ISSUE 006

Under a temporary truce, the escaped prison gang leaders meet at Black Hide and use the performance stage like an "Elmer Gantry" tent revival to whip up morale, organize forces and consolidate demands. After comparing notes, they agree to combine intelligence and efforts to find and punish Carlos. Carlos' prison files reveal connections to Linda and Candy. An initial military response to contain the multi-facility takeover is brutally put down by the inmates, showing the National Guard exactly what kind of action it will take to end this mess.

The vampires have enabled Carlos to dominate the local meth market, but he wants more: he wants to become one of them. When he learns that the ceremony to convert him would require a healthy pregnant woman with untainted blood, Carlos doesn't hesitate to inform the vampires that Linda is clean and sober, and carrying his child.

Lucien visits Linda's Moonbeam Tavern while it's safely packed with firefighters and plenty of National Guard grunts mustering as part of a buildup of forces to contain the situation at the prisons and at Black Hide.

Lucien chats up Linda. She tells the handsome but strange man (whom she assumes is a foreign correspondent) how the tavern got its name. Originally built in the early 1800s as a church where an immigrant Dutch lunar cult worshiped the moon through an aperture carved in the roof's ridge beam, legend has it that children were sacrificed on a stone-topped altar, exactly where the billiard table is now.

Salivating at the smell of Linda and the sight of her swollen womb, Lucien cannot believe his luck. At the next full moon, he and his brothers will sacrifice Linda and her baby, renewing the vampires' physical forms and blood supply in order to kick their meth addictions before returning to France. They have no intention of allowing Carlos to join their fraternity.

Furious at being burned by his own stepfather, defied by Linda and then publicly bested by Ray, Carlos attempts to mobilize his incompetent cadre to wage war on the ToroTread compound. But he's out of ephedrine, and cannot manufacture any more crank. He's burned or killed all his contacts, and resupply is out of the question.

The weakened vampires jump ship, knowing they can hunt among the thousands of tweakers running wild in Lake County to sustain them until their moonlight date with Linda. Carlos' inability to produce meth leaves no incentive for his whitebread K-Fed forces to tangle with the ToroTread boys, let alone the Aryans and the Yucatan Mafia. They also walk out, leaving Carlos hunted and alone.

The quiet of the nearly empty mansion brings Candy out of hiding. When he finds his nephew Carlos playing Scarface alone at the desk in his study, the resulting brawl storms from room to room and floor to floor. Candy is about to finish his evil nephew when a team of Aryans and Yucatans interrupt, saving Carlos' life only to ensure that it will end slowly and badly. They've brought a satchel of woodcarving tools, greasy kitchen gloves, handcuffs and shackles, road flares and a video camera.

At that moment, machine gun fire rakes the room: a biker gang decimated by Carlos and the vamps have returned for vengeance. The Aryans and Yucatan Mafia goons are cut down, allowing Candy to disappear inside the walls - and a last-gasp oath from a dying Yucatan gunman helps Candy remember the obscene Spanish password to his panic room. The gunfire narrowly misses Carlos, begging for mercy on his knees. He escapes like a cat on the last hour of its ninth life.

Candy secures himself in his panic room and watches on CCTV as three vicious gangs engage each other at arm's length in a Stalingrad-style shootout. Outside, Carlos reaches the highway and leaps aboard a passing Forest Service rig headed out of state. When he passes Howard returning to Lake County in the RV, however, Carlos aborts his escape for a chance to settle the score.