Throat (34 page)

My brain was in a fog.
Maybe I should leave the Space Center completely. Go somewhere else
. There were other places I could hide. Maybe Wirtz would never find me. I could even …

Someone was coming up the walk toward me.

It was a NASA security guard. A heavyset older guy with a jacket and a cap and an official-looking blue uniform. A big black handgun was strapped to his hip.

I would have seen him from a mile away, heard him even, if I hadn’t been so distracted by the fight with Sagan. The guard was not a hundred feet away. I was dead. I was dead.

Only a split second and I would be out of the shadows and the guard would see me. I panicked and did the first thing I thought to do … didn’t stop to think about my hurt ribs, but took two steps and leapt, flying up the side of the building. I grabbed the rolled metal edge at the top and flung myself over onto the roof.

I looked down for the guard. He was still coming; nothing had changed.
Thank God
. He hadn’t seen me. He was just staring straight ahead. Then I saw Sagan.

He wasn’t moving. He was standing on the concrete walkway looking up. Looking at me. He had seen.

*    *    *

I ran back to the tower, but I didn’t climb up. I saw the bunker and dashed inside. Tore my clothes off and threw them down on the cold, dirty floor. Kicked my shoes into a corner. Cranked the faucet on full blast and started slapping my naked body with water. The water was frigid, but I didn’t care. I scooped it up in handfuls, beating my skin with it, slamming it into my face.

I wanted to clean it away. Clean it all away. As if being a vampire were something that was on my skin. I knew I couldn’t, but I couldn’t stop trying. I scrubbed and scrubbed, kept pounding handfuls of the cold water in my face, on my arms, stomach, everywhere.

I was talking to myself as I did it, barely conscious of what I was saying.
I’m a monster. I’m a freak. A monster. A freak. A monster. A freak. Monster freak monster freak …

Finally I slipped slowly down the cinder block wall until I was slumped in the water. The faucet was still on full blast, beating against my legs. I wrapped myself in my arms, hung my head, all my hair in front of me, seeing nothing, hearing nothing but the roaring of the water as it drowned out my sobs.

I fell over on my side. The water was getting deeper and deeper until my ear went under and my hair floated around my face.

I didn’t care what happened anymore, I didn’t. I was used to fighting, but I didn’t know how to fight something like this. It wasn’t possible.

The water was still roaring. I didn’t move for a long time. I didn’t want to move ever again. What was the point?

I closed my eyes and tried to pretend I was the water. All of me would just wash away into the darkness and disappear into the ground.

*    *    *

I had gotten so used to the sound of the water, the silence made me suddenly feel deaf. I didn’t move, just lay on my side with one ear in the water, legs drawn up against my stomach.

He knelt beside me and put his arms under my back. I felt myself go limp as he lifted me up and pressed his body against mine. We didn’t speak. He held me a long time. I had never felt that before—someone holding me while I had no clothes on. I was surprised it felt the way it did. I would have thought I would be ashamed, embarrassed. But I didn’t feel any of that. I just felt like I was sinking into him, the way I had wanted to sink into the water.

“Does this mean you’re not going to leave me?” I said.

A long time later, after I had gotten dressed and most of the water had dribbled away, we were sitting just outside the bunker, our backs against the concrete. I reached over and touched his hand.

“How did you find me?” I said.

“You’re not invisible, you know. Just walked into the woods and kept walking. You went in the same direction where I’d seen you come out before. Like I said, not many people know about the old test stand anymore. It made sense.”

“I’m sorry … I’m sorry about what I said. I didn’t mean it. I don’t know why I did it. I think … maybe I was using it as an excuse to push you away. Because I was afraid, Sagan. Afraid for so many reasons. If you knew everything …”

He squeezed my fingers. “I’m going to know everything, because you are going to tell me everything. Starting at the very beginning. So much of what I thought I knew … it went out the window when I saw you scale that wall.”

“You’re wondering … what I am.”

Sagan smiled. “So … you’re not on the run from some government lab? Like in the movies?”

“Not even close. But if they ever found out …”

“I’d never see you again, right?”

“Pretty much.”

“Were you … born this way?”

I hung my head, looking at the ground. “Sagan, there’s something … I have to tell you. And you’re going to have to believe it. You won’t believe it, but you have to. Because if you don’t … well, that’s it. I wouldn’t know what to do. But even saying that … you won’t believe it.”

“Really? It’s that bad?”

“It’s that … impossible. I can’t even believe I’m going to tell you. I don’t know what you might do.”

He frowned. “Hey, give me some credit.”

“But … this is more than that. It’s not just what I can do. That’s not the strangest part. The strangest thing is what I am.”

“God, Emma, what is it already? Are you radioactive? From another planet? Or … let’s see … you got bombarded with gamma rays and—”

“Shut up. Just shut up. This is hard.” I sat there, mind going blank. “All right. I’m just going to say it.”

“Okay. I’m right here. I’m not going anywhere. I promise. You can tell me you are from the center of the earth, the vanguard of a race of superchicks hell-bent on world domination. One mall at a time …”

“Be serious or I won’t say a word.”

“Okay. Serious. I can do serious. You just got a sample over at the observatory.”

“No, I mean it. I’m going to kill you if you don’t take this seriously. This is my life here. I wouldn’t make this up.”

“All right already. Put me out of my misery!”

I took a very long breath … held it awhile … then finally let it slowly out. I had to do it again. I closed my eyes.
Just say it
.

“Sagan … I’m a vampire.”

It was interesting watching his face. I wondered if he was basically the very first person—human being, I mean—who had ever been told something like that. I caught him with his mouth open. It stayed open. He didn’t speak. Didn’t even look close to speaking.

“See why I didn’t want to say anything?” I said finally.

