Seize the Night: New Tales of Vampiric Terror (46 page)

Ed crossed Farm-to-Market Road 3008, another dirt track that passed for a highway in these parts, and entered the little village of the murdered children.

He saw a girl of seven or eight, sitting on a black rock, surrounded by goats. She wore an ochre-colored blouse and a white skirt, and though she didn’t smile when she saw Ed approach, he could see a jumble of white teeth, big as pebbles in her mouth. Ed tried to say hello, but before the girl could answer, an old woman darted out of a nearby shack and pulled her inside.

Alarmed by the sudden appearance of the woman, Ed stopped and looked around. There were many children standing there, watching him, but within seconds, cautious mothers and grandmothers were hustling them inside.

“Hey, asshole,” a man said from behind him.

Ed turned.

A group of men were standing there, some of them armed with metal pipes, others with knives.

“What the fuck you want, man?” one of the men said. He was about twenty-five, dressed in jeans and a long-sleeved white T-shirt. His black hair was a thick mess, and the mustache on his face had yet to fill in, but he carried himself like the village tough guy. He pointed a knife at Ed. “What the fuck you want?”

Ed put his hands up. “My name is Ed Drinker,” he said in Spanish. He patted the air between them. “Easy, please. Easy. I’m with the Patterson Cryptozoological Institute. I’m here to help you.”

“You want to help, huh?”

“Yes. Please, I just want to ask you some ques—”

Before he could get the words out, somebody hit him in the back with something hard. Ed collapsed to the ground, dizzy, disoriented, and rolled over onto his side. A young woman was standing over him with a shovel.

“No, wait!” Ed said.

The woman raised the shovel over her head and slammed it back down, aiming for his head. At the last second, Ed shifted to his right, the shovel slapping the dirt where his face had just been. The ground was wavering beneath Ed’s feet, but he still managed to stand. The men were closing in on him, and he felt rough hands grabbing his shirt, trying to throw him back to the ground.

“Get off me!” he shouted.

He twisted and turned, slapped at the hands groping about his face, and somehow found himself running toward the road, an angry crowd gathering behind him.

They closed on him just as he reached his Suburban.

He ran to the driver’s side of the vehicle and stopped short. The back tire had been slashed and the Suburban looked to be kneeling
in the dirt at the feet of the old church. He wheeled on the angry crowd, spit flying off his lips, his lungs burning, hands raised to defend himself. They circled around him, pipes and knives waving in the air, their faces twisted with rage and something deeper that Ed could recognize but not understand.

He had nothing left and he had come very close to begging for his life, when suddenly the crowd cowered and backed away.

Ed let go of the breath he’d been holding.

The villagers were retreating, but their attention wasn’t on Ed anymore. Rather, they were focused on the train of three black Cadillac Escalades closing in on their position. The Escalades skidded to a stop and a horde of cameramen poured out. With the cameras pointed in their faces, the villagers shrank back, with only a few hazarding an angry glance backward as they retreated.

Ed, who had collapsed to his knees from exhaustion, found cameras crowding around him. He tried to shield his eyes from the blinding white lights, but it did little good. He saw a heavyset man in a blue guayabera shirt and white linen slacks step out of one of the Escalades and he knew Charles Marsh had set him up.

Marsh pushed his way through the cameramen and knelt at Ed’s side. It was all very dramatic, all very obviously staged. Despite the heat of the morning, the fat man smelled of cologne.

“Goddamn lucky we came along when we did,” he said, and of course the cameras were right there to capture the whole exchange. “Are you all right, Dr. Drinker?”

Ed looked up at him.

“They almost had you, didn’t they?”

Ed just stared at him.

Marsh rose to his feet, turned, and addressed the cameras. “Well, that’s the risk field investigators face. This could have gone really bad, but luckily we were here.”

He turned back to Ed.

“Dr. Drinker, it looks like somebody has disabled your vehicle. If you want, we can give you a ride back to town.”

Ed glanced back at his Suburban, and that was enough to clear his head. He had a spare in the back. He could make it out of here by himself, even if replacing the tire would cost more than he had to spend.

Which was exactly what Marsh wanted, wasn’t it?

