The Coldest Girl in Coldtown (7 page)

Death is a shadow that always follows the body.

—English proverb

T
ana directed Aidan to pull the car into a gas station about an hour after they’d left Lance’s house. There were no other cars in sight, and these days all twenty-four-hour marts had bulletproof-glass cashiers’ booths, so she thought it’d be safe to stop. Full dark had fallen, her arm was starting to ache from holding the tire iron, and she was pretty sure she wasn’t going to be able to keep it together much longer. Exhaustion was creeping up on her, her cuts stinging and her head throbbing. She hadn’t eaten anything since she’d woken—hadn’t even thought of eating—and each time her stomach growled, Aidan looked over at her as though her hunger reminded him of his own.

It was hard to stay alert, hard not to be distracted by images of the farmhouse, of bodies, rising up behind her eyelids when she
blinked, everything drenched in red. And along with that, the memory of the vampire’s teeth scraping the back of her leg, his hand clamped on her calf.

She’d watched programs in health class talking about the spread of infection. There’d been an illustration of the human mouth and the vampire mouth side by side. She thought of it, illustrated in blue and yellow, pink and red. Vampire canines grew longer than their human counterparts, with thin channels that let the creature draw blood up through its teeth and into the back of its throat. When a vampire bit down, a little of its own fouled blood was pushed into the human bloodstream, causing infection. There’d been cases like hers before, cases where the teeth didn’t fully penetrate. Sometimes people were fine, sometimes they weren’t. If she didn’t go Cold in forty-eight hours, she’d know her luck had held.

Aidan pulled up to one of the pumps. “We can’t keep driving without a plan. We’ve got to go
somewhere
.”

“I know,” she said, her panic-fogged mind going round and round, every possible move seeming worse than the last. She had no idea what to do next. All she knew was that she felt about ready to jump out of her own skin.

As he opened the car door, a lock of hair fell into his eyes. He pushed it back, the way he’d always done. It seemed like such a normal gesture, when everything else was so not normal, when he wasn’t normal, that she had to swallow past the lump in her throat.

He reached for the pump, selecting regular unleaded.

Tana felt as though everything was happening much too slow and too fast, all at once. During the drive, she’d been afraid to talk,
because if she started, she wouldn’t be able to hold how she felt inside. She wouldn’t be able to make him believe she was in control.

“We’ll get a map and make a plan,” she said, hoping he wouldn’t see how tired she was. If she seemed weak, she might seem more like prey. She made her voice as steady as she could. “I’m going to the bathroom to get cleaned up first, though. I’ll meet you in the mart after you’re done with the gas.”

From the trunk she heard a soft thump. Gavriel was back there, waiting to be freed. But what would he do then? Were they supposed to just dump him by the side of the road and hope for the best?

“We’ll be right back,” Tana called, and despite trying to control it, her voice quavered.

Slinging her handbag over her shoulder and grabbing her boots, she walked steadily away from Aidan and the car until she got to the corner of the mart, then she ran the rest of the way to the bathroom, slamming the door behind her and locking it. Before she could help it, she started sobbing. She cried and cried until she choked on her tears. She slid down the wall, crying so hard she could barely catch her breath. She slammed her fists against the loose linoleum tile of the floor, hoping the pain would shock her into calming.

Shock
, Tana thought,
I’m in shock
. But she didn’t really know what that meant, only that it was bad and that it happened in the movies. In movies, people got over it quickly, too, usually with a slap to the face.

Standing, she slapped her own cheek and watched it become rosy in the mirror above the grimy bathroom sink. She didn’t feel any different.

After long moments of standing there, staring at her reflection, she remembered that she’d said she was going to get cleaned up. She washed her arms in the sink, splashed water on her legs to rub off the blood. She couldn’t see the scrape on the back of her knee very well, but from what she could see, it looked not much different from her other scratches and cuts. It didn’t seem swollen or discolored. It didn’t seem deep. It didn’t seem like anything at all, much less something that could turn her into a monster. She cleaned it with the antibacterial soap in the pump and shaking fingers, hoping that could kill any infection before it spread. Then she stood up, leaning against the locked door, and started lacing up her boots, pulling the ties tight.

