Throat

by R. A. Nelson

  “You promised you wouldn’t do this,” I said. “You said you would be serious.”

  “I … am serious, Emma,” Sagan said. “What do you expect me to say?”

  “I expect you to think I’m crazy. But I’m asking you … I’m pleading with you … to believe me.”

  “Okay, you want me to be honest?”

  “Please.”

  “I wouldn’t have believed you if I hadn’t seen you go up that wall. But … being honest, remember? I don’t know how to believe in something like vampires.”

  “Well, you better learn.”

  “I … I don’t have any.”

  “All right. I’ve seen you out in the daylight lots of times. Just another myth, huh?”

  “No. That’s real. Only … there are some vampire things that don’t apply to me.”

  Sagan stood up. I almost couldn’t bear looking at his face. He didn’t look like he disbelieved me.… He looked … sad. Like he had lost someone very important to him.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” I said. “I told you you would think I was crazy. I told you that over and over.”

  Sagan had his hands on his hips. He was walking back and forth, as if refusing to make eye contact. Then I realized it wasn’t that.… This kind of news wasn’t something you could take just sitting there. It came out in your body.

  Finally he looked at me again. “I don’t think you’re crazy.” He said it very quietly, as if someone might overhear. “Maybe I’m crazy. Because nothing you have done has seemed crazy to me. Well, except living out here.”

  “Breathe,” I said. “Please.”

  “I’m breathing. I’m here. I haven’t left.”

  “It … rearranges everything, doesn’t it?” I said. “When I figured it out, I got sick. I mean, physically ill. For days. All this amazing stuff had been happening to me, and somehow I was still getting up each morning, not questioning it so much, just amazed over and over. I think it made me numb. Then when I realized what it was, I got so sick, I felt like I was dying. And I think I was. I mean, the Emma I used to be … she is dead.…”

  “You’re not saying like undead, are you?”

  “No, of course not. I’m alive. But the person I was before that … she’s gone. Well, I’m still here. I’m still me. But once I understood … it just wiped me out. It was too much to take.”

  Sagan was looking kind of ill himself.

  “You’re not going to throw up or something, are you?” I said.

  “No. Please don’t take this the wrong way, Emma, but I just don’t see how it could be real. What makes you think you’re a vampire? I mean, obviously, beside your wall-climbing skills. Were you bitten by a radioactive spider?” He grinned, but it was a sickly kind of grin.

  “I was attacked,” I said, instantly erasing his grin. “I didn’t remember it at first because I had a grand mal seizure, a tonic-clonic, right in the middle of it. You sometimes come out of a seizure with a kind of amnesia about what happened. Well, that time my amnesia lasted for days, weeks.”

  “Wait a minute. You’re telling me you have epilepsy?”

  “A seizure condition, yeah.”

  Sagan swore. “And all this time you have been living out here by yourself with a seizure condition. And you didn’t tell me.”

  “I figured if I told you that, you’d turn me in. You know, for my own safety.”

  “Okay.” He sat back down next to me as if his legs would no longer hold him. “Tell me all of it. Everything.”

  So I told him everything: all about that day at the soccer tournament, breaking Gretchen’s nose, taking the car, and winding up in the hospital. The changes.

  “So … you saw him?” Sagan said. “The guy … er, the vampire … who attacked you?”

  “That’s the worst part,” I said. And I told him all about Wirtz, how he had fed from my leg and then later on appeared to me the night that I ran away.

  “And he keeps coming back,” I said.

  Sagan was looking down at his hands when I finished. I think it was something he had to do.… Maybe looking at the most familiar things in the world, his own hands, was his way of keeping his feet attached to the ground.

  “You gonna flake out on me or what?” I said.

  Sagan raised his head slightly. “Or what.”

  “Which means?”

  “I don’t know what it means, Emma. You’re right. I’ve been begging you to tell me the truth and … now I don’t know what to think.”

  I stood up. “You want me to show you something, don’t you?”

  “I want to trust you. That isn’t trust, making you prove it.”

  “But it would help, wouldn’t it?”

  Sagan got up too and looked at me, almost as if he had never seen me before.

  “Maybe I don’t want proof,” he said. “Maybe I’m afraid of proof. You’re the best thing that has ever happened to me, you know? Maybe I don’t want it to be true.”

  “You think I’m lying.”

  “No. And that scares me.”

  “So why are you into astronomy?” I said. “What do you hope to find out there? You know, I’ve seen footage from those moon missions. We watched some of it in school. And I’ve seen the pictures from the Martian rovers. You know what? Boring. It’s rocks, Sagan, just rocks. That’s pretty much all they’ve found, isn’t it?”

  “They’re trying to determine if there was liquid water and—”

  “Big deal. What are you really looking for out there? Water? No way. Aren’t you looking for something huge? Really different? Strange beyond your wildest dreams strange? What about all those books you read as a kid.… Would you have read them if the whole secret, the whole danger, the mystery—if all it ever turned out to be was barren places full of useless rocks?”

  “What are you saying?”

