Throat

by R. A. Nelson

“I didn’t even see that, Emma. No joke. How did you move that fast?”

  I pulled the hoe out and set it back into position. “I don’t know. Just part of the deal, I guess. I figure it’s like this.… If you’re a slug and you’re turned into a vampire, you’re going to be a sluglike vampire. But if you’re a top-notch athlete … well, it’s multiplied.”

  “Don’t get cocky.”

  “Sagan, I have to be cocky. Haven’t you ever played sports? You can’t go into something like this without being cocky. You’d be dead before you got your hands on your first weapon.”

  He shook his head. “I feel like any minute some guy with a camera is going to step out from hiding and tell me I’ve been punked. If I hadn’t seen what you did in the woods …”

  “Now do you see why the cops could do nothing to protect me? My family? Nobody but another vampire can stop this guy. He’s too fast. Too strong.”

  “A bazooka.”

  “You’d die trying to load the thing. How do you think they’ve kept hidden for thousands of years?”

  “They? So there’s more than just the two of you?”

  “Oh no. You make us sound like a couple. Yeah, there’s lots more.”

  “How do you know?”

  I stood there gazing at him, realizing my mistake and trying to decide whether to lie my way out of it or tell him everything. Everything. Tell him all.

  “I’ve … I’ve met some of them,” I said, waiting for Sagan to react. This time his face didn’t change.

  “Real vampires. You’ve met them. Here, like locally?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Blood-sucking, coffin-dragging—”

  “They aren’t like that. They’re … good people.”

  “Good people who run around in the streets at night, killing—”

  “But they don’t kill anybody,” I said.

  I told him about Lena, Donne, and Anton, along with the warring vampire factions. Sagan caught on quickly—it’s not that I was afraid he wouldn’t, but more concerned that he might blow a circuit somewhere in his head because of the all-out strangeness of everything he had to absorb. So I fed it to him in manageable chunks.

  Sagan took a long inhale and let it out slowly. “Any more stuff like this, and I’m liable to lift off,” he said.

  “Hey, I’ve got an idea,” I said. “Let’s take a break. There’s still a little light left.”

  The sun was almost down; the state park would be closing soon. But it was great to see the Stone House Hotel in the daylight for a change. It looked like the familiar place I had loved so much growing up. The playground was covered with screaming kids. People were jogging, walking their dogs, throwing Frisbees. Talking about vampires here felt ridiculous.

  “I’ve been here plenty of times,” Sagan said, climbing up on one of the low walls. He walked along like a tightrope performer, arms out for balance, swaying dramatically with each step. He walked all the way to the end of the wall and hopped down in front of me. “And I’ve never been sucked on once,” he said with a grin.

  “Be serious,” I said.

  “So you’re saying you could lead me right to them, this very moment.”

  “I could, yeah.”

  “But they would be asleep.”

  “I don’t know if Lena sleeps all that much, but probably.”

  “So just anybody could stumble into this little place and find them there?”

  I looked at the trail that ran along the edge of the mountain. “It’s a little tough to see it, especially with your eyes. Human eyes, I mean. I almost didn’t see it and I was right there with them.”

  “A caver could find it,” Sagan said.

  “Probably. They cover the opening with a big stone. But what would you find? Three homeless people who might not be in all that good of a mood. Call it home delivery.”

  “Huh?”

  “Vampire pizza.”

  He laughed.

  “They must have some kind of alternate plan,” I said. “The oldest has been a vampire since 1862. That’s a lot of years of dodging people. I bet they have that kind of stuff figured out.”

  Sagan looked in the direction I was looking. “It’s right down there?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So you really want me to meet them?”

  “Not right now, but soon. And only if you feel up to it and they agree. Are you scared?”

  “Well … interested, sure. Scared? Next question.”

  “Really I’d rather do it at the Space Center. You’d be on your own turf, so that would be better for you. And maybe they wouldn’t feel as uncomfortable as they would if a human were inside their … home.”

