Lot Lizards (11 page)

The man shook his head, jingling his car keys; he looked grumpy. "No, I'm going to turn around and head back. Just wasting time here."
 

Lee shrugged and said, "Suit yourself." Then to Byron again: "He went out toward the shop, I think." Holding his elbows close to his sides, extending his forearms and doubling both fists, Lee thrust his pelvis forward a couple times and said, "Know what I mean?"
 

Byron nodded; he knew. And he knew exactly where to find David. There was a small cement-floored room behind the shop with a table, chairs, a rickety sofa, an old black and white rabbit-eared television and a refrigerator. Sometimes when business was slow, the guys would go back there and play cards, drink Cokes and smoke a lot. That was where David always went when he wanted a little privacy with one of the lizards, and Byron was sure he was there now, probably on the sofa with his pants down around his ankles.
 

Byron headed that way, pulling out his key ring and finding the key that would open that back room, because he knew David would have it locked. Going through the shop, Byron passed Buddy Pritchard, one of the mechanics, hunching under the hood of a Mack. "David come through here?" he asked.
 

"Yup. In the back. But I don't think he wants anymore company," the mechanic chuckled, never turning away from his work.

Without pausing, Byron went to the door in the dark narrow corridor in back and slipped the key in, opening it without knocking. He figured maybe a surprise visit would shake the boy up a little, make him think twice next time.
 

"David?" he said, stepping inside. "We got a cop out fruh—"

The only light came from a small covered lamp on the card table. David sat on the sofa with his head leaning back and arms limp at his sides. His pants were around his ankles, just as Byron had expected, and the girl he'd seen through the window earlier was kneeling between David's legs, slurping.
 

But something was wrong.

David was panting. His chest was heaving up and down in rapid piston-like rhythm and his mouth and eyes were open wide. Too wide. Not the kind of a wide that comes with pleasure but with fear or pain. And the girl, who didn't react to Byron's presence for a moment, held David's cock in her fist, pounding frantically, holding it to the side so it was out of the way of her face, which was buried in the fold of flesh between David's thigh and groin. Her head moved up and down, back and forth, and the noise she made...such a loud, thick sound, like a calf sucking its mother's tit.
 

And David continued to pant, unaware of Byron. He looked so pale in the poor light.

Feeling bad now, regretting the intrusion, Byron repeated, "David, there's a cop out—"

The girl spun around, dark hair flying about her face with the sudden movement.

Something dribbled from her mouth. Something dark.

It was on David's leg, too, smeared there like jam on toast.

David kept panting...panting and panting...

Byron said quietly, "What in theee
fuck
—"
 

The girl dove. She shot across the room like an attacking dog, bloody hands outstretched, mouth yawning open and eyes narrowed to black cuts. And something else, something impossible, something ridiculous. She had—
 

—fangs. They were long and curved and red with David's blood and they seemed to grow longer as her lips pulled back and her mouth opened wider. She hissed—an awful sound, colder than the snow outside—and her palms struck Byron's chest and slammed him back against a four foot high bookshelf full of grimy thick binders, grease stained telephone books and catalogs, and his lungs emptied under the force of her blow. He slid to the floor and fell on his side in front of the open door, clutching his chest and fighting for a breath, just one breath, but his lungs did not seem to be there anymore and—
 

—the girl closed her fists around his shirt and—

—No, Byron thought as his scalp shriveled,
no, she can't do this, she's too tiny, just a tiny little thing, just a kid, she can't, she just can't, SHE CAN'T BE FUCKIN' DOIN’ THIS
! —
 

—she lifted him off the cement floor, his whole body, all two hundred and sixty pounds of him, just swept him up and threw him across the room, and—
 

—Byron hit the back of the sofa with a monstrous thud, pounding the whole sofa against the wall, then he rolled to the floor at David's feet. He was getting up instantly, rising to his knees and turning toward the door, but—
 

—the girl was gone.

Gagging as he tried to breathe, Byron half-crawled to the door, leaning against the doorjamb as he pulled himself to his feet and leaned out to look down the corridor and into the shop.
 

Buddy was still working on the truck. The girl was not there.

Byron tried to speak several times before he actually made a sound and when he did, his voice was like rusty pipes: "Stuh-stop that guh-girl!
Stopper
!"
 

Buddy looked at Byron distractedly. "Huh? What?"

"That guh-girl!" He pointed with a shaking hand. "Just ran through here.
Stop her
!"
 

"What girl?"

"The one who—she just ran—she was just—"

"Nobody's been through here but you." Annoyed, he went back to work, muttering, "The hell you guys
doin'
in there, anyways?"
 

Byron spun around, nearly falling, and staggered across the room to David's side.

His eyes and mouth were still open wide, but he'd stopped panting. In fact, he looked like he'd stopped
breathing
. His erection twitched, smeared with blood; his dark pubic hairs were caked with it, matted and glistening, and more of it ran from the wound beside his groin.
 

Byron fell onto the sofa and slapped a hand onto David's chest, shaking him as he barked, "David!
David
, are you
okay
?"
 

The young man blinked, lifted his head slowly, lips curling into a drunken smile. When he saw Byron, the smile disappeared and he blinked some more, rapidly, confused. "Whaf re you..." He looked around, frowning. "Where'd she go? She wasn't even—she didn' fin—"
 

He saw the blood. Stared at it the way he might have stared at a tap dancing frog. Then he screamed, "Jesus
Gawd
Jesus
Gawd
I'm
bleeding
I'm
bleeding
Jesus
Gawd
Jesus
Gaw
—"
 

Byron gripped his shoulders and pushed him back, squeezing as he said, "S'okay, Dave, s'okay, now, you're gonna be fine, just fine, so calm down, now, calm down." Then, over his shoulder, he shouted, "Get some help!"
 