  “I’m saying … maybe you are ready for this. More ready than you think. Papi always says there’s a reason for everything. A reason things happen. Maybe that’s why I found you, right? Out of all the other people on this base. What would anybody else have done … I mean anybody … if they had caught me here, breaking into a building, searching for food?”

  Sagan breathed out. “Turned you in.”

  I took hold of his arms and looked straight into his crazy blue eyes. “You have to understand something. I have been living with this. Living it. Just pretend it’s real for one minute and put yourself in my shoes. Wouldn’t you be practically desperate for someone else to know? Someone important to you? Someone to believe in you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “But you would be so scared of telling them, because it’s too crazy, it’s impossible.… It’s for the kind of people who believe in bigfoots and UFOs.…”

  “I believe in UFOs.…”

  “There you go,” I said, letting go of his arms and smiling. “So you’re telling me you can believe in little green men …”

  “Gray, they’re usually gray.…”

  “Okay, little gray men with heads shaped like gigantic light-bulbs and big black footballs for eyes … how they come and abduct people, etc.…”

  “I didn’t say I believed in that,” he said.

  “Okay, they are real, anyhow. You can believe in that, but you can’t believe that there might be another kind of human being out there? Human beings just like us, for the most part, who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and got infected …”

  “Infected? So now you know what causes vampirism?”

  Whoops. I wasn’t sure he was ready to hear about the Sonnen. “Just throwing some possibilities out there,” I said. “But imagine those people.… They didn’t ask to be made into vampires, but they were. And so now they have to live and somehow keep away from the rest of the world.… Think of what that would be like.”

  “And feed off regular people.”

  “Exactly.”

  “It doesn’t sound like a disease; it sounds like a curse,” Sagan said. “A nightmare.”
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  “Not a real glamorous way to live, huh?” I said. “Hiding in dark dank places by day, stalking other human beings just to stay alive.”

  “And you’re telling me you’re one of those … people.”

  “Yeah. Except for the drinking blood thing and the sunlight thing. Everything else about me is full vampire.”

  “But that would mean … you have …”

  “Superpowers, basically. Like the way I’ve been getting in and out of the Space Center. It’s not all that tough, really. I just jump over the fence.”

  “Ten feet high with razor wire, and you jump over it?”

  “Pretty regularly.”

  “So that’s what you never wanted me to see, huh?”

  “Well … of course.”

  Sagan shook his head and then ran his fingers through his hair. “But that’s the thing; you’ve got it all worked out, haven’t you? You can explain anything by these powers, can’t you?”

  “I’m just telling you the truth. Like the mall. You want to know how I got those clothes? I ripped a few doors off their hinges. And when the cops came …”

  “Cops?”

  “They would have caught me if not for my … skills. They even shot me with a Taser and it didn’t stop me.”

  “This is nuts, Emma, nuts!”

  “I can show you the holes where it stuck in my shoe. See?”

  Sagan rubbed his eyes and walked in a little circle that came right back to me.

  “So basically, you have a choice,” I said. “You can believe me and … maybe have the biggest adventure of your life. Or … you can think I’m just some chick who got off her meds, ran away from high school … and lose me for good.”

  “Meds. You must be taking something for your … condition,” Sagan said.

  “I was,” I said. “It’s a prescription drug called Dilantin. I haven’t taken it for a while, and I had a seizure and fell off the tower last night. And I saw him here.”

  “Him?”

  “Wirtz. The vampire who turned me.”

  “Turned you. God, Emma. Do you know how that sounds?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And you saw him here?”

  “Well … a projection of him.” I explained about Wirtz and the Feld without giving specifics about the other vampires.

  “So … you think … this vampire, Wirtz … you think he is using the Feld to get inside your mind?” Sagan said.

  “Yeah. But only when I’m experiencing some kind of seizure, apparently. That’s the only time I ever see him.”

  “And he can see the things around him when he’s here?”

  “He seems just as solid as you sitting there. But I’ve been experimenting some. If I can tap into his Feld first, then I have control. Well, as long as I don’t have a tonic-clonic. But time is running out.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Wirtz is getting close, that’s what I mean. He’s seen my tower now. It’s going to get really dangerous around here very soon. I need to be ready.”

  “So … you’re really going to fight this … Wirtz guy.…”

  “Yeah. And I came here to do it.” I pointed up at the test stand. “This is basically … my siege castle. And there’s something else.… He won’t stop. I know that. He won’t stop until … one of us is dead.”

  “So you’re saying you’ve got to … you’ve got to kill him. And you actually think you can.”

  I took his hand. “Look. Let’s make this easy. Let’s not even call it proof. How about a demonstration?”

  I led him to the most private place I could find—the secret glade in the woods.

  “But you’re hurt,” he said. “That’s the most gruesome bruise I ever—”

  I tugged my shirt up where Sagan could see. The bruise was already going away.

  “Did I tell you I also heal incredibly fast?”

  Sagan shook his head. “Okay, so what next? You’re not going to bite me, are you?”

  I laughed. “Maybe later. But I had something a little different in mind.”

  We stopped in front of the sign I had found before.

  DANGER!

  BURIED MUNITIONS

  NO TRESPASSING

  DO NOT DIG WITHOUT GPR PERMIT

  “Not cool,” he said. “We really shouldn’t be here, Emma.”

