by Matt Kincade
“Spare me, kid. Little late in the game for that kind of play. Turn right up here.”
All the while, Carmen sat quietly, holding her pistol unenthusiastically against the passenger’s skull.
The little road turned from pavement to dirt and eventually ended. The headlights showed a collapsed wooden structure whose original purpose wasn’t clear. Random bits of rusted metal lay strewn around.
“You two, outta the car.” Alex held his pistol on them as the two climbed out of the front seats.
Alex and Carmen exited the car as well. In his left hand, Alex held his sheathed sword. He holstered his pistol and slid the sword into his belt. He marched them forward, into the glare of the headlights. They squinted and turned their heads away. “All right, Carmen, this one’s for you.”
“What do you mean?”
Alex pointed to the two thugs. “Y’all get on your knees.”
Reluctantly, they did.
“Eeny, meeny, miny, moe,” said Alex. He grabbed one of the thugs by the collar. In a flash he whipped out his folding knife and cut the thug on the neck. It was a shallow cut, not even close to fatal, but blood flowed freely and soaked his white shirt-collar.
“Hey, what the fuck!” said the thug. He pressed his hands to the cut as he screamed in outrage.
“Carmen, you smell that?”
Carmen’s nostril’s flared. She took a deep, sensual breath. “Yeah,” she said. “I smell it.”
“That’s blood, darlin’. That’s what you need now. That’s all you’re ever gonna need anymore. This right here, this is your life, you hear me?” He hauled the bleeding prisoner to his feet and pushed him toward her.
Carmen couldn’t help herself. She moaned as the smell of hot blood overpowered her. She seized the thug by the shoulders. He struggled, but her fingers were like iron spikes. He screamed again as she sank her teeth into his flesh. The other thug started to stand up, and Alex roughly shoved him back onto his knees.
Carmen’s razor-sharp canines severed his carotid artery like a scalpel. A hot jet of blood spurted into her mouth. She pulled him closer and drank hungrily. He flailed and kicked, but she held him fast, the blood pumping into her mouth and down her throat. She swallowed greedily, reflexively, barely able to keep up with the flow. In seconds, it was slowing. The thug relaxed his grip and went limp. His heartbeat slowed, faltered, and stopped. Carmen fell to her knees, her lips still locked around the fatal wound. She drank every last drop. Finally, she pulled her mouth away, panting. The man’s body flopped to the ground and lay still.
Carmen, on her knees, gasped for breath. “Oh my, God,” she said. “Oh, my God…oh, my God. What…oh, Jesus, what did I just do?”
“You did what you gotta do. And now there’s one less scumbag in the world. You still hungry?”
“God no,” said Carmen, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand.
Without another word, Alex pulled his pistol and casually shot the second thug in the head.
“Well, you’re a vampire, darlin’. You believe me now?”
Carmen looked down at her bloody hands. “Yeah.”
“If you wanna live like this, you gotta know what it takes. You gotta have blood. ’Bout once a week, at the least. Less often than that, you’ll get a little crazy and might do something you’ll regret.” He stood over the bloodless corpse and drew his sword. “One last thing. You feed on someone, you gotta take care of the body.” He swung the sword. The corpse’s head rolled away and bumped against a mesquite bush. “Cut the head off, burn it, or leave it out in the sun. That’s the only way of being sure it won’t turn.”
Alex flicked the blood from his blade and wiped it with a cloth before returning it to the scabbard. “You feel okay?” he said.
Carmen stood up and looked around, in a daze. “Could you turn the headlights off?” she asked, “It’s too bright.” Alex leaned in the open driver’s door and hit the switch. The darkness was absolute. It was a moonless night, the stars cold white spots upon an utterly black canvas. As Alex looked up, the sheer immensity of the sky rocked him back on his heels.
“I can see…” Carmen turned in a slow circle. “…everything. It’s like daytime! I can see every shrub! Every twig!” The night was so dark that Alex could barely see Carmen. “There’s a bobcat right over there,” she continued. “And a mouse hiding under a bush. I…I can smell them. I can hear them. This is incredible. My God, can you smell it?”