When she was done, she called Pauline.

Dialing the number was automatic, giving in to the temptation of momentary escapism. She couldn’t think as the phone rang; her mind felt empty of everything but the feeling that if Pauline answered, then she was going to be all right for a little while. Tana didn’t know what she was going to say, didn’t even know how to put together words to explain where she was or what had happened. She’d been operating on instinct and impulsiveness at Lance’s farmhouse—get everyone out and worry about the consequences later. But later had come. It was waiting for her outside the door. She could only forestall it.

“Hello?” Pauline’s voice was loud and in the background. Tana could hear music playing.

“Hey,” she said, like everything was normal. It felt good to pretend. Muscles along her shoulders relaxed minutely. “What are you doing?”

“Hold on, I have to go in the other room. So much is going on.”
A door shut on the other end of the line and the music dimmed. Then Pauline started telling Tana the news about David, her kinda sorta boyfriend at drama camp. He had a girlfriend back home—a girl he’d been with since middle school—but he’d been giving Pauline mixed signals all summer. Intense conversations and made-up excuses to touch each other during improvs, followed by agonized hand-wringing. His girlfriend was coming to visit Tuesday, but just that night David had kissed Pauline. She was freaking out.

Tana felt relief wash over her along with the familiar drama. She sagged against the door frame, tipping her head back and closing her eyes. She could have interrupted Pauline, could have told her about the nightmare drive through the dark with the tire iron in her hand, told her about the vampires and the carnage and the scrape of a tooth. But if she did, she would have to think about those things again.

So she listened to Pauline tell her the story, and then they rehashed it a bit; and when Pauline asked her how she was doing, Tana said that she was fine.

She was fine and the party had been fine and everything was fine, fine, fine.

“You sound weird,” Pauline said. “Have you been crying?”

Tana thought about asking Pauline to find an abandoned place with a door that could be barred and lock her inside with a few gallons of water and granola bars. Pauline would do it for her; Tana knew she would. And a week later, when Tana begged and howled and screamed to be let out, maybe Pauline would do that as well. It was too big a risk.

So Tana insisted that she was really, really fine. Then Pauline had
to go because she had a nine o’clock curfew and was leaving the common room to head back to her dorm.

For long minutes after Tana hung up and put away her phone, she tried to hold on to the feeling of normalcy. But the more she stood there, the more her stomach cramped with fear, the more she was aware of how her skin felt hot and cold at once.

She had to not be infected, that was all. She had to not be infected so she and Pauline could move to California after graduation as they planned. They were going to rent a tiny apartment, and Tana was going to get a boring, steady job—like maybe be a waitress or work the front desk at a tattoo parlor or at a copy shop, where they’d get discounts on head shots—while Pauline went to her auditions. They were going to do each other’s makeup like pinup girls from the fifties and wear each other’s clothes. And they were going to swim in the Pacific Ocean and sit under palm trees while the warm breeze off the water ruffled their salt-crusted hair.

Finally, Tana realized that she couldn’t stay in the bathroom any longer. She opened the door, braced for an attack, braced for one of the vampires from the house to have followed her somehow, but there was no one and nothing—just a concrete lot and woods, lit by the flood lamps over the gas pumps. The night was sticky warm, and in the distance she could hear the singing of cicadas. Not caring if it made her a wimp to hate the dark, she ran back toward the brightly lit mart, only slowing when she was at the door. She jerked it open, wishing she hadn’t left her tire iron in the car, even though she was sure they didn’t let people bring stuff like that into regular businesses.

From behind the bulletproof glass, a clerk grinned at her like a
man who wasn’t too worried about his security. He had a mass of red hair sticking up from his head in gelled spikes.

There was a small television, mounted high up one wall, showing a feed from inside the Springfield Coldtown, where Demonia was introducing viewers to the newest guests at the Eternal Ball, a party that had started in 2004 and raged ceaselessly ever since.

