V-Wars by Jonathan Maberry

Author:Jonathan Maberry
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9781480429222
Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

"ROADKILL" PT.2

Nancy Holder

— 8 —

Rampage. Thompson didn’t get his full patch for killing Moncho, because he didn’t tell anyone that Moncho had returned, seemingly from the dead, and that he’d been a vampire. No seemingly about that. He didn’t tell Bobby because Bobby had started seeing vampires everywhere — behind the counter in the liquor store; driving the school bus; sitting in one of the seats on the school bus. Bobby saw them flying across the moon at night. Bobby heard them sucking out the blood of the town’s few remaining cattle and chickens.

It didn’t take special training in nonverbal communication to know that Bobby was losing his shit.

Luther Swann kept insisting that vampires didn’t fly. Bobby said he’d seen a wedge of them flying over his house, like geese flying south for the winter. No one contradicted Bobby.

But they did trade looks.

In the middle of the night, Bobby would burst out of the house in a pair of jeans, brandishing a semi-automatic, and paint the night with starbursts of live ammunition. One night he killed a cat. Another night, he killed an old man.

He insisted the old man had been a vampire. He said the Mendozas came up to the windows at night and taunted him, promising to steal their own children so that they could turn them into vampires and be together again forever. And he went out there to cut them in half and instead, the old man died.

No one else saw the Mendozas. If Little Sister and Manuel overheard Bobby’s raving in the middle of the night, they didn’t show it. Or maybe they had forgotten that the vampires he was talking about had once been their parents. More crosses went up on the turquoise door and the walls of the Morrisey home. But Yuki Nitobe had explained that crosses didn’t serve as deterrents against vampires. Bobby said they did.

As the months went by, Little Sister stuck to Walker, which upset “Manny” no end. Thompson understood why. No one had adopted him with any special affection. Manuel went through weeks where he clung to his sister day and night. Then he’d ignore her completely, making a show of hanging out with the O.M.s. Thompson could see a one-percenter in the making, but he stayed well away. Manuel was not the mission.

Little Sister had a birthday — sweet sixteen — and all her uncles gave her presents, mostly jewelry, and some makeup in the original packaging, which meant that it had probably been stolen because outlaws stole things. Thompson refrained from pointing out that in Latin cultures, fifteen was the big birthday for girls. Their quinceñera. She layered on her treasures and strutted around in a cropped T-shirt and low-slung cutoff jeans, practically in her own original packaging, but no one came near her. Maybe Walker had staked his claim. If that were the case, in the old days, she would have a tattoo somewhere prominent that read “Property of my Old Man Walker” by now. Now it was nearly three day’s ride to get to a decent tattoo parlor.

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