“You son of a bitch,” Ed said.

Marsh shrugged. “Cut!” he said. He made several hand gestures to the cameramen surrounding him, motions that to Ed looked an awful lot like instructions to keep filming, and said: “Ed, seriously? Come on, man, this is good stuff. Think about it. All the dangers a field investigator has to go through, all the risks. It’s solid gold.”

“Fuck you, Charles,” Ed said. “You did this, didn’t you? You cut my tires.”

“What? No, you’re crazy. How could I have done that? We just showed up.”

“You did! Goddamn you.”

Marsh made a slicing gesture across his throat, and instantly the cameramen backed off.

“Ed, what are you doing?” Marsh said in a low voice. “This is good stuff here. Think of the publicity. Think of what this could do for your career.”

“What? As the stooge you rescued? You set this up, you bastard.”

Marsh backed away, not frightened, but looking sad, shaking his head as though in pity. It made Ed furious.

“I’m sorry,” Marsh said. “I really am. But none of that’s true. I’m sorry you’re so upset, but I haven’t done anything to hurt you. I’m trying to help you, if you let me.”

Ed was so mad he couldn’t even speak. He stared at the cameras ringed around him and he wanted to break something. Starting with Charles Marsh.

But he didn’t dare. That would ruin him for sure.

Instead, he glanced down at his fists and forced them to open. It took a long time for the color to flood back into his white knuckles.

“I don’t need your help,” he said at last.

Marsh nodded, turned to his film crew, and motioned for them to return to their vehicles. “Load it up, boys! We’re moving out.” Then, when the cameras were gone, Marsh closed on Ed again. “So tell me,” he said. “Why did you come here? What did you hope to learn from these people?”

“The truth,” Ed said.

“What truth? What does that mean to you?”

For Ed, that was the tipping point, the one bit of proof he needed to bring everything into focus. Charles Marsh was lost. For all his money and connections, he had absolutely nothing to go on. Even now, with everything going his way and Ed’s professional ruin in his hands, Charles Marsh was begging for Ed to give up the clue that had eluded him.

“It means you’ll have to do your own work for once, Charles. I’m not giving you shit. Not ever again.”

Marsh’s expression turned cold. He glanced over his shoulder at his film crew packing up their vehicles. Then he turned back to Ed. “You’re gonna regret this, Ed.”

“We’ll see.”

And with that, Ed went to the back of his Suburban and pulled out the spare tire. He wedged the jack under the vehicle. It started to rain hard as he cranked the tire iron. He bent his head, his rage turning to frustration, but refused to let his frustration give way to sobbing. If some of Marsh’s crew were still filming him—and it would be unlike them to miss an opportunity such as this—and they caught him wallowing in his own misery, he would never be able to hold his head up at a convention again.

Once the tire was changed, he closed the back door to his Suburban and thought for sure he was done here. He was in the process of
climbing back into his Suburban when an old woman staggered out of the rain, a bucket in her hand. He put a hand over his eyes yet still had to squint against the downpour to see her. She made no attempt to shield her eyes though.

“You’re wrong,” she said in Spanish.

“About what?”

“About the children. About what happened to them.”

Ed dropped his hand from his face. The water was running into his eyes, but he didn’t notice. “What do you mean?”

“There is no
chupacabra
,” she said. “There never was.”

“I know that.” He had to shout to hear his own voice over the pounding rain. “So who did kill those children?”

The woman put her bucket down and pointed up the road.

Ed glanced that way, but he couldn’t see a thing through the heavy rain. “What am I supposed to be looking at?”

“You’re the one who told them it wasn’t a
chupacabra
the last time.” It wasn’t a question.

“That’s right.”

“Do you think that is the work of the
chupacabra
?”

“What?”

“Those crosses. Did a
chupacabra
do that?”

Ed shook his head. “No.”

She nodded. “There’s a woman that lives in the house down the road, that way. The dog you found last time was hers.”

“Okay,” he said. He had no idea what she was driving at. “Do you think she’s responsible?”

The woman didn’t answer. She picked up her bucket and made like she was going to walk off.

“Wait!” he said. “Please, wait.”

