by Eric Miller
I was the load, I was the cargo. They knew all along…
They used me. This book is full of crushed souls and broken dreams… I will prove it to you… I have to… Don’t leave me in here, it’s so cold…
Edward M. Erdelac is the author of eight novels including Andersonville, Coyote’s Trail, and the Merkabah Rider series. Various summer vacations spent gallivanting up and down the United States with his parents as a kid instilled in him a fascination with the open road and the people who traverse it, and he still prefers the trip and every odd stop along the way to the getting there. To this day he appreciates the various men and women who cut loose on the air horn in response to his frantic pull string gestures out the back window, and encourages his offspring to do the same. Born in Indiana, educated in Chicago, he lives in the Los Angeles area with his wife and a bona fide slew of kids and cats. His other works can be found at http://emerdelac.wordpress.com.
CROCODILE
Edward M. Erdelac
GWENDOLYN COULD NOT ENTIRELY SUPPRESS the girlish shudder that began in the pit of her stomach and somehow spread through her torso to the tips of each extremity as Brendan took her hand in his and led her toward the forest.
Brendan.
Her dark angel.
Her Peter Pan.
His hand was cold, as if scoured by a winter wind, though it was a sultry August evening after a rain, the remains of it rising as steam off the moonlit pavement and hanging in the air. Yet despite his coldness, wherever he touched her, warmth spread as if kissed by a noontime sunbeam.
She followed him. She would follow him anywhere. Particularly tonight.
She was reminded of the first time he had taken her hand and led her like this into the wild night.
***
Like any night, she was working the counter at the Pizza Hut in the Happy Joe’s Rest Stop on the edge of town, that sprawling neon and flickering fluorescent complex situated alongside the I-10 like an island of light in a dark delta, always busy with the roar of the big trucks, always stinking of diesel. Haley, the cashier, interrupted the looping Merle Haggard music to announce the vacancy of another shower.
So many big-bellied men leered at her from behind their whiskers across the counter she had ceased telling them apart. Though they came from every corner of the country, they were almost all one. One hairy, endless flannel and mesh back cap parade of Skoal chewing, pig-knuckled fathers, so like her own; inappropriate, unmannered, too loud, and overpoweringly male.
Noodler, as she mentally called the man who had approached her in the parking lot at the end of her shift while she sleepily rode her tired feet to her Honda may well have been her father for all either of them knew. Daddy had climbed up into the beaded seat of his Peterbilt when Gwendolyn was four, sent his rig groaning down the driveway, turned the corner, and never looked back.
The only impressions she still had of Noodler were the same sort of dull, musky, beer sweat feelings she’d let pass over her like inclement weather every six hour shift for the past two years.
Ron, her assistant manager, had warned her time and time again never to clock out and head to her car without having him come along, but Ron looked at her the same way so many of the customers did. Never mind his non-threatening clean-shaven face and pitiable acne scars. When he walked her to her car she felt just as uncomfortable. What was the difference between Ron hanging back in the name of chivalry to watch her ass and some forty-year-old pervert directing a tobacco-stained grin squarely at her tits while he ordered a greasy personal pan and a suicide?
The employees parked their cars at the edge of the lot behind the pumps. Happy Joe’s required that so there was always ample parking for the endless array of customers stopping by on their way to somewhere else.
Those were the people that interested Gwendolyn. Not just the hot young guys (pickups and sports cars) and the young couples (U-Hauls), or the contented, slow moving retirees (Winnebagos or blinding, silver Streamlines) but even the families, the beleaguered fathers trying to hold down the spasmodic little kids, exploding with energy after having been confined to the minivan for untold hours, while the haggard looking mothers ordered from the menu and didn’t look at her once. She extrapolated their lives by the music she heard drifting from their cars, the Kenny Chesneys, the Rihannas, the Wiggles.
Categorized as they might be, these were people with lives. Commitments, responsibilities, they might have, but they were free. They moved on and never returned.
Not like her.
Not like the truckers.
Happy Joe’s Rest Stop was their home. Gwendolyn’s even more so. The truckers lived out of their vehicles, but at least their scenery changed. She spent most of her life right here at this counter, wishing for something, anything to happen.
Beyond the ringing pumps were the line of employee cars, and beyond that, the rows of glittering rigs, maybe a small light in a sleeper now and then, maybe on occasion a burst of wheezy laughter or a four letter word, but otherwise nothing but the incessant rattle and roar of trucks arriving or departing, the hiss of brakes.
That was the overnight parking, where the drivers slept and woke at all hours, dreaming maybe of their destinations, always leaving, always returning.
There were women who moved among the trucks. Lot lizards. Hopping from rig to rig, tucking wrinkled dollars into their animal print bras or their garish bags, stinking as if they rode between the exhaust stacks, women who smelled of diesel machines and were little more than that, really.
There was no way Noodler could’ve mistaken Gwendolyn for one of those. She still had her Pizza Hut shirt on, her stained black apron over her shoulder, her tennis visor.
But he put himself between her and the handle of her car door, jutted his narrow hip out and blocked the key hole.
