Alternate Ending

Joe says: This was as close as we got to any outright disagreements while writing this. And I gotta give big props to FPW, because it was totally unfair to him. We established early on that we'd all have POV characters, and we could end up doing what we wanted with them. I met with Jeff in Florida and we discussed how the Jenny/Randall dynamic would end up--they were star crossed lovers, with Randall's love strong enough for him to fight for Jenny even after he became a dracula. I'd also discussed Adam and Stacie's fates with Blake, and since he grooves on nihilism and tragedy, he decided to go the tragic route.

Paul had free reign to do what he wanted with Shanna and Clay, though we'd all discussed letting Shanna live. Clay's fate, however, changed often during our email discussions. He lived and died and lived and died, back and forth, over and over. The problem was Clay turned out to be one of the most memorable, and likeable, characters in the book.

We all knew going into this that we wanted a Night of the Living Dead type of ending. So Paul did what each of us did--he killed his main character in a spectacular fashion.

But I really didn't want Clay to die. Paul had created such a fun character, and the rest of the climax was such a downer, that I really believed Clay should live.

Happily, Paul was big enough to allow it, even though it was uncool of me to be such a whining little bitch boy. We compromised with the new, happier ending that appears in the manuscript.

Paul also introduced another mysterious character in these scenes named Dr. Driscoll, who seems to understand what's going on. This hints at a deep government conspiracy. We all liked this idea, especially if we do a sequel, but it confused some of our beta readers. If we do wind up writing Draculas 2, no doubt Dr. Driscoll will be a key figure.

Shanna

SHE stood by Clay's suburban, watching the dark, blocky mass of the hospital. A faint, faint glow lit some of the windows, probably backwash from the emergency lights in the hallways, but for the most part it looked dead and deserted. But looks were deceiving. She knew it crawled with--what had Jenny's ex called them? Draculas. Right. Jenny and her ex were in there--still human, she hoped--and so was Clay.

She prayed for his safe return. Yes, she was going to break his heart when he did return, but she wanted him back. Because somehow the world seemed a better place with Clay than without him.

Ten minutes ago the army had roared in and heavily armed soldiers had piled out of their trucks. A large black trailer had followed the soldiers into the lot but had parked away toward the rear. The people who had emerged were civilians.

And then something scary: The army set up spotlights at the emergency entrance, around the main entrance, and at each stairwell exit. Then they'd positioned soldiers with flame throwers at each point. Looked like they'd been convinced it was contagious. She'd expected officialdom to scoff at the stories of what had gone on in the hospital, but she guessed the recording Clay had insisted on making had convinced them.

Well, she'd never said he was a dummy, just not on her wavelength.

Just then, to her right at the corner of the building, flames lit the night. A scream echoed and then died.

Her heart stumbled over a beat. That was the door she and Clay had used to escape, the door he'd re-entered. They wouldn't have burned him by mistake, would they? No...that scream had had an unearthly quality. Had to be one of those draculas trying to escape the building. Still...

She took a step in that direction to go check, just to be sure, when she noticed movement on the ground, not too far from her. She looked closer and saw one of the supposedly dead state troopers moving--one of the pair Clay hadn't shot.

Oh, God. As it lifted its head and looked her way, glow from the army headlights glinted off rows of long sharp teeth.

"Hey!" she called. "Hey, somebody! We've got trouble over here! Hey!"

Nobody seemed to hear her. The noise from truck motors revving, soldiers shouting to each other, giving and taking orders, swallowed her cries.

"Hey!" she called, raising her voice to its limit. "A little help over here."

She backed up a few steps, readying to run, fearing it was coming for her, but it veered away, toward the empty darkness.

Confused? The side of its skull looked bashed in. Too damaged to know what it was doing? Well, that was fine with Shanna...

Except if it got away and bit someone, the plague would be loose and there'd be no stopping it.

She screamed. "Will somebody please--oh, crap!" He was going to get away and no one was paying her a bit off attention.

She glanced in the rear of Clay's Suburban and saw his super shotgun, his beloved AA-something. She didn't want to touch it...she remembered Marge back in the chapel, but somebody had to stop that thing.

She grabbed the gun and went around the other side of the car in time to see the dracula passing. How hard could this be? She raised the shotgun, pointed it toward the thing, and, closing her eyes--she couldn't look--pulled the trigger.

The gun boomed but had nowhere near the kick of that pistol Clay had handed her.

She opened her eyes and saw the dracula on the pavement. She was about to congratulate herself when she realized it was still alive, if that was what you could call whatever it was, and trying to regain its feet. But it couldn't. Shanna had shredded its knee.

