Cheerleading was still a new thing in Johnson’s Crossing, at least as far as the faculty was concerned. For the squad, now midway through its fifth year, cheerleading was something that had always been and would always be. Cheerleading was eternal. It only made sense that their once and future team captain should be equally everlasting.
Andrea herself watched the girls who moved around her with a predator’s eye, assessing them each, measuring their strengths and weaknesses according to a scale that predated anything so plebian as high school. She had been considering moving on to another town, another set of daily routines, when the paper had run the announcement that cheerleading was coming to the local high school, and she had decided to come back for one more year—one more year that had transformed, after her customary break to let the minds of the faculty recover, into another four-year trip through the halls of academia.
Cheerleading was fascinating. It was like the humans had suddenly figured out that they couldn’t fly, and were trying to figure out a way to make up for it. It wasn’t there yet, but part of being a vampire was learning how to see the places in the pattern where the shape of things to come hadn’t quite appeared, and Andrea could see them soaring. The tumbling and pom-pom shaking of today would give way to the death-defying stunts of tomorrow, and it was going to be amazing, and she was only sorry she wouldn’t be there, flying with them.
Being a vampire meant passing for a human teenager for a long, long time, but by the time cheerleaders learned to fly, she would be past this stage in her life, off to spend a decade or so repeating her missus degree at some middle-of-nowhere college with easily enthralled registrars. It was a pity. She liked this town, and she liked this school, and she liked these girls. Oh, these girls, these bright, brief birds, who were more like attractive chickens than the parrots their children’s children would be, but still. They did the best they could with what they had. They did the best they could.
There were already people behind the auto shop—greasers in their black leather jackets, vocational study kids in their white shirts with the rolled sleeves and their old jeans with the pegged cuffs, like rolling something was the same as repairing it—but none of them mattered. They’d come around the corner to find the quarterback there once, all golden boy glory and the possibility of getting caught while in company so elevated that an example needed to be made. Worse, he’d been there with some tarty little thing he must have scraped off the drama department floor, all popping gum and teased-up hair, when he should have been there with Mary if he was going to be there with anyone.
The Pumpkins took up their usual position along the wall. Iris produced a pack of cigarettes. About half the girls took one, while the other half brushed their hair, or checked their lipstick, or did any one of a dozen other things that signaled “too cool to be in class, yet still too cool for you” to anyone who happened to wander by. Andrea waved off the cigarette she was offered, choosing instead to rest her shoulders against the wall and watch the others with a possessive predator’s eye.
These were her Pumpkins. They wouldn’t be hers forever, would move on to the protectorates of other monsters, other ideal lives, but for now, for the moment, they belonged entirely to her. She didn’t have to share if she didn’t want to, and upon careful consideration, she found that she didn’t want to.
Which was why it was such a problem when the hot rod roared up on the narrow stretch of asphalt behind the auto shop and the boy in the black leather jacket leaned out the window, grabbed Iris around the waist, and hauled her, shrieking, into the car. Iris kicked and fought the whole way, to no avail: in a matter of seconds, the hot rod was shrieking away again, leaving only a few tire tracks and a single Mary Jane to show that it had been there in the first place.
Andrea pushed away from the wall, eyes wide and mouth hanging open, like she couldn’t decide between shock and fury. The rest of the Pumpkins were squawking and fluttering like the birds she’d always fancied them to be, stunned into meaningless motion.
It was Laura—pretty, vapid Laura, who never met a question she couldn’t answer incorrectly—who seemed the most collected, possibly because she spent so much of her time confused that a few unexpected events simply weren’t enough to throw her.
“I think Iris just got kidnapped,” she said, as calmly as if she were remarking on the weather. “Maybe we ought to go and get her back?”
***
CUTTING CLASS WAS ONE THING: leaving school grounds before the final bell was something else altogether. It was likely to attract attention if the whole squad tried it, no matter how much they all wanted to be a part of Iris’s daring rescue. Especially since there was always a chance some teacher would suddenly get a bee in their bonnet about talking to Iris, and when that happened, they’d need to have people in place to make excuses and shuffle her supposed location from bathroom to bathroom as she fought valiantly against a scourge of “girl troubles.”
In the end, only four of them—including Andrea, of course; she wasn’t captain yet, but everyone knew she was going to be, just like everyone knew the squad was hers, had been since the beginning, would be until her preternaturally slow aging took her away from high school at last—were able to cram themselves into Mary’s car, with Mary herself behind the wheel.
“So try not to die, okay?” said Mary, flicking her cigarette out the window. That was the whole of the warning she gave before she slammed her foot down on the gas and roared out of the student parking lot at a speed that would reduce the occupants of the car to mere brightly-colored blurs in the eyes of anyone who happened to be looking. Andrea, who was in the front passenger seat, squeaked loudly and grabbed hold of the dashboard, clutching it until the indents of her fingers were pressed into the leather. The girls in the backseat shrieked and clutched each other.