He wasn’t fat like most of them, but he had one of those foam and mesh hats, so dirty she couldn’t read the phone number for the garage it advertised, the frowning brim frayed in bursts of green thread. He had on a black Jack Daniel’s T-shirt, the white writing like an old time epitaph, and tight black jeans fastened to his waist by a huge yellow enamel belt buckle, an unfurling Gadsden flag with the coiling rattlesnake. Don’t Tread On Me. Boots. Not cowboy boots, heavy, treaded workmen’s types with steel toes, like tanks on his big feet.
She couldn’t remember what Noodler said to her. She could only see his teeth and big round eyes in the dark. She tried to push past him, but all of a sudden he was all over her, hissing in her ear, hard, rough hands on her arms, body bulging against her, pushing her against the car.
His face was prickly and scraped her neck. He smelled of liquor.
Her favorite story growing up had always been Peter Pan. Her mother had told her her name Gwendolyn was like name of the girl from the story, Wendy.
She could not help but equate the trucker to a pirate. He sneered, and he was dark, and rough and strong and drunk, just like one of Hook’s crew.
That was when he had appeared.
Brendan.
Her dark angel.
Her Peter Pan.
Noodler was off of her suddenly, jerked away as if someone had hooked his belt to the back of one of the departing Freightliners. He slammed against Ron’s Nissan and fell to the oily pavement.
Noodler came up with something shiny in his fist, sharp, like a lion’s tooth made out of steel. She heard it click as it opened.
He jumped up to his feet, lunging. Her savior was just a boy her own age. Slight and short-haired, the back of his neck very white and clean. She saw the trucker’s knife disappear into his stomach, heard the sound it made punching through his skin, tearing his shirt.
She screamed, but it was muffled, her own hands flying up to her mouth to stifle it.
The boy didn’t fall. He swiped his hand down as if to brush the offending weapon away, and she heard another sound, a crackling. This time it was the trucker who screamed. The knife clattered on the ground, the hand twisted horribly, hanging
loose at a severe right angle from his broken wrist, like Noodler, the pirate from Peter Pan with the backward hands.
The boy’s other hand shot out and caught Noodler by the throat, the fingers pushing together hard enough to pinch out the scream.
He lifted the bigger man up with one spindly arm and brought him down hard on the hood of Ron’s Nissan Sentra, hard enough to crack the windshield and dent in the metal. Then he sprang up and straddled him. He put his other hand to Noodler’s throat and leaned in as if whispering a secret.
The only sound Noodler made was when his heels battered and scraped at the hood of the car. His arms swung at the boy, dealing hard blows to the side of his head with his good hand (the other flopping grotesquely at the end of the snapped wrist) to his neck and ribs. The boy didn’t even flinch. The flailing arms weakened and fell to clawing, then surrendered all effort completely. His limbs twitched as they dangled over the edge of the Nissan, and the boy straightened, just as a car swung away from the pumps.
The headlights briefly illuminated him as he reared back.
He was as young as Gwendolyn, and more beautiful, with ivory, blemishless skin, unmarred by any body hair that she could see. His loose red shirt was partially unbuttoned, revealing a narrow, lean chest. He had an angular look, a narrow, sharp face, and dark eyes. His hair was brown and neatly trimmed, the natural waviness barely constrained.
He stared at her from beneath a downturned brow in that moment, and she saw his lips were bright red with blood, as were his abnormally long teeth. But she wasn’t scared. She felt the first flutter, as he touched her with his eyes.
She knew right away what he was.
She had read all the books in the break room, in the car before and after work, in the secret place of her room. Lestat and Edward Cullen had long ago supplanted Peter Pan in her girl’s heart. Just like she had prayed as a girl for Pan to float into her room and lead her past the first star on the right, now she would every night amid her pink bed sheets wish to see a pale, longing face at her window beckoning her to step into the dark.
The headlights turned their attention back to the entrance ramp and he moved. She heard the hood of the car groan and pop as his weight was lifted.
“Wait!” she called, breathless. “Please wait!”
A shadow moved and became the boy. The blood was gone from his lips, and his teeth, still sharp, but nowhere near as long. Had she imagined it? He was so close. Vampires moved faster than regular people she knew. His eyes were like a wolf’s. His nostrils flared like those of her pet rabbit Bunnicula, taking in her scent.
“You know what I am?” he asked. His voice wasn’t deep, but it wasn’t a boy’s either. He could be a hundred years old, she knew.
She nodded, unable to even say it.
“You’re not scared?”
She shook her head. She was only scared he would leave.
She couldn’t smell him. He had just fought and killed a man and there was no sweat. His hair wasn’t even mussed or damp. He wasn’t breathing.
She smiled, thrilled.
He smiled back. His teeth looked completely normal now.
“Your teeth…”
He drew his lips closed, as if embarrassed.
“No,” she said, touching his lips with her fingertips, feeling the thrill of it deep within. “I love them. But…”
“They only come out when I’m…” he shrugged, letting the words trail of meaningfully.
She nodded, understanding.
He had the face of an angel. A dark angel.
She felt something ice cold close around her hand and looked down. The blood in her palm grew warm and shot up her arm, filled her cheeks. She trembled at his first touch.
“Come with me?”
She nodded.
