by R. A. Nelson
No signs around, so it seemed safe enough. I moved into the clearing. In the center was a towering structure that rose up like a big squarish grain elevator emblazoned at the top with a huge peeling NASA logo. Metal stairs zigzagged up the tower’s sides to doors placed at different levels. The tower itself was made of thick metal plates studded with giant bolts, and the whole thing was laced with ladders and catwalks. From the top protruded a monstrous arm that had to be nearly a hundred feet long running perpendicular to the tower, making the whole structure look like an upside-down letter L.
Directly beneath the arm was a gigantic iron chute that disappeared into the ground, then bent and reappeared at an angle pointed at the woods on the other side.
I walked around to the front of the chute. It looked like a fireplace big enough to drop a house in.
I glanced around, tingling all over. I had the sense the tower hadn’t been used in decades. It looked as if everything had been left to the elements. So quiet, undisturbed.
Perfect.
I had found my castle.
Before climbing the tower, I did a little exploring in the immediate area. There were a couple of abandoned one-story cinder block buildings nearby with peeling paint and doors that had never seen a bar code reader. I pushed inside and immediately caught the rank smell of a structure returning to a wild state.
A couple hundred feet from the base of the tower, a huge concrete bunker had been built into the side of a low hill. The bunker had square observation windows, but the glass was long gone. The walls of the bunker looked to be about two feet thick, something not even Wirtz would be able to get through, only the opening leading inside was much too wide for me to block.
I stepped inside the bunker and slipped my shades off. A little ways in I found a water faucet sticking out of the wall beneath one of the observation ports. I turned it on and was surprised to see it still worked. Ewww. I was thirsty, but the water came out brown and ropy. I left the faucet running, hoping it would clear sooner or later.
The interior was cooler than the outdoors because it was partially underground. There wasn’t much inside. In the back I came to a steel mesh curtain with only darkness beyond. I could see into the darkness, of course, but there really was nothing there. Only more concrete floors and walls running deep into the hillside. I could smell dirt and hear water dripping somewhere far off. The underground exhaled, ruffling my hair. Save it for later.
I put my sunglasses back on and sprinted to the tower and began climbing, launching my body up the side rather than taking the stairs. The strength of my legs was incredible—I flew upward at least fifteen or twenty feet with every kick, propelling myself higher and higher from one handhold to the next using my newly discovered vampire senses to judge distances. I felt so confident I wouldn’t fall, it was almost as if I could fly.
It didn’t take long to reach the flat metal roof at the top. The only things higher than what I was standing on were the supports at the end of the big iron arm that jutted out over the clearing. I dusted rust from my hands and looked around. The view from up there was perfect. I could see everything for miles around: NASA buildings, the river, the interstate, acres and acres of swamp, forest, and fields. With my eyesight, it would be next to impossible for anybody to approach without me noticing.
Assuming I’m awake to see it.
I dropped to a catwalk one floor below and found a steel door leading to the inside of the tower. The door was old but still locked. I put my shoulder against it and used my strength to smash it open.
“Oops.”
The door came completely off its hinges. I was holding it by the steel knob. I held the door over the drop below and let go, just to get it out of the way, aiming for the next catwalk. It missed and fell to the ground seventy or eighty feet below with a reverberating crash. Oh well.
Behind the gaping hole where the door had been was a dingy little room. It smelled as if it had been closed for decades. I stepped inside and found a gray desk, a couple of folding chairs, and a green filing cabinet, all covered with patches of rust.
The desk was empty and the filing cabinet drawers were rusted shut, so I ripped them open with my bare hands. Inside were masses of moldering yellow and pink paper. If I needed a fire, here was plenty of starter fuel.
The carpet was the color of dead grass, and the lumpy steel walls reminded me of oatmeal. A mildew-spotted fire extinguisher hung next to a shelf that was bare except for a single stained coffee cup half filled with pieces of bugs.
