They Thirst (3 page)

A few moments later a sidewinder began to undulate toward the rabbit's cooling carcass.

And on the motorcycle, enveloped in a cocoon of wind and thunder, the rider stared along the cone of white light his single, high-intensity beam afforded, and with a fractional movement he guided the machine to the center of the road. His black-gloved fist throttled upward; the machine growled like a well-fed panther and kicked forward until the speedometer's needle hung at just below ninety. Behind a battered, black crash helmet with visor lowered, the rider was grinning. He wore a sleek, skin-tight, black leather jacket and faded jeans with leather-patched knees. The jacket was old and scarred, and across the back rose a red Day-Glo king cobra, its hood fully swollen. The paint was flaking off, as if the reptile were shedding its skin. The machine thundered on, parting a wall of silence before it, leaving desert denizens trembling in its wake. A garishly painted sign—blue music notes floating above
a
pair of tilted, red beer bottles, the whole thing pocked with rust-edged bullet holes—came up on the right. The rider glanced quickly at it, reading JUST AHEAD! THE WATERIN' HOLE! and below that, FILL 'ER UP, PARDNER!
Yeah,
he thought.
Time to fill up.

Two minutes later there was the first, faint glimmer of blue neon against the blackness. The rider began to cut his speed; the speedometer's needle fell quickly to eighty, seventy, sixty. Ahead there was a blue neon sign—THE WAT RIN' H LE—above the doorway of a low, wooden building with a flat, dusty red roof. Clustered around it like weary wasps around a sun-bleached nest were three cars, a jeep, and a pickup truck with most of its dull blue paint scoured down to the muddy red primer. The motorcycle rider turned into a tumbleweed-strewn parking lot and switched off his engine; immediately the motorcycle's growl was replaced with Freddy Fender's nasal voice singing about "wasted days and wasted nights." The rider put down the kickstand and let the black Harley ease back, like a crouching animal. When he stood up and off the machine, his muscles were as taut as piano wires; the erection between his legs throbbed with heat.

He popped his chin strap and lifted the helmet off, exposing a vulpine, sharply chiseled face that was as white as new marble. In that bloodless face the deep pits of his eyes bore white pupils, faintly veined with red. From a distance they were as pink as a rabbit's, but up close they became snakelike, glittering coldly, unblinking, hypnotizing. His hair was yellowish-white and closely cropped; a blue trace of veins at the temples pulsed an instant behind the jukebox's beat. He left his helmet strapped around the handlebars and moved toward the building, his gaze flickering toward the cars: there was a rifle on a rack in the truck's cab, a "Hook 'Em Horns!" sticker on a car's rear fender, a pair of green dice dangling from the jeep's rearview mirror.

When he stepped through the screen door into a large room layered with smoky heat, the six men inside—three at a table playing cards, two at a light bulb-haloed pool table, one behind the bar—instantly looked up and froze. The albino biker met each gaze in turn and then sat on one of the bar stools, the red cobra on his back a scream of color in the murky light. After another few seconds of silence, a pool cue cracked against a ball like a gunshot. "Aw, shit!" one of the pool players—a broad-shouldered man wearing a red checked shirt and dusty Levis that had been snagged a hundred times on barbed wire—said loudly with a thick Texas drawl. "At least that screwed up your shot, didn't it, Matty?"

"Sure did," Matty agreed. He was about forty, all arms and legs, short red hair, and a lined forehead half-covered by a sweat-stained cowboy hat. He was chewing slowly on a toothpick, and now he stood where he could consider the lie of the balls, do some more chewing, and watch that strange-looking white dude from the corner of his eye.

The bartender, a hefty Mexican with tattooed forearms and heavy-lidded black eyes, came down the bar following the swirls of a wet cloth. "Help you?" he asked the albino and looked up into the man's face; instantly he felt us if his spine had been tapped with an ice pick. He glanced over toward where Slim Hawkins, Bobby Hazelton and Ray Cope sat in the third hour of their Friday night poker game; he saw Bobby dig an elbow into Ray's ribs and grin toward the bar.

The albino said quietly, "Beer."

