Not If You Were the Last Vampire on Earth (16 page)

Ike was revealed behind him as the vamp fell, standing tall and grim. He rolled his shoulders and his eyes squeezed shut in pain for a minute before he regained his control and looked at me. He extended a single hand to help me up. He glanced at the vamp I took out minutes before on the floor.

“Is he dead?”

I shook my head. “Knocked out. You’ll want to secure him before he wakes. There’s rope in the storage closet or tranquilizer darts in the room where the dog cages were.”

“We’re at nine minutes.”

I nodded. “Yeah. Thank you. For everything you’re doing for her.”

His gray eyes appraised me thoughtfully. “Just finish it. Okay? I gave her a map to a human colony,” he said. “Drew it out for her. Get her there. But do not go any further than the lake. No vamp has ever crossed into that colony. Not even me and that’s my aunt and sister in there. You get her to the lake and you leave.”

I looked at him solemnly. He was asking me to give Tasha up. To take her to this colony and then walk away.

I loved her. I loved her so much I knew I would do exactly what he was asking.

“Understood,” I told him without hesitation.

And I could tell from the look that flitted across his face that he believed me.

Chapter 38

Her

Nine minutes.

Damn it, Alex.

I sat in the passenger seat. I was coming out of my skin. I knew the waves of nerves were radiating from me. I could hear my dogs whining in the cargo hold.

“We’ll go,” I hissed to them out the window. “We’re just going to wait one more minute.”

Ten minutes.

I lied. I couldn’t bring myself to take the truck out of park. I knew if I didn’t see his face, my fate was going to play out here at the M.D. Anderson Medical Center.

Eleven-

Sweet Jesus Almighty! I never thought Alex’s face could look any more desirable but I was wrong. Seeing it twisted in worry and hurrying through the parking garage was the best vision I could possibly have right now.

He ran up to the driver’s side yanking the door open and I quickly scooted over to the passenger side to give him room.

I frantically pulled on my seatbelt as he threw the gear in drive and peeled out of the garage. The sunlight hit my eyes and assaulted my vision as I struggled to clip myself in.

“What took so long?” I yelled as he simultaneously yelled at me, “I told you to leave!”

Sweat dripped in rivers down his temple. His knuckles were painted red in blood. I swallowed thickly at the sight of him.

“You knew I wouldn’t leave,” I said in lowered tones. All the frustration I had in me bubbled away. Whatever transpired on his end looked far worse than my extra four minutes waiting in the silent truck.

I felt him glance at me, but I couldn’t tear my eyes away from his hands. He followed my gaze then quickly wiped them on the front of his shorts. “It’s worse than it looks,” he muttered.

“Is it?”

“I didn’t have to kill anyone. So that’s a start.”

“Is Ike okay?”

Alex nodded. “More than okay. He wasn’t kidding when he said his military training made him ready for stuff like this.”

I rubbed my hollow chest, trying to catch up to a shit ton of new realities. Since I woke up with a start this morning, everything I’ve known has been bludgeoned over the head and returned to me in a huge, pulpy, confusing mess. “How can everything be so different in just a few short hours?” I murmured, mostly to myself.

Alex reached out a hand to me but his eyes caught on some missed blood and he quickly withdrew. I caught it on the seat in between us and held. Everything around me may have changed, but he was still my vamp. I wondered if he would miss Houston the way I missed Tucson. He’d apparently traveled around a lot but I could still sympathize leaving the place you grew up.

A thought suddenly struck me.

“Go to your childhood home!” I demanded.

He casted a bewildered look in my direction. “What?”

“I’ve been there. Several times. There’s something I need to get from there. Please.”

“Vince might know about it. We were friends for years. He might think to check there.”

“We have enough time. Vince is busy playing turf wars with those other vamps. It won’t take long, I promise. Please.
Please.
” The painting I made for him was still in his childhood home, patiently waiting for his birthday to roll around. It was likely we wouldn’t be anywhere near Houston by then. I couldn’t bear to leave Kisa and his mom’s portrait hanging there, forever frozen in obscurity. Not like the others. Not when it didn’t have to be that way.

He looked hesitant but I could tell by the way his knuckles tightened on the steering wheel that he was relenting. The car jerked suddenly towards the next exit and we headed towards Highway 290.