I went back to the doorway and sat down. I wondered where Wirtz was at exactly that moment. What did vampires do to avoid the sun? It was ridiculous to think of them dragging coffin-loads of dirt around, plunking them down in some sweaty basement whenever they needed a rest. As for me, I could bed down in this room as soon as I found something decent to sleep on. No way was I going to stretch out on that nasty carpet.
There’s something in the trees, I thought.
No, not a monster, but something monstrously large, and only a few hundred yards away. A shiny aluminum structure with a long drive leading up to it.
I scrambled down the tower and went uphill through the forest to a little high point of land. I lay on my stomach and hands, creeping forward cautiously because I could hear a car coming. Over the crest of the little hill a Mini Cooper was swinging around the curve. I ducked my head, then leapt across the road as soon as the car was out of sight again.
The woods thinned on the other side of the drive, and there was a long building nestled in an even longer clearing. At the end of the building was a tall metallic dome glinting like aluminum foil in the sun. A sign at one end of the drive read:
MSFC SOLAR OBSERVATORY
CONTRACTOR’S ENTRANCE
The building had windows so narrow they looked like medieval arrow ports—what Papi called balistraria. I picked a spot between two of them, took several long hopping steps, then sprang right up the side. It felt just as natural as walking. I grabbed the rim of the flat roof and hoisted myself up.
Something immediately clutched at my stomach: Oh my God. Hot dogs.
I dashed to the far side of the roof and flipped myself over to where I was hanging upside down. I lowered myself slowly, and sure enough, there it was, a cafeteria. I looked both ways; nobody was around. I dropped to my feet and found a door that led to a kind of air lock. I got through the outer door, but the inner one was sealed.
The sight of those steamy-wet hot dogs turning under the heat lamp almost had me battering down the glass door. I saw two cooks in white aprons moving around in the back, but no one else. Must be preparing for lunch.
I looked at the cafeteria door again: it had the same kind of bar code reader I had seen at the first complex. My anger flared. I would need a special key card or badge to get through it. Hey, this is an emergency here—I briefly considered tearing the reader off the wall and smashing my way in. I would get my hot dogs, sure, but I was also pretty certain I would scare the cooks to death and set off an alarm somewhere. Not the best way to treat one’s neighbors.
I stepped out of the air lock and slipped back into the woods, frustrated. Making it worse, the breeze was still bringing me a fresh scent of those tantalizing … A noise behind me made me flinch. I dropped down, feeling ridiculously exposed. Two men were walking up the sidewalk without looking my way.
“Hey, you still watch American Idol?” one of the men said.
“Yeah, but it’s crap,” the other said. “The singers this season are crap. The songs are really terrible. I miss the old days.”
One of them was tall and fat, the other short and thin. They both had badges with their pictures on them swinging from cords around their necks. They headed straight for the air lock door I had just left and stuck their badges up to the reader and they were inside.
I was right behind them, moving so quickly and silently, I caught the door in mid-swing; neither of the men even turned around.
The inside of the building w
as shaded in lights and darks. I slipped behind a large pillar in the cafeteria that was decorated with posters of outer space and let the men walk away from me. Now the only people I could see were the cooks in the back, one of them stirring something in a large stainless steel pot while the other rapidly chopped onions.
I sprinted to the hot dog case without making a sound and fell to the floor in front of a steel counter directly below the revolving wieners. Saliva was practically dripping down my pajama top. I raised my head slowly, reached around, and snagged two hot dogs before the guy chopping onions could even bring down his blade. They tasted so wonderful, my eyes started to water. I stole two more hot dogs and gobbled them.
Now I was thirsty again. But it was nothing at all to grab a cup of orange drink from the dispenser. It was kind of funny, actually. The cook doing the stirring kept looking up every time I thumbed the dispenser, but by then my hand was already gone. It took several tries to get a full cup. Finally he put down his spoon and came over to investigate. By then I was gone.
Okay, food and shelter situation solved, at least temporarily. Now I needed to get busy. I still had several hours before I had to start worrying about the dark again. I skirted the minefield, wishing I had shoes, and made a beeline for the nearest highway. Time to do a little shopping.