He took a step toward her but slipped on the muddy ground.

“Please, wait,” he said again. “Why are you telling me all this?”

She pointed down the road again. “Because you were the only one who stopped to look at the crosses.”

And with that she was gone.

E
d remembered seeing a ranch house down the road from the old church, near the banks of Atascosa Creek. Nobody made mention of the house the last time he was down in this area several years ago, which didn’t really surprise him. The townsfolk had been in high spirits back then, and despite all his claims to scientific integrity and the completeness of his investigations, he too had been so caught up in the excitement of possibly getting to study a real-life
chupacabra
that he’d failed to learn anything about the geography of the county. His attention had centered on dash-cam videos and interviewing ranchers and looking at rotting canine carcasses.

But he remembered that the rancher they’d brought Ed to see at the time had also lived along Atascosa Creek. A little farther north from where he was now, but still in the same area. Maybe the specimen that rancher had killed really did belong to the woman down the road. A loose dog, even one afflicted with mange, would have had no trouble straying a couple of miles. And the mange was known to dehydrate its victims, which would explain why the dog would stay close to the water. Ed didn’t see how that connected the dog’s owner to the five children who had been killed, but it was a better lead than anything else he had to go on.

He pulled out of the church parking lot and headed back up Farm-to-Market Road 474, toward the creek. The rain was still coming down pretty hard, but he could see the house well enough, and it was immense, even by the ranch-home standards of South Texas. It looked tumbledown though, almost like it was abandoned. There were no lights in the windows. The roof sagged at one corner, and parts of the porch railing that had once ringed the entire front
of the massive one-story house were warped and broken. Others were missing altogether.

He was tempted to get out and explore but didn’t relish the idea of slogging through knee-deep mud. Plus, this was Texas, and people in these parts hung signs in their yards that said things like
THE SECOND AMENDMENT MAKES ALL THE OTHERS POSSIBLE
and
YOU CAN CALL 9-1-1, I’LL CALL .357.

The idea of getting a gun muzzle jammed into his ear appealed to Ed even less than wading through the mud, so he decided to head back to his motel. It’d give him a chance to clean up and unwind with a beer while he did some research online.

On the way, it looked for a time like the black pickup that had fallen in behind him on County Road 17 was following him, but it turned off as he entered town and Ed dismissed it as nerves.

And after the day he’d had, who could blame him?

H
is room was on the second floor of the Cuero Motor Lodge, all the way at the end of the parking lot.

The rain had slacked off a little, but it was still coming down, and so Ed walked to his room with his eyes on the ground as he fiddled with his keys, his mind still on the old woman he’d met in the churchyard.

He didn’t notice his door was open until he reached it.

He froze. Somebody was rummaging around in there, and through the crack in the door he could see his room had been trashed.

“Hey!” he said, and pushed the door open.

His stuff was all over the floor. A man in a green T-shirt was standing by the bathroom door, his back to Ed. As he stepped into the room, Ed had just enough time to realize the man was wearing pressed jeans when a second person he hadn’t seen blindsided him.

His attacker drove his shoulder into Ed’s rib cage and smashed
him into the wall, knocking the wind from him. Ed slumped to the floor, his vision a swirling mess, and came close to losing consciousness.

“Let’s go!” the second man said. “Grab the computer and the file and let’s go!”

The one who’d roughed him up was already out the door. Ed never got a look at him. But he recovered quickly enough to see the guy in the green shirt and pressed jeans scoop his laptop and the accordion file from the bed. As the man ran for the door, Ed lunged at him, throwing his arms around the thief’s knees.

They both went down on the wet walkway outside the door. The man in the green shirt managed to hold on to the file, but Ed’s laptop hit the ground with a nasty crack. The man kicked again and again, trying to plant his heel on Ed’s chin. He missed Ed’s face but managed to hit the nerve at the base of his neck, and once again Ed felt the fight drain out of him.

With his last bit of strength, Ed dropped a feeble hand on the top of the broken laptop and pulled it toward him. The man in the green shirt tried to wrest it away from him, but Ed started to yell for help, and the two assailants finally gave up and ran down the walkway toward the stairs.