  “Me surrounded by three vampires and you wouldn’t want them to feel uncomfortable.”

  “Four vampires.”

  “Three-point-five,” Sagan said.

  “Okay. But you’ll like them. I hope they’ll like you.”

  “Hope?”

  “They will! Only, Donne seems to have a little trouble with guys. She’s with Anton, but I get the impression she kind of bosses him around.”

  “Is that unusual?”

  I hit him on the arm. Night was falling as we walked back to the Jeep.

  “So this Wirtz guy, he’s Verloren, and you don’t know where his hideout is,” Sagan said as we drove back down the mountain.

  “I don’t think he has one,” I said. “Lena says the Verloren are mostly loners and nomads. They’re the violent ones, remember? They can’t hang around any one place too long or they’ll be discovered.”

  “And they—the Verloren—they answer to some kind of queen or something—”

  “Die Esserin,” I said. “Only, I don’t think she’s a queen. Just the first Verloren who was able to get some of them to cooperate, at least to a certain degree, from what Lena says. I get the feeling she is really different … that anybody who can do the kind of thinking she has done would usually move over to the Sonnen. But for some reason she didn’t.”

  “Power hungry,” Sagan said. “She wants to take over the world. Turn us … human types … into cattle.”

  I looked at him. “You’re grinning again.”

  “I’m sorry, but I have to. Or I’d go crazy. It’s too much. Human beings infiltrated by vampires who want to breed us for food and others who worship the sun?”

  “I don’t know if they actually worship it.”

  “Okay, they’re cured by it. The very thing that is supposed to burn them alive or turn them to dust, whatever.”

  “I told you, it’s because they need a huge dose of it, quickly … something that comes from the sun. That’s why I was asking you about CMEs the other day. I know it all sounds crazy. That’s why I tried so hard to keep you out of it. The Feld …”

  “Now that part I can believe,” he said.

  “But that’s the craziest part!”

  “Only if you don’t know anything about quantum physics. My turn to show you something.”

  Sagan let me out on a little side road that ran alongside the Space Center. He parked the Jeep and waited, leaning back, his arms folded.

  “I hate to sound like a cliché, but this I gotta see.”

  I was a little self-conscious. “It feels weird doing it with somebody watching. I feel like a circus performer or something.”

  “True. Okay.”

  I looked back at him one last time, took two steps, bounded into the air, and sailed over. Landed so lightly on the other side, I barely rustled the thick layer of old leaves underfoot.

  “God,” Sagan said.

  “What?”

  “Just … God. It’s going to take a while getting used to this, Emma.”

  I walked over to the fence. “Stop looking at me like that.”

  “I can’t help it. It’s just so …”

  “I know, I know … it’s weird.” I put my fingers through the wire. “But don’t ever forget, I’m still me.”

  “Come here,” Sagan said.

  He pu
t his face against the wire. Our lips met at a space in the fence.

  Soon we were sitting in the control room of the Solar Observatory. Sagan ran some of his comet-hunting routines while we talked so no one would think he had disappeared. Then he clicked a mouse and leaned back in his chair.

  “There you go.”

  I looked at the screen. It was a Wikipedia page on something called the “zero-point field.”

  The electromagnetic

  zero-point field is loosely

  considered as a sea of background

  electromagnetic energy that

  fills the vacuum of space.

  “Sound familiar?” Sagan said.

  “So you think this is the Feld?” I said.

  “Sounds like it, the way you describe what it can do. Actually, it’s what you do in it. With it. Within it. See how slippery a concept it is?”

  “Oh, believe me, I’m slipping away already.”

  “Don’t be funny.”

  “If I didn’t know this stuff was possible, I would say it sounds about as fake as ESP.”

  “Lots of quantum physicists believe in ESP. More and more of them are starting to believe there really is a connection between all of us. And we’re all individually connected to the universe.”

