Chapter 35
35
T he room was chockfull of marijuana plants that stretched back as far as the eye could see. Clustered in groups of four, they were arranged in neat rows, with a wide aisle dividing the plants down the center. There had to be at least five hundred shrubs.
The place hummed with electricity. Fans were anchored along the wall in gaps, aimed at the plants. Dangling from the ceiling like tangled threads of spaghetti were dozens of bare light bulbs on wires, the source of the creepy green glow. Directly above the plants were more lights, though these were off: huge rectangular-shaped fixtures with foil-covered hoses shooting out from the tops. Power cords ran along the walls like coils of snakes.
At the far end of the aisle was a tattered old recliner. In it sat a passed-out snoring hippie with two silver braids, liver spotted hands, and a sizable potbelly. He had to be pushing eighty. He was like an Atomic Era refrigerator, old but tough, and still kicking. I ran up to him and gave his shoulder a rough shake. “Hello? Sir? Please wake up!”
The tips of his fingers were coated in white, and the front of his tie-dyed shirt was streaked with crumbly fingerprints. On the floor between his skinny chicken legs sat an empty donut box, a half-full liter of Dr. Pepper, and a pineapple-shaped ashtray overflowing with cigarette butts. What caught my eye was the shotgun angled against the side of the recliner. The stock of it was engraved with a name: Cal.
I shook him again. “Um, Cal? Please, please, wake up!” My drugged voice had the words coming out thick and off-key, like I was talking through a JELL-O mold.
He stirred, yelling, “What’s goin’ on?”
“Shh!” The fans were so loud that a regular killer wouldn’t have heard him, but, unfortunately, it wasn’t a regular killer who was perusing me.
His eyes flew open. “Hey! Whatcha doing in here?” His hands fumbled for the shotgun, seizing it by the barrel and pulling it up. “You’re trespassing!”
I hissed, “Please, be quiet! He’ll hear you!”
“How’d you get in?” Now he had the shotgun in his hands and was clambering to his feet. “You’re lucky I didn’t shoot you, darlin’.”
“Listen to me,” I slurred. “There’s a bad man after me. We need to hide! If we don’t, he’s going to kill—”
“You sound funny. Are you on drugs?”
“Yes, but—”
My new friend Cal swatted a hand at me. “You’re talking all kinds of crazy! Get the hell out of here, druggie!” The audacity of such a statement coming from a man growing pot in an abandoned warehouse.
I clenched my fists at my sides. Seriously? Out of all the people I could beseech for help, it had to be this guy and not an off-duty cop or angry-tempered MMA fighter with something to prove.
“I was drugged, and the guy who did is dangerous!” I grabbed him by the front of his shirt. “He. Is. Going. To. Kill. Us. Get it? If we don’t hide, we’re going to die!”
The man glared at me like I was an idiot. “Hellooooo? Do you see this shotgun? Ain’t nobody gonna kill me—"
A crash just outside a building, then a taunting voice coming through the tarps. “Ooooliviaaaa, I’m coming for you, you stupid bitch! I can smell you all over this place. Come out, come out, wherever you are!”
I clawed at Cal’s arm. “Take my damn arm off, why don’t you!” he snapped.
I mashed my hand down over his stubbly mouth. I was done trying to explain. He was clearly not picking up what I was putting down. “Quiet!”
“Ooooliviaaaa, You can run but you can’t hide . . .”
I grabbed the hippie’s shirt and tugged him down the middle aisle, hoping the reek of the pot plants would mask our scent. But, no, it was too late. James had spotted us.
His hand was around my throat in an instant. I gagged, clawing and punching his forearms in a feeble attempt to break free. Fighting was useless. To the vampire, I was the equivalent of a hulking bodybuilder getting pummeled by an infant. He laughed in my face.
“Stop that, you pale sumbitch!” Cal yelled, whacking James across the back with the shotgun barrel. He was the antithesis of what I’d consider a knight in shining armor, but I had to admire the old man for his chivalry. “I don’t want to shoot you, son, but I will if I have to!”
James let go of my throat and turned to the hippie. I coughed and retched for air, fighting nausea as the blood returned to my face.
“Don’t!” I tried to warn Cal.
“Beat it, you old fucker,” James sneered, flashing his fangs. He shoved my hero senior citizen on the shoulder, sending him flying into a row of plants. The rectangular lights above swayed and cracked together. A few of the planters tipped over. Cal lay motionless on his back amongst a mess of broken pottery and dirt. Thorny codger that he was, he still maintained his grip on the shotgun.
James resumed choking me. I fought against him for all I was worth, but I might as well have been trying to move a mountain. It was pathetic. The world around me quaked and began to fade. I used the only weapon I had left. He released me when I dug my stiletto into the top of his foot, howling with indignation. I was sure it was because I’d marred his designer loafer and not because I’d hurt him.
The shotgun sounded when Cal, lovely man that he was, blew James’s shoulder wide open. Snarling, James charged towards his shooter, the wound on his shoulder already starting to heal. In a kneejerk response, I stuck my foot out and tripped him, knocking the vamp flat on his face.
I took that as an opportunity to run, though I didn’t get far. The vampire seized me by the ankle and yanked. Like Cal and James, I was now on the floor, flat on my stomach.
James pulled me toward him, and I reached out frantically, trying to grab on to something, anything, that would hold. I closed my fingers over the lip of a planter and hung on for dear life. It banged against the lights above, knocking them askew. The plant fell over and spilled out on top of me, dirt landing in my eyes.
Temporarily blinded, I blinked away the grit and saw that a thin bamboo stake had also landed on me. It was about a foot long and two inches wide. Its intended purpose was to reinforce the stem of the plant. I had a different use in mind.
