Page 83 of So Thirsty

Naomi comes up behind me, and there’s blood smeared across her face. I’m too afraid to look back at the other driver, the one laid out on the hood of her hatchback.

“Sloane,” Naomi says, possessed. Ghoulish. “Are you thirsty?”

There’s another pop. The woman at the gas station is still shooting. Still screaming. “Stop them! Stop them!” She runs across the street toward the accident, waving the gun in one hand, her phone in the other.

“I’m calling the police! Don’t let them leave!” she says.

I look to Naomi, the fear of consequences taking hold, but Naomi doesn’t look back. She’s busy salivating over the truck driver, who is now slowly backing away from her.

“Miss,” I say to the woman with her cheek chewed through. I clasp my hands behind my back, for her sake and for mine, so I don’t neutralize this threat the way I want to. The bad way.

“Stay right there!” she says, pointing the gun at me. “I’m calling the—”

She’s gone.

She vanished.

She just vanished into thin air.

Only, I can hear her screaming. The screaming is the worst screaming I’ve ever heard. Worse than when she was getting her face bitten into.

Where is she? Where did she go?

“Holy shit,” the truck driver says as all the lights on the street go out.

I look at him, and he’s looking up. Until Naomi’s on him. She sweeps his legs out from under him, so his head hits the pavement, and his lights go out. She’s sipping the blood from his knuckles, cradling his hands to her lips like he’s someone precious to her.

I would tell her to stop, but I can’t get past this screaming. I spin around and around trying to figure out where it’s coming from, to see where the woman went, and how she went so fast.

And then I see.

She’s on top of the convenience store. There’s someone behind her, veiled in shadow, feeding on her. Her arm is pulled back at a terrible angle, and someone’s got it. Someone not letting go.

“Help me! Help!” she screams, until whoever it is reaches forward and twists her head, snaps her neck. Then she’s quiet. Then everything’s quiet.

Sometime between when we pulled out of the gas station and when we crashed, the van arrived. It’s parked on the street right in front.

The woman’s broken, bloodless body drops from the roof and lands on the pavement with a sickening splat. A second later, Tatiana jumps down. She wears a set of hot pink silk pajamas. Her hair is pulled back, and she unties it, shakes it out as she strides past the pumps toward the van. She waves at me, smirking.

Henry stands at a pump, letting gas spill out everywhere. He’s got an unlit cigarette in his mouth.

“Don’t!” I’m trying to shout, to be loud, assertive, because the clerk is still inside the store, and enough blood has been shed, but my voice won’t cooperate. Because my throat disagrees. There’s no such thing as too much blood.

There’s movement inside the convenience store, and I see Ilie and Elisa. They’re framed by the doorway as they feed on the clerk, Ilie on his leg and Elisa at his neck.

“Sloane,” Naomi says. “Have some. He tastes like bourbon.”

I turn around to find her sprawled out on the road next to the flattened body of the truck driver. He’s covered in puncture wounds. Bite marks.

“I saved you some,” she says, with a glint her in eye that might be drunkenness or antagonism. Either way, it doesn’t look like there’s anything left in the man. And even if there were, I wouldn’t touch him.

I’m in the middle of a massacre.

The truck driver starts to wheeze, his chest like a plastic bag in the wind. He inflates and deflates. I step toward him, the soles of my boots crunching on bits of broken glass. His eyes have sunk into his head. He’s too close to death to live. He’s dying, and there’s nothing I can do about it.

“Go on, Sloane,” Naomi says.

Would it be a mercy?