  I thought of what Lena and Anton had been telling me.

  “Some think we’re evolving in ways beyond the Darwinian,” Sagan said. “We started out with the geosphere, which was inanimate matter. Right now we’re in the biosphere, which is animate matter. But soon, maybe real soon, we’ll be moving on to the noosphere.”

  “Don’t tell me.… That’s where we all turn into soap bubbles and fly off into space—”

  He kicked my foot. “It’s where human thought begins to transform the biosphere with pure mind power. Using the zero-point field to predict future events or rearrange molecules to turn substances from one state to another. It’ll be like alchemy. Magic. Anything you can imagine.”

  “So … you’re thinking maybe vampires …”

  “Maybe their special abilities let them tap into stuff we haven’t been able to yet, at least on a big scale.”

  “That makes it sound like … vampires are some kind of leap ahead.”

  “Sure, it’s possible,” Sagan said.

  “But that means …”

  “Yeah.”

  “You’re on your way out,” I said, giving him a pinch.

  I was miserable waiting for him to get out of his classes the next day. Sagan called around lunchtime and told me he had come up with all sorts of plans for upgrading my defenses.

  “I know of some stuff we can borrow from a couple of places on the center,” he said. “We’ll have to wait till everybody leaves, but if we hurry, we could get them set up tonight.”

  A few hours later we were standing outside a big industrial building with peeling white paint. We walked around to the back to an area that was crowded with steel canisters, forty-gallon drums, and black hoses leading to portable compressors.

  “My dad has an old friend who runs this shop,” Sagan said. “This is where they keep the stuff they don’t use anymore, equipment that is no longer needed.”

  “Junk, huh.”

  “Except there’s nothing wrong with it. They have new stuff coming in, so they put the old stuff out back. Eventually they have a government sale where people bid on it for pennies on the dollar.”

  “So they won’t mind us borrowing it for a while?”

  “No way. They won’t even know it’s gone for months. We can bring it back … after …”

  “I don’t like the sound in your voice when you say that,” I said.

  “Try not to worry.” He patted the side of a tank that was a kind of yellow cube on wheels with a wicked-looking spray nozzle. “These babies have the potential for being downright hostile. NASA uses them to blast rust off the old rockets for repainting. Come on, let’s get loading. This is our best chance with nobody out here.”

  It took three trips with the Jeep to get everything back to the test stand. I told Sagan I could have hauled the stuff on my back and gotten it there even faster, but he talked me out of it.

  “What would security think if they saw some chick running down the road with a compressor on her back?”

  It took a lot longer than we thought to get the new stuff in place.

  “Looks like the only source of water is down in the bunker,” Sagan said as we walked back down from the tower. “We’ll need about a million miles of hoses.” He sighed. “Some heavy-duty extension cords, a decent socket set, what else?”

  “I can get all that tomorrow,” I said, a Home Depot twinkle in my eye.

  “No way, no more stealing,” Sagan said. “We can find it around here; I can bring the sockets from home.”

  We decided to knock off for the night and get something to eat. Later we were sitting outside the Solar Observatory, gobbling up Mexican. The sky was beautiful with a partly full moon.

  Sagan sat back against a tree. “So you think I’m going to let you do this by yourself?”

  “You have to,” I said.

  “No way. You have to swear you’ll let me be here, or I’m blowing up the whole deal.”

  “We’ve been over and over that. You’d get yourself killed. I’d have to … watch you die. That’s exactly what somebody like Wirtz would want. Somebody here who was helpless—”

  “Whoa, I’m not helpless. There are other ways to fight this … thing … without giving him the advantage.”

  “Like how?”

  “Like with brainpower. You say somebody with a bazooka couldn’t stop him. Which only means you can’t fight him in conventional ways. It’s gonna take something very different.”

  “Chain saw works for me.”

  “I’m serious, Emma.”

  “You think I’m not?”

  “It’s you who is going to get yourself killed if you try to fight him straight up,” Sagan said.

