Once Upon a Sunset

Chapter 3: In Which the Group Heads West

At the end of the dirt road that Derek lived on, they made a right turn west down Highway 67. They went on down the highway for several miles. Eventually the road became woodsy, and on the left side, the railroad followed parallel for a while. They came to a long concrete bridge through a swamp on the right side of the bridge (which Kim, ever the knowledgeable one, informed him didn’t exist prior to the Flood of 1990; even the way she said it implied capital letters). Just off the bridge, Derek uttered his first words on the drive, “Turn here,” and Jack turned left onto a county road and then another left onto a stretch of abandoned lane with a triangular metal gate blocking passage.





Jack parked the truck and took the keys out of the ignition. Wordlessly everyone piled out of the vehicle and pulled their tools from the back. Popcorn pointed down the old road. The further it progressed, the more the woods grew up around it, casting the entire length in shadow and green. Far down, too far to tell exactly, the road vanished into foliage and darkness.





“It’s down here,” Derek said. “There’s either a nest or the remains of one near the banks of Anderson Creek.”





“Does that mean there’s more than one down there?” Kim asked.





“Surely no more than three, but the scent seems a bit old.” Derek dropped his satchel on the other side of the gate and stepped over the low side. “It seems almost like there were several down there and the party broke up. There could still be one or two down there.”





“Will they attack us in the daylight?” Kim asked.





“They probably won’t even wake up.” Derek looked through his satchel. Popcorn walked under the gate to his feet. “Yeah, I got everything,” he muttered. “I really wish you’d let me put on that that collar I got you.”





Popcorn snorted. Kim and Jack stepped over the gate.





“I know how you feel about collars, but still—hey, you know that’s not the case! I am not trying to pretend I own you! That was a low blow!”





She let out a loud yapping sound.





“Oh, come on, it has a cross on it!”





Lizzie noticed Chris standing by the driver’s side. His face was pale.





“You okay?”





Chris stared down the abandoned road. “I don’t want to go down there.”





Lizzie put her arm around his shoulders. “I know. I felt the same way on my first hunt. We’ll be fine. Look, it’s not even dark yet.”





Chris looked up at the sun for a second. “How long do you think we’ll be in there?”





“I don’t know. Maybe two hours, but I’m not sure.”





“Are you guys coming?” Kim called.





“You guys go on ahead, we’ll catch up.” Lizzie said.





“You sure?” Jack asked.





“Yeah, we’ll be fine.”





Jack and Kim looked to Popcorn, who nodded, and the four of them started off.





The group walked on and left them behind.





“I’m not going to try and tell you that we’ll be okay,” Lizzie said. “It’s still a good four hours at least until sundown, though, and those are the best odds we’ve seen.”





“How long have you been doing this?” Chris asked.





Lizzie considered his question for a moment. “Why don’t we start walking and I’ll tell you on the way?”





Chris looked again at the sun and, tightening his grip on Jack’s tire iron, nodded. They crossed the gate and Lizzie started the story.





“Derek moved to Maud about nine months ago. That wasn’t long after the kids disappeared in DeKalb. Everybody here was freaking out. My mom wouldn’t even let me leave the house after I got home from school unless she was with me. Naturally, I didn’t like that. It seriously cut into my social life. The first day I met Derek, I’d had it out with my mom because she wouldn’t let me go to the District football game. I was on the cheerleading squad then. After I stormed out, I went to sulk at my grandpa’s house next door, and I went with him to meet the new tenants of his rent house.”





“What did you think of him?” Chris asked.





“He was interesting. Very nice, polite, gorgeous—sorry, you didn’t need to hear that—but I had a reputation to uphold, so I didn’t really talk to him. I mean, he was a drifter at best. At worst, he was the sharecropping tenant. I saw him from time to time doing odd jobs for my grandpa around the farm, and even more often when he got that job working for the city, but he was just another good-looking guy I oogled when my friends weren’t looking.





“About two weeks later, I snuck out of the house to go to a party in a friend’s pasture. It was only a bit more than half a mile, so I walked. The road was deserted at that hour. I could see a good quarter of a mile in either direction when I turned off the driveway, and there wasn’t a soul. I’d walked a little ways when I noticed the footsteps behind me. I turned around and there was a young guy, about sixteen, walking up to me.





“‘It’s dangerous for a pretty little girl like you to be walking around after dark,’ he said. I wanted to say something witty, but I didn’t recognize him. That may not sound weird to you, but I live in Maud. We know everybody. I was still pretty far from the nearest house, so I couldn’t run or scream before he attacked me.





