The Traveling Vampire Show

Chapter Fifty-six

We were plunged into darkness… except for a fluttering yellow-orange glow of firelight. It came from the blazing top of the pole that the lightning had struck.

Suddenly, warm rain was pouring down.

The blazing pole loomed over the bleachers like a giant torch, dimmed by the rain but still on fire.

All around us, people began leaping to their feet.

They wanted out.

As they shoved and bumped us in their rush to escape, Lee and I stood up. We climbed onto our seats and looked down. On both sides of the arena, people were fleeing through the downpour. Some were falling. Others were fighting. But I didn’t care what was happening to them.

I turned my eyes toward the cage in the center of the arena. By then, the fiery light post had nearly been extinguished. Through the heavy rain, I could barely make out the shapes of Rusty and Valeria.

Then came another blast of lightning.

It turned the rain into slanting silver streaks and filled the cage with a shuddering white glare. I glimpsed Rusty on top of Valeria, jeans down around his ankles, his white rump shoving, flexing.

Darkness.

Someone bumped me from behind. I don’t know whether it was deliberate or one of those careless collisions of the kind that happens when people are in a hurry. Either way, the result was the same. I yelped and teetered.

Lee grabbed me. She couldn’t stop me, though. We both fell forward, grappling with each other, colliding with a few people below us, knocking them off their feet before we crashed down on the slick, wet bleachers. We rolled and fell between two rows.

I struck a board. Then Lee mashed me against it.

She seemed very heavy for such a slender woman. I couldn’t budge. She lay on top of me, gasping for breath. Her cheek was warm and wet against the left side of my face while the right side got pelted by rain. Under my back, I felt the vibrations of all the shoes and boots and sandals and bare feet pounding their way down the bleachers.

Nobody stopped to help us.

For that matter, with the darkness and downpour and the way we were down in a low place between the rows, maybe no one even saw us.

The bleachers trembled and shook.

Out behind the stands, car doors thumped. Engines began to sputter and cough and race. Headlights came on, casting a pale glow into the rain-filled air above Janks Field. Horns honked. People shouted. More doors slammed. More engines revved.

I suddenly remembered the Cadillac twins and what I’d done to their car.

I’d intended to strand them, but I hadn’t planned on us being trapped in the grandstands when it happened.

Brilliant move, Thompson.

Directly above us, lightning fluttered across the sky and thunder crashed. Lee flinched.

Which surprised me. She seemed too strong for that. But all her weight was on top of me, so there was no mistake about it: she jerked like a startled little girl. Suddenly feeling protective of her, I raised my arms and wrapped them around her back.

“You okay?” I asked.

She nodded, her cheek sliding against my face. “How about you?” she asked.

“Guess I’m okay.”

“Am I crushing you?”

“Nah.”

“Maybe we’d better stay here for a few minutes. Give the crowd a chance to clear out.”

I almost told her that I wanted to get up and check on Rusty… but then I remembered my last glimpse of him in the lightning flash. It made me feel a little sick.

Valeria obviously wasn’t a vampire, after all. Just a beautiful woman with a very strange and dangerous job. And she hadn’t been playing ’possum, after all. She’d been stunned or out cold.

You don’t do things to someone in that condition.

You just don’t.

Not even if she’s gorgeous and naked and pretends to be a vampire.

I knew Rusty was always horny, always making crude remarks, always talking (when Slim wasn’t around) about how much he’d like to “do it” to this or that girl. Or “jump her bones” or “give her a taste of the one-eyed monster” or so on. Maybe it shouldn’t have been a shock to catch him doing that to Valeria.

But it was.

How did he even know how?

The way he’d been going at her, I couldn’t help thinking that maybe he’d had some previous experience.

No. He would’ve bragged about it.

Unless the girl was…

From somewhere behind the bleachers came a scream. Looking back toward Janks Field, all I could see was a pale glow given off by headlights. I was too high in the stands for a view of the ground or even the vehicles.

“Glad we’re not mixed up in that,” Lee said.

“Yeah.”

“How you doing?”

“Fine.”

“You’re not squished yet?”

“Nah. I’m okay.”

“You make a pretty good mattress.”

“Thanks.”

“Maybe a little lumpy here and there.” She squirmed as if looking for a more comfortable position.

All of a sudden, I was acutely aware of being flat on my back with Lee on top of me.

Through her soaked, clinging shirt, my hands felt her back—and no bra straps. Her breasts were mashed against my chest. The way her belly touched mine, I could feel each breath she took. Her groin was tight against my crotch. Though we were thigh to thigh, her legs were slightly apart and squeezing mine together as if to hold herself in place.

