Shut up Clayton Birch you shut up.
Oh God I don’t want to do this must I do this.
Clayton had offered to make her a vampire, which meant he had almost certainly made others. Were they as benign as he? Were the ones who murdered her husband and took her boy unusual in their extreme violence?
Or was Clayton the anomaly? No matter how he had helped her, no matter how humanely he harvested what he needed, his life ran on stolen human blood. She had seen him feed.
I can’t make decisions like this alone God please help me.
A scorpion made its way across the floorboards, claws out, stinger high.
That’s the sign, she thought.
Poison.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered.
She hugged the box, left it moist where her cheek had touched it.
Before she could stop herself, she dragged it across the caboose’s floor, eased it into a bright rectangular patch of sunlight offered by a window.
She breathed in and out three times.
She glanced out the window where tall, rocky hills offered black shadows between heaps of stones. Something bright flashed there, but she couldn’t make out what.
Am I really killing him after he helped me?
You’re helping him now.
You’re ending his curse.
She thought she should get on the other side of the chest so her way to the door wouldn’t be blocked—her hands throbbed with the memory of the white-hot fire ignited by Rob’s exposure to sun. Would an older vampire burn hotter and faster? More tears dropped on the box. She sobbed openly and hugged her face to it. She suddenly didn’t care if she made it out of the caboose—she didn’t have the strength for a hike to Pennsylvania, she had no money, no abbey to return to. And her son—she didn’t want to think about her son. She had seen the vampire Rob’s mouth moving, making words, telling her the lengths Wicklow would go to in furtherance of his cause.
She had looked at the awful picture he had shown her.
She would go into the desert and pray about Glendon.
The desert was a good place for understanding revelations.
Two years ago, Phillip Wicklow and Hank Calvert had been hot on the heels of the Suicide Motor Club when the vampires struck Judith’s family. Calcutta had called her mother from Amarillo that night, so the Bereaved had gone to a suspected lair in McLean in the morning, hoping to catch them. They didn’t find Luther and company. They were only just too late.
They found instead a newly made vampire child shrieking for its mother in the shadows of an old tire shop. A child Luther had turned and abandoned for his own amusement, knowing it would burn or starve. And Wicklow took it back to All Souls Ranch. It was precious to him, both as a specimen to study and as incontrovertible evidence that the thirsty dead were real. He kept the child alive, if barely, on the blood of deer, and kept him imprisoned.
Have you witnessed proof of evil on the earth?
I have.
They didn’t show the boy to Judith, of course.
She would have known it for her son.
Glendon.
She remembered now the music from the basement at All Souls Ranch.
To soothe him.
I’m in the trunk, Mom.
Not a car trunk.
A case.
A cage.
Gimme little lovin’
Got a cake in the oven
And I’m servin’ up a piece for you
She didn’t know if this image was true, but she thought it was.
Rob had given her a picture of Glendon taken from the 1967 newspaper article about his disappearance, clipped out and laminated, like many of the pictures Wicklow had shown them.
The number 10 stood out in red on the top corner.
Known vampire.
It would be hard to keep her sanity but she would have to.
She would free her son from this.
She would kill Phillip Wicklow if he tried to stop her.
He would probably try to stop her.
No, to die here in the caboose wouldn’t be so bad.
She unlatched the hasp of Clayton’s tool chest, dug her fingers into the wood of the lid, prepared to lift.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”
You’re a betrayer.
She sobbed so hard she barely got the Latin words out.
“Sublata est maledictio. Memoret Deus misericordiam tuam.”
She lifted the lid, let the sun in.
And laughed.
Paint cans for weight.
Five one-hundred-dollar bills fanned out.
A PO box address, scrawled on a notecard beneath these words:
Repay me if you must.
Write me if you will.
Those weren’t the first things she saw, of course. First she had been dazzled by the most glorious arrangement of sunflowers she had ever seen, their saffron petals blazing in the New Mexico morning light.
She held the sunflowers to her chest, stood in the window, looking out at the cave mouth where a light glinted—she knew he sat safe, watching her, ready to go deeper into the cave or mine or whatever it was if she came after him.
She had no bullets in her gun, anyway.
She had very little strength left.
He had outsmarted her.
Which, she supposed, wasn’t very hard.
The brass telescope flashed again in the darkness.
Judith put her hand to her heart.
Smiled at him.
Blew a tender kiss that way.
She folded the money and the address into her pocket.
The scorpion raised its pincers at her.
She stepped over it.
Walked out into the sunlight and away.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Sincere thanks to friend and editor Tom Colgan at Berkley for his unwavering support, and for his invaluable observations about The Suicide Motor Club, my favorite of which went something like “Are you crazy? Don’t cut that!” I am again and always grateful to my agent, Michelle Brower, and to Sean Daily at Hotchkiss and Associates; both of you affected the trajectory of this narrative in all the best ways. For expert assistance with matters forensic, ballistic, and kinetic, I’d like to thank Teri DeWitt and Eric Wagner. Drawing on hard-won law enforcement experience, Officers Derek Conley and Kevin Daniels gleefully examined the chase scenes herein to make sure rubber met road in credible ways. Thanks, Steven Graham Jones, for lending your hawk-keen eye and coyote-sharp ear to this fable and leaving it better than you found it. If I had forgotten how thrilling and dangerous older V-8s feel with their chirping tires and lazy brakes, Corey Dickerson at Mershon’s World of Cars was kind enough to remind me by letting me take a ’65 Falcon for a spin on the lonely roads just outside Springfield, Ohio. (Damn, that was fun!) Thanks are due to several who helped midwife this story, as they helped with stories past; if I do not again conjure them individually, it is only in the interest of adding new names to this finite space, and in the confidence that they know who they are and how indispensable they are to me. Finally, I want to thank Jennifer Schlitt, who in her constancy, kindness, and grace informed Judith’s character in ways I wasn’t fully aware of until I sat down to write these final lines.
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