As Malachi pumped the gas, the old man leaned on the pump watching. "We've got cold soda pop inside," he said. "Only a quarter a can. I get cases of off-brands in the Wal-Mart when I go to El Paso."
"That sounds fine to me." Malachi replaced the pump handle and screwed on the gas cap. "What about a place to wash up?"
"Oh, we got that, too. Running water and everything." The old man laughed as he sauntered back to the deep porch and a screen door there. He paused on the first step and Malachi stopped at his back, waiting to enter the little store.
"Dottie, you and Jeremy come on out," the old man called to his right.
Malachi looked and saw the flash of a little girl's blue dress before it disappeared behind the comer of the store.
"Dottie? Jeremy? You hear me now. We got a customer. Y'all come on out and show some manners."
Dottie was a child of nine or ten, thin, barefoot, wearing a blue dress made of some kind of shiny material. She looked like a little princess who had forgotten her slippers, for her feet were bare and dusty. Her hair was brushed and shining like spun gold as it cascaded around her face in thick curls. Her face was made up with pink lipstick, rouge on her cheeks like round red moons, and even mascara on her long lashes. A silver purse dangled from her arm. Behind her a boy appeared looking over her shoulder. He was the same age and wore a white T-shirt and overalls. He, too, was barefoot.
The two children came up another set of steps at the end of the porch, keeping their gazes down.
"Dottie, Jeremy, say hello to the nice young man. What's your name, son?"
"Malachi."
"Say hi to Malachi. See how it rhymes, hey? Say hi to Malachi."
"Hi," the little girl said shyly.
"Hi," said the little boy.
"This sweet little gal and this big boy are my grandbabies. She's Dottie, he's Jeremy, and I'm Howard Clemmons. Come on in with us, kids. We're going to have a soda pop."
The children fell into line behind Malachi as they went through the screen door.
Inside more surprises waited. The darkness was broken by long cords holding tin-shaded lamps dangling from an open-beamed ceiling. Along one side of the big open room loomed a waist-high glass case. Inside were shadowy objects that drew Malachi to them. He put his hands on the glass countertop and leaned over, looking down inside at boxes of rattlesnake tails lying on squares of cotton. Farther down the case he saw carefully constructed rattlesnake skeletons held by steel pins attached to pieces of driftwood.
"I got the live ones back there." Howard pointed to the back of the room.
"Thanks, but I like to steer clear of rattlesnakes. We had them around our ranch every spring. I don't much like them."
"Not like them? Why, the rattlesnake's the King of Texas, don't you know that? They been here longer than the Apache. They're God's only creature really equipped to live in the desert. We're just strangers here. The rattlers, now, they're the ones own the land."
"I can't dispute that."
"They sing."
Malachi turned around to the little girl who had spoken. He wasn't sure he'd understood her, she spoke so low. "What?"
"They sing. The rattlesnakes."
The old man said, "She means when they rattle their tails. It sounds like a song."
Malachi shook his head. What a weird family. Singing rattlesnakes. Oh, man. But what did he expect to find out here in the middle of a desert? The old man and little kids were so isolated they probably made up stories for one another just to stay sane.
"Uh, how much do I owe you for the gas?"
"Here, have a cold soda pop first. We don't get many travelers. You're not in a hurry, are you?"
Malachi didn't know how it happened, but after sharing Cokes with the old man and the children, the four of them sitting around a square table covered with slick red oilcloth, the gloom of the shadowed store drying his sweat, he started talking about where he'd come from. East Texas was like a foreign country when compared to West Texas. The old man had never been east of El Paso. East Texas piney woods was like a fable to him. Trees and whole forests growing in Texas sounded like a lie God made up to entice folks away from the west, he told Malachi.
"Not only have I never been across Texas, but I ain't been any farther west neither. I hear there's rain forests up in Washington State and streams so clear you can reach out and touch fat, sassy bass in Colorado, but all I know is my place here. That's why it suits me. That's why the King Rattlers let me stay. I was born and raised and guess I'll die and get buried right out back behind the store when my time comes."