“You mean … you’re one of those people who has read a ton of Anne Rice books and now you want to be a vampire, so—”

“No. I’m serious. I am a vampire. Not the pretend, wannabe kind. The real thing.”

“You’re saying … vampires are real.”

“Yes.”

“Not the goth offshoots … but the real deal. You drink blood from people … turn into a bat … fly … sleep in a coffin full of dirt.”

“You promised you wouldn’t do this,” I said. “You said you would be serious.”

“I … am serious, Emma,” Sagan said. “What do you expect me to say?”

“I expect you to think I’m crazy. But I’m asking you … I’m pleading with you … to believe me.”

“Okay, you want me to be honest?”

“Please.”

“I wouldn’t have believed you if I hadn’t seen you go up that wall. But … being honest, remember? I don’t know how to believe in something like vampires.”

“Well, you better learn.”

“I … I don’t have any.”

“All right. I’ve seen you out in the daylight lots of times. Just another myth, huh?”

“No. That’s real. Only … there are some vampire things that don’t apply to me.”

Sagan stood up. I almost couldn’t bear looking at his face. He didn’t look like he disbelieved me.… He looked … sad. Like he had lost someone very important to him.

“I know what you’re thinking,” I said. “I told you you would think I was crazy. I told you that over and over.”

Sagan had his hands on his hips. He was walking back and forth, as if refusing to make eye contact. Then I realized it wasn’t that.… This kind of news wasn’t something you could take just sitting there. It came out in your body.

Finally he looked at me again. “I don’t think you’re crazy.” He said it very quietly, as if someone might overhear. “Maybe I’m crazy. Because nothing you have done has seemed crazy to me. Well, except living out here.”

“Breathe,” I said. “Please.”

“I’m breathing. I’m here. I haven’t left.”

“It … rearranges everything, doesn’t it?” I said. “When I figured it out, I got sick. I mean, physically ill. For days. All this amazing stuff had been happening to me, and somehow I was still getting up each morning, not questioning it so much, just amazed over and over. I think it made me numb. Then when I realized what it was, I got so sick, I felt like I was dying. And I think I was. I mean, the Emma I used to be … she is dead.…”

“You’re not saying like undead, are you?”

“No, of course not. I’m alive. But the person I was before
that … she’s gone. Well, I’m still here. I’m still me. But once I understood … it just wiped me out. It was too much to take.”

Sagan was looking kind of ill himself.

“You’re not going to throw up or something, are you?” I said.

“No. Please don’t take this the wrong way, Emma, but I just don’t see how it could be real. What makes you think you’re a vampire? I mean, obviously, beside your wall-climbing skills. Were you bitten by a radioactive spider?” He grinned, but it was a sickly kind of grin.

“I was attacked,” I said, instantly erasing his grin. “I didn’t remember it at first because I had a grand mal seizure, a tonic-clonic, right in the middle of it. You sometimes come out of a seizure with a kind of amnesia about what happened. Well, that time my amnesia lasted for days, weeks.”

“Wait a minute. You’re telling me you have epilepsy?”

“A seizure condition, yeah.”

Sagan swore. “And all this time you have been living out here by yourself with a seizure condition. And you didn’t tell me.”

“I figured if I told you that, you’d turn me in. You know, for my own safety.”

“Okay.” He sat back down next to me as if his legs would no longer hold him. “Tell me all of it. Everything.”

So I told him everything: all about that day at the soccer tournament, breaking Gretchen’s nose, taking the car, and winding up in the hospital. The changes.

“So … you saw him?” Sagan said. “The guy … er, the vampire … who attacked you?”

“That’s the worst part,” I said. And I told him all about Wirtz,
how he had fed from my leg and then later on appeared to me the night that I ran away.

“And he keeps coming back,” I said.

Sagan was looking down at his hands when I finished. I think it was something he had to do.… Maybe looking at the most familiar things in the world, his own hands, was his way of keeping his feet attached to the ground.

“You gonna flake out on me or what?” I said.

Sagan raised his head slightly. “Or what.”

“Which means?”

“I don’t know what it means, Emma. You’re right. I’ve been begging you to tell me the truth and … now I don’t know what to think.”

I stood up. “You want me to show you something, don’t you?”

“I want to trust you. That isn’t trust, making you prove it.”

“But it would help, wouldn’t it?”

Sagan got up too and looked at me, almost as if he had never seen me before.

“Maybe I don’t want proof,” he said. “Maybe I’m afraid of proof. You’re the best thing that has ever happened to me, you know? Maybe I don’t want it to be true.”

“You think I’m lying.”

“No. And that scares me.”

“So why are you into astronomy?” I said. “What do you hope to find out there? You know, I’ve seen footage from those moon missions. We watched some of it in school. And I’ve seen the pictures from the Martian rovers. You know what? Boring. It’s rocks, Sagan, just rocks. That’s pretty much all they’ve found, isn’t it?”

“They’re trying to determine if there was liquid water and—”

“Big deal. What are you really looking for out there? Water? No way. Aren’t you looking for something huge? Really different?
Strange beyond your wildest dreams strange? What about all those books you read as a kid.… Would you have read them if the whole secret, the whole danger, the mystery—if all it ever turned out to be was barren places full of useless rocks?”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m saying … maybe you
are
ready for this. More ready than you think. Papi always says there’s a reason for everything. A reason things happen. Maybe that’s why I found you, right? Out of all the other people on this base. What would anybody else have done … I mean anybody … if they had caught me here, breaking into a building, searching for food?”

Sagan breathed out. “Turned you in.”

I took hold of his arms and looked straight into his crazy blue eyes. “You have to understand something. I have been living with this. Living it. Just pretend it’s real for one minute and put yourself in my shoes. Wouldn’t you be practically desperate for someone else to know? Someone important to you? Someone to believe in you?”