JENNY CALHOUN LIVED IN Arvada, a bedroom suburb right smack in the center of the radioactive smoke plume should Rocky Flats catch fire, like it has twice before. She agreed to meet that afternoon at a coffee shop next to a supermarket, which suited me. I couldn’t easily hypnotize her in such a public place, but she wouldn’t try to seduce me, either. Plus, the openness should keep the mysterious assassin from lunging after me again. I hoped.
Over the phone, Jenny described herself as young-looking-whatever that meant-with wild red hair.
From my background info on her I knew Jenny to be twenty-six. At a table outside the coffee shop sat a slender girl with narrow, trendy eyeglasses and a mane the color of hot copper wire. Young-looking was right. She appeared sixteen-maybe. On this bright day, it was warm enough for her to sit slouched with her sweater unbuttoned. A midriff blouse and black skirt clinging to her lithe frame didn’t add one year to her apparent age. Had to be Jenny.
She zeroed in on me as I approached and kept her green eyes fixed on my face. When I got close and removed my sunglasses she said, “You’re an interesting-looking specimen.”
“I’m Felix Gomez. And you’re Jenny?”
She lifted her paper cup in a cardboard sleeve. “The one and only.” She shed a flip-flop and with her manicured toes, nudged an empty chair away from the table. “Sit.”
The aroma of caramel and coffee rose from her cup. I could do with a good jolt of caffeine, but as I didn’t have any blood to spike it with, I’d wait.
I scooted the chair into the shade of the umbrella and sat. “You don’t mind talking here?”
“Nope. I ain’t gonna say anything I shouldn’t.”
“I’m going to ask about the outbreak.”
Jenny faked a pout. “Shame. You know I can’t say anything about that. I was hoping you had read my number on a bathroom wall and wanted a date.”
“Sure, we’ll go on a date.” Anything to get her talking.
“I’m teasing. I’m under medication and wouldn’t be much fun.”
“Prozac?”
Jenny shook the handbag hanging off the back of her chair. The sound of pills rattling against plastic came from the bag. “It’s put a crimp in my social calendar, but then again, when I wake up in the morning I no longer ask where am I and who is the guy snoring next to me.”
“Did the outbreak make you that promiscuous?”
“Felix, let me put it this way. Assuming the average penis is six inches long, since the outbreak I’ve had about twenty-five and a half feet of dick from different men.”
Charming calculation. “So if you’re not looking for a date,” I asked, “why did you agree to see me?”
“Curiosity. To see who else wanted to ask strange questions.”
“What kind of questions? Who asked them? Someone from DOE?”
“No.” Jenny sat up and curled her fingers around the cup. Her voice turned serious. “This guy didn’t show me any credentials. He was a foreigner I’m sure. Spoke with an accent, though his English was good.”
“He asked about the outbreak?”
“Not really. He knew about it. Called it the sickness.” Jenny looked down to her cup. “But mostly he asked about others talking to me.”
The comment triggered my sense of self-protection and heightened my awareness of the surroundings. Our table was closest to the corner of the sidewalk. A few cars drove past the curb as they cruised through the parking lot of the strip mall. Everyone seemed preoccupied with something else, certainly not with us.
“What other people?”
“Not people.” Jenny raised her eyes, her features tense. “He asked about vampires.”
Her answer was as shocking as a live wire against my nose. Vampires? I held my breath to retain my composure. Since when do humans ask about vampires? We were myths, as fantastic to humans as unicorns and UFOs.
Jenny’s gaze darted suspiciously about my face. She pulled her hands from the coffee cup and put them in her lap.
“What’s the matter?” I asked.
“It’s the make-up,” she whispered.
Her concern implied danger and I readied my hand to remove my contacts and hypnotize her.
Her expression grew more apprehensive. “You’re not a-”
Smiling, I interrupted her. “A vampire? What do you think?”
Jenny stared for a moment, then gave an apologetic grin. “Of course not.” She extended her arms across the table and held her coffee cup again. “Sorry.”
“My skin condition is from the Iraq War, the second one.” I touched my face and lowered my hand. “I’m hypersensitive to the sun.”
“Like a vampire?”
I laughed. “Sure, like a vampire if you want.”
Jenny chuckled with me. “I once slept with someone who wore makeup. Didn’t really sleep, as it turned out. He was all into the Goth thing, which didn’t bother me, but when he came out of his bathroom sporting an erection, eye shadow, and lingerie, that was my cue to leave, nymphomania or not.”
But what about the snoop who came looking for my kind? “The guy who asked about vampires, what did he look like?”
“Older. Way older.” Jenny stroked her scalp. “Buzz cut. And a beard. Big cross around his neck. Nerves wound kinda tight. Creepy even.”
“Was he alone?”
“No. He came to my house in a van. Somebody else was driving. Couldn’t see who it was.”
“And he asked about vampires? Just like that?”
“I didn’t want to talk to him, especially since details about the outbreak are supposed to be confidential. The vampire question came out of the blue.”
“Did you report him, Jenny?”