“‘Who are you?’ I asked him. He smiled. ‘Johnny Irving,’ he said. That was when I was really scared. I remembered that was the name of the boy who first disappeared in New Boston. Then I noticed he didn’t have a shadow. I took a step back, and he laughed. ‘What’s wrong? Little girl getting scared?’


“I tried to sprint toward the nearest house. He was in front of me before I had time to make it two yards. I screamed, but he grabbed my throat and squeezed. I hit his arm a few times, but he only laughed.





“‘Welcome to living death,’ he said, but I heard someone call out in Latin and Johnny screamed. I fell down onto the road. Johnny was gone. Derek was running up the road to me, asking me if I was all right. He helped me back to my house and told the police what he could, which was more or less the truth.”





“What do you mean?” Chris asked.





“Well, he couldn’t just come out and say ‘vampire,’ but he could say that some guy had me by the throat and he ran off when Derek came over.”





“Oh. That makes sense. What happened after that?”





“I tried to go through life the way I had been, but it all seemed so pointless. It’s hard to talk to your friends about some other girl’s guy problems without her knowing right after you’ve been attacked by a boy who is presumed dead. I went to my grandpa’s house one day when Derek was feeding the horses and I asked him. He told me about the vampires.”





“Why did you decide to help him fight them?”





Lizzie looked down the road at the group. “I didn’t feel right leaving him to do it alone. He was doing my town a great service, whether we realized it or not. I couldn’t just let him face down these monsters alone.”





They walked on in silence for a few minutes.





“What about the others?”





“Kim was out late after a party in Texarkana. She was stuck at a red light and a vampire tried to get into her car. It didn’t try for long. Me and Derek pulled up in his car and it came to attack us.”





“Did you guys kill it?”





Lizzie paled a bit. She swallowed. “Yeah.”





Chris looked down at the road. They were on an old bridge over a creek. Down below were large rocks and tree stumps, dotted occasionally with beer cans and empty whiskey bottles.





“What about Jack?”





“Jack had it worse than any of us. He stopped to give a ride to a co-worker outside of Red Lick. He hadn’t heard that the kid went missing two days before. The vampire moved to get him then, but Jack tried to fight him off. It wasn’t pretty. By the time we got there, he already had his fangs in Jack’s neck. Jack had a broken leg, a concussion, a few cracked ribs.”





“Wouldn’t Jack have become a vampire?”





Lizzie shook her head. “I think it’s more complicated than that. Derek washed the wound with holy water, just to be safe, but they have to be drained slowly, at least three nights in a row, until death, and then they have to take a life. I think. At least that’s one way to do it.”





Chris nodded. The shade grew darker still, and the highway was fading away into the foliage. He wrapped his arms tighter around his chest and looked down. The group ahead had turned onto another path awhile ago, and he hadn’t seen where they went. “Do you know how much further?”





“I think I know where they’re going, but no, I don’t know how much further.”





Jack stepped onto the road from behind a bush.





“Is something wrong?” Lizzie asked.





“No, Derek just asked me to come show you where we went.” He pointed down a path that was barely fit for an ATV. It led over the train tracks and into the deeper woods beyond.





“Has he found anything yet?” she asked.





“Not yet. The smell is there, but that’s it.”





Lizzie smiled at Chris. “You ready?”





Chris peered down the path. “No.” But as soon as the word was out it seemed absurd, and for a moment all he could do was laugh.





“What’s wrong with him?” Jack whispered.





“Just be glad he’s not crying,” Lizzie said. “That’s what I do.”





“I think I’d like crying better. At least that would be normal.”





“Just shut up.” She turned to Chris. “What’s funny?”





“I don’t know.” He wiped his mouth. “It just came out.”





Lizzie offered him her hand, and he accepted. With that, they followed Jack down the trail, meandering further and further from civilization. After a few minutes of uneasy silence, Chris noticed a wide body of water up ahead. Derek and Kim were walking around the bases of the trees, occasionally peering into the knot holes and (at least once) scaring out the tenant birds. Popcorn sniffed the ground a few yards away from them, trying to find a distinct trail.





“What’s new?” Lizzie asked.





“Absolutely nothing,” Derek said. “The scent here is at least three days old, but it’s the strangest thing I’ve ever encountered. There were a lot of them here.”





“Can you tell how many exactly?” Kim asked.





“We counted twelve on the way here before we lost count.” Derek pulled salt out of his satchel. “Popcorn thinks the entire coven was here.”





“The entire coven?” Jack asked. “Do they usually stay in one place like this?”