"Sure, coming up." Louis the bartender turned away in relief. The biker looked bizarre, unclean, freakish. He was hardly a man, probably nineteen or twenty at the most. Louis picked up a glass mug from a shelf and a bottle of Lone Star from the stuttering refrigerator unit beneath the bar. From the jukebox, Dolly Parton began singing about "burning, baby, burning." Louis slid the mug across to the albino and then quickly moved away, swirling the cloth over the polished wood of the bar. He felt as if he were sweating in the glare of a midday sun.

Balls cracked together on the green-felt pool table. One of them thunked into a corner pocket. "There you go, Will," Matty drawled. "That's thirty-five you owe me, ain't it?"

"Yeah, yeah. Damn it, Louis, why don't you turn that fuckin' music box down so a man can concentrate on his pool playin'! "

Louis shrugged and motioned toward the poker table.

"I like it that loud," Bobby Hazelton said, grinning over kings and tens. He was a part-time rodeo bronco-buster with a crew cut and a prominent gold tooth. Three years ago he'd been on his way to a Texas title when a black bastard of a horse called Twister had thrown him and broken his collarbone in two places. "Music helps me think. Will, you oughta come on over here and lemme take some of that heavy money you're carrying around."

"Hell, naw! Matty's doing too good a job at that tonight!" Will put his cue stick away in the rack, glancing quickly over at the albino and then at Bobby. "You boys best watch old Bobby," he warned. 'Took me for over fifty bucks last Friday night."

"Just luck," Bobby said. He spread his cards out on the table, and Slim Hawkins said in his gravely voice, "Shee-yit!" Bobby reached for his chips and gathered them in.

"Dumb luck my ass," Ray Cope said. He leaned over the table, and Slim Hawkins said in his gravelly voice, empty paper cup. "Jesus, it's hot in here tonight!" He let his gaze shift past the red cobra on that kid's jacket.
Goddamn biker,
he thought, narrowing ice-blue eyes rimmed with wrinkles.
Don't know what it is to work for a livin'. Probably one of those punks who robbed Jeff Hardy's grocery store in Pecos a few days back.
He could see the kid's hands as the albino lifted the beer mug and drank. Under those gloves, Cope thought, the hands were probably as white and soft as Mary Ruth Kennon's thighs. His own large hands were chunky and rough and scarred from ten years of ranch work.

The Dolly Parton song faded. Another record dropped, hissed, and crackled for a few seconds like hot fat on a griddle. Waylon Jennings started singing about going to Luckenbach, Texas. Matty called for another Lone Star and a pack of Marlboros.

The albino downed the rest of his beer and sat staring into the mug for a moment. He began to smile slightly, as if at a private joke, but the smile was cold and terrible, and Louis winced when he happened to catch it. The albino swiveled around on his stool, reared his arm back, and flung the mug straight into the jukebox. Colored glass and plastic exploded like several over-and-under shotguns going off at once; Waylon Jennings's voice went into an ear-piercing falsetto for an instant, then rumbled down to a basso as the turntable went crazy. Lights flickered; the record droned to a stop. There was utter silence in the bar, broken only by the sound of pieces of glass clinking to the floor.

Louis had raised his head from where he'd bent down for Matty's beer. He stared at the ruined jukebox.
Madre de Dios!
he thought,
that thing was three hundred dollars almost five years ago!
Then he looked over at the albino who was watching him with a death's head grin plastered across his unholy face. At last Louis got his tongue working. "You crazy?" Louis screamed. "What the shit you do that for?"

Chairs scraped back from the poker table. Immediately the place was filled with the ozone smell of danger and hot tempers.

With eyes like solid chunks of blood-veined ice, the albino said, "I don't like that shitkicker music."

"You crazy, man?" Louis shrieked, sweat popping out on his face.

Bobby Hazelton, his hands curled into fists, said between clenched teeth, "You gonna pay for that machine, freak."

"Sure as hell are," Ray Cope echoed.

The albino turned on his stool very slowly and faced the men. His smile froze everyone but Will Jenks, who stepped back a pace. "Got no money," the albino said.

"I'll call the sheriff then, you
bastardo!"
Louis started to move down the bar toward the pay phone on the wall, but instantly the albino said "No you won't" in a softly chilling voice. Louis stopped where he was, his heart hammering.

"No call to bust that machine," Matty said and picked up a pool cue from the rack. "This is a peaceable place."

