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me rig up a booby trap for the door? Aaron, you have any rope in that hoard of yours?”
    “Yeah, I think so—”
    He did. Miles of it. I didn’t know where he got all that rope—was rope a desirable commodity on eBay?—but he had a lot of it. Jack found the pieces of broken wooden table, and together they built something. Had no idea if it was actually going to work, but at this point we had to try everything.
    Even the lunchboxes. I dug in a couple of kitchen drawers, the ones where all the junk ended up, until I found a roll of duct tape. The all-powerful duct tape. “I’m really sorry, Aaron.”
    “Hey, what—Sam!”
    “I won’t tear them up, they probably won’t even get hurt, not unless someone actually stabs at us. But you know, if they actually stab at us, you’ll be glad I’m doing this.”
    I held a Dukes of Hazzard box against his chest, over his heart. “Hold that.” He held it, baffled. I stretched loose a long length of tape with that comforting ripping sound, and slapped it across the box, his chest, under his arms, around his back. I wrapped it around four or five times, with a couple of loops over his shoulders to stabilize the box so it didn’t fall. A regular duct-tape-and-lunch-box cuirass. I didn’t even have to worry about him being able to breathe.
    “Now do me,” I said, handing him the tape and holding a Dragon’s Lair lunchbox to my chest. A minute later, I had my own armor.
    “This won’t work,” he said, bemused, arms outstretched, staring at the box awkwardly taped to his chest.
    “Or maybe it will?”
    We looked dumb. We looked like total dorks. But you know what? Wasn’t nobody going to be stabbing any of us through the heart.
    “You want one?” I said to Ginny.
    “No, that’s okay,” she said. “I figure they won’t kill me, I’m food.”
    Sobering thought, there.
    Aaron was still looking at himself like he’d been drenched in slime. “I’m never gonna get that sticky tape stuff off these things. I’ll have to list them at ‘fair,’ tops.”
    “Two words, my friend: Goo Gone. It’ll be fine.” I turned to Jack. “So, do you want to be taped up with Care Bears or The A-Team ?”
    He looked at me like I was crazy, then said, “ The A-Team . Duh.”

B EFORE I COULD try one more time to get Jack and Aaron to sign the sublet towel before handing it to Ginny there was a scratching noise at one of the windows in the living room, behind the TV. Normally, I would have said it was an animal, a rat or raccoon maybe, clawing at the edges, looking for a way in, but the silhouette, shadowed by the streetlights outside, was of a human figure. After tapping at the window a few more times, the figure left, slipping away like smoke. I went to my bedroom, looked at the window on the back wall—again, the tapping came, a concerted scratching, testing access. We’d secured the windows. We’d be okay.
    A knock came at the front door, and a voice called. “Jack? Sam? I just want to talk. Can’t we just talk? You don’t even have to open the door.” It was Carter.
    “I think we’re just fine where we are, how are you?” Jack answered.
    “There’s been some kind of misunderstanding—”
    “Oh, like you hiding away your own vampire squad? Did I misunderstand that?”
    Silence. Then glass broke. The sound came from Aaron’s room.
    “Shit,” Jack muttered and grabbed one of the spear-like table legs.
    We all started for the room, but I said, “No, Jack, stay by the door, we can’t let anyone get in.”
    So much for the place being defensible. We suddenly had four fronts to cover, and we didn’t know anything about the bad guys except that they were vampires. I could sense them, cold eddies in the atmosphere. Ginny shut the bedroom door and I assumed locked it, but it locked from the inside, it would only slow an invader down a couple of seconds.
    Aaron, protected by rubber gloves, and Ginny grabbed Nerf guns and moved in to aim them at the bedroom door,