“Fear makes the wolf bigger than he is.”
That’s something Papi liked to say.
Still, I had never stolen anything in my life. Not a stick of gum or even a grape from the produce department. Okay, hot dogs. Just like my grandfather, I had always thought thieves were complete creeps. Now I was standing in the power tool aisle at Home Depot about to commit a felony.
Papi had been in the army in East Berlin and had plenty of guns, but he never taught me anything about them. “You are ein Fräulein,” was all he would say, shrugging. He’d let me watch him plink cans with his .22 in the gully behind his apple trees and that was about it. “Little girls shouldn’t know such things.”
Maybe he was right: I was probably more of a hand-to-hand kind of chick.
I knew nothing about weapons or defending myself, other than plain raw fury. It had been all I ever needed. Until now.
I had one of those long flatbed orange carts loaded to the rims with a thirty-inch Poulan chain saw, a battery-operated nail gun, a roll of wire, a five-gallon bucket of swimming pool chlorine, a hundred feet of nylon rope, a shovel, a pick, an air mattress, a hand pump, liquid soap, a battery charger, bungee cords, a small generator, a five-gallon gas can, a double-bladed ax, the biggest garden hoe they sold, and a large assortment of smaller items, from duct tape to nails to whetstones.
I was scared to death. But that was good. When I got scared, I got angry. And when I got angry, I could do scary things.
“Where do you keep your ankle grinders?” I said to a Home Depot man in the orange suspenders.
He was about sixty, rumpled, with thick glasses and a bulbous nose. He gave me a look. “You mean angle grinders?”
“Oh yeah. Angle. That’s right.” I guess that’s what my mom likes to call a “Freudian slip.”
The man looked at my nasty pajamas and stolen rubber Home Depot gum boots with raised eyebrows. Hey, you haven’t been to high school lately, I wanted to say. After a night in a concrete pipe, I was pretty rumpled myself, which is one reason I thought of Home Depot in the first place. You can look like anything in there and nobody bats an eyelash.
The man took me to the proper shelf. The angle grinder was a small handheld tool with a diamond wheel like a miniature circular saw used for cutting anything from concrete to tile. I liked the heft of it in my hand.
“This thing is brutal,” the old guy said. “You have to be really careful, or it can cut your hand off. Literally. Whatcha planning on building?”
“A belfry,” I said, and hustled away before he could ask me anything else.
I had briefly thought about breaking into a gun store or a place that sold samurai swords, but those kinds of weapons would be more conspicuous to haul around. Plain old tools would be less likely to arouse suspicion.
I already had the sense that Wirtz was not only dangerous but cocky. One of those guys who was so confident in his physicality, he didn’t figure he needed anything else. Especially against a half-vampire girl. Let him keep thinking that way.
Like I say, I didn’t know weapons, but I knew tools. Papi and I had spent many an hour trolling through Home Depot over the summers, building everything from bird feeders to rabbit hutches. I had selected the hoe in his honor. The hoe was Papi’s favorite tool.
“You don’t have to bend so much to use it,” he liked to say. “Und you can lean on it when you are tired.” He would turn the hoe and show me how the sharp corner of the blade could make a razor-thin line in the soil. “You see? It can be ein Skalpell.” Then he would turn it back flat and crush a row of weeds. “Or a road grader.”
Or, in the right hands, it could split open a man’s skull.
I strapped my load down with bungees, then rolled it to the back and parked in a quiet aisle that was aimed directly at the big contractor’s entrance. I waited. At last when the clerk moved away, leaving the doors temporarily unguarded, I blasted off toward the wide automatic doors.
By the time the shoplifting alarm started whooping, I was already burning rubber halfway across the parking lot and gaining velocity.
I finally stopped running half a mile from the store and looked behind me. Not surprisingly, nobody was there. Who could have kept up with me? I pointed the cart toward the Space Center and bounced across a field. I felt rotten about taking the stuff and promised myself to someday come back and pay for it all, whether that was really true or not. But now I had one more errand.