"Was,"
Bobby said. "What're you doin' around here anyway, freak? Lookin' to rob somebody maybe? Have some fun with somebody's wife or daughter when the man's gone to work? Huh?"

"I'm heading through. Going to L.A." The albino, still smiling faintly, glanced at each of them in turn—the track of his gaze freezing Ray Cope's veins, making Will Jenks's temples throb, sending a shudder along Slim Hawkins's spine. "Thought I'd stop to fill up, like the sign says."

"You're gonna pay," Louis threatened, but his voice sounded weaker. There was a shotgun under the bar, but to get it he'd have to step nearer to the albino, and something within him warned him not to.

"Nobody asked you to stop here, cottonhead!" Ray Cope steeled himself and began to move around the pool table toward the albino. "We don't like you biker freaks around here!"

"I don't like shitkickers either." This was said calmly, almost offhandedly, as if the albino had just said he didn't particularly care for the dry tang of the Lone Star beer, but instantly a surge of electric tension ringed the room. Bobby Hazelton's eyes bulged with anger, the sweat stains under his arms growing larger in circumference. The albino slowly began to unzip his jacket.

"What'd you say, freak?" Bobby hissed.

The albino, his stare impassive, whispered, "Shit . . . kickers."

"You sonofabitch!" Bobby shouted and then leaped toward the biker with fists swinging. But in the next instant the albino's jacket came open; there was a terrifying roar, a burst of blue smoke, and a hole where Bobby Hazelton's right eye had been. Bobby screamed, clawing at his face even as the wadcutter slug tore away the back of his head and spattered the men behind him with bits of bone and brain. He pinwheeled across the poker table, crashing down on kings and jokers and aces, and on the floor the legs of the corpse kept jerking as if Bobby were still trying to run.

The albino, blue smoke wafting between him and the other men, had withdrawn from the inside of his jacket a pistol with a long, thin barrel, a squarish black body, and a grip that resembled a sawed-off length of broom handle. The deadly muzzle was drooling smoke. The albino stared, his eyes slightly widened, at the contorted corpse on the floor.

"You killed him!" Slim Hawkins said with incredulous wonder, clawing at the droplets of Bobby's blood across the front of his gray cowboy shirt with the pearl-stud buttons. "Jesus God, you killed him . . ." He choked, gagged, and started to throw up through his hands.

"Godawmighty!" Will said, his mouth hanging open. He had seen a piece like the one that kid held once before, at a gun and knife show in Houston. It was an old automatic the Germans had used back in World War II—a broom-handle Mauser, he thought it was called. Ten slugs to a clip, and the damned thing could fire faster than a man could blink. "Bastard's got a machine-gun pistol!"

"Yeah," the albino said softly, "that's right."

Louis, his heart beating so hard he thought it would explode through his chest, took a breath and dove for the shotgun. He squawked with terror as his feet slipped out from under him on a wet spot. But even as his hands curled around cold iron, the albino had whirled around, eyes brimming with bloodlust. Louis looked up into two bullets that sheared off the top of his head. He crashed backward into a shelf of beer mugs, his brain exposed to the world; the corpse uttered a soft, eerie sigh and crumpled into a heap.

"Oh . . . God
. . ." Will breathed. Bile rose to the top of his throat, and he almost strangled on it.

"Hold on now, fella . . . just hold on now . . ." Matty was saying over and over again, like a record that had gotten stuck on the jukebox. His face was now almost as white as the albino's, and his cowboy hat was splattered with Bobby Hazelton's blood. He put his hands up as if begging for mercy, which he was because in that terrible instant the men knew they were going to die.

The albino stepped through a churning curtain of smoke. He was smiling like a child at Christmas who wanted to see what would spill out when the packages were ripped open.

"Please," Will said hoarsely, his eyes wide circles of terror. "Please don't. . . kill us . . ."

"Like I said," the biker replied evenly, "I stopped in to fill up. When you boys get to Hell, you tell the devil Kobra sent you. That's with a
K."
He grinned and opened fire. A bloody cowboy hat sailed up toward the ceiling; bodies writhed and spun and fell like marionettes on crazy strings; a few teeth torn from a blasted mouth rattled to the floor; fragments of a gray shirt with pearl-stud buttons floated toward the rear of the room on the breath of a volcano.