Throat

by R. A. Nelson

  Snap out of it, Emma, a voice said. It was my own voice, coming up from far below. Now. Now. Now.

  “If you do not come to me,” Wirtz said, “let me tell you what I will do. I will find you, and through you I will find your family.” He smiled. “I will have her. I will hold her in the air and break her spine across my leg. With luck, she will still be alive. Alive enough to know she has been paralyzed. But do not worry. Her condition will not last long. I will rip her throat open and suck her dry until she is shriveled and gone almost completely, but not quite. I will save some spark of life, some Funke, until the very end. And then I will tear her head from her shoulders.”

  The voice in my head was screaming now. Come up, Emma, come up!

  “Very well,” the vampire said. “Your silence is your answer.” He gestured at the sneakers. “This is your decision. I will find you. Her blood will be on your hands.”

  He stooped beside Manda’s shoes, reaching as if to stroke them with his dirty fingernails.

  “All I need is something that will tell me … where … you … are.… Ah.”

  The fingers stopped just short of caressing the shoes.… The vampire had spotted something else. A scrap of paper. My school lunch menu. The menu was upside down. If Wirtz turned it over, he would see the name of my school in bold print across the top.

  He reached for the paper, then his face twisted with something that almost looked like pain. The vampire drew back his hand and stood, looking at me. Mouth like a wound. He sighed.

  “No matter. It is only a question of time. And I have so very much of it. Run if you prefer, Mädchen. I will still come. I will never stop coming until I find you. Never. Das schwöre ich. This I vow.”

  Hurry hurry hurry!

  I was close now, so close; the part of me that the seizure had buried was moving fast, about to break through the top.

  The vampire smiled. “Sie werden wie ein Schwein sterben.”

  You will die like a pig.

  The clock read 12:04.

  An animal sound gushed from my throat. The seizure was over; I was free of the paralysis. I flung myself off my bed and leapt across the room at Wirtz. Kill him. Kill him.

  I flew straight through the vampire and smashed into my closet door instead. The door groaned as it was knocked off its track; I lashed out furiously, splitting the wood in half and throwing shards of it up in the air. Sheetrock rubble from the ceiling fell on my head. I looked wildly around the room. Wirtz had disappeared.

  I shouted Manda’s name at least five times before my mother came in and grabbed my arm from behind. I flung her away, not realizing she wasn’t the vampire. She slammed against the bedroom door, shutting it with her back, looking at me with crazy eyes. Manda’s voice came crying through the crack.

  “Emma, Emma, Emma!”

  My mother put her arms out toward me, eyes wide as she took in the destruction of my room. “Emma, what’s wrong! What’s happening?” She was almost screaming the words.

  I felt all the air leave my body. Oh my God. What am I doing? “I have to … I have to go, Mom,” I said. “I have to go now.…”

  She put her hands out again. “What … what are you talking about? What’s wrong?”

  Manda banged on the door, but my mother was still leaning against it.

  “Emma! Emma!”

  My sister’s voice sounded alarm bells in my head. I took a step backward and looked around in a panic. I could still feel the vampire in the room. His cold, heavy emptiness filling the space.

  Manda was still screaming. Mom was struggling to keep the door shut so my sister wouldn’t see this. See what I’ve become.

  I had to do something. Seconds counted. It’s me he wants, I thought. Wirtz was looking for me; I was leading him straight to them. If I stayed any longer … the vampire would be back … holding Manda in his hands. His mouth on her throat. As her life ebbed, when he was drunk on her blood, when he had gorged on my sister’s blood, he would throw her away like a broken doll. And it would all be my fault.

  I’m the monster.

  I had to draw him away. Now. I turned and grabbed the first thing I saw—my sunglasses off the nightstand. I shoved them in my pocket, rushed across the room, and threw my shoulder at the window, hitting it full force. I could feel it as I blasted through the glass and wood, and the window exploded outward with the force of my body.

  I was nearly twenty feet off the ground. I fell in a shower of shards and debris and landed in the grass. I shook the glass out of my hair. I didn’t have a plan but to run, just run. Run as far and as fast as I could, before Wirtz could close in on them. Draw the vampire away.

  I ran down our little side road, then streaked across four lanes of traffic without waiting for the cars to pass.

  I was barefoot and wearing pajamas. I kept going until I broke through a band of trees. I was in a field, then another band of trees and then another field and a farm road. I put on more speed. Power station. Gravel. Pavement, leaves, woods. I was flying past hills, rocks, fences, walls. I chewed up miles of countryside until I had no idea where I was or how far I had gone.

  I burst through a wood and came to a wide river. I could see a barge moving through the water that looked as if it wasn’t really moving at all. I took a tremendous leap and hit the water hard and then was stroking for the barge, kicking up a wake behind me.

  I grasped the edge of the barge’s nasty saturated wood and threw myself over, sailing past the heads of two men smoking on deck. The smell of their cigarettes filled my nostrils and I could hear a tiny piece of their conversation as I zoomed over—“That’s how you pick up girls”—then I fell into the water on the other side and was swimming again.