“Smell what?” said Alex.
“The night! The air, the ground, the bushes…It’s hard to explain. And you know what? I feel…warm. I feel really good.” She rubbed her shoulders and took a step toward Alex. “I just killed somebody, and I drank his blood. Shouldn’t I feel bad? I mean, I do…but at the same time, I feel good. It’s like…”
“Like a drug,” Alex finished for her.
“Yeah. Like a drug. And…” She took another step toward him, close enough that he could see the smile on her face. “You know what? I lied. I’m still hungry.”
Carmen moved faster than even Alex could react. In a heartbeat she was next to him, pinning his arms to his sides. She leaned in and opened her mouth.
“Wait a minute darlin’. Don’t do nothing you’re gonna…” He stopped. Instead of the sharp burn of piercing teeth, he felt warm lips on his neck, the gentle flick of a moist tongue. She ground against him and sucked on his ear. His cock snapped to attention. “Now, hold on a tick, darlin’, maybe you ain’t in your right mind right n—”
Carmen ripped his shirt down the front and ran a hand across his chest. Her other hand traced the rigid contour in his jeans. She kissed him again, just above the collarbone. “Shh. No more talk,” she whispered as she unzipped his fly.
Alex could feel more than see her. She was a shape, a silhouette against the night sky as she rode him. She was the feeling of hands on his chest, lean thighs hard beneath his own hands, her pushing him into her again and again. She leaned in close, and he felt the electric brush of her hair and her nipples against his chest. She grabbed his wrists and held him down, her lips hovering above his, her breath hot and heavy, never losing the rhythm.
And Alex, God help him, had never been so turned on…and he was terrified. Her hands held his wrists like a vice; he felt like they were trapped under a boulder. He couldn’t get away if he wanted to. Carmen’s mouth, those two bone knives, hovered just inches from the highway of veins and arteries in his neck, veins that strained and bulged as he strained against her.
She came silently, her breath short and fast, her body squeezing against him until he thought he might die. Her hair teased against his face as she froze, her thighs tight and rigid, her muscles spasming as she rocked with the force of her orgasm. After what seemed like minutes, the tension left her body, and she resumed a leisurely pace. Alex came mere seconds later, so hard he felt like he’d broken something. Carmen smiled beatifically as she watched his face contort. She tightened herself against him as he desperately pushed into her. At last he too finished. His body went limp as a wet rope, utterly spent.
Finally Carmen let go of his wrists. She let him pull out of her then lay down next to him on the cool desert sand. She kissed him. “Holy shit,” she said. “Wasn’t that something?”
“You can say that again.” He wrapped his arms around her, and they lay there, in the dust and grit of the New Mexico desert, the impassive stars high above. Two fresh corpses lay sprawled not twenty feet away.
Some time later, Alex felt a warm wetness against his cheek. He touched the wetness with a fingertip and brought it to his mouth. They were tears.
Carmen was crying. She hugged him tightly. “Jesus, what am I?” she said.
Alex ran a hand down her hair. “You’re my girl.”
Chapter Eighteen
“The Don said he was gonna wait for me to come to him,” Alex crammed his gear back into a duffel bag. “But I ain’t waitin’ around in case he changes his mind. We can make it back to my place before daybreak, i
f we hurry. Then I can take a little nap in peace, then we can figure out what comes next.”
Carmen mechanically packed her meager belongings away and didn’t respond. Since they’d dusted themselves off, dressed, and driven back to the motel, she’d been distant, almost drugged.
The cleanup was fast, slowed only by Alex going over every piece of gear and clothing, searching for surveillance devices. He found a thumb-size device at the bottom of a duffel bag and left it in the nightstand drawer. When he was satisfied, they piled into the truck and drove away.
Carmen spent the drive in silence. She responded briefly, if at all, to Alex’s attempts to drum up conversation. Leaning against the doorframe, she watched the night desert through the open window. Her nostrils flared, as if she were smelling incredible new things, but her face maintained an expression of wistful sadness. Finally Alex gave up on conversation and plugged in his iPod. He put on Leonard Cohen’s Songs of Love and Hate and let it play through to the end.