Buddy came to the door and stared for a long moment, wiping his hands on a dirty rag. "The hell happened here?"

"Goddammit, just get some
help
!" In the small space, Byron's tremendous voice sounded as if it could move furniture and Buddy flinched, then hurried away. Turning to David, he asked softly, "What happened, now, David? Tell me. What' d she do?"
 

He'd stopped screaming and was whimpering now, head shaking back and forth, back and forth as he said, again and again, "Not bad, please God, don't let it be bad, not bad, not too bad..."
 

There was a large metal sink in the corner of the room with a paper towel dispenser above it on the wall. Byron got a towel, wet it, and knelt beside David, dabbing the blood away gently.
 

David had stopped looking down.

There were two wounds—puncture marks—and not very neat ones.

Byron pressed the wet towel over the wounds and tried to stop the bleeding, thinking all the while of the girl. Her teeth.
No, no...fangs
, he reminded himself, blowing hard through pursed lips and puffing his cheeks.
 

"She bit me, Byron," David rasped, clutching Byron's sleeve. His face was colorless and his saucered eyes were watering. "And I knew it. I
knew
it."
 

"You knew what?"

"I knew what she was doing, but...but I couldn't, you know...
stop
her because it...it felt good. I thought she was gonna suck me off but she
bit
me and,
Goddamn
, Byron, if
felt good
!"
 

He stared up at Byron with the expression of a man who has just realized that everything he's ever been taught in his whole life thus far is wrong; for a moment, his grip on Byron's sleeve tightened, then his whole body became limp and his head fell back, mouth open. He made more whimpering sounds—"Ooohh-ho, oh-ho boy, ooohh..."—then said, "I don't feel so good, Byron."
 

"Yeah, I know, buddy, but you're gonna be fine. Somebody's coming." He stared at David's deadly pale complexion, noticed the way his skin seemed to sag as if he'd lost even the slightest muscle tone. A simple bite would not have done that. But Byron knew it had not been a simple bite.
 

He remembered the awful slurping sounds he'd heard upon entering the room...

"Well," Byron said, trying to sound jovial, "maybe this'11 teach you. No more screwing around on the job." He chuckled and patted David's shoulder. But he was not jovial and the chuckle and gesture were lies. He was worried. That girl, whoever she was, had sucked blood from David Pike's crotch and now she was out
there
somewhere.
 

Worst of all, Byron could not—no matter how hard he tried—remember what she looked like. And something told him that David wouldn't remember either...
 

CHAPTER 10

About twenty minutes before Byron discovered David in the shop's back room, a terrible accident occurred on Interstate 5 between the Sierra Gold Pan Truck Stop and Yreka. It was the kind of accident that no one involved saw coming, not even in the final two seconds before it actually happened, and which no one involved could explain later. It just
happened
.
 

Eight vehicles were involved.

Three of the vehicles were eighteen wheelers, two of which were tankers, and their trailers were scattered like seeds in a new garden. The trailers, once they came to rest, managed to block Interstate 5 in both directions, the tanks spilling their contents onto the highway.
 

This was the news that Deputy Travis Cody of the Yreka Sheriff's Office brought with him when he arrived at the Sierra Gold Pan Truck Stop in response to a call regarding a parking lot fight. In the office of the truck stop's travel store, Cody shared the news hurriedly with the injured man, one Malcolm Osick, and one of the store's cashiers, Bette Fremon.
 

"I'm really sorry," Cody said, "but you're gonna be cut off from the hospital for a long time because of the chemical spill and I gotta get over to the scene right now, so you'll have to do the best you can until I can get somebody over here or come back for you myself."
 

Osick lay groaning on a cot and Bette sat beside him, an open first aid kit on her lap, dabbing Osick's battered nose with a piece of gauze dipped in alcohol.
 

Cody was winding up his apology quickly as he backed out of the office when he collided with Buddy Pritchard, who was stumbling into the office looking haggard and a little ill.
 

"Oh, um, yeah, yeah," Buddy said, running a hand through his wet snowy hair, "Byron said you'd be here. Um, yeah, um, we need you over to the shop. There's a guy there, David, a guy from the gas island. He's, um, bleeding. Really bad. I don't know what's happened, but there's, um, blood. A
lotta
blood. I think he's hurt pretty bad."
 

Cody rolled his eyes slowly and sighed, shaking his head. That was when he suggested that Bette get on the P. A. and page a doctor or nurse...
 

"Where the hell have you
been
?" Adelle hissed when Jon returned.
 

Jon started to scoot in beside Dara when Doug saw him freeze, half seated, eyes locked on the space between Doug and Adelle and just above Cece's head. He didn't move for a moment, just stared, suspended in his awkward about-to-sit position. Then he dropped into the seat, blinking rapidly, suddenly looking ashen, drained, as if he'd just seen aliens land in the parking lot.
 

Jon said quietly, "I was just...um, playing some video games... is all." He bowed his head and frowned at his cheeseburger.

"Well, your food's getting cold," Adelle said, her tone softer now. "C'mon, eat up, hon." She was just now beginning to wind down from her conversation with her sister; Doug could almost see the tension rolling off her like beads of perspiration.
 

Jon picked up the burger and took a bite hesitantly, as if he weren't sure what rested between the sesame seed buns. As he chewed, his eyes wandered to that space above Cece's head again, staring at something.
 

Trying to be inconspicuous, Doug looked back over his shoulder. He saw nothing unusual, nothing to warrant the troubled look in Jon's eyes. There was just the crowded restaurant and, seated in the next booth, the two loud unbathed men Doug had seen out front earlier; the worst of the two faced Doug and both were hunched over their plates eating noisily and sloppily.