  I came up the far bank, battling through river trash and vegetation, streaking through the woods and leaving a trail of drops in the air behind me. I crossed another field and came to a fence. The fence was twice as high as my head and strung with razor wire at the top. It had a large white sign that said:

  US ARMY INSTALLATION

  NO TRESPASSING

  TEST RANGES

  I took two steps and bounded over, hit the ground running on the far side. I ran through one big field after another, then nothing but thick woods. I came to a hillside with a farm road running along its edge and a broad drainage wash that emptied into a big concrete pipe.

  I ran into the wash and threw my body into the pipe. Lay there listening to the sounds of the nighttime around me. They were loud. Insects chirruping and creaking and buzzing. Wind in the trees. Twigs crackling as something moved over them.

  I curled up and made myself smaller, holding my head in my hands and drawing my knees up to my chest.

  Had I gone far enough? I could imagine the vampire out there in the dark. Tracking me. Licking his lips, biting them. If he found me here …

  I waited, certain any moment I was going to see Wirtz’s terrible face peer over the edge of the pipe.

  Finally my heart began to slow. I couldn’t believe what I had just done. I lay on the rough cement listening and watching. My pajamas were still wet from swimming the river. My hair dripped into my eyes and down my back. I was used to a bed, a home, protection, warmth.…

  I shivered miserably and wept.

  As the hours crawled by, my vampire ears had me jumping at everything that moved. I had never felt so far away from the things I knew. Everything was alien. The sounds, distant lights across the fields, the smell of wildness …

  I think I slept.

  Where was I?

  I blinked and opened my eyes, starting violently. Directly over my face was the grodiest-looking spider I had ever seen. I raked my fingernails on the inside walls of the pipe, scrambling to get out. Flopped on the moist ground, then almost started bawling all over again.

  Sunshine.

  The unimaginably bright ball of the sun was rising over the hill. So intense, it nearly made my eyes bleed. I dug my sunglasses out of the pocket of my pj’s and put them on, then lay there a long
time letting the orange glow wash the night out of my skin.

  I sat up. Nobody else was around. I was sitting at the base of a low woody slope surrounded by fields and woods as far as I could see. Mom …

  A fresh wave of tears rolled down my face. She had to be scared out of her mind. I put my hand back in my pocket. Stupid. My cell was lying on my nightstand at home, plugged into its charger.

  I got up and scaled the hill behind the pipe and found a clear place to get a look around. I could see a fence to the north and beyond that a line of traffic crawling up a highway that ran alongside a town. The skyline—or lack thereof—looked familiar. That’s Huntsville, I thought. The highway was I-565. So I was about thirty miles from home, give or take.

  The vampire could be anywhere.

  I sat on a limestone outcropping, forcing myself to slow down and think. I could still feel that invisible finger entering my head—the burning connection between us. It was insane, but I was certain of it: somehow my seizure had let Wirtz through to me. But the real, physical vampire had never been in my room. That was an image of Wirtz I had seen. A projection. I had gone right through him when I had lunged against the closet door. But he had spoken to me and could see everything around him—Can all vampires do this stuff? I wondered.

  And what was stopping him from visiting again? Without warning, given the nature of seizures. It terrified me to think of what could have happened if that lunch menu had been right-side up.… If I hadn’t run away …

  Manda …

  For once my instincts had been good. The only way I could help her now was by keeping alive and staying away from home until I could figure out what Wirtz was up to. How to stop him.

  I looked at the horizon. The sun was supposed to make everything better, wasn’t it? For the first time in my life, it didn’t. I had never felt so miserably alone and frightened. But it did remind me of one thing.

  I have a power you don’t, I thought.

  If the legends were true, right now Wirtz was dug in somewhere like a rat in a hole. And he would be there for at least the next thirteen or fourteen hours. The daylight belonged to me.

  The first thing I had to do was find something to drink. I knew all about giardia, the little germs that get in streams when an animal like a deer dies in the water. I didn’t care. I was about to fall over from thirst. I found a stream at the base of a hill, a brook that was clear and cool and rushed over small stones. I lay on my belly and drank until I could hear my stomach slosh. I felt dirty, so I splashed my streaky face and washed my arms and legs.

  Feeling a little better, I scaled the hill again and scouted the surrounding territory.

  I faced west and saw three long roads, one of them wide like a highway with at least four lanes of slowly creeping traffic. The other two roads were narrower and swung toward one another and eventually joined. A lot of the cars were headed to a cluster of tall buildings straight in front of me.

  Scattered all over were breaks in the woods. I could see other groups of buildings, most of them long and low to the ground. There were lots of fields as well, some of them dotted with cows. What was this place? It looked weird seeing livestock so close to office buildings.

  To the east I could see nothing but thick woods and more low hills. To the south the Tennessee River, which I had crossed the night before, sparkling in the morning light. Near the river was a tall brown structure that appeared to be made of iron surrounded by small square buildings with low concrete walls.

  First things first. Right now I was hungry. I crept down from the hill and followed the long curve of the old farm road, staying just in the edge of the trees, heading in the general direction of the cluster of tall buildings.

  There was a broad pasture between me and the office complex. I would have to be less cautious if I wanted to find something to eat there. The parking lot was full—most of the people seemed to be inside now. Hopefully they weren’t staring out their windows.