"You can't ever die," Jeremy said, his face serious as a car wreck.
"Oh, no, uh-uh, not for a long, long time. Don't you fret about that, boy."
"What happened to their folks?" Malachi asked, chugging down the cold Coke.
"Their momma was my girl, Sherry Ann. She left here with a Marine who came one day for gas, just like you. Sherry Ann had been telling me she was going with the first available looker stopped in. She wasn't lying. Bill—that was his name—Bill gave her a smile and a wink and off she went, everything she owned already packed in her ma's old suitcase. She didn't come back until over a year later, tiny little Dottie and Jeremy in her arms. They're twins." The old man smiled indulgently at his grandchildren. "Dottie's five minutes older, aren't you, Sugar?" He waited for the little girl to smile and nod before he continued. "Not long after Sherry Ann was home, she got sick. I drove her all the way to El Paso to a doctor, but they said it was too late. She had septa . . . septa . . ."
"Septicemia," Jeremy said, pronouncing the word carefully. "Poison in her blood."
"That's it! Septicemia. Jeremy here is a smart kid. Anyway, they said she hadn't never healed right inside her from the cesarean she had when the twins were born. So it's been me and these two scamps ever since."
"Don't you ever get lonely out here?" Malachi asked. He thought he'd go batty living such an isolated existence.
"Let me show you something." The old man stood and Malachi followed him to the back of the store and through a door into a darker room. He could make out a full-size bed with an old metal frame and a doorway leading into another bedroom farther back in the darkness. On the other side of the living quarters was a small, apartment-size gas stove, a sink and drainboard, and next to it, a yellowed refrigerator. There was a sagging sofa and two cane-bottom chairs facing a TV on a metal cart.
"Come on." The old man gestured him across the room to a back door leading outside.
Malachi stepped into the sunshine and had to wait a moment for his vision to adjust. A dozen steps beyond the door sat wire cages on wooden frames. Hundreds of cages. They stretched the length of the store building and behind them were three more rows of cages. All filled with snakes. Big, little, and gigantic snakes. Rattlers lay like languid scarves across bottom wire, other rattlers were curled so tight their heads had disappeared, and many of the snakes slid like dreams across one another in silky, smooth, gliding motions.
"Jesus," Malachi said. "That's a lot of snakes. I've never seen so many snakes."
"I breed 'em," the old man said proudly. "I milk 'em, too. For the venom. There's this lab in El Paso pays me high dollar for that stuff. It's more precious than gold. As you might guess, we don't get too many customers." He laughed in a jolly way that made Malachi grin.
He walked behind the old man as they passed behind the first row of standing cages and into the second. When they reached the last row Malachi thought his skin was actually shriveling from the creepy feeling brought on by so many rattlesnakes.
Then he saw they'd come to the front of a small cabin. It seemed to be one room, with a shake-wood roof and a barn-wood door.
The old man turned to him. "You may be a drifter, I can't tell. I don't know you, I admit that. But if you're just looking for a place to wait something out, this is it. I've rented this little cabin out before. I don't ask much for it 'cause it ain't worth much. You can eat with us. I always cook more than
we can eat anyway."
"Why would you take in a stranger?"
"Well, son, there's people come by here and they don't know where they're heading. You can see it in their eyes. You can tell how they hold themselves kind of stiff, like they might break into a thousand pieces if they move too fast. And they wouldn't even be on this highway if they really knew where they wanted to go. Why they'd be taking the freeways and bypassing this place. People who come here need a little time to get all straightened out where nobody's gonna bother them. It seems to me you got that look. You can stay, if you need to. 'Course, nobody's gonna twist your arm," he added.
Malachi was astonished the old man had sensed exactly what he needed. He couldn't keep driving across the country. He had to stop somewhere and this was as good a place as any. He didn't think anyone would ever find him here. It wasn't a main highway. Hell, it wasn't even a minor highway. More like a lost one. He bet not more than two vehicles a day passed by.