I started to get a boner.

Squirming, I pushed at Lee. “We’d better get up.”

“I’ll try.”

She reached up to the bench with her right hand, pulled at it, shoved at my shoulder with her other hand, unclenched her thighs and managed to sit up on me, straddling my hips, her legs dangling off the sides.

If anything, this position was worse for me. Didn’t she realize what she was sitting on?

Didn’t she care?

Maybe she liked it.

Lightning flashed.

Lee flinched again.

For just a moment, through the slanting streaks of silver rain, I saw her sitting upright on top of me with her head turned toward the arena. Her soaked hair was flat against her head. Her face, shiny as oil, streamed with water. So did her bare arms. Her drenched shirt was half unbuttoned. It adhered to her body and took on the shapes of her breasts. Her stiff nipples pushed out the clinging fabric.

I saw all this in the starkness of the lightning, a glare that probably lasted no more than a second but seemed to go on much longer. And just before the darkness returned, I saw Lee’s jaw drop open.

“Oh, my God^!” she gasped.

“What?”

“He’s down! She’s on him!”

My insides cringed. I tried to sit up but I couldn’t—not the way Lee was sitting on me.

She began to climb off. Trapped between the bleacher seats, her legs dangling, it was a struggle. Finally, she freed herself.

The moment she was off me, I lurched upright and looked for Rusty. Whatever cars remained on Janks Field, their headlights weren’t pointing in our direction. All we had in the arena was darkness and pouring rain. I could hardly see the cage, but there seemed to be pale shapes inside it. They might’ve been naked bodies squirming in a tangle, but I couldn’t be sure.

Lee dropped onto the bench in front of me, twisted around, reached out and squeezed my arm. “Let’s get down!”

She helped me climb out from between the bleacher planks. Then, side by side, we hopped carefully but as fast as we dared down the slick boards like a couple of hikers leaping from rock to rock in an effort to cross a stream.

No one was in our way.

The stands on both sides of the arena looked empty. It seemed that everyone except us had already fled. By the sounds of engines and car horns and shouts, many of them were still in Janks Field, fighting the traffic jam.

What’re the Cadillac twins up to?

I hardly got a chance to start worrying about them, however, before several dark shapes hurried into the cage with a gurney.

Then several more came running toward Lee and me.

We almost reached the bottom of the bleachers before they stopped us.

The man blocking our way said, “Show’s over, folks. Time to go home.”

“We’re not going anywhere,” Lee said. “Not without my son.”

“Your son, right.” Though I couldn’t make out the details of his face, he was obviously the same man who had stopped us the last time. “Go on, get outa here.”

“You can’t make us,” I blurted. I was angry and scared. I needed to get past these people and stop the others from taking away Rusty. “This is public property. And anyway, my dad’s the chief of police. So you’d better just get out of our way.”

“Sure, kid.”

“Please,” Lee said to him. “We only want to…”

I broke to the side, my feet somehow not flying out from under me, and leaped. One of the gang tried for me. I shouldered him or her out of the way, but the impact knocked me crooked. I managed to plant one foot on the bottom row of the bleachers and spring off. In midair, I saw several dark figures moving inside the cage… rolling the gurney. A pale body was sprawled on the gurney. Someone else stood nearby, hands on hips.

Balance gone, I landed on the ground with a splash, stumbled and started to fall.

I was caught by strong hands. They clamped me just below my armpits and hoisted me upright. After I was standing, they didn’t let go.

“What seems to be the problem beret’

It was the voice of Julian Stryker.

“My friend,” I blurted. “They’re taking away my friend.” In case he didn’t know who I meant, I said, “Rusty. The one who…”

“I know who he is,” Stryker said. “He’s been hurt. They’re taking him to an ambulance.”

The sky suddenly trembled with lightning.

Stryker’s mane of black hair was plastered to his head, his stark white face dripping and shiny, his lips crimson. So much like a beautiful woman, but rugged and craggy like a man. His silk shirt was clinging like ebony skin to his powerful shoulders and chest.

In the last moment of brilliant light, I saw past Stryker’s side—the gurney gliding by, weighted down by Rusty.

Rusty, naked except for his white socks. Chubby, pale, shiny.

His arm was no longer bandaged.

Where his arm had been nipped by the poodle, he now had a mouth-sized patch of gory pulp.

The blood’ll bring vampires like chum brings sharks.

Thunder rumbled.

Darkness clamped down and Rusty was gone.