The Traveling Vampire Show

Chapter Five

We started walking across the field.

“Guess we beat ’em here,” Slim said, her voice hushed.

“Looks that way,” said Rusty. He also spoke softly, the way you might talk late at night sneaking through a graveyard. He looked at his wristwatch. “It’s only ten-thirty.”

“Still,” I said, “you’d think they’d be here by now. Don’t they have to set up for the show?”

“Who knows?” Rusty said.

“How do we know someone isn’t here?” Slim asked, a look on her face as if she might be kidding around.

“I don’t see anyone,” Rusty said.

“Let’s just be ready to beat it,” I said.

They glanced at me so I would know they got both meanings. Usually, such a remark would inspire some wisecracks. Not this time, though.

“If anything happens,” Slim said, “we stay together.”

Rusty and I nodded.

We walked slowly, expecting trouble. You always expected trouble at Janks Field, but you never knew what it might be or where it might come from.

The place was creepy enough just because it looked so desolate and because a lot of very bad stuff had happened there. Bad things still happened. Every time I went to Janks Field with Rusty and Slim, we ran into trouble. We’d been scared witless, had accidents, gotten ourselves banged up, bit, stung and chased by various forms of wildlife (human and otherwise).

Janks Field was just that way.

So we expected trouble. We wanted to see it coming, but we didn’t know where to look.

We tried to look everywhere: at the grandstands ahead of us, at the mouth of the dirt road behind us, at the gloomy borders of the forest that surrounded the whole field, and at the gray, dusty ground.

We especially kept watch on the ground. Not because so many people had been found buried in it over the years, but because of its physical dangers. Though fairly flat and level, it was scattered with rocks and broken glass and holes.

The rocks were treacherous like icebergs. Just a small, sharp comer might be sticking up, but if your foot hits it, you find out that most of it is buried. The rock stays put and you go down.

You don’t want to go down in Janks Field. (Forget the double-meaning.) If you go down, you’ll come up in much worse shape.

Even if you’re lucky enough to escape bites from spiders or snakes, you’ll probably land on jutting rocks and broken glass.

The field was carpeted with the smashed remains of bottles from countless solo drinking bouts, trysts, wild parties, orgies, satanic festivities and what have you. The pieces were hard to see on gray days like this, but whenever the sun was out, the sparkle and glare of the broken bottles was almost blinding.

Of course, you never walked barefoot on Janks Field. And you dreaded a fall.

But falls were almost impossible to avoid. If you didn’t trip on a jutting rock, you would probably stumble in a hole. There were snake holes, gopher holes, spider holes, shallow depressions from old graves, and even shovel holes. Though all the corpses had supposedly been removed back in 1954, fresh, open holes kept turning up. God knows why. But every time we explored Janks Field, we discovered a couple of new ones.

Those are some of the reasons we watched the ground ahead of our feet.

We also watched the more distant ground to make sure we weren’t about to get jumped. That sort of thing had happened to us a few times before in Janks Field. If it was going to happen again, we wanted to see it coming and haul ass.

Our heads swung from side to side as we made our way toward the stadium. Each of us, every so often, walked sideways and backward.

It was rough on the nerves.

And it suddenly got rougher when Slim, nodding her head to the left, said, “Here comes a dog.”

Rusty and I looked.

Rusty said, “Oh, shit.”

This was no Lassie, no Rin Tin Tin, no Lady or the Tramp. This was a knee-high bony yellow cur skulking toward us with an awkward sideways gait, its head low and its tail drooping.

“I don’t like the looks of this one,” I said.

Rusty said, “Shit” again.

“No collar,” I pointed out.

“Gosh,” Rusty said, full of sarcasm. “You think it might be a stray?”

“Up yours,” I told him.

“At least it isn’t foaming at the mouth,” said Slim, who always looked on the bright side.

“What’ll we do?” I asked.

“Ignore it and keep walking,” Slim said. “Maybe it’s just out here to enjoy a lovely stroll.”

“My ass,” Rusty said.

“That’s what it’s here to enjoy,” I pointed out.

“Shit.”

“That, too.”

“Ha ha,” Rusty said, unamused.

We picked up our pace slightly, knowing better than to run. Though we tried not to watch the dog, each of us glanced at it fairly often. It kept lurching closer.

“Oh, God, this ain’t good,” Rusty said.

We weren’t far from the stadium. In a race, we might beat the dog to it. But there was no fence, nothing to keep the dog out if we did get there first.

The bleachers wouldn’t be much help; the dog could probably climb them as well as we could.

We might escape by shinnying up one of the light poles, but the nearest of those was at least fifty feet away.

A lot closer than that was the snack stand. It used to sell “BEER—SNACKS—SOUVENIRS” as announced by the long wooden sign above the front edge of its roof. But it hadn’t been open, far as I knew, since the night of the parking disaster.

We couldn’t get into it, that was for sure (we’d tried on other occasions), but its roof must’ve been about eight feet off the ground. Up there, we’d be safe from the dog.

“Feel like climbing?” Slim asked. She must’ve been thinking the same as me.

“The snack stand?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

“How?” asked Rusty.

Slim and I glanced at each other. We could scurry up a wall of the shack and make it to the roof easily enough. We were fairly quick and agile and strong.

But not Rusty.

“Any ideas?” I asked Slim.

She shook her head and shrugged.

Suddenly, the dog lurched ahead of us, swung around and planted its feet. It lowered its head. Growling, it bared its upper teeth and drooled. It had a bulging, crazed left eye. And a black, gooey hole where its right eye should’ve been.

“Oh, shit,” Rusty muttered. “We’re screwed.”

“Take it easy,” Slim said. Her voice sounded calm. I didn’t know whether she was talking to Rusty or the dog. Or maybe to both of them.

“We’re dead,” Rusty said.

Glancing at him, Slim asked, “Have you got anything to feed it?”

“Like what?”