“No. The vampire question was too weird. I’m under enough scrutiny already, so why draw more attention to myself? DOE acts like I contracted the nymphomania just to embarrass them. The guy left straight away and I didn’t see any harm done. So I kept quiet about it.”
“When did he visit?”
“Two days ago.” Jenny twirled a lock of her hair between her fingers. She stared at me as if she could see through my makeup. Her gaze beamed desire. Was the nymphomania taking hold?
“Has your medication worn off?”
“The hell with my medication.” Jenny rubbed her foot up my sock and between my trouser leg and shin. “Wanna make it twenty-six feet? Assuming that you’re average, of course.”
“Twenty-six feet of what?”
“This.” Jenny reached across the table and grabbed my belt buckle. I pulled away, but she kept her grip and caused me to drag her slender body against the table. We knocked over her cup and spilled coffee on the sidewalk.
I needed to subdue her before she started stripping. I turned my face downward and squeezed the contacts into my empty hand.
“Come on, Felix,” she cooed. “Don’t get shy on me. I hear you combat veterans can get really perverted.”
I palmed the sides of Jenny’s head.
Her aura burned a hot cadmium yellow. The nymphomania was in control.
“You demented bastard,” Jenny sneered, eyes closed. “The rough stuff, huh? Right here in public? I can take it.”
With my back to the parking lot, in the reflection of the café window I saw a passing BMW slow down. The driver’s window retracted and a woman’s anxious face peered out at us.
“What’s going on?” she asked.
I kept my back to the BMW, didn’t want to subdue that woman as well, and brought my nose against Jenny’s.
Her eyes opened and bore into mine. “Holy…” She went limp, her tongue drooling over her slack jaw.
Hurriedly I folded Jenny’s tongue back into her mouth and shut her jaw. I sat her in my chair and pulled my sunglasses from my coat pocket. Covering my eyes with the glasses, I approached the BMW and explained in my most professional, soothing voice. “There’s no trouble, ma’am. My patient’s had a seizure. She’s okay.”
The woman scowled. “Like hell. I know what I saw.” She lifted a cell phone against her cheek. “You can explain it to the police.” I was close enough to touch her door when the BMW accelerated away. The woman tossed one look back at me.
I lifted my sunglasses and zapped her.
Her eyebrows rose in astonishment and her lips formed an oval around the gape of her mouth. The BMW zoomed through the pedestrian crossing. Shoppers jumped out of her way. The BMW veered to the right and crunched into a parked Cadillac SUV, spraying the asphalt with the shattered red plastic of the tail lamps. The Cadillac’s alarm screamed as if wounded.
Under the cover of this distraction, I gave Jenny another vampire glare to refresh the hypnosis. Jerking her by the arm, I tugged her around to the alley behind the strip mall. She stumbled behind me. Her flip-flops slapped the pavement.
The alley reeked of urine and rotting food. Piles of flattened cardboard boxes stood along the walls. I pulled Jenny toward the Dumpster.
“Uhh, inside the Dumpster-now that’s kinky,” she whispered excitedly. Pheromones gushed from her body. How did this nymphomania burn through my hypnosis?
I whipped Jenny ahead of me and sent her tripping over a stack of wooden pallets. My fangs sprouted. After a glance to see that we were alone, I knelt to hold her by the shoulders. I pulled her head back and curved her delicious throat toward me.
Afterwards, I walked her back to the sidewalk tables and left her slumped in a chair, her sweater buttoned tight to her neck to hide my bite marks. Within a few minutes she’d wake up, confused and oblivious to our meeting.
On the way home I couldn’t keep my thoughts from careening into one another like bumper cars. So much had happened that didn’t make sense. Once back in my apartment, I sat in the armchair with an old-fashioned glass in my hand, scotch and boar’s blood served neat. Midway through the second glass, my thinking had calmed enough for me to analyze with some degree of coherence what I did and didn’t know.
My first break had been the revelation from Tamara that Dr. Wong possessed the Tiger Team report about Building 707, but that in turn raised more questions. Why would the head of Radiation Safety keep the report from his boss, Gilbert Odin? Who was the report intended for, and what did it describe? Tiger Teams were special national-level committees convened to investigate serious concerns about nuclear-weapons safety. They never issued a finding that didn’t cause someone’s head to roll in the dust. I hadn’t heard of any heads rolling at Rocky Flats…yet. Maybe my friend Gilbert Odin was afraid that ax would fall across his own neck.
The second revelation was this mysterious yellow aura emitted by the nymphomaniacs and their ability to resist vampire hypnosis.
Third, someone had come after me with a rifle. Why? I doubted they were soliciting memberships for the NRA.
Last, and equally troubling, was Jenny’s mentioning that someone had been asking about vampires. This someone knew about the nymphomania, and yet what he queried Jenny about was vampires. A human asking about vampires? Impossible. Or maybe he wasn’t human. And why would he make the connection between the outbreak of nymphomania and us vampires?
I set my empty glass on the end table. Tomorrow I would keep digging into the nymphomania until I found out who was asking questions about me.