  “I know we shouldn’t, you goofball. I shouldn’t even be on the base. Would you believe I ran through this meadow the first day I was here and came through without a scratch?”

  Sagan swore. “So you really are Superman, huh. Nothing can hurt you?”

  “Oh, I can be hurt. You should have seen me last night. I was just lucky. Extremely lucky. So what’s a GPR?”

  “Ground-penetrating radar. They use it to locate buried objects. Chemicals. Bombs. Canisters of mustard gas.”

  “Mustard gas!”

  “Before NASA, this place was an army base,” Sagan said. “Still is. Going back to World War II. So why are we here? You mentioned something about a demonstration.”

  “Okay. But not here. I’m never setting foot in that field again. Take me someplace safe—preferably a forest.”

  It was only a short distance away, so we walked. Sagan was still holding my hand, and that made me feel better. He still wants to touch me.

  “How’s this?” he said.

  “No mustard gas?”

  “Just trees.”

  “Okay.” Now that I was going to do it, I was suddenly nervous. How would he react? “Look, this is hard.…”

  “I thought it was going to be easy?”

  “I don’t mean physically hard. Just … please don’t freak. It’s going to be kind of crazy.”

  Sagan smiled. “I won’t. Why would I? It’s going to be interesting.”

  “You promise?”

  “Sure.”

  I let go of his hand and picked him up. Tucked him against my side like a six-foot-long football.

  “Hey, wait a minute!” Sagan yelled, struggling to get free.

  I was off, bounding through the trees like before. I was hardly aware that I was even holding him, except that my balance was off.

  “Oh shiiiiiiiiiiii …!” Sagan yelled, his words whipped away by the wind.

  I was using my left hand to grab tree branches, flinging myself from one tree to the next like a monkey, then dropping to the ground and bounding upward again. It felt the way it always did: exhilarating. I shifted Sagan around to my shoulders, carrying him fireman style. It didn’t slow me down a bit.

  At last I came to a stop and put him down. He fell over and lay on his back.

  “God. God.” He said it over and over as he struggled to catch his breath.

  “What are you breathing hard for?” I said, grinning. “I’m the one doing all the work.”

  I squatted next to him, not winded at all, and waited for his head to catch up to his body. At last he blinked and rubbed his eyes.

  “I can’t believe … you just did that,” he said.

  “Okay. How about this?”

  I found a dead tree and shoved hard. It fell with a huge jolt I could feel all through my legs, the tree looking rubbery as it bounced like a pencil you twiddle between your fingers. I glanced at Sagan, pleased to see that his eyes were bugging out.

  I tried to pick the tree up, but it was like trying to palm a basketball.… My hand was too small. I had to get both arms around the trunk to hoist it into the air.

  “Where do you want it?” I said.

  “What else would you like to know?” I said when we were back at the tower.

  I had to admit, after the shock of finally being caught, I was enjoying this. I had always been a show-off.

  “I don’t even know what to ask,” he said. “Well, technically that’s not true. I have about three million questions. But I’m not sure where to start. All I know is stuff from TV shows and movies. Can you be seen in a mirror?”

  “Yep. I’m solid. Physical. That would be defying the laws of physics.” Than
ks, Anton.

  “Okay, you said you don’t drink blood.… How?”

  “I haven’t figured that one out yet. When I was attacked, I had a seizure while he was still … feeding … and somehow I figure it scrambled my transformation. So I only got part of the total package. Same thing for sunlight. Except that I have to wear these.” I tapped my sunglasses. “I’m pretty much blind in regular daylight.”

  “So …”

  “As far as I can tell, all of the good, none of the bad. If you don’t count the fact that I’m homeless and a crazy vampire is out to kill me.”

  “But why?”

  “Who knows. It hurt his ego that I got away the first time? Or maybe he’s just bitter.… He definitely wants to know my ‘secret.’ So all I have to do is tell him, no problem, just be born with epilepsy and you’re halfway there.”

  Sagan turned and looked up at the tower in the distance. “You really think this is the best place to fight him?”

  “It’s pretty much the only place,” I said. “Think about it.… Would you want to fight somebody like Wirtz out in the open?”

  “I wouldn’t want to fight him at all.”

  “You assume I have a choice.”

  “Well, at least I can see why you didn’t want to go back home. You would draw him right to your family. But what if … what if I got us a little place somewhere, an apartment! Wouldn’t you be safer there?”

  “I would feel cornered. Here at least I can see. I can move around, maybe get some advance warning, slow him down.”

  “But what’s to stop him from just climbing up there and killing you?”

  “You want to see?” I said.

  So I took him up the tower and showed him my defenses. The trip wires, deadly garden tools, chemicals, all of it.

  “A hoe,” Sagan said. “You’re going to kill this … monster … with a hoe.”

  “That’s basically for good luck,” I said. “A hoe is my all-time favorite tool from working in Papi’s garden. Besides, in a pinch …” I slipped the hoe out of its hiding spot, spun 180 degrees, screaming, “Yahhhhh!” The corner of the hoe was embedded in the tower’s metal hide. Sagan’s face went pale and he softly swore.