The desert outside the window was alive like Carmen had never realized before. With vampire eyes, she saw rabbits scurry and dart, saw owls silently take wing and the rabbits cower in fear. The smells that reached her were impossible and complex, yet, to her amazement, her mind had no trouble sorting them out.
Shortly before sunrise, they arrived at Alex’s home. He pulled the truck up to the front door in a wash of dust. He shut off the headlights. “Carmen?”
Carmen started, as if waking up.
“You still with me?”
She blinked. “Yeah, I’m all right.” Like a sleepwalker, she opened the truck door and helped carry the gear inside.
Alex rummaged in the fridge and found some pizza. While he wolfed it down, he said, “C’mon’ darlin. It’s been a long couple days. Let’s get some sleep.” He realized he was talking to an empty room. “Carmen?” he said.
Alex stood and searched the house. Finally he found her out on the porch, facing the east. The sky lightened and turned gray, the first hints of the dawn.
“C’mon in, Carmen,” said Alex.
She didn’t move. She simply stood and watched the developing sunrise. “I guess I won’t see any more sunrises. Or, at least, only one more.”
“Hey, sweetheart, let’s just get some sleep. Things’ll seem different in the mor…tomorrow.” He took her by the arm, but she didn’t respond.
“All I have to do is stand here, right? Just stand and watch the sun come up? Easiest thing in the world.” She turned to him. “Wouldn’t it be better this way?”
The eastern horizon trembled and turned yellow, a thin liquid line of fire breaking over the mountains. Tears welled in Carmen’s eyes.
“Darlin’, I don’t know anymore, honest to God. Why don’t you just come on inside? We can figure it out later.”
She looked at the horizon, then back at him.
As the first rays of daylight swept over the plains, she relented and let him pull her inside. He slammed the door to the rising sun.
“Carmen, don’t scare me like that ever again.”
She hugged herself and looked at the floor. “I don’t know what I want anymore.”
“If it helps any, I’m a mite confused myself. Don’t worry about that right now. You got all the time in the world.” He took her by the hand and led her, like a child, to the bedroom. She didn’t resist as he sat her on the bed. He took off her shoes and undressed her then pulled back the covers and laid her down in the bed. He made sure the drapes were closed tightly, then undressed himself and climbed in next to her. Her body felt cold beside him, but he wrapped his arm around her anyway. He listened to her breathing even out, and soon she was fast asleep. Alex lay there for an hour, closing his eyes and willing himself to fall asleep. Though he was so tired he could hardly keep his eyes open, sleep still didn’t come.
Finally he slid out of bed, leaving her there. He left the bedroom and eased the door shut. Dressed only in his underwear, he padded down the hallway to the den. He hit the hidden switch, and the bookshelf swung out, revealing the stairway leading down. He closed and locked the vault door. With a dozen feet of steel and concrete between him and Carmen, he went to bed and fell immediately into a deep, dreamless sleep.
***
Alex woke up in the late afternoon. He dressed and went upstairs to find Carmen still asleep. He exercised, made coffee, and took his laptop and camera downstairs to do some work. By the time Carmen woke up in the evening, he’d printed out dozens of high-resolution photographs of the Don’s compound. He was busily at work, sketching out a map of the buildings and surrounds. A glance at the security monitors told him that Carmen was awake, so he grabbed his coffee mug and headed upstairs.
Carmen stood at the sliding glass doors, her toes just shy of the rectangle of sunlight on the floor. She heard Alex behind her. “I can’t drink coffee anymore, can I?” she said.
“Actually, liquids ain’t a problem. Vampires can drink. I mean, you can drink booze. Wine, for example. Or coffee. Ain’t gonna get no sustenance from it, though. Alcohol still gets you drunk, and caffeine’ll still wake you up.”
“Thank God for small favors.” She poured herself a cup of coffee. She was dressed in sweat pants and one of Alex’s T-shirts. She held the mug with both hands as she sipped the steaming brew. “I slept like…like the dead.”