"Lower your weapon!" shouted a voice behind her.

She turned and found herself facing the muzzles of half a dozen guns of various shapes and sizes and a chorus telling her to drop it. She laid the shotgun gently on the pavement. After all, Clay loved that thing.

"Now you listen!" she said.

A soldier who looked like he was in command got in her face. "What do you think you're doing, firing that here?"

Shanna jerked a thumb over her shoulder. "One of them was getting away."

A couple of the soldiers looked past her. She could tell by their expressions they'd never seen a dracula before.

"Get Doctor Driscoll," the officer said.

A few minutes later a woman, one of the civilians from the big trailer, appeared. She stared at the dracula with virtually no reaction, not a hint of surprise.

After a few seconds she said, "Dispose of it."

The officer motioned behind him and a soldier with a flame thrower appeared.

"Light it up," he told him.

The soldier hesitated, then sent a stream of liquid fire at the thing, engulfing it in flame. It screamed, spasmed, rolled on the ground, then lay still.

Shanna turned away and retched. That had once been a person...

She turned back to the woman, Dr. Driscoll. "Is that the only way to stop the infection?"

The woman stared at her with an alarmed expression. "Infection? Who said anything about infection?"

"It's obvious."

"It's nothing of the sort."

And then it hit Shanna. Dr. Driscoll hadn't been repulsed by the dracula. She'd been expecting it. "You've seen this before, haven't you? You knew about this."

"Who are you and where do you get your wild ideas?"

"I was in there. I saw--"

"In there? In the hospital?" The doctor signaled to the soldiers. "Lock her in quarantine."

A pair of them grabbed her, one by each arm, and were dragging her toward the trailer when four of the hospital's third-floor windows facing the parking lot blew out, belching flame and filling the air with bits of glass and charred flesh.

"Clay? Oh, no! Clay!"

Jenny

There was a frightening moment when the whole building shuddered from some sort of explosion. One of Clay's toys? Or had the cavalry finally arrived?

Jenny continued to stare up at the military helicopter. Over the din of the rotors she yelled, "Down here!"

It hovered directly overhead, and she watched one of the bay doors open. Then they began to lower a rescue basket down on a cable.

No...not a rescue basket.

What the heck is that?

Shanna

The soldiers who had been escorting her--a euphemism--to the trailer had seemed as shocked by the explosion as she. She'd tried to use their distraction to escape but they had too secure a grip on her. They'd pulled her inside and stuck her in what they'd called "the quarantine room."

It looked improvised in some ways--a featureless space with no decorations and half a dozen one-piece polymer chairs. But the small, fixed window that had to be at least an inch thick said otherwise. The best thing about that window was it faced the parking lot. Shanna had her nose pressed against it now, hands cupped around her eyes to shut out the room light, straining to see what was going on.

What had happened? An explosion could mean only one person: Clay. But what could he have been carrying to blow out a wall like that? Better not to think about it. Who knew what Clay carried in his bag of tricks?

The door opened behind her. She turned to see four disheveled-looking kids being herded into the room by the same two soldiers who had brought her. They moved away and Dr. Driscoll stepped into the doorway. She held a squalling baby in her arms.

"Here," she said, holding it out to Shanna. "It's a girl."

Not knowing what else to do, Shanna took her. One look at her face told her it was a newborn.

"What--?"

Dr. Driscoll sniffed. "I don't do babies."

Shanna had done a ton of babysitting as a teen. She knew that cry.

"She's starving."

"We have nothing to feed it."

"But--"

"She must be quarantined with the rest of you. Deal with it."

She shut the door.

Shanna turned to the kids and, over the baby's screams, pieced together a disjointed story about a guy with a chainsaw--had to be Jenny's Randall--and a "guy with a big cool gun"--no question who that was--who had saved them and put them on the helicopter.

"Only four of you?"

They nodded and began to cry. Not a good question.

The door opened again, revealing neither the soldiers nor Dr. Driscoll. Instead, a good-looking guy in green scrubs and longish brown hair stood there, smiling.

"Hello, Shanna. I'm Doctor Cook, a pediatrician. I've come to check over the baby."

He reached for her and Shanna gladly relinquished the screaming child.

As soon as Dr. Cook cradled her in his arms, she stopped crying. Shanna looked to see if anything was wrong but she had her eyes open and was staring at the doctor.

"That's amazing."

He smiled again. "I have a way with children."

Something familiar about him, but she couldn't put her finger on it.

He glanced up and down the hall, then looked her directly in the eyes. "You don't belong here. I'm stepping outside. You can come with me if you wish."

"But the kids--"

"Will be fine. This is a one-time offer."

Shanna didn't know about this. "I can just walk out?"

