The car shot forward, slamming up onto the sidewalk. An enraged pedestrian hammered the window as they smashed through a food cart.

“You damn fool! That was that guy’s rice bowl!”

“You told me to!”

“I didn’t tell you to hurt people.” Above all things in the world, Paul hated to hurt. He would put a fly out the window rather than swat it. He would watch quietly as a mosquito gorged on his blood, then brush it off when he thought it was getting greedy.

Ironic, in a man who had killed so much. When he slept at night, his legions of dead would steal near: the kids who’d died in the dark corners of Vietnam, the victims of the vampires, the crew members who had not returned. They would call to him; they would stroke him with their cool hands; they would beg him to return them their lives.

He would wake up awash in sweat and choking with terror and regret. He would go to the brutal light of the bathroom as to an altar afire with candles, and gulp the pills of oblivion. Black sleep.

Asia had made him love certain very bad things, chief among them opium. Better than hash, better than grass, better than coke or any of the new designer drugs, far better than the brute high you got off horse. Opium was a deep pleasure, something wonderful that connected earth and soul. It made you feel at peace with the eternal world. He loved the mechanisms of an opium high: the long pipes, the sweet vapor, even the tickly lice in the greasy old sheets of today’s few real opium dens.

Paul Ward had sunk deep and sinned hard. Why not, my friends? Tomorrow we die.

Well, that was what they’d thought back in the seventies, listening to Kissinger on Armed Forces Radio. It had seemed hard then, before he knew about vampires, but it had really been easy.

The Jungle Jamboree. No way could you do opium then. He who tripped died.

Still true now, at least for him and his crew. Killing vampires was horribly dangerous. They were quick, so quick that they could throw a knife at nearly the speed of a bullet.

They could not be killed with normal gunfire. You could empty the biggest, most evil weapon in your arsenal right into one of the damn things and it would just stare at you with its deceptively calm eyes, waiting for your bullets to run out. You had to destroy the head.

If you cut them open after they’d fed, they would gush blood like exploded ticks.

The Book of Names had identified twenty-six vampires in Asia. He and his crew had burned out or poisoned or dismembered twenty-four vampires in Asia, and found the remains of two ruined lairs, creatures that had lost their lives on their own.