Mary didn’t seem to notice any of that. She was driving. Outside of a car, she knew everyone thought of her as mulish and stupid and a little bit useless, and maybe they weren’t wrong: she was all those things, and it didn’t bother her, most of the time, because she knew that at the end of the day, she’d be back behind the wheel, back on the open road. Her father had stopped paying for her gas after her first report card of the school year, saying that no daughter of his who couldn’t even pass home economics deserved to have her own car. She hadn’t put a penny in the tank since then, and her baby handled better than ever, taking the curves like a dream, unbeatable on the highway. Unstoppable.
She liked being a Fighting Pumpkin and she liked her squad well enough to put up with them, but sometimes she thought life would have been an awful lot better if she’d just been born a boy. Boys were allowed to be stupid and a little bit useless and love their cars more than they loved anything else in the world. They had permission, and she didn’t.
But oh, none of that mattered when she drove, in her souped-up hot rod that she’d rebuilt herself in the auto shop, with the tank as dry as a bone, running on hope and hormones and need.
Andrea clutched the dashboard a little tighter. When she spoke, there was a strangled note in her voice. “Maybe try not to kill us all today?”
“You’re a vampire,” said Mary, with her customary bluntness. “You’re hard to kill.”
“‘Hard’ is not the same thing as ‘impossible,’ and everyone else in this car is human.” Well, one reanimated corpse, one alien in a vat-grown body, but human for all intents and purposes. Human in the sense of a car crash would end with a trip to the morgue for some, if not all, of them.
Mary sighed. “Spoilsport,” she said, and slowed down a little.
The girls in the back seat heaved a sigh of relief.
“Why did they take Iris?” asked Emily, leaning forward. She was one of the younger members of the squad, still new to the orange and green, and the delicate web of nonsense and improbability that bound them all was still revealing itself to her. She’d technically been at school before joining the Fighting Pumpkins, but as she’d been three separate student
s at the time, it didn’t really count. “She’s only barely team captain anymore. Everybody knows it.”
“They probably knew that taking Andrea would end with nobody having a throat anymore,” said Laura, and yawned, pulling in as much air as she could manage. “People need throats. All the biology studies agree.”
“I don’t know, but we’re going to find out,” said Andrea grimly. “All the hot rodders hang out down by the levee. I’ve seen that car before, I know I have. We’re going to find it, and then we’re going to find the driver, and then we’re going to explain why you don’t touch a Fighting Pumpkin.”
“Explain with fists, right?” asked Mary.
“We spend two hours every day kicking higher than our own heads,” said Andrea. “I think we can get our point across.”
“Only if we get there before they hurt her,” said Mary, and bore down on the gas again.
If any of the rest of them had driven like that, they would have had the fuzz on their bumpers in seconds. Not Mary. She drove like the road was her personal property and she was only deigning to share it with the people around her out of pity, because if she didn’t share, they’d be relegated to horse trails and gravel driveways. The police never bothered her. Andrea privately suspected that they were afraid to.
The town zipped by outside the windows in a blur of bright color and brighter sunlight. Andrea let go of the dashboard long enough to dig her sunscreen out of her purse and apply a liberal amount to her arms, rubbing it in until the vague tingling that had started there faded away. Mary gave her a sidelong glance.
“So, if you lost that, would you just, I don’t know, burst into flame?”
“No. But I would get a very, very bad sunburn, and then I would get very, very hungry, and since the symbiont that’s responsible for vampirism isn’t as picky about where its next meal comes from as a human would be, I’d start to see you all as potential lunch partners. In the bad, messy, bloody, dead way.” Andrea smiled, and her teeth suddenly seemed a little pointier than they were really meant to be. It was probably a trick of the light, and yet . . . “So someone who thought hiding my sunscreen on tryout day would be a good way to keep a vampire from being team captain, well. That someone would have to be prepared to attend a lot of funerals. Including her own.”
“Can you really attend your own funeral?” asked Laura.
Andrea kept her eyes on Mary. “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe it’s time for us to find out.”
Bit by bit, Mary’s smugness melted away, replaced by unease. She switched her gaze back to the road. “I was just asking,” she muttered.
“Stop asking,” advised Andrea.
Silence fell across the car. They spun past the city limits, and into the surrounding farmland, flashing past strawberry fields and artichoke patches and cows that didn’t even lift their massive heads to watch the hot rod full of cheerleaders zoom by.
The fields fell away, replaced by unirrigated scrubland. Looming out of the landscape ahead of them like a warning came the boxy shape of the old military complex, wreathed in a heat haze that seemed to shimmer there no matter what the weather did. It stood barely ahead of the slash of the levee that tore across the land like a scar. It didn’t rain as often in California as it did in so many other places—sort of funny, given how much food they produced, but true. When it did rain, the soil was often unprepared, and couldn’t take the volume. The levee kept everything they loved from being washed away.
One day, it would fail. Andrea glanced at Mary again, this time with the gentler eye of the much older and much wiser and much wearier. All these girls would likely be women by the time that happened, their youths burnt out like fields of stubble in the fall. They might not even be alive when the flood came. But it would come all the same. The flood always came.
