"Earl!" a ponytailed man in a Harley Davidson tank top shouted. "Hey, everybody! Harbinger's here!" The Hunters dropped what they were doing, jumped up and crowded around us, many of them asking questions.

"Calm down," Harbinger boomed. "As soon as everybody's here, we'll have a full debriefing. Status? Who're we missing?"

The biker-looking fellow started to tick off names on his fingers. Apparently he at least knew everybody. "Nobody called in any casualties today. Most of these vamps never knew what hit them. We stacked up piles of the bastards. Boone is here, but his guys volunteered to be perimeter security for now. VanZant, Paxton, and Mayorga's teams called in and are on the way. Eddings just crawled out of some mine, said he didn't get the message to pull out before dark. So they should be last ones in."

"Didn't get the message, my butt," Julie said angrily. "You don't stay in a vampire hole after dark."

"Crazy bastard," Sam said with admiration.

"Where's my… the Boss?" Harbinger asked.

"Called about fifteen minutes ago. Him and the Newbies kicked some serious ass up in Forestdale. They're coming. The Boss sounded really happy on the phone."

"No surprise. He hasn't got to kill anything in years. Thanks, Phillips." Harbinger slapped the man on the back. He raised his voice so that all of the assembled Hunters could hear. "You scumbags best not have eaten everything. I'm starved."

"Fred's making up some dinner-he used to be a chef you know-but right now there's pudding cups in the fridge," said one, as he spooned Dorcas' precious chocolate into his mouth.

"You poor condemned fool," muttered Sam under his breath. For that Hunter's sake, I hoped that Dorcas had had a chance to use up her daily quotient of violence against vampires.

"Whoa there, chief. We're dying here," the man named Phillips interjected. "Rumor has it that you had something to do with that five minutes. What was up with that?"

"Where'd you hear that?"

"It was all over the Feds' encrypted channels. Something about a demon massacre in Natchy Bottom," a female Hunter said. I loved the fact that breaking into the government's secure communications did not cause anyone to bat an eye.

"Yeah, man, that was some freaky shit," said a short man. "Whole world is going crazy out there."

Most of the others nodded in agreement. In the background the news video was showing huge crowds of demonstrators gathered in front of the White House. The scrolling information across the bottom warned of the condition-red terror warning, and the declaration of martial law across the Southeastern U.S.