  “Thanks for the vote of confidence.”

  “No, I’m not meaning to insult you. I’m just saying … you are giving him way too big a slice of the percentages if you do it that way. Even with your vampire powers, he’s bigger, more experienced. One slip, he could have you.”

  “So what are you saying?”

  “Out-think him. Tip the odds in your favor as heavily as possible. Don’t rely just on raw fury.”

  I smiled at him.

  “Don’t smile at me,” he said.

  “I’m not making fun of you.”

  “Then why are you smiling?”

  I tried to think of how to put it into words. “It’s … hard to explain. And … to tell you the truth, it kind of makes me feel like crying. I’m tired of crying.”

  “Why crying?”

  “Because … you care, you know? You care so much. I don’t know how to say it.… It’s like … I belong to you, you know? Not in this controlling way, but … I’m messing this up, Sagan.” I touched at the corners of my eyes with the back of my hand, careful not to get any salsa on my face. “It’s like I’m … yours. I’m important to you.…”

  “Well, of course, you … crazy person.” He said it so softly, it didn’t sting, but made my heart feel as if it were expanding instead. He reached across and touched my arm. I could have melted just then. I coughed and blinked.

  “Okay. You were saying you want to fight this guy,” I said. “And not get murdered in the process. How do you do that? I’m telling you, you wouldn’t stand a chance.…”

  “Tell that to my WoW friends,” Sagan said, clenching his jaw.

  “WoW?”

  “World of Warcraft. I don’t care who you are. I don’t care what powers you have. If you’re coming at me, you better bring it. Because I will eat your frigging lunch.”

  I would have laughed at the sheer ridiculousness of it if it wasn’t for the look on his face. He meant it.

  “But this isn’t a game,” I said.

  “Everything’s a game,” S
agan said. “When you get down to it. Everything in life is ultimately some kind of strategy. If you have a better strategy than the other guy, he’s going down. Like I said, it’s all in the percentages.”

  I was feeling my heart growing again. “So … what makes you think you can even out-think him?” I said quietly.

  “Trust me, Emma. He doesn’t want any part of me.”

  I couldn’t talk for a good while. I just couldn’t. Because my heart was about to burst and I wanted it to burst.

  I packed him off into the Jeep with a long kiss and felt lighter and freer than I had felt in ages. I wanted that lightness to continue. Time for a little confession.

  “His name is Wirtz,” I said to the three Sonnen.

  We were walking through a grove of tall hardwoods up at the state park not far from the rim of the mountain. At the mention of the name, they all stopped walking at once.

  “What?” I said.

  “Emma, you are certain this is the person who turned you?” Lena said.

  “Yeah. I’m not sure how to spell it. But that’s what it sounds like. Why?”

  “This … Verloren … he’s a bad one. Really bad,” Anton said. “The Verloren don’t really have a structure, but if they did, Wirtz would be high up there.”

  Donne made a face like somebody had just sprinkled dirt on her tongue. “You are so lucky to be alive, Fresh.”

  Lena put her hand on my shoulder.

  “You love history; let me tell you another story.”

  “There once was a family that lived in the Temperance Community of Telfair County in the state of Georgia in 1818,” Lena said. “The father operated a large plantation there, with a boatyard, gristmill, and a brick factory. He was said to be a hard, driven man. Ruthless and lacking in mercy. Other than his business interests, he had but one love in this life, his only son, a boy named Karel.

  “One night in March, the father and his son were camping on the banks of the Ocmulgee River, where the brick-making clay was extracted. A small band of Creek Indians saw their campfire and crept up on the two.

  “Karel was instantly killed and his father badly wounded. The Creeks then proceeded to scalp them both. The father was forced to watch the scalping of his beloved son. Then it was his turn. The Creeks peeled back the flesh while the man was still alive. The father did not scream, but lay as still as death, withstanding unimaginable pain in order to escape with his life.