But the cages of rattlesnakes made him hesitate. He didn't have a phobia about snakes, but he wasn't enamored of them either. Rattlers were like cold alien things that went where they wanted and killed anything in the way. They could swallow a rabbit whole, their jaws opening incredibly wide. They were swift and, when they were as large as some of these were, they were deadly, able to cause a man's heart to stop dead under a minute after a strike. Though they couldn't kill him if he were able to heal himself of the poison's toxin fast enough, he still didn't like them at all.
"Well, that sounds like a good offer," Malachi said, eyeing the snakes. "But these things don't get out of these cages, do they? I mean, they're pretty close to the cabin."
The old man laughed and struck him on the back, guiding him to the door of the little house. "They won't hurt you none, son." He laughed again. "That rhymes, hey? None? Son?"
An hour later, after he'd showered the road dust off himself, Malachi stored his bag in the cabin and walked a wide circle around the rattlesnake cages to the store. He'd paid for a week, the old man charging him just twenty dollars. He thought he could hang out a while, no problem. He liked the old man with his silly rhymes and the serious little twins with their sad eyes and silent ways. People who lived so alone seemed strange at first, but while in the cabin cleaning up, he had listened in to their conversation about him. They were in the store, at the red table. Malachi's hearing was so sensitive he could pick up their voices through the walls of the cabin, the walls of the store, and across the distance, even while shower water sprayed over his head.
The old man said to the children, "He's in some trouble or other. We got to help him."
"He's not a bad man," Dottie said.
"No, he's not. He's just a boy. He needs a place to stay a while. We'll treat him right and take care of him good as we can, and maybe he'll go back to his momma and daddy then."
"He can read my mind," Jeremy said.
The old man guffawed. "He can't do no such thing, Jeremy."
"I think he can."
"Come sit in Grandpa's lap," Howard said. "You just need a big ole hug."
"I love you, Grandpa," Dottie said, joining her brother in Howard's generous lap.
There was a small silence, and Malachi turned off the water to listen for the old man's response. When it came, it was a loving, fatherly voice.
He said, "I love you more, Sugar. I love you more than the moon."
4
Charles Upton had formed his own clan. They lived atop a stony plateau where a narrow whitewater stream fell off the cliff two hundred feet to a tree-circled pond. The Australian Blue Mountains had opened their arms to him and to his followers. They couldn't have all come together in a city. Even if they'd taken over a large building, some nosy human would have come sneaking around, inquisitive about them.
Once in the mountains, the Predator's were dispatched for supplies, each bringing with him a load of new material for creating small geodesic-domed shelters. They were made of lightweight panels, but proved strong enough to withstand the wind and rain. Most vampires were used to creature comforts of some sort, and living openly in the wild wasn't something many of them would have liked.
To keep the area manageable, the Predators lived two and three in each shelter. At night they gathered around bonfires, the flickering shadows transforming them into silent and ghostly apparitions.
Below them in the valleys lay scattered small villages where the Predators fed, careful not to take too many victims. Some complained they were starving; they had never had such poor pickings. But Charlie made it a strict rule there should be as few deaths as possible so as not to arouse the populace. Any Predator who could not comply would be banished. "Take the wildlife," he said. "No one will miss a kangaroo."
However, few Australians ventured into the mountains once the vampires came. Anyone who approached was taken down or turned away, their minds disoriented as they stumbled down the mountain paths back to the villages.
Rumors abounded, frightening the villagers so that even the courageous feared walking up the slopes after sunset.
More and more vampires gathered, sent for by "Charlie" and promised the world. They were getting anxious now, coming to Upton too often to ask about his plans. When were they going to be allowed to kill the Cravens? Oh, they wanted to kill them, they abhorred them, why must they wait? When could they take control?
When they pressed him too much, Upton could feel the bones of his face melting and rearranging. It always put his petitioners on edge. Since he'd become a jaguar in the jungles of Thailand when he'd escaped the monastery, he had felt more and more compelled to change his head into that of a feral cat.