Cars began to appear out of the heat haze as they drove closer. It felt like they were moving toward some great confrontation, something that should have happened in the grace of twilight, not in the glaring light of day. Andrea tensed. This was the sort of thing that was better done by night. Iris would have been just as easy to snatch from outside the diner, or from the picnic tables in front of the burger joint downtown. All the Pumpkins went there after school at least three times a week. So why take her from behind the auto shop, unless it was to force this confrontation during the daylight hours?
Suddenly, this felt like the jaws of some great and terrible beast, gaping wide for now, but ready to snap shut the moment they were too deep to turn back. Andrea gripped the dashboard tighter. It didn’t matter. They needed to keep going. Iris was counting on them, and Iris was a Fighting Pumpkin, and if there was one thing she had learned from cheerleading, it was that you did not leave a teammate behind.
“Loyalty is a plague,” Andrea muttered.
“What?” asked Mary.
“Drive faster,” snapped Andrea.
Mary drove faster.
***
THEY WHIPPED AROUND the last curve like a carload of avenging angels, skidding to a halt barely fifteen feet from the line of hot rods that were already parked there, waiting for them to arrive. Most of the drivers looked like they had barely finished their own high school educations, hair slicked back and piled high, jackets missing their sleeves and dripping with chrome chains that were too short to be used as weapons in any kind of proper fight.
Still, they made an intimidating picture.
The four Pumpkins, in their pegged pants and their orange and green accent scarves, did not. But they climbed out of Mary’s car all the same, hands clenched into fists, pretty faces contorted into scowls. It was not, perhaps, a showdown for the ages. It was a showdown all the same.
“One of yours took one of ours, and she didn’t go willingly,” called Andrea. “Give her back and this is all over. No one has to get hurt.”
The greasers laughed. A few of them made obscene gestures in her direction. Andrea looked serenely on, as did Laura. Her planet boasted several gesture-based languages, and none of them included profanity: on her world, all profanity was spoken. Thus far, the rest of the squad hadn’t seen fit to enlighten her on the many ways Earthlings could tell each other to fuck off. It wasn’t about preserving her innocence; more about making sure she didn’t start flipping teachers the bird when they displeased her.
“Sorry, sweetheart, but this ain’t a negotiation,” rumbled the man Andrea took for their leader. He was tall and broad and if not for his baby-face and the class ring still glittering on his hand, he would have seemed far too old for the gang around him. Like her, only with his years written on the outside, not the inside. “We bought the little witch fair and square.”
“Iris is a witch?” Laura cocked her head as she turned to look accusingly at Andrea. “I wasn’t told that. I should have been told that. I have questions.”
“I think he means ‘bitch,’ and doesn’t want to cuss in front of girls.” Andrea narrowed her eyes. “Iris isn’t for sale.”
“I don’t care about swearing in front of you, sweetheart,” said the man. “I care about swearing in front of my lady. Mary, baby? You want to come over here?”
“Sure do, honey,” said Mary, and skipped around the front of her car to stand next to the man. In case that wasn’t a sufficient signal of where her loyalties lay, she bounced up onto her tiptoes and pressed a kiss against his cheek before turning and offering a poisonous smile to her fellow Fighting Pumpkins. “Oh, by the way, I won’t be in class tomorrow. Or at the game this weekend. Or ever again.”
“You’re dropping out of school?” Emily sounded horrified. “But we’re supposed to get a good education so we can take better care of our kids! And what about the squad? We need you for the pyramid!”
Andrea, who remembered a time when the good education wouldn’t have been a part of that sentence, somehow managed not to groan.
Mary rolled her eyes. “As if any of us are getting a good education in that place. Isn’t that right, Frank?”
�
�You know it, baby.” Frank kissed the top of Mary’s head before looking blandly at the remainder of the squad. “You should go. Gonna be a long walk home. Unless . . . ”
“Unless?” asked Andrea.
“We could give you a car and a driver. And your girl back, of course. No point in coming all the way out here without getting what you came for. It’ll cost you, but maybe you’re willing to pay. How strong is that sense of ownership, dead girl? You willing to go one for one if it gets your precious squad out of here?”
Andrea hesitated. Then she cocked her head to the side, looking at the bruiser thoughtfully. “What’s your grandfather’s name?”
“Abraham Harker.”
“Mmm.” She shook her head. “I thought Abe and I had buried the hatchet. How is he?”
“Dead.” Frank scowled. “You should be, too.”
“So you kidnapped one of my cheerleaders, all so you could lure me . . . where?” Andrea made a show of looking around herself. “The middle of nowhere? I’m a vampire. That doesn’t mean I don’t know about camping.”
“Danny.” Frank snapped his fingers. Another of the greasers appeared, standing anxiously by, a bucket of clear liquid in his hands. Frank pointed at it. “This stuff’s designed to take the oil off an engine. It’ll clean anything. Even the filthy skin of the damned.”
“I’ll have you know I bathe regularly, not that it’s any of your business,” said Andrea.
“Don’t care.” Frank looked at her coldly. “That’s the deal I’m offering. Your girls go free. You stay here, wash off that sunscreen of yours, and burn.”
“You didn’t say anything about killing her,” said Mary, doubt creeping into her voice. “You just said you were going to get your own back, for your gramps. She hasn’t done anything worth killing over.”
Pop the Clutch Page 2
