Vampire Seeker (16 page)

We appeared to have stopped at some remote railway station. A sign above the entrance read
Silent Rest
. From what I could see through the small window beside my bed, was more dust, cactus plants and…
Harry
! He passed beneath my window and I closed the gap in the curtain.

“Oh, my God!” I cried out, as memories of what had happened between us the night before flooded my mind.

Did we really do that?
I wondered, my cheeks flushing hot. Did I really tell him to take me from behind?!

“What was I thinking of?” I breathed, clapping my hands over my face. “How am I ever gonna look at him again?”

Slowly separating my fingers, I peered through them as I then remembered opening my eyes and discovering that he hadn’t
been in my room at all last night. It had all been a drunken fantasy. But had it? Quick flashes of memory sliced their way
through my hangover as I remembered discovering that the door to my room had been left open.

“Someone had been in here with me,” I said aloud, desperate to convince myself. But then again, I’d been
so drunk last night, I could’ve easily left the door open myself. I couldn’t be sure of anything.

“Sammy, wake up!” I shouted at myself, slapping my temples with the flat of my hands. “C’mon, you
can do it! You can wake up back in 2012 if you really think about it. C’mon!” I closed my eyes and thought of
all the things that I missed from back home and shouted them out loud. “Twitter! Facebook! iPod! Rihanna! Macky-Dee’s!
L’Oreal!”

“What’s iPod?” someone asked.

I snapped open my eyes to find Zoe standing in the doorway of my berth and looking at me with an odd look. She was holding
a silver tray in her hands.

“What’s iPod?” she asked me again.

“Something I could do with right now,” I gasped, shocked to see her standing there.

“So, what is iPod?” she asked, coming and sitting at the foot of my bed and placing the tray on her lap.

I looked at her; the whole situation was so surreal that I started to laugh.

“What’s so funny?” she asked with a half-smile on her pretty face.

“You, sitting there, asking me what is iPod,” I said. “iPod isn’t an
is
it’s a
what
.”

“What?” she said, her smile now fading, wondering if I was laughing at her?

“It doesn’t matter,” I said, still trying to mask my own smile. But to hear her say the name of an object
which wouldn’t be invented for another hundred years or more seemed so weird. I looked at her sitting on the end of
my bed, her rough woven denims, boots, blue shirt, gun belt with revolvers fastened to her thighs. She must be the only cowgirl
in 1888 who was ever going to mutter the word
iPod
.

But it wasn’t really funny. It was sad because I was either really trapped in 1888, going mad, or both. Without even
really knowing I was about to do it, I started to cry. My body shook as I wrapped the sheet about me and pressed the heels
of my hands over my eyes. I felt Zoe get up from the end of the bed, and slip her arm around my shoulders.

“Don’t cry,” Zoe said, squeezing me tight. “What’s wrong?”

“It’s nothing,” I sniffed.

“You can talk to me,” Zoe said. “I promise I won’t tell anyone.”

“I shouldn’t be here,” I snivelled. “I’m from another place.”

“I know,” Zoe said. “You’re from England. But that isn’t so bad, is it? I mean, you speak funny
and all, but that doesn’t bother me.”

“Thanks,” I laughed between my sobs. “I don’t fit in here – I don’t even know what I’m
doing here. I don’t know who I am anymore. It’s like I’m different somehow,” I blurted out.

“I felt like that once,” she said softly.

“You did?” I asked, taking my hands from over my eyes and looking at her.

“Sure,” she said, looking back at me.

“What happened?” I asked, wondering if she was like me in some way – had come from someplace else.

“The preacher saved me,” she said thoughtfully. “I was lost, and then found.”

“What do you mean by that?” I asked, wiping the tears from my cheeks.

“My whole family was killed by vampires,” she said, her eyes looking haunted, as if reliving some terrible nightmare.
“They came in the night as we slept in our beds. I woke up to the sounds of my mother’s screams. I was little
at the time, eleven, I think, it seems like such a long time ago now. My older brother, Jack came running into my room, and
taking me by the hand, he dragged me away to the barn where he hid me. He went back to help my mother and father, but those
vampires killed him, too.”

“How can you be so sure?” I asked her, shocked by what she was telling me.