Who said he must look like a man? When his emotions raged, he let his face go all liquid and then reform like soft putty. His cheekbones rose. His chin receded. His nose pushed out from his face into a snout. His eyes changed to an elliptical shape and became amber with fiery red pupils. His forehead slicked back into his black hair and his teeth, all of them, sharpened to diamond points.
Finally, Upton stopped performing the trick for the followers who harassed him and began to let the cat features of his face remain once the petitioners left his central dome shelter. He looked at himself in a hand mirror and grinned like the Cheshire cat. He could still be thought a man, but one who was deformed, or maybe one whose face had been misshapen in an accident and fixed badly.
He knew what his clan said of this transformation. That he was truly deranged. That he might not be able to deliver what he'd promised. If he wanted to be a jaguar, why, what other manner of weirdness would he want and how would it affect their future they'd so hastily placed into his hands?
He called them together one night under a new moon. He stood before the bonfire so that his face was cast in shadow. "If I frighten you," he shouted, "you need to leave here. You need to return to your solitary haunts, living depraved lives on city back streets and alleys. If I can put the fear of God into you simply because I choose to be part animal, then what possible need have I of you? I will tear you apart with these teeth and drink you dry! Bring me the weaklings!"
None stepped forward. Some cowered, and Upton took notice which ones feared him most. That night after the clan had settled in uneasily, he went around to the ones who might betray him one day because of their cowardice. He brought with him a bejeweled scimitar he had procured before leaving Thailand. The deaths were not easy, nor were they prolonged. One by one, in utter silence, the weaklings struggled against their attacker until they succumbed, their blood left on Upton's long rough tongue.
When the killing was finished, Upton's shrill cat cry thundered out over the clan and rang off the stony plateau. No more would they mock him or speak of his eccentricity in whispers. A few deserted him the next day, slipping from the camp and making their way through the long valleys and back to the port in Sydney. The ones who were left were his kind and devoted to him. They looked on his deformed face and smiled. They went in search of other Predators to replace the mi
ssing and the dead, vowing their allegiance to Charlie, Jaguar Charlie, Cat Charlie, the greatest Predator they had ever known.
He kept the cat face permanently after that. He let go of all semblance of a human face. It made him happy to scare the life from his victims even before he ever touched them with his dripping fangs. His power grew and his supernatural abilities increased by substantial leaps. It was as if by letting go, by embracing his true self, he was more vampire than ever, more truly the creature he had always hoped to be.
By the time Balthazar sent Sereny to him, Charlie had more than two hundred and fifty followers. The plateau was crowded with shelters, and at night the many bonfires lit up the sky like an erupting volcano. Villagers in the valleys pointed to the Blue Mountains and the faint yellow light there. They cringed behind closed and locked doors. Whole communities packed their things and left their homes, heading for anywhere but the mountains. They went on foot, on donkey, crowded together in rusting buses and broken-down cars.
Upton knew of the exodus and didn't care. He would leave the Blue Mountains before anyone came to investigate. He would take the battle to the enemy. It would begin on American soil before spreading throughout the world, and the destruction of Mentor would be his first victory.
He knew before Sereny said a word why she had come. He silently rejoiced, shielding his emotions from her. He had heard of Balthazar and his caves. He had heard stories of Balthazar's underground bone palaces and crypts. He thought these things were an extravagant and ostentatious display of evil, yet pleasing to the mind, like the remembrance of rich chocolate melting on the tongue. A Predator should live and look just as he pleased.
It seemed to Charlie that the great Predator in Lanzarote would make a fine commander in Upton's army. He could be his right-hand man if he was not too proud to take a secondary position of power. On the other hand, if he wanted to give Charlie orders, there would be no joint endeavors whatsoever. Charles Upton had built a billion dollar conglomerate through sheer cunning and intelligence. He hadn't taken orders from anyone since he was a child. Not even the monks.
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