“Yeah, me too,” said Alex. “God knows we needed it.”
“Did you sleep upstairs last night?” asked Carmen.
After a moment’s hesitation, he said, “No. I went downstairs.”
“That’s what I thought.” She paused. “How come?”
Alex rubbed his neck. “Old habit, I guess. C’mon. Lemme show you what I’m workin on.” He led her downstairs to the basement. She followed him to what seemed to be an office. There were filing cabinets, desks piled high with paperwork, maps pinned to the walls and dotted with thumbtacks and photographs. “I got a pretty good map of the compound laid out. Now, we’re still gonna need more surveillance to put together a proper hit. Gotta know when supply trucks come in and out, how many guards, what the shift changes are like. Gotta find out more ’bout them remote sensors at the fence line.”
“Alex,” Carmen said, “are you afraid of me?”
Alex laughed and rubbed his neck again. “Darlin’, what the heck are you talkin’ about?”
“Is that why you slept down here today? Were you afraid I was going to bite you in my sleep or something?”
“Baby, that’s crazy talk. You’re my girl.” He kissed her on the lips. “I ain’t afraid of you. I just couldn’t sleep, that’s all, and I wound up down here. It’s quieter.”
She cocked her head and smiled hopefully. “Because you know I’d never hurt you.”
“I know, darlin’. You don’t gotta tell me.”
Alex went back to planning. Carmen sat on the edge of a table, watching him as he added details to his map, making notes in a spiral notebook.
“Now, I’ve always had more luck with daytime hits, but your condition kinda puts a kink in that. Either I go in the daytime without you, or I go at night and put myself at a disadvantage against the other vamps. Ain’t really figured how we’re gonna play that one yet. I guess if—”
Carmen tugged at her collar. Suddenly the house felt cramped and stifling. “Alex, is it dark yet outside?”
Alex checked his watch. “Yeah, it’s just now sunset.”
“I’m going to go get some fresh air.”
He looked at her for a moment. “Sure thing, darlin’. Stay out of trouble.”
Carmen fled up the stairs, reaching the back door just as the orange sunset gave way to indigo. She breathed the evening air in deeply, feeling it like electricity coursing through her blood, her muscles, her bones.
Every sound, every cricket, every rustle of leaves in the wind. She drank them all in. She could hear a mouse breathing, cars on the road miles away. The snap of bat wings above her head.
Not really knowing why, she coiled her body and
jumped. The ground fell away beneath her. Before she knew what had happened, the ground was twenty feet below. She flailed her arms in terror as the ground came back up to meet her, but somehow she landed perfectly, light as a down feather. She laughed and did it again.
She bounded across the hills, ran flat out across the desert at superhuman speed, held her arms wide out and caught the wind. Though it was a moonless night, every detail of the terrain was as plain as day to her. She never took a wrong step. All around her, the desert was alive. Rattlesnakes hunted mice; lizards scampered off to sleep; a lone cougar slunk through the dark. Coyotes yipped and squealed.
At her approach, a jackrabbit broke cover and bounded away at top speed. On a whim she chased it, matching its erratic path turn for turn, finally bending down and snatching it up in her hand. She felt its heart hammering in its chest. Exultant, she held it for a moment as it watched her in abject terror. She dropped the little animal. It stood there for a second, dumbfounded, before it finally broke and ran.
Carmen headed for the highest point around, an outcrop of worn sandstone. She half climbed, half leapt to the top and crouched there. She saw the distant lights of a small town, the twinkle of solitary cars moving along a lonely highway. Far away, she spotted a single light that could have come from a ranch or a home. A jetliner flew far overhead, blinking red then green.
She tilted back her head and laughed.
***
Hours later, flushed and exhilarated, Carmen found her way back to the house. She squinted at the glare of the porch light as she came in through the front door. Alex sat on the couch, watching TV. The only light in the house came from the glowing screen. He held the clicker in his hand, but his .45 sat on the couch next to his leg. When the door opened, he turned his head. “Where’ve you been?” he asked.
“Out,” Carmen answered. She stood in the doorway.