“I hid in the barn three days. I was too scared to come out,” she whispered, still looking away. “It rained
really badly one night and I remember feeling so thirsty. My lips were cracked and dry so I licked up the rain which dribbled
in from beneath the barn door. In the end, I was so hungry I had to leave my hiding place. But then I wished I hadn’t.
I wished that I’d starved in that barn, because if I had never left it, I wouldn’t have seen their bodies. The
vampires had left my family strewn across the ground by the well. Their throats had been ripped out, and their bodies were
just empty shells. I shooed away the crows that pecked at them. I wanted to bury their bodies, but I couldn’t, I couldn’t
bring myself to touch them. I took some stale bread and a flask of water from the house and left the farm and never went back.
Filthy, tired, and scared, I staggered out into the desert. I remember counting three moon rises, so I think I walked for
three days. On the fourth, I collapsed in the searing heat. With my eyes half open, I prayed for Jesus to come and take me
away, to take me to him. Then with my eyes closing upon the world, I saw a figure riding towards me out of the desert. Through
the wavering heat that shimmered off the dusty ground, I could see the figure was dressed in black. At first I thought it
was the devil, not Jesus, who had come to save me. Then with my eyes closing, I looked up to see that it wasn’t the
devil, it was a preacher man.” Then turning to face me, Zoe ended her story by saying, “The preacher saved me,
Sammy, and he will save you, too – if you just have faith in him.”

I thought of how I had woken in the desert to find the preacher standing on the rocks, the tails of his black coat billowing
out behind him like some kind of apparition. “How can he save me? What is he going to save me from?” I asked Zoe,
as she slipped her arm from around my shoulders and stood up.

“The vampires, of course,” she said, picking up the tray which she had left at the foot of the bed. Then, as if
changing the subject, she smiled at me and said, “I brought you some food.”

“Not more elk,” I groaned.

“Bacon and eggs,” she smiled, pulling away the cloth that covered the food.

I took the tray from her and smiled back. “Thank you, Zoe,” I said, then added, “Why have we stopped?”

“The driver says that the train needs to take on more water and coal before we head into the mountains. This is the
last chance we will get. After that it’s just…” and she trailed off.

“Just what?” I asked, cutting the eggs in half with my fork.

“The preacher says we’re heading into Hell,” Zoe said, heading for the door. Then she stopped, and reaching
into her back pocket, she smiled, “Drake has toothbrushes!”

She threw the small wooden brush at me and I snatched it out of the air with a flick of my wrist and I looked at it. The teeth
looked yellow and coarse, as if made from horse hair, I couldn’t be sure. It didn’t look as if it had been made
by Colgate, but it was a toothbrush. Yay!

“Zoe, I can’t thank you enough,” I said.

“The toothbrush was nothing, really,” she smiled back.

“I didn’t mean that,” I replied.

“What then?”

“For talking.”

“It’s okay,” she half-smiled at me. Then she paused as if to say something else.

“What?” I asked, cocking an eyebrow.

“Just be careful of Harry,” she whispered, as if warning me somehow.

Before I’d had the chance to ask her what she meant, Zoe had gone, leaving me alone in my berth with bacon and eggs,
a toothbrush, and my sore head.

After bathing in the porcelain tub in the bathroom along the corridor, I brushed my teeth, which felt good, and dressed in
my cowgirl clothing. With the guns strapped against my thighs, I left the train. It was dusk and the sun was a mere semi-circle
peeking over the tips of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in the distance. The preacher had been right. As the dying sun cast
its long red shadows over the tips of the mountains, it did look like a fountain of blood was flowing over them. I drew in
a sharp breath as I studied their beauty in wonder. The white, snow-flecked peaks glistened with a crimson tinge and the mountains
themselves looked almost mauve in colour. Deep gorges appeared like black shadows as the sun sank behind them like a fading
star.

“Beautiful, aren’t they?” someone said, and I turned to find the preacher standing beside me, a cigarette
jutting out from beneath his droopy white moustache.

“Breath-taking,” I murmured, looking back at the mountains.

“It’s a cryin’ shame the same can’t be said about the creatures that lurk among them,” he said,
handing me a cigarette. I took it from him, and he held a match to it for me.

“Do you really believe there are vampires up there?” I asked.