“No, and that’s what worries me. Typically they’re scattered around a thirty mile or so radius from the maker. If the maker calls them, they will come, but the maker only calls the underlings if something endangers him, which, naturally, isn’t often.” He sprinkled the salt into the shape of a Jesus fish, made a cross in the air, and reached for his holy water.





“So the maker was, what, sleeping here?” Jack asked.





“No. That’s the crazy thing. The scent is still here, but only because there were so many of them at the same time. The scent hasn’t had time to settle in any one place, like it would if a few of them were nesting here.”





“Okay, I’m a little confused.” Lizzie said.





“You’re not the only one.” Derek sprinkled some holy water on his Jesus fish. He mumbled a few words in what may have been Hebrew. Popcorn bowed her head, but as soon as he was done, she resumed sniffing.





They noticed the yelling in the woods behind them.





“Who is that?” Kim asked.





“I’d guess it’s the game warden,” Lizzie said. “That’s the only person I can think of that would be out here.”





Jack bent down to tie his shoes. “I know the game warden. He’ll just tell us to leave or something.”





A male voice, close yet indistinct, yelled at them from the other side of a grove of trees. Jack’s head snapped up. A scraggly man ran around the brush toward them.





“Derek, we’ve got to go.”





Derek looked up as if from a trance. “What? Why?”





“Because that’s not the game warden.”





The man, still a good distance from them, pulled out a pistol and fired. A small stick just above Kim’s head broke from the tree she was next to. The group, with no more necessary provokation, ran back down the path. The scraggly man screamed at the sun and followed after them, firing sporadically into the trees. At the railroad crossing, Popcorn made an abrupt left turn and dashed into the thick shrubs that were low to the ground. The rest of the group followed Derek onto the old road. He motioned, not to go back to the car, but further down the road and into the bushes.





“What are we—” Kim muttered.





“Shh!” Derek stopped in a small clearing. The railroad rose above them on the embankment. The man stumbled up onto the crossing. He twitched without ceasing, feverishly spinning to look into the bushes. The group ducked whenever he turned toward them.





A spot of light dashed across his cheek. At first he failed to notice. The light danced across again, this time into his right eye, and he spun around furiously. Lizzie reached out and covered a silver hair clip in Kim’s hair that was reflecting the sunlight. She was just barely too slow, however, and the man caught a glimpse of something moving in the bushes. He let out a drunken laugh. His knees wobbled as he stepped toward them. He raised the gun, almost certain something was there, and pointed.





A growling, almost gravely barking made him turn so fast he nearly fell. He scampered away to find it. They could hear him chanting, “Come here, little doggy, come here, little doggy” as he left.





They watched him stumble away and into the brush. Derek whispered, “We’re going to run back to the car.”





“What about Popcorn?” Kim asked.





“She’ll meet us there. Hurry.”





They snuck from their hiding places as quickly as they dared without making any noise. As soon as their feet touched the broken concrete, they ran down the old road.





The man stepped out directly in front of Kim and grabbed her. She screamed. The man cackled and howled, snarling at the sky without coherence except for the occasional slew of joyous and obscene exclamations.





Jack ran up to try and overpower him, but the man put Kim in between them. Derek blurted something in Hebrew—something about “bene Elohim”— and took a step back. The man raised the gun to Kim’s temple.





A dove shot down almost vertically and opened a deep gash on the man’s fingers. A long shriek billowed from his toothless mouth. Kim managed to break his hold. He lunged to grab her again and met Jack’s blow halfway. He sprawled on the ground.





“Praise to you, Lord Jesus Christ.” Derek crossed himself.





“Who is he?” Chris asked.





“He’s not some random addict,” Derek said. “Popcorn says he was waiting for us.”





“Waiting? What do you mean?” Jack asked.





“Look at his neck.”





Jack bent down and moved the man’s collar. A score of puncture wounds covered his vein.





“He’s one of the maker’s servants,” Derek said. “The maker will often prey on the mentally weak and force them to do their will. They act as a weapon in the daylight when he’s not as strong.”





“Can we get out of here?” Chris blurted.





“Yes, absolutely. Quickly.” Derek wrapped his arm around Chris’ shoulder and proceeded out of the woods at a brisk pace. Jack hugged Kim tight and they moved without really letting go of each other. Lizzie walked alongside the dog, taking quick glances back at the fallen form behind them.





An eternity later, they were back at the truck. They piled in silently, and as Jack started the truck, a few of them jumped at the roar of the engine. They turned down the road and sped east toward Maud a little faster than deemed legally necessary. Normally, Derek would’ve called Jack on that, Lizzie noted, but after this day, she supposed he would let it slide.