"The military personnel are distracted at the moment. That is only temporary, I assure you. Come."

He turned and walked toward the rear of the trailer. Shanna followed, saying, "But I came in--"

"Two entrances."

He led her to a door that opened on the side opposite the hospital. Three steps down and fifty feet across the pavement put them on the edge of the trees bordering the parking lot. He turned and stared toward the hospital. She followed his gaze and saw the soldiers withdrawing deeper into the lot, away from the building.

"Are they leaving?"

"Hardly."

He pointed up to a helicopter, much larger than the TV station's, hovering over the hospital roof. Its flashing lights revealed a long, bulky cylinder hanging vertically from a cable as it was lowered to the roof.

"Is that something to haul away survivors?"

"Hardly." His tone was grim as he repeated the word.

She glanced at him--so was his expression. She again had that sense of deja vu--that somehow she'd seen him before, that they'd met before.

"What is it, then?"

"They call it an 'autoclave.'"

She'd heard Dr. Driscoll mention that, but still had no idea what it was.

"That's no help."

"In medical facilities, it's a device used to steam sterilize medical instruments."

She shook her head. "I'm not following."

"No reason you should. I didn't understand either, so I eavesdropped. It's a giant shaped charge. When detonated it will shoot a plasma jet down through the hospital roof with irresistible force at a speed of eight-thousand feet per second. The jet will penetrate each of the floors like an anti-tank missile melting through steel armor plate. The air in the hospital will heat to ten thousand degrees, sterilizing the entire structure."

Shanna heard the words as she watched the helicopter ascend from the roof and fly off without its cargo, but they weren't making sense.

...plasma jet...ten-thousand degrees... sterilize the entire structure...

And then--

"Oh, my God! They can't! Clay's in there!"

Jenny

BY the time she realized that the object they had dropped on the roof was a bomb--a huge, army-green charge--Jenny had just enough time for a belly laugh. Randall would have appreciated the irony of surviving a dracula outbreak only to be killed by the good guys.

Clay

He snatched up the Taurus and began wiping her off. Poor girl was a mess--blood, plaster dust, and who knew what else.

He hugged her to his chest. "Hey, baby. Gonna take you home and get you cleaned up and oiled and good as--"

He heard a boom from above and then a blast of heat like a solar flare fused Alice to his chest and his last thought was how they'd be together forever.

Shanna

Shanna began to run toward the parking lot. She had to find Dr. Driscoll, had to convince her not to--

The roof of the hospital exploded in an incandescent flare. The boom and shockwave stopped her in her tracks and she watched in horror as the windows and walls of the fourth floor belched flame and debris, followed almost immediately by the third and second and first. Every entrance, every exit blew its doors and shot flames like giant blowtorches.

And then the floors began to collapse--first the roof onto the fourth, then the fourth onto the third, pancaking all the way down to ground level, leaving only a flame-riddled cloud of smoke and dust and debris on the far side of the parking lot.

A cheer went up from the watching soldiers and she wanted to kill them. Instead, she began to cry. Huge, wracking sobs shook her to her toes.

Clay... she felt the ring box in her pocket pressing against her thigh. A good man, a hero, and no one would know. Not that Clay would care. No, wait. Those kids would know. They'd remember the guy with the big cool gun. Clay would love to be remembered that way, but--

She felt a hand on her shoulder and spun--Dr. Cook.

"You'd better go," he said.

She wiped her tears. "Where? How?"

"Walk into the woods and keep going. Don't look back, and don't go home."

"Why not?"

"They'll be looking for you."

"Who are 'they?'"

He frowned as he stared at the trailer. "I don't know. And I don't know how they learned about--" He cut himself off with a quick shake of his head and looked at her. "Whoever they are, they don't want you running around. You weren't locked in that room because they thought you might be infected. You've seen too much. They want to contain you."

"But where can I go?"

"Anywhere but here. Please. Get away now."

"Why are you doing this? Why do you care?"

He hesitated. "You seem like a good person. And... I'd like to know you better. But that can't happen if you're locked away. Now go--please."

She turned and hurried into the woods with no idea where she was going. But as the trees swallowed her, a slow-burning anger replaced her grief. They killed Clay Theel, a good man who'd asked to marry her. Squashed him like a bug. Where did they get off thinking they could get away with that?

She thought of Clay's father. After they'd worn each other out in bed, she used to listen to Clay talk about his "daddy" and what a nut he was. But a survivalist type might be just what she needed right now. He deserved to know that his son was dead, and how he died. And he'd be the type to believe why he died.

Where had he said Daddy lived?

Up near Silverton?

That was where she'd head.