Throat (10 page)

I sat up. Nobody else was around. I was sitting at the base of a low woody slope surrounded by fields and woods as far as I could see.
Mom …

A fresh wave of tears rolled down my face. She had to be scared out of her mind. I put my hand back in my pocket.
Stupid
. My cell was lying on my nightstand at home, plugged into its charger.

I got up and scaled the hill behind the pipe and found a clear place to get a look around. I could see a fence to the north and beyond that a line of traffic crawling up a highway that ran alongside a town. The skyline—or lack thereof—looked familiar.
That’s Huntsville
, I thought. The highway was I-565. So I was about thirty miles from home, give or take.

The vampire could be anywhere.

I sat on a limestone outcropping, forcing myself to slow down and think. I could still feel that invisible finger entering my head—the burning connection between us. It was insane, but I was certain of it: somehow my seizure had let Wirtz through to me. But the real, physical vampire had never been in my room. That was an image of Wirtz I had seen. A projection. I had gone right through him when I had lunged against the closet door. But he had spoken to me and could see everything around him—
Can all vampires do this stuff?
I wondered.

And what was stopping him from visiting again? Without warning, given the nature of seizures. It terrified me to think of what could have happened if that lunch menu had been right-side up.…
If I hadn’t run away …

Manda …

For once my instincts had been good. The only way I could help her now was by keeping alive and staying away from home until I could figure out what Wirtz was up to.
How to stop him
.

I looked at the horizon. The sun was supposed to make everything better, wasn’t it? For the first time in my life, it didn’t. I had never felt so miserably alone and frightened. But it did remind me of one thing.

I have a power you don’t
, I thought.

If the legends were true, right now Wirtz was dug in somewhere like a rat in a hole. And he would be there for at least the next thirteen or fourteen hours. The daylight belonged to me.

The first thing I had to do was find something to drink. I knew all about giardia, the little germs that get in streams when an animal like a deer dies in the water. I didn’t care. I was about to fall over from thirst. I found a stream at the base of a hill, a brook that was clear and cool and rushed over small stones. I lay on my belly and drank until I could hear my stomach slosh. I felt dirty, so I splashed my streaky face and washed my arms and legs.

Feeling a little better, I scaled the hill again and scouted the surrounding territory.

I faced west and saw three long roads, one of them wide like a highway with at least four lanes of slowly creeping traffic. The other two roads were narrower and swung toward one another and eventually joined. A lot of the cars were headed to a cluster of tall buildings straight in front of me.

Scattered all over were breaks in the woods. I could see other groups of buildings, most of them long and low to the ground. There were lots of fields as well, some of them dotted with cows. What was this place? It looked weird seeing livestock so close to office buildings.

To the east I could see nothing but thick woods and more low hills. To the south the Tennessee River, which I had crossed the night before, sparkling in the morning light. Near the river was a tall brown structure that appeared to be made of iron surrounded by small square buildings with low concrete walls.

First things first. Right now I was hungry. I crept down from the hill and followed the long curve of the old farm road, staying just in the edge of the trees, heading in the general direction of the cluster of tall buildings.

There was a broad pasture between me and the office complex. I would have to be less cautious if I wanted to find something to eat there. The parking lot was full—most of the people seemed to be inside now. Hopefully they weren’t staring out their windows.

I came out from the trees and scrambled over a low fence. The buildings were so big, they were farther away than they seemed. It would take a little while to get there. I could unleash my feet, but it couldn’t be good if anybody saw a barefoot girl in filthy pajamas and shades setting a new land speed record.

I circled the complex from a good distance away. It felt a little safer when I got to the back of the parking lot. At least I wasn’t so exposed. I trotted around to the front and saw a sweeping semicircular entryway. In the middle of the entryway was a grassy oval on which sat something that looked like a funky piece of abstract art. Dark golden in color, roughly cone-shaped, wide at the base and narrow at the top. As I studied it more closely, I realized it was a huge piece of machinery of some kind.

The golden machine was covered with twisted metallic pipes and thick, painted wiring. It reminded me of something I had seen before. Suddenly it hit me:
An engine
. An enormous, otherworldly
engine, but yeah, an engine. It was perched in front of a large sign that read:

I had heard of this place, sure. I had never been inside the fence, but back in middle school I had visited the world-famous Space and Rocket Center just outside the base. It was NASA’s scaled-down version of Disney World, complete with zero-g rides, antique space junk, and rockets you could climb through. That’s where I remembered seeing an engine like this one before.

I remembered they had told our class that the actual Space Center was surrounded by a huge army base called Redstone Arsenal. Which made sense, considering they would have to protect the secrets of the space program from foreign governments. So some of those cars I saw coming through the gate probably belonged to soldiers.

As I watched from about a hundred yards away, people from the parking lot mounted the steps and entered, sweeping some kind of badge in front of a bar code reader to get inside. There was no way I could find any breakfast in there without being spotted. I turned and trotted back to the woods.

I crouched next to a sassafras tree, stomach growling.
Guess I could eat the leaves
. Looking back at the sea of cars, I thought of Manda and smiled, thinking how she would drive me crazy if she knew I was here. Wondering if the astronauts ever came to visit and where they kept the moon dust hidden.

Hidden
.

An idea popped into my head. I was tucked away from the rest
of the world, surrounded by thousands of acres of woods, fields, and hopefully about a million army tanks. Finding food and shelter couldn’t be all that tough, either. Not on a place this size with this many buildings.