I parked my load behind a Dairy Queen that was part Texaco gas station. Nothing else around but fields and a greenhouse nursery. My “purchases” would be safe. I went to the front with my five-gallon can and waited until I saw a guy leave the hose on while he went inside to pick out some junk food. I took the hose out of his tank and squeezed the can nearly full before he even got back to the counter.
I hid the gas in the back with the other stuff and went inside, hoping the clerk hadn’t noticed me. She was busy with several customers. Great. I would never get a better chance. I peeked into the little office in the rear. Empty. Snuck in and uncradled the phone, dialing my home number. After the fourth ring, the answering machine at home picked up and I blurted out a message. It cut me off at thirty seconds, just as I was saying something to Manda. I swore and dialed the number again.
“Hello?”
Mom’s voice startled me. I could hear everything at once—terror, sadness, frustration, hope, all in a single word.
“Emma!”
She must’ve just gotten in from work and snatched up the receiver as my message was running out.
“Darling! Darling, that is you, isn’t it! Oh God, where are you? Are you okay? You must be hurt, oh God, darling! Oh please say something, anything …!”
“Mom,” I started.
She screamed and I tried to talk, but her relief and joy were so loud and messy, I’m sure she couldn’t understand a word I was saying.
“Mom, I’m okay! Please … don’t worry! I’m fine, I just had to leave … really fast. It was so stupid, what I did, going through the window that way, but I didn’t—I didn’t know what to do. I had to go, Mom.”
“Tell me. Are you in a hospital? Oh my God, Emma, what happened to you? Has somebody done this to you, made you this crazy? Tell me where you are! I’m coming right now. But please, please, God, be okay, please, oh please …!” She was practically sobbing and screaming at the same time.
“Mom, Mom!” Now I was bawling too. I had to speak louder to even be heard. “I’m not in a hospital, I’m fine. I’m not hurt.”
“But … how could you be okay? I saw you. You jumped through a window! I don’t understand …! Whatever … whatever it is, we can fix it, honey. I’m so sorry! I know
I haven’t been the best mother, I haven’t.”
“Come on, you’ve been fine! It’s not you, it’s me. It’s all me! But I don’t mean I did anything. I didn’t do anything bad! I mean—the window, yeah, but—it … it wasn’t my fault, I had to. I had no choice. I was afraid if I had stayed a second longer …”
I didn’t know how to finish the sentence. I knew I wasn’t making sense, was only making things worse. But I couldn’t tell her the truth, I just couldn’t. She begged me to explain and I had to deal with a fresh bout of shouting and weeping. Finally I just held the phone against my leg, afraid the clerk would hear us from the other room.
“Mom, would you listen. Please! Just listen … just … for a second, could you?”
“I called the police, Emma. You are making me crazy,” she went on. “Oh please, dear God, please come home. Please just let me come pick you up.”
She was practically shrieking now. I took my shades off and swiped my sleeve across my face. I had to get under control here. “Please … please, Mom. Calm down. I can’t tell you where I am, Mom. I can’t explain why I left. You will just have to accept that. There was nothing else I could do. You’ll understand—”
“Drugs! It has to be drugs. I have told you time and again—”
“It’s not drugs, Mom. You know me better than that! I would never put that crap in my body.”
“Someone gave them to you! I know it. A boy. Someone … someone slipped them in your food, something you drank.”
“Nothing like that, Mom. I’m okay, I swear.”
“But where are you?” Her voice was choked; she was running out of steam at last. “What am I supposed to do, Emma? Knowing you are out there—somewhere dangerous … and I can’t even help? Oh dear, sweet God …”
I saw the clerk moving around the counter out in the store.
“Look, I’ve got to go now, Mom. I’ve got to go. I’ll be okay, I swear. You don’t have to worry. I’ll call again. Okay? Soon as I can. Tell Manda I love her—”