“I don’t just believe it,” he said, blowing smoke from the corner of his mouth, his clear blue eyes staring
at the mountains in the distance. “I know it.”

I quietly smoked my cigarette and watched the preacher from the corner of my eye. He must have known I was looking at him,
as he said, “It will be dark soon; come with us into town so you can get supplies.”

“What kind of supplies?” I asked him.

“Bullets,” he said, grinding out his cigarette in the dust with the heel of his boot. “You’re gonna
need as many as you can carry.”

“Do bullets kill vampires?” I asked him.

“If you shoot them in the head enough times, it does.” Then he was gone, striding along the platform.

I watched him go, cigarette smoke lingering around my fingers. I could see that Zoe, Louise, and Harry were waiting for him
at the entrance to the station. Flicking the butt of the cigarette away with my thumb and forefinger, I put my hat on and
made my way towards them. Steam hissed in short bursts from the pistons attached to the Scorpion Steam’s wheels. Coal
was being dropped into the tender behind the driver’s cab from a contraption which hung in the air above it. Clouds
of black soot showered up into the red evening sky.

I reached the others, and trying hard not to make eye contact with Harry, I looked straight at Louise.

“Hi,” I said.

“How are ya doing?” Louise asked with a smile.

“She’s got a sore head,” Zoe cut in with a giggle.

“Too much whiskey, I guess,” I said, and shot a sideways glance at Harry, who just stared back at me.

“You were as drunk as a fiddler’s clerk the last time I saw you,” he said, with that grim-looking smile
of his.

“Really?” I shot back at him with a snide look, wishing that we were alone so I could ask what, if anything, happened
between us the night before. It was killing me not knowing for sure.

“Really,” he said, and turned away.

Wanting to change the subject, and blushing like hell, I faced the preacher and said, “Where’s Drake and his doctor
friend?”

“Haven’t seen them,” the preacher said. “Still in bed, I reckon.”

“If you hadn’t had done that thing with the holy water last night, Sammy, I would have started to believe that
Drake and the doctor were both a couple of bloodsuckers,” Louise said.

Then, remembering the stunt I had pulled last night, I clapped my hand to my face, and looking at them, I said, “I’m
really sorry about that last night. I didn’t mean to…”

“You did nothing wrong,” the preacher told me. “Someone had to find out if we were amongst vampires. I liked
your thinking.”

“But you seemed angry,” I reminded him.

“Not at you,” he grunted. Then looking at each of us, he added, “Let’s get moving. We need to be back
before dark.”

Leading us through the small waiting room area, we stepped out onto a wide, dusty track which led straight into town. I could
see the buildings a short walk away. The town was framed by the mountains in the distance. As we reached the main street,
I saw a sign which read
Welcome to Silent Rest
.

I noticed at once that this town was different from Black Water Gap. Whereas that town had been bustling with life and noise,
Silent Rest
was just like its name –
silent
. The main street, which cut through the heart of the town, was deserted. Unlike the saloon we had stayed in, the bar in this
town was closed for business. Tumbleweed blew lazily across the street in the chilly wind, which came down off the mountains.
Even the Marshal’s Office looked closed for business.

“Where is everyone?” Zoe asked the preacher, as the five of us walked side-by-side up the main street.

“In church, praying,” the preacher said back, pointing towards a tall, white building at the end of the street.

Just like the church in Black Water Gap, it had a tall, white spire, which towered upwards. At the very top of this there
was a brass bell. The roof of the church slanted away in both directions, and there was a wooden porch. On either side of
this, there were two white framed windows. Through them, I could see the orange glow of candlelight.

We reached the porch, and before pushing open its large double doors, the preacher looked back at us and said, “Take
off your hats and show some respect – you’re about to enter the Lord’s house.”

I removed my hat, letting it hang down against my back by its strap, and followed the others inside. There was a man standing
before the congregation, who had all packed themselves into the church. Those who hadn’t been able to find a seat stood
in the aisles and gathered in a throng at the back of the church. The man at the front had been either talking or praying
before the townspeople, but hearing us enter, he stopped and looked at us. Those whose heads weren’t bowed in prayer
turned to see what or who had disturbed their meeting. With their faces turned towards us, I could see fear in their eyes.