Clutching the bamboo reed, I flipped over on my back and jammed it into James’s eye. Blood spurted from his eye socket like an erupting geyser. I pulled it out and stabbed him again.
“ Youfuckingcuntbitch !” His eye wasn’t healing as quickly as the bullet wound had, but it was recovering. He sprang forward and landed on top of me. Then, he straddled me and commenced choking. He whispered in my ear, “I’m going to take my time and enjoy this.”
“No!”
He yanked the stake from his eye and tossed it aside. He choked me to the point of nearly passing out, then released his grip. He choked some more. And released. He repeated the act again and again, prolonging my agony. Choke-release-choke-release.
Cal didn’t come to my rescue this time. He hadn’t made a sound for a while, and I began to suspect he was dead. Probably a blessing considering what James would have done to him once he was finished with me.
In the distance, the atmosphere began to change, from green to electric blue to yellow. Between chokings, I was able to crane my neck out far enough to see why. The lamps above the plants—the rectangular ones with the foil hoses—were turning on as the green lights were going off. They were lighting up in sections, starting at the entrance of the room, by the tarped doorway. About half the lights between us and the door were on, and the ones closest to the door were brightest. The intensity of the bulbs appeared to be increasing as they heated.
James didn’t notice. He went to work strangling me again, grinning as though having the time of his life. My throat was throbbing. He stopped suddenly, sighed, and said, “You know what? All this work has made me hungry.”
“Please don’t,” I begged as he lowered his mouth to my neck. I squeezed my eyes shut as the world around us turned yellow, crying out as his teeth pierced the sensitive flesh near my collarbone. It was absolutely nothing like being nibbled by Robert. James’s bite was neither sweet nor erotic. It was cold, spiteful, and worse than any pain I’d ever experienced.
Thinking of Robert, I started to cry. I missed him so much, and the thought of never seeing him again was devastating. Please don’t let this creep be the last sight I will ever see , I thought.
Behind James’s healed shoulder, the yellow glow deepened.
The vampire, finally noticing the change, pulled his face away from my neck and peered up at the light. His mouth was hanging open and I could see my blood all over his fangs. It was sickening, but the sting in my throat was worse.
Suddenly, he was screaming.
It was his hair that began to smolder first. Smoke billowed off his skull, then travelled down his neck to the rest of his body. His hair crackled, and every inch of his exposed skin began to blister.
It was the light that did it.
Things only got nastier for James when the bulb reached it full brightness. Panicked, he rolled off me. By the time he got to his feet, his back, legs, and shoulders were on fire. His skin sizzled and popped, reeking of cooked meat and charred hair.
James tottered a couple steps forward, then fell to his knees, cursing in an unearthly voice that belonged to the darkest demon in hell. He stopped screaming once his tongue fell out. He clawed at his face as pieces of his flesh crumbled away, turning to ash. Suddenly, he was crumbling all over, his skeleton collapsing in a dusty cloud.
I turned away for the grand finale. I didn’t need to see what happened. Robert had told me more than I’d wanted to know about vampire death. When an immortal dies, it’s never pretty.
When I turned back to James, he was nothing but an iridescent mound of black powder, like volcanic sand on a Hawaiian beach. Though he was dull in life, he was downright sparkling in death, a big pile of shimmering black glitter. Like a pair of crowning gems, two white fangs sat atop his remains.
Behind me, Cal moaned.
“I thought you were dead!” I cried as I ran to his side and helped him sit up. I’d been saying that phrase an awful lot lately.
With dirt sprinkled over his body and green leaves sticking from his braids, he looked like a mythical forest creature. He dusted himself off and spat out a glob of grit. “It stinks like barbeque,” he commented, getting to his feet. “Now, is it me, or did that fellow just turn to ash?”
“Um . . .”
“You know anything about growing weed?” he asked.
“No.”
“Figures,” he snorted , because obviously all respectable twenty-something women should have practical knowledge of pot farming.
Cal tapped the hood of the lamp closest to him. “This warehouse, it’s dark. Plants need sunshine to grow. Got them set on an automatic timer on account of all my napping. Gets pretty boring, sitting here all night watching plants.”
My mouth dropped open as I understood. “UV lamps. Of course.”
“These lamps aren’t like the ones they’ve got at tanning salons. Those would dry out the plants real quick,” he carried on casually, as if we hadn’t just escaped death and witnessed a vampire burn to death. What must Cal’s day-to-day life be like, I wondered, if what had happened was no big deal to him? “But they do the same kind of job.”
“I see.”
“So, your boy over there must have been seriously allergic to the sun,” he said, clearly not believing a word of his propaganda. He winked, making it clear that he wanted to remain in the dark about the whole situation. His illicit pot growing must have given him enough to worry about.
“Sun allergy. Right.”
“Are you alright?” he asked with sincere concern. “I’m sorry I couldn’t get to you sooner. I must have been knocked out for a minute after that asshole tossed me. Did he bite you?”
I fingered the throbbing spot on my neck, locating two puncture wounds. The bleeding had slowed to a tiny dribble, not much worse than a paper cut. What hurt more was the inside of my throat. It was like choking down glass each time I swallowed. “Yep. The guy was insane.”
“Loco,” he agreed.
I tilted my head toward the smoldering mound. “What do you want to do about that?”
He flicked a hand toward a hose coiled against the wall. “I’ll rinse him. Nobody will ever know the bastard was here.” I hadn’t noticed them earlier, but there were gutters set along the floor intermittently. Drainage for the watered the plants.
“You need any help?” I offered.
“Nah. Will only take a sec.”