  I came out from the trees and scrambled over a low fence. The buildings were so big, they were farther away than they seemed. It would take a little while to get there. I could unleash my feet, but it couldn’t be good if anybody saw a barefoot girl in filthy pajamas and shades setting a new land speed record.

  I circled the complex from a good distance away. It felt a little safer when I got to the back of the parking lot. At least I wasn’t so exposed. I trotted around to the front and saw a sweeping semicircular entryway. In the middle of the entryway was a grassy oval on which sat something that looked like a funky piece of abstract art. Dark golden in color, roughly cone-shaped, wide at the base and narrow at the top. As I studied it more closely, I realized it was a huge piece of machinery of some kind.

  The golden machine was covered with twisted metallic pipes and thick, painted wiring. It reminded me of something I had seen before. Suddenly it hit me: An engine. An enormous, otherworldly engine, but yeah, an engine. It was perched in front of a large sign that read:

  GEORGE C. MARSHALL SPACE FLIGHT CENTER

  NATIONAL AERONAUTICS AND SPACE

  ADMINISTRATION

  Holy crap.

  I had stumbled onto a NASA base.

  I had heard of this place, sure. I had never been inside the fence, but back in middle school I had visited the world-famous Space and Rocket Center just outside the base. It was NASA’s scaled-down version of Disney World, complete with zero-g rides, antique space junk, and rockets you could climb through. That’s where I remembered seeing an engine like this one before.

  I remembered they had told our class that the actual Space Center was surrounded by a huge army base called Redstone Arsenal. Which made sense, considering they would have to protect the secrets of the space program from foreign governments. So some of those cars I saw coming through the gate probably belonged to soldiers.

  As I watched from about a hundred yards away, people from the parking lot mounted the steps and entered, sweeping some kind of badge in front of a bar code reader to get inside. There was no way I could find any breakfast in there without being spotted. I turned and trotted back to the woods.

  I crouched next to a sassafras tree, stomach growling. Guess I could eat the leaves. Looking back at the sea of cars, I thought of Manda and smiled, thinking how she would drive me crazy if she knew I was here. Wondering if the astronauts ever came to visit and where they kept the moon dust hidden.

  Hidden.

  An idea popped into my head. I was tucked away from the rest of the world, surrounded by thousands of acres of woods, fields, and hopefully about a million army tanks. Finding food and shelter couldn’t be all that tough, either. Not on a place this size with this many buildings.

  I started to feel a little better about my situation. Then I remembered Wirtz’s face as he spoke the words: I will never stop coming until I find you. Never.… This I vow.

  No matter how careful I was, sooner or later he would find me. He had superpowers, was driven by some kind of murderous vampire vendetta, and had all the time in the world. My skin prickled with the realization.

  Wirtz would never stop coming until … until one of us is dead.

  Okay, as hungry as I was, my most pressing need was a safe place to sleep. I refused to spend even one more second in a concrete pipe. But my home base couldn’t be just anywhere. I shuddered at the thought of facing Wirtz out in the open. But as long as I stayed here at the Space Center I had certain advantages, and I was determined to exploit them. Through instinct or sheer luck, I had found the perfect place for a siege. And, thanks to my grandfather, I knew a thing or two about sieges.

  The first thing to do, Papi always said, was find the most defensible position. This usually meant high ground with a full view of the surrounding terrain in 360 degrees.

  But just camping on top of a hill and trying to keep watch felt like suicide when facing a creature as powerful and deadly as Wirtz. I had powers of my own, sure, but I would feel a lot better at night in some kind of defensive structure where
I had ways of slowing the vampire down.

  In the Middle Ages a noble family would build what was called a motte and bailey: an enclosed area, usually on a hill, surrounding a group of small wooden or stone structures. Later they would start on the actual castle itself.

  No matter how strong and fast I was, I didn’t have the time or the serfs for that. What I needed was something already built. I immediately thought about the tall brownish structure I had seen and took off for the river.

  With no other eyes to see, I turned on the jets and raced through the forest. Soon I broke into a pasture full of cows. I rushed through the herd at supersonic speeds, and they fled in a panic, mooing crazily.

  I pushed harder, using the run to experiment with my vampire abilities. I leapt into the air, twenty feet off the ground, and soared through the notch of a tree without touching a leaf. Came to earth again on the far side, soft as kissing a baby.

  I burst into a meadow, empty except for tall wildflowers that blew over in my wake. I threw my arms wide, bounding through clouds of yellow pollen.

  On the far side of the secret meadow, something caught my attention: a large white board near the edge of the woods. I walked around to the other side to look.

  DANGER!

  BURIED MUNITIONS

  NO TRESPASSING

  DO NOT DIG WITHOUT GPR PERMIT

  I stopped breathing. I had just been running and bouncing through a minefield. I could have blown myself up. I sat down shakily, looking back at the innocent yellow flowers.

  Can a vampire die?

  If Wirtz was to be believed, they sure could. Keep going.

  I could smell water and knew I was close to the river. Moving much more carefully this time, I walked a little ways into the woods and a new place opened up before me, a wide circle of grassy gravel and weeds.