eventually join up with the slower body of mist that was coming straight down the slope.
He liked going to the mailbox. It was the closest thing the community had to an interface with the wider world, even if it was only an old diesel drum on a post set back twenty feet from a minor mountain road. Sometimes Amos saw a car go past, impossibly swift compared to the horse buggy he rode in once a month, when they visited with the cousins over in New Hareseth. Once a bus had stopped, and a whole bunch of people had gotten out and tried to take his photograph, and he had almost dropped the mail as he tried to run back and keep his face covered at the same time.
The flag was up on the box, Amos saw as he got closer. That was good, since otherwise he would have to wait for the mail truck to get back out on the main road. Sometimes the postal workers were women, and he wasn’t allowed to see or talk to strange women.
He hurried to the box and carefully unlocked the padlock with the key that he proudly wore on his watch chain, as a visible symbol that while not quite yet a man, he was no longer considered just a boy.
There were only three items inside: a crop catalog from an old firm that guaranteed no devil work with their seeds; and two thick, buff-colored envelopes that Amos knew would be from one of the other communities, somewhere around the world. They all used and reused the same envelopes. The two here might have been a dozen places and come home again.
Amos put the mail in his voluminous outer pocket, shut the lid, and clicked the padlock shut. But with the click, he heard another sound. Right behind him, the crunch of gravel underfoot.
He spun around, looking not ahead but up at the sky. When he saw that the sun was still shining, unobscured by the lowering cloud, he lowered his gaze and saw. a girl.
“Hi,” said the girl. She was about his age, and really pretty, but Amos backed up to the mailbox.
She wore no crosses, and her light sundress showed a bare neck and arms, and even a glimpse of her breasts. Amos gulped as she moved and caught the sun, making the dress transparent, so he could see right through it.
“Hi,” the girl said again, and stepped closer.
Amos raised his bracer-bound wrists to make a cross.
“Get back!” he cried. “I don’t know how you walk in the sun, vampire, but you can’t take me! My faith is strong!”
The girl wrinkled her nose, but she stopped.
“I’m not a vampire,” she said. “I’ve been vaccinated like everyone else. Look.”
She rotated her arm to show the inside of her elbow. There was a tattoo there, some kind of bird thing inside a rectangle, with numbers and letters spelling out a code.
“Vacks. vexination.,” stumbled Amos. “That’s devil’s work. If you’re human, you wear crosses, else the vampires get you.”
“Not since maybe the last twenty years,” said the girl. “But like you said, if I am a vampire, how come I’m out in the sun?”
Amos shook his head. He didn’t know what to do. The girl stood in his path. She was right about the sun, but even though she wasn’t a vampire, she was a girl, an outsider. He shouldn’t be looking at her, or talking to her. But he couldn’t stop looking.
“I don’t have a problem with crosses, either,” said the girl. She took the three steps to Amos and reached over to touch the crosses around his neck, picking them up one by one, almost fondling them with her long, elegant fingers. Amos stopped breathing and tried to think of prayers he couldn’t remember, prayers to quench lust and. sinful stirrings and.
He broke away and ran a few yards toward the village. He would have kept going, but the girl laughed. He stopped and looked back.
“Why’re you laughing?”
She stopped and smiled again.
“Just. men don’t usually run away from me.”
Amos stood a little straighter. She thought he was a man, which was more than the village girls did.
“What’s your name?” asked the girl. “I’m Tangerine.”
“Amos,” said Amos slowly. “My name is Amos.”
Behind the girl, the fog kept coming down, thick and white and damp.
“It’s good to meet you, Amos. Are you from the village up the mountain?”
Amos nodded his head.
“We just moved in along the road,” said Tangerine. “My dad is working at the observatory.”
Amos nodded again. He knew about the observatory. You could see one of its domes from the northern end of the village, though it was actually on the crest of the other mountain, across the valley.
“You’d better get home before the fog blanks the sun,” he said. “It’s vampire weather.”
Tangerine smiled again. She smiled more than anyone Amos had ever known.
“I told you, I’m vaccinated,” she said. “No vampire will bite me. Hey, could I come visit with you?”
Amos shook his head urgently. He couldn’t imagine the punishment he would earn if he came back with an almost naked outsider woman, one who didn’t even wear a cross.
“It’s lonely back home,” said Tangerine. “I mean, no one lives here, and Dad works. There’s just me and my grandmother most of the time.”
The fog was shrouding the tops of the tallest trees across the road. Amos watched it, and even as he spoke, he wondered why he wasn’t already running back up the road to home.
“What about your mother?”
“She’s dead,” said Tangerine. “She died a long while back.”
Amos could smell the fog now, could almost taste the wetness on his tongue. There could be vampires right there, hidden in that vanguard of cloud, close enough to spring out and be on him in seconds. But he still found it difficult to tear himself away.
“I’ll be back tomorrow,” he said, and bolted, calling over his shoulder. “Same time.”
“See you then!” said Tangerine. She waved, and that image stayed in Amos’s head, her standing like that, her raised arm lifting her breasts, that smile on her face, and her bright hair shining, with the cold white fog behind, like a painted background, to make sure she stood out even more.
Amos wasn’t home by five, or even half past, and he just barely beat the main body of the fog that came straight down the mountainside. The home door was shut and barred by the time he got there, so he had to knock on the lesser door, and he got a cracking slap from his mother when she let him in, and when his father finished his bath, he ordered an hour-long penance that left Amos with his knees sore from kneeling and made the words he’d been repeating over and over so meaningless that he felt like they were some other language that he’d once known but had somehow forgotten.
Through it all, he kept thinking of Tangerine, seeing Tangerine, imagining what might happen when he next saw her. and then he’d try to pray harder, to concentrate on those meaningless words, but whatever he did, he couldn’t direct his mind away from those bare arms and legs, the way her unbound hair fell.
Amos slept very badly and earned more punishments before breakfast than he’d had in the past month. Even his father, who favored prayer and penance over any other form of correction, was moved to take off his leather belt, though he only held it as an unspoken threat, while he delivered a homily on attention and obedience.
Finally it was time to get the mail. Amos took no chances that this plum job might be taken from him. If anyone else saw Tangerine, he’d never be allowed to go to the mailbox again. So he put on his bracers, coat, and hat without being asked and went to tell his mother he was going.
She looked at him over her loom but didn’t stop her work, the shuttle clacking backward and forward as she trod the board.
“You be back by five,” she warned. “Theodore says the fog today will be even thicker. It is a shocking month for vampire weather.”
“Yes, Mother,” said Amos. He planned to run to the mailbox as soon as he was out of sight of the village. That would give him a little extra time with Tangerine. If she came. He was already starting to wonder if he might have imagined her.
He also made sure to wave and nod to Young Franz, who was working on the roof of his father’s house again. But as soon as he was around the bend, Amos broke into a run, pounding along the road as if there was a vampire
