Jesus bent her head to the side, pushed her hair out of the way, bared her neck. He bit down, but only slightly. A streaming wash of dark blood spilled over her white neck, coursing down her pink dress.
'This is her blood,' Jesus said. 'Drink of it.'
Wheeler hurried forward, put his mouth to the wound. He did not even have to suck. The liquid was drawn into his mouth automatically, a hot, sourly bitter substance, thick and viscous and intermittently chunky.
And it was good.
Across the desert, the radio picked up only middle-of the-road stations that seemed to play exclusively hits from the sixties and early seventies. Glen Campbell. The Carpenters. The Fifth Dimension.
Melanie. Joe South.
The songs made Robert feel slightly sad. Nostalgia, he supposed. The first sign of encroaching old age. He didn't know whether his life had been less complicated then or whether the world had been less complicated, but it had been a happier time, a more innocent time, and both he and the world had since moved on.
He had been to Phoenix, had spent the morning at the federal building with Rossiter, and what he had been shown had been enough to curl his hair. After that prima donna shit the agent had been pulling for the past month, it was strange to see him open and cooperative, offering help and information. Robert was shocked to find that Rossiter had an entire vampire file, a massive list of people over the past several decades who'd had the blood sucked out of them. Neither he nor the agent knew whether this was the work of many vampires or if their vampire had simply been traveling around, but Rossiter wanted him to ask Sue and her grandmother about it.
Robert felt good that he had finally been let into the agent's confidence, that he was finally being treated as though he was an equal, but he knew that it was only occurring because Rossiter thought he could be of some tse to his career. The agent was no longer rude and disnissive toward him, but he was toward his own people. He'd been curt to one of his fellow agents, downright asty to an assistant, and Robert realized that this selfish axogance was a fundamental part of Rossiter's personalty. Perhaps it was what made him a good law enforcement fighter. Perhaps it was why he was Robert's age and so much more successful in their field. But if that's what it took to get to the top, Robert thought, he didn't want it. Rich was right. Rio Verde really wasn't such a bad place to be,
Rossiter also appeared to be acting somewhat secretive Lbout the existence of the vampire. When he'd asked obert to accompany him to Phoenix, to the FBI offices, obert had envisioned a meeting with a task force, a conrence with business-suited experts who would map out quick coherent strategy to deal with the problem. un stead they'd walked unnoticed to the little cubicle Rosrapidly called an office and had not discussed anything with anybody. Instead of world-class minds addressing themselves to the situation in Rio Verde, he was presented with eroxed copies of declassified information and was asked to consult Sue's family....... It seemed strange to him, and he said as much to Roslater, but the agent assured him that, within the next few days, the big guns would be called in. 'This is a bureaucacy,' he explained. 'We work differently here than you in on your little police force.'
Robert left around noon. Rossiter said he had to check n with his supervisors, make a report or something, and le would be following later. He wanted to meet again with Sue and her grandmother and plan a specific strategy for tracking down and disposing of the vampire.
The vampire.
It was amazing to Robert how quickly he, and everyone had accepted the existence of a vampire in their midst. Even Rich had come around. The supernatural was supposed to be fodder for B-movies and pulp fiction, believed in the real world only by the ignorant and uneducated, an embarrassing reminder of a more superstitious past. But apparently those roots were not buried as far as people liked to pretend. Or perhaps all of those books and movies somehow sustained a tolerance for such ideas.
Whatever the reason, the revelation that vampires were not the figment of some author's imagination but were honest-to-God beings had not thrown everyone for a loop.
There were those few Medusas, but other than that, people were willing to confront the problem with the new information at their disposal.
That gave him hope. :
He drove into town on 370. He hadn't realized how much the black church had grown until he saw it from the perspective of the highway.
It was now the dominant structure in Rio Verde, its black hulking shape visually overriding even the formerly prominent mine. The church was the most visible object when Robert rounded the curve of the first foothill, thrust into prominence by the stark contrast of its blackness with the pale tones of the earth, rock, and surrounding buildings. It looked to him like a shadow, a shadow that was growing, spreading, and would eventually encompass the whole town.
That was a strange thing to think, Robert told himself. Strange but appropriate. He found his attention focused on the church as he passed the first few shabby shacks and trailers on the outskirts of town, and he still saw its shape, imprinted on his mind, as he pulled into the parking lot of the station.
People were missing. It was now confirmed. No one had called, no reports had been made, but he had instructed Ted, Steve, Ben, and Stu to canvas the town, to look for anything suspicious, to try to determine whether anything out of the ordinary was occurring. They'd found two abandoned cars, several empty houses with open front and garage doors, and more than a few dead dogs and cats. Throughout the town, businesses were closed. Traffic was nonexistent.
Robert took the list from Ted. Whether people were missing because they did been frightened off and had left voluntarily, or whether they'd been .. . taken, this news was disturbing.
Rossiter arrived just after five, a few moments after Woods, and the three of them met Rich at the paper. They waited several minutes for Pee Wee, called his house and got no answer, then left a note for him and went to Sue's.
The meeting was short and maddeningly uninformafive. The old woman had apparently said she was tired, had gone to her room, and would not come out. Sue and her parents seemed to accept this as a matter of course, but Rich and Woods and Rossiter also seemed to accept this as SOP, and that made Robert angry. They placidly accepted the news that nothing was going to be accomplished tonight, and spent fifteen or twenty minutes re hashing information that they'd already gone over twenty times.
Didn't they realize that lives were at stake here? Robert left alone--angry, tired, and frustrated. He'd come with Rossiter, but there was room in Woods's car for the FBI agent, and he decided to let the coroner take Rossiter to his motel He wasn't in the mood for companionship tonight.
He sped toward home. It was cold outside, all trace of Indian summer long since gone, but he felt warm, sweaty, and he drove with the windows open, Lynyrd Skynyrd cranked up on the stereo. He wiped the sweat from his forehead. Maybe he was getting a fever. Maybe he had the flu.
Or maybe it was stress.
He gunned the car as the asphalt changed to dirt. ROn me was singing
'I'm on the Hunt,' and Robert sang with it. at the top of his voice. It felt good to scream out some rock and roll, cleansing.
The rocks and cacti on the side of the road were black amorphous shapes, but on the hill beyond his house was a strange white object that stood in sharp contrast to the otherwise uniform darkness. He slowed the car as he neared his drive, finally pressing the brake pedal all the way down. At the top of the hill, clearly visible by the light of the half moon, was something bright and fluttering. It had no distinct shape but grew and contracted in rhythmic billows, segments reaching out and retracting, twisting and turning, dancing with the cold desert wind.
The sight sent shivers down Robert's back, and he thought he heard whispers on the breeze. The fluttering thing on the hill was unknown, yet somehow familiar, like something half-remembered from a long-ago nightmare, and the agitated mutability of its shape struck a chord within him.
He put the car into gear, turned onto the driveway, and sped through the darkness, maneuvering the tricky bumps and ruts by instinct. He slowed as the drive opened onto the front of his house and slammed on the brakes.
Pee Wee's pickup was parked in his carport.
Robert got out of the car and hurried across the dirt, heart thumping. Pee Wee's passenger door was open, the overhead light on, but the big man was nowhere to be seen. Robert called out his friend's name, yelled it more loudly, then walked backward out of the carport. He would have sped inside the house, checked to see if Pee Wee was there, but the front door was locked and his friend could not have gotten in.
The burning overhead light worried him.