They ran off through the maze of silver trucks, into a new and wild night, newer and wilder than any night in her life.
She was not afraid with him. He had killed to protect her. She would do anything for him.
But that first night, he didn’t ask for anything.
He held her hand tightly, and they walked, along the road, through the fields, and down the dark streets of town, for hours and hours.
And they just…talked.
But the things they talked about!
She gushed a lot, babbled out to him her whole life story, all her daydreams, her secret surety that some of them were real, her boundless delight in vindication. When she was finished, she begged to know his story.
He told her his name was Brendan, but that he had once had another name back when he’d been mortal, “in Bible times.” He told her he had come from a wealthy family of merchants. He had befriended a young Roman soldier named Messala who one day rose to the position of provincial governor. When the Romans had marched into his city, Brendan and his mother and sister had been standing on a roof and accidentally knocked a loose piece of tile down into the street. The tile had hit Messala and, for the offense, Brendan had been sentenced to slavery, chained to an oar on a warship while his family was imprisoned in a Roman dungeon. During a sea battle with Egyptians in which their ship was sunk, he had saved the life of the Roman captain and been freed, then granted Roman citizenship in gratitude.
Soon after he’d learned that his family had died of leprosy while he’d been away. He renounced his newfound citizenship and instigated a revolt, leading an army of gladiators to the palace of his former friend. He ran him down with a chariot.
As he told her this, tears spilled down Gwendolyn’s face. What tribulations he had faced! His life could have been a book itself, maybe even a movie.
Heartbroken by the death of his mother and sister, Brendan had for a time found love in the arms of a slave girl he had freed from Messala’s house, but the gladiator army was ambushed by the Romans and they were both taken prisoner and crucified. He said the greater suffering had been to watch her die slowly just out of his reach. Then that night as he hung on a cross, a pale traveler had come upon him. Seeing he was still alive, he had taken a ladder from his cart, set it up against his cross and climbed it. Brendan had thought the man intended to cut him down and save him out of pity, but he had been a vampire, looking for an easy meal. A passing cohort of legionnaires had surprised the stranger, and he had run off, but not before his bite had infected Brendan. Using his new supernatural strength, he had agonizingly freed himself from the cross and hid from the rising sun in a cave.
He said he had never been back to Italy since.
“And that’s why to this very day…I still hate WOPs,” he finished, brushing her hair from her face. “You know, you remind me of her, the slave girl who died. She was a Trojan.”
“What was her name?” she asked.
“Helen.”
Then, as it was near dawn, he got up to leave.
She begged to see him again, and he swore that she would, sealing the immortal promise by leaning in and kissing her softly. It was like licking an ice cube, or a patch of snow. His breath smelled metallic, like the groaning pipes beneath the sink. When they parted from that first, wonderful kiss, her breath roiled in a little white cloud in his sad smile, across his deep dark eyes, brimming with a pain and sorrow that seemed to span the ages.
She knew right away that she loved him. Who else could she ever love?
Of course the police were waiting for when she got home, both because of her hysterical mother and because Ron had found Noodler’s body sprawled on his car after locking up. Everyone was so concerned. She answered all their questions, said she’d decided to walk home as it was such a nice night, and hadn’t seen anything.
A policewoman told her she was lucky. Noodler had been identified as a serial rapist, and no one was going to lose much sleep over him. Gwendolyn only shrugged, and thought of Brendan.
That night she dreamed of him in green tights and a red feathered cap, circling the ceiling of her bedroom and smiling down at her.
She went right back to work because she knew he would be the
re at the end of her shift. She knew because of the kiss.
And he was. Every night afterwards he met her in the parking lot. Sometimes they drove, mostly they walked, and talked, and kissed. He told her all about the long life he had lived all over the world, about all the people he had known through history, Genghis Khan, Abraham Lincoln, even Sherlock Holmes.
He held her till she shivered in his cold arms (but he was always a perfect gentleman, even though sometimes she sort of wished he wasn’t), and he answered every question she had about vampires.
All but one.
“When will you take me to your lair?”
“Soon,” was all he said, and drew her closer, taking in her scent with a flare of his nostrils, then kissing her deeply.
She always knew the time would come.
And tonight it had.
She had somehow woken in the morning knowing this would be the night they would be together at last. She had packed an outfit in the car and changed before she clocked out. A sexy black top with lace trim and her best jeans, her Victoria’s Secret panties, the red ones with the matching bra. She had worn perfume for him too, something with a name she didn’t dare try to pronounce in front of him for fear he’d laugh at her.
She’d brought condoms. She wasn’t sure if she could get pregnant, but it was best to be safe. Did vampires cum? She didn’t honestly care if he did get her pregnant. She would gladly have his child, but she didn’t know how he felt and thought it best to wait until another time to bring it up. She thought she might like to bear his child before he made her a vampire, just in case vampire women couldn’t have babies.
She wondered if Brendan’s baby would be a half vampire, like in Blade.
If he was, would other vampires hate him? She would teach him or her to be good, to love both halves of him or herself, to accept him or herself first.
She had never thought to ask him about other vampires. Had he met any in his travels? There would be time enough to ask later. All the time in the world.