“What were you doing there anyway?” Alex asked after several silent minutes of driving. He narrowed his eyes. “I never told you where I grew up.”

“I’m a snoop. That’s learned in Tasha 101, Alex.”

He drove quickly through the roads. I’d never driven to his home at this pace. I had always savored the drive, trying to look at the landmarks as he would’ve seen them.

One time when I’d asked him about his neighborhood growing up, he’d been vague. He shrugged and continued plopping drops onto microscope slides as he responded to me.

“It was typical. Typical streets. Typical school. Typical neighbors. My mom was always freaked out about me getting exposed so we were the normal-est of the normal families. We lived in one of those cookie cutter developments where every house is the same shape with different color shutters. We drove a Honda. We bought sliced wheat bread and hung up a tasteful amount of Christmas lights and cut our lawn every week and my mom refused to teach us to speak Korean. Even though my grandma moved here from Korea while pregnant with her and spoke very little English. We couldn’t talk to our grandmother.”

I had rubbed his back and he’d sighed but continued with his work. I never uttered a word about the little white house with blue shutters that I had spent my afternoons digging around in. I conjured the image up in my mind as he spoke, enjoying the layers his words dripped over the memories I had of laying in his old bed and staring at his Beastie Boys poster.

He slowed the vehicle to a crawl and pulled the moving truck up to the curb in front of the house before turning off the engine. He faced me expectantly.

“Five minutes,” I breathed to him with a small smile before sliding out of the passenger door. He shook his head but followed me.

“Did you break in?” he asked as I pulled a key out from under a dead plant on the porch.

“The first time,” I admitted. “But I found the spare key-”

“-in the mail drawer by the sink,” he finished for me. “That’s like, level four snooping if you came across that.”

I didn’t answer, just pushed into the front door with Alex close on my heels. My heart was pounding. Harder than when we had bullets aimed in our direction. I’d never shown my work to anyone. Obviously. That my first reveal would be the one person I’d want to please most in the world...that scared the shit out of me.

He stood in the entrance way with me so I closed the door and walked in further since he was taking my lead.

I walked around to all the large windows in the living room and opened the curtains to let in the afternoon sunshine. Alex had been shuffling around behind me, picking up the remote, poking at some magazines, pulling in details he’d probably forgotten about but I sensed the moment he went absolutely still.

My opening the last curtain slowed down in response and I couldn’t bear to turn around and read his face. My fist tightened in the fabric and my pulse wreaked havoc on my system. He was still quiet. This was a terrible idea.

I sunk to my knees and stared out the window to the street Alex grew up on. A bike still leaned against a tree, all rusted and brown and forgotten. The leaves were still green and bright despite it being fall in the rest of the world. It was quiet, like a siesta quiet, like the neighbors were all just napping. On the outside, this street looked untouched.

Still no sound from Alex.

I leaned my chin on the window sill and let the sun warm my face. My stomach knotted, loosened, knotted again. If he didn’t like it, I knew I would never paint again. I never considered that a loved one may come across one of my works and hate it. How vain was I? Maybe seeing their images and tokens and snatches of life brushed across a canvas would just rip open old wounds. I thought I’d been helping but maybe it would make the lonely seem lonelier. The empty seem emptier. I would need to find something else meaningful to do with my time.

I felt him rip me away from the window. His hands were strong and firm on my arms. He stood me up and turned me to face him. Tears stained tracks down his cheeks.

His voice came out raspy. “I love you for this.”

And then his arms squeezed me and his tears wet my shoulder and I brought my hands up to run my fingers through his short, dark hair.

“Happy early birthday,” I whispered.

Chapter 39

Her

We didn’t go straight to Washington. Alex needed more juice. He had a store of it in Portland but he was nervous about going without for that long. We opted instead to make a pit stop in Oklahoma City. It would mean going the opposite way for a bit but truthfully, I loved the idea. Ever since Ike told me about the settlement, my skin tingled with the thought of living life among people again, but at the same time Alex had become very important to me. I was headed towards a crossroads and I wanted to fend off that intersection as long as possible.