I started to feel a little better about my situation. Then I remembered Wirtz’s face as he spoke the words:
I will never stop coming until I find you. Never.… This I vow
.

No matter how careful I was, sooner or later he would find me. He had superpowers, was driven by some kind of murderous vampire vendetta, and had all the time in the world. My skin prickled with the realization.

Wirtz would never stop coming until … 
until one of us is dead
.

Okay, as hungry as I was, my most pressing need was a safe place to sleep. I refused to spend even one more second in a concrete pipe. But my home base couldn’t be just anywhere. I shuddered at the thought of facing Wirtz out in the open. But as long as I stayed here at the Space Center I had certain advantages, and I was determined to exploit them. Through instinct or sheer luck, I had found the perfect place for a siege. And, thanks to my grandfather, I knew a thing or two about sieges.

The first thing to do, Papi always said, was find the most defensible position. This usually meant high ground with a full view of the surrounding terrain in 360 degrees.

But just camping on top of a hill and trying to keep watch felt like suicide when facing a creature as powerful and deadly as Wirtz. I had powers of my own, sure, but I would feel a lot better at night in some kind of defensive structure where I had ways of slowing the vampire down.

In the Middle Ages a noble family would build what was called a motte and bailey: an enclosed area, usually on a hill, surrounding
a group of small wooden or stone structures. Later they would start on the actual castle itself.

No matter how strong and fast I was, I didn’t have the time or the serfs for that. What I needed was something already built. I immediately thought about the tall brownish structure I had seen and took off for the river.

With no other eyes to see, I turned on the jets and raced through the forest. Soon I broke into a pasture full of cows. I rushed through the herd at supersonic speeds, and they fled in a panic, mooing crazily.

I pushed harder, using the run to experiment with my vampire abilities. I leapt into the air, twenty feet off the ground, and soared through the notch of a tree without touching a leaf. Came to earth again on the far side, soft as kissing a baby.

I burst into a meadow, empty except for tall wildflowers that blew over in my wake. I threw my arms wide, bounding through clouds of yellow pollen.

On the far side of the secret meadow, something caught my attention: a large white board near the edge of the woods. I walked around to the other side to look.

I stopped breathing. I had just been running and bouncing through a minefield. I could have blown myself up. I sat down shakily, looking back at the innocent yellow flowers.

Can a vampire die?

If Wirtz was to be believed, they sure could.
Keep going
.

I could smell water and knew I was close to the river. Moving much more carefully this time, I walked a little ways into the woods and a new place opened up before me, a wide circle of grassy gravel and weeds.

No signs around, so it seemed safe enough. I moved into the clearing. In the center was a towering structure that rose up like a big squarish grain elevator emblazoned at the top with a huge peeling NASA logo. Metal stairs zigzagged up the tower’s sides to doors placed at different levels. The tower itself was made of thick metal plates studded with giant bolts, and the whole thing was laced with ladders and catwalks. From the top protruded a monstrous arm that had to be nearly a hundred feet long running perpendicular to the tower, making the whole structure look like an upside-down letter L.

Directly beneath the arm was a gigantic iron chute that disappeared into the ground, then bent and reappeared at an angle pointed at the woods on the other side.

I walked around to the front of the chute. It looked like a fireplace big enough to drop a house in.

I glanced around, tingling all over. I had the sense the tower hadn’t been used in decades. It looked as if everything had been left to the elements. So quiet, undisturbed.

Perfect
.

I had found my castle.

Before climbing the tower, I did a little exploring in the immediate area. There were a couple of abandoned one-story cinder block buildings nearby with peeling paint and doors that had never seen
a bar code reader. I pushed inside and immediately caught the rank smell of a structure returning to a wild state.

A couple hundred feet from the base of the tower, a huge concrete bunker had been built into the side of a low hill. The bunker had square observation windows, but the glass was long gone. The walls of the bunker looked to be about two feet thick, something not even Wirtz would be able to get through, only the opening leading inside was much too wide for me to block.

I stepped inside the bunker and slipped my shades off. A little ways in I found a water faucet sticking out of the wall beneath one of the observation ports. I turned it on and was surprised to see it still worked.
Ewww
. I was thirsty, but the water came out brown and ropy. I left the faucet running, hoping it would clear sooner or later.

The interior was cooler than the outdoors because it was partially underground. There wasn’t much inside. In the back I came to a steel mesh curtain with only darkness beyond. I could see into the darkness, of course, but there really was nothing there. Only more concrete floors and walls running deep into the hillside. I could smell dirt and hear water dripping somewhere far off. The underground exhaled, ruffling my hair.
Save it for later
.

I put my sunglasses back on and sprinted to the tower and began climbing, launching my body up the side rather than taking the stairs. The strength of my legs was incredible—I flew upward at least fifteen or twenty feet with every kick, propelling myself higher and higher from one handhold to the next using my newly discovered vampire senses to judge distances. I felt so confident I wouldn’t fall, it was almost as if I could fly.

It didn’t take long to reach the flat metal roof at the top. The only things higher than what I was standing on were the supports
at the end of the big iron arm that jutted out over the clearing. I dusted rust from my hands and looked around. The view from up there was perfect. I could see everything for miles around: NASA buildings, the river, the interstate, acres and acres of swamp, forest, and fields. With my eyesight, it would be next to impossible for anybody to approach without me noticing.