In the background, girls and boys in rubber harnesses swung through the air. The camera swept over the dance floor, showing the crowd, a few of which had looping hospital tubes stuck to the insides of their arms. The lens lingered over a boy no older than nine holding out a paper cup to a thin blond girl. She paused and then, leaning down, twisted a knob on her tubing, causing a thin stream of blood to splash into the cup, red as the boy’s eyes and the tongue that darted out to lick the rim. Then the camera angle changed again, veering up to show the viewer the full height and majesty of the building. At the very highest point, several windowpanes had been replaced with black glass, glowing, but designed to keep out the kind of light that could scald certain partygoers.

Tana’s scar throbbed and she rubbed it without thinking.

“Hey,” Aidan said, touching her shoulder and making her jump. He was carrying a bottle of water, but he stared at the screen as if he’d forgotten about everything else. “Look at that.”

“It’s like the Hotel California,” Tana said. “Or a roach motel. Roaches check in but they don’t check out.”

All infected people and captured vampires were sent to Coldtowns, along with the sick, sad, or deluded humans who went there voluntarily. It was supposed to be a constant party, free for the price
of blood. But once people were inside, humans—even human children, even babies born in Coldtown—weren’t allowed to leave. The National Guard patrolled the barbed-wire-wrapped and holy-symbol-studded walls to make sure that Coldtowns stayed contained.

Springfield was the best known and the biggest Coldtown, with more live feeds, videos, and blogs coming out of there than from Coldtowns in much larger cities. That was partially because it was the first and partially because the Massachusetts government made sure that people trapped inside had power and communications sooner than the others The outbreak in Chicago was contained so fast that the quarantined area never had a chance to evolve into a walled city-within-a-city. Las Vegas was Springfield’s rival in live-streaming vampire entertainment, but blackouts were common, disrupting feeds and making regular viewing unreliable. New Orleans and Las Cruces were small, and the Coldtown in San Francisco had gone dark a year after its founding, with no one broadcasting anything out. There were people in there; satellites could track their heat signatures at night. That’s all anyone knew. But Springfield wasn’t just the best known and the biggest, Tana thought, looking at the screen, it was also the closest.

“It’d be a good place to hide out,” Aidan said, with a sly look at the car and the trunk with the vampire inside.

“You want to turn Gavriel in for a
marker
?” Tana asked him. There was one exception to the whole not-being-allowed-to-leave thing, one way out of Coldtown if you were still human—your family had to be rich enough to hire a vampire hunter, who would turn in a vampire in exchange for you. Vampire hunters got a bounty from
the government for each vampire they put in a Coldtown, but they could give up the cash reward in favor of a marker for a single human’s release. One vampire in, one human out.

Even amateur hunters who turned in a vampire could get a marker. If Aidan got one, then he could go into Coldtown and, if he stayed human, if he beat the infection, he could get out again.

“Not for a
marker
,” Aidan said, his eyes still on the screen. “For the
cash
. We could get some serious money from the bounty on a vampire. Enough for me to hole up for a couple of months in some crappy hotel and ride this thing out.”

“I think I got—not bit, exactly.” She blurted the words that she couldn’t tell Pauline, that she’d been afraid to say out loud. He needed to know if they were going to make real plans. “Scraped. With a tooth.”

That made him look at her, really look at her, his eyebrows drawn together with actual concern. “And you don’t know if you’re going to go Cold.”

“I have to assume I am.” She tried to not let him see how scared she was, how her heart thundered to say the words. “
We
have to assume.”

He nodded. “It’d be enough money for both of us to hole up for a while. Two rooms, two keys. We could pass them under the door to one another when we were done. But we’ve got to do something. I’m hungry, Tana.”

“Gavriel helped us—” She stopped herself, unsure. The farther they got from the farmhouse, the more Gavriel seemed like a monster all on his own. She thought of his eyes, red like spilled garnets, red as
poppies, red as the bright embers of a fire. She thought of what they taught in school:
cold hands, dead heart
. Plenty of vampires had forgotten how to feel anything but hunger. He’d helped her, sure, but that didn’t mean she could trust him not to turn on her now that they were out of danger. Vampires were unpredictable. “At least that gives us a direction to head in. I’m going to grab some food. You should try to eat, too, and see if it cuts down the craving.”