We made love outside the Dr. Pepper museum in Waco. We had driven well into the night and we both needed to get off the road for a couple hours. Alex told me about the one and only soft drink he loved.

“The taste is so peppery sweet,” he said, flicking the hair around my ears. We were stretched out on the bed of a Ford F-150. We’d ditched the moving truck in a small town outside of Houston where the people were more trusting and keys to vehicles were in obvious places. Alex chose the truck because he hated sharing a van with the dogs.

“I get it. I love those three buffoons, but they’re doggie breath can
kill
,” he’d complained.

Right now Mowgli, Bagheera, and Baloo were stretched out around the truck on the ground, dusting their coats with dirt and nipping at grass.

Alex took a swig of the cold soda. Someone had hooked up a fridge of the stuff to a k-cell generator. Nothing else. Just the fridge. It was like Christmas for Alex.

“I used to drink one everyday,” he said. “After school in the main hallway. There was this soda machine and my friends and I would hang out there waiting for the bus. I felt normal.”

“You were normal.”

He pulled a face. “I was the weird vampy kid. Just, no one knew that except me and Kisa.”

“I would have liked Kisa.”

“You would have. And she would have liked you.”

“I’m sorry I’ll never have the chance to know her.”

Alex kissed me then, slow and soft. As he drew away, he smiled. “You did know her. In the way that you discover people. That picture-” he nodded towards the cab of the truck. “You saw things I’d forgotten.” He paused for a moment and his eyes got that faraway look that I knew so well. He was about to tell me something. “Kisa didn’t die in The Sweep.”

I raised my eyebrows. He didn’t talk much about his family’s death. I’d always just assumed the virus got them.

“She died in a car accident. While I was in med school. During the time when The Sweep first began and it was just vampires and vamps dying off. It was just an ordinary accident. I was so beside myself with grief. I had gone deeper undercover, contacting them only once a month. One month when I called, my mom told me about it. She had to wait three weeks to let me know my twin sister died.” He shook his head. “I felt like the worst brother in the world.”

I rubbed his shoulder while he shared, hurting for him. The grief lightened from his eyes as he pulled himself from the memory. “In a way, I guess it was for the best. She didn’t have to see what became of this world. My mother’s death was a far more painful way to go. Like your dad’s.”

“Worst months of my life,” I stated.

“Yeah. Mine, too.”

And then he reached a hand around me, placing it on the small of my back and pulling me flush against him. He didn’t say anything else, just claimed me silently in the bed of the truck underneath the large
Dr. Pepper Museum
sign. Our clothing was discarded. He tasted me, bringing me to finish more than once and I tasted him, providing him with sweet torture.

“Okay,” he’d said breathlessly when I’d gone down for his turn. “We need to change course. I want to be inside you when I come.”

Afterward, we slept that way, naked under the stars. I had my head on his shoulder which reminded him to sleepily murmur promises to stamp it with a property of me tattoo.

In the morning he made campfire biscuits out of flour, sugar, and powdered milk that he brought back to life with some water. They were pretty gritty and had an overly starchy taste without butter but we hadn’t had time to scrounge up much else in our hasty getaway.

The Oklahoma City stash turned out to be a bust. We arrived in the city in good spirits. Alex had been there briefly on a Clearance mission and had hidden a stash in a Circle K gas station. He tended to do that. Hide stashes around in case he ever needed quick access.

However, he found it was raided. He came out of the station looking grim. I tried to smile and joke about his poor hiding talents but that didn’t shake the seriousness from his face.

“Where’s the next stash?” I asked. I didn’t mind taking another detour. Just the thought of a human settlement was enough to make me buoyant. I could put off actually arriving on that thought alone. Buy more time with Alex.

He pursed his lips. “The next closest is Portland.” He turned the ignition. “Tasha, we need to drive fast.”

Some of the playfulness left my voice. “When’s the last time you ate?”

“Three days ago. I haven’t eaten since before Vince and his crew showed up. I’m sorry. This stash has always been here. I check it every time I drive back through this way home. For years.” He cursed under his breath. “I was careless. We shouldn’t have stopped for the night.”

I gulped nervously. “How long can you go?”

He pulled onto the highway and accelerated, gripping the steering wheel tightly. He didn’t look at me when he answered. “Three days.”