warm May day and the bright sun beating on his dark blue suit coat had
sweated him up. It had taken him longer than he'd planned to find this retreat
house.
                 Spring Lake . The Irish Riviera . An Irish Catholic seaside resort since before
the turn of the century. He looked around at its carefully restored Victorian
houses, the huge mansions facing the beach, the smaller homes set in neat rows
running straight back from the ocean. Many of them were still occupied. Not
like Lakewood . Lakewood was an empty shell.
                 Oh,
they'd been smart, those bloodsuckers. They knew their easiest targets.
Whenever they swooped into an area they went after officialdom first — the
civic leaders, the cops, the firemen, the clergy. But after that, they attacked
the non-Christian neighborhoods. And among Jews they picked the Orthodox first
of the first. Smart. Where else would they be less likely to run up against a
cross? It worked for them in Brooklyn and Queens, and so when they came south
into New Jersey, spreading like a plague, they headed straight for the town
with one of the largest collections of yeshivas in North America.
                 But
after the Bensonhurst and Kew Gardens holocausts, the people in the Lakewood communities should not have taken quite so
long to figure out what was going to happen. The Reformed and Conservative
synagogues started handing out crosses at Shabbes—too late for many but it
saved a few. Did the Orthodox congregations follow suit? No. They hid in their
homes and shuls and yeshivas and read and prayed.
                 And
were liquidated.
                 A
cross, a crucifix — they held power over the undead, drove them away. Zev's
fellow rabbis did not want to accept that simple fact because they could not
face its devastating ramifications. To hold up a cross was to negate two
thousand years of Jewish history, it was to say that the Messiah had come and
they had missed him.
                 Did
it say that? Zev didn't know. For all he knew, the undead predated
Christianity, and their fear of crosses might be related to something else.
Argue about it later—people were dying. But the rabbis had to argue it then and
there. And as they argued, their people were slaughtered like cattle.
                 How
Zev had railed at them, how he'd pleaded with them! Blind, stubborn fools! If a
fire was consuming your house, would you refuse to throw water on it just
because you'd always been taught not to believe in water? Zev had arrived at
the rabbinical council wearing a cross and had been thrown out—literally sent
hurding through the front door. But at least he had managed to save a few of
his own people. Too few.
                 He
remembered his fellow Orthodox rabbis, though. All the ones who had refused to
face the reality of the vampires' fear of crosses, who had forbidden their
students and their congregations to wear crosses, who had watched those same
students and congregations die en masse. And soon those very same rabbis were
roaming their own community, hunting the survivors, preying on other yeshivas,
other congregations, until the entire community was liquidated and its leaders
incorporated into the brotherhood of the undead.
                 This
was the most brilliant aspect of the undead tactics: turn all the community
leaders into their own