Samantha shivered again and hugged herself tightly, rocking back and forth very slightly. "We had talked about finding somebody like this. I mean, we did the Yahoo chat groups and all, but it's mostly bullshit and porn, and anyway, how can you trust somebody you meet online? And now this guy comes right out with it and says, 'We eat people.' " She shivered more, really big this time. "Tyler comes to me and says, 'You won't believe what happened last night.' Which she says a lot, and I'm like, 'Okay, again?' And she says, 'No, really,' and she tells me about Vlad and his group…"
Samantha closed her eyes and licked her lips before going on. "It's like a dream come true," she said. "I mean, it's too good. I don't believe her at first. Because Tyler is-was-kind of flaky, and guys could see that and they would say stuff to her just, you know, to have sex with her? And I'm sure she'd taken X or something anyway, so how can I be sure this guy is for real? But she takes me to meet Vlad, and he shows us some pictures and things, and I think, 'This is it.' "
Samantha looked straight at me and brushed the hair from her forehead. It was nice hair, a mousy brown color, but clean and shiny, and she looked for all the world like a normal teenage girl telling a sympathetic adult about something interesting that happened in French class-until she started talking again.
"I always knew I would do this someday," she said. "Find somebody who would eat me. It's what I wanted most. But I thought it would be later, you know, after college or-" She shrugged and shook her head. "But here he was, and Tyler and me are like, 'Why wait?' Why should I spend my parents' money on college, when I can have what I want without it, right now? So we told Vlad, 'Okay, totally, we're in,' and he takes us to meet the head of the group, and…" She smiled. "Here I am."
"And Tyler isn't," I said.
Samantha nodded. "She was always lucky. She got to go first." The smile got bigger. "But I'm next. Soon."
And her apparent eagerness to follow Tyler into the cauldron dried up all my professional zeal, and I had nothing more to say. Samantha just watched me to see what I would do-and for the first time in my life, I had absolutely no idea what that would be. What is the correct facial expression to put on when someone tells you their lifelong fantasy is to be eaten? Should I go for shock? Disbelief? What about moral outrage? I was quite sure the subject had never come up in any of the movies or TV shows I had studied, and even though I am considered a clever and creative person in some circles, I could not imagine anything at all that might be appropriate.
So I stared, and Samantha looked back at me, and there we were: a perfectly normal married man with three kids and a promising career who just happened to enjoy killing people, staring at a perfectly normal eighteen-year-old girl who went to a good school and liked Twilight and who wanted to be eaten, sitting next to each other in a walk-in refrigerator at a vampire club in South Beach. I had been trying so hard lately to achieve some close approximation of normal life, but if this was it, I thought I would prefer something else. Outside of Salvador Dali I really can't believe the human mind could handle anything more extreme.
And at last even the mutual staring began to seem too strange, even for two dedicated non-humans like us, and we both blinked and looked away.
"Anyway," she said. "It doesn't matter."
"What doesn't matter?" I said. "Wanting to be eaten?"
She shrugged, an oddly genuine teen gesture. "Whatever," she said. "I mean, they'll be here soon."
I felt like someone was tickling my spine with an icicle. "Who will?" I said.
"Somebody from the coven," she said, and she glanced back at me. "That's what they call it. The, you know. The group that, um, eats people."
I thought of the file I had seen on the computer. Coven. I wished I had copied it and run for home. "How do you know they're coming?" I said.
She shrugged again. "They have to feed me. Like, three times a day, you know."
"Why should they?" I said. "If they're just going to kill you, why do they have to take care of you?"
She gave me a you-are-so-dumb look, combined with a head shake. "They're going to eat me, not kill me," she said. "They don't want me to get all sick and skinny. I gotta be, you know. Chubbed up. Marbled. For flavor."
Between my job and my hobby I have to say without bragging that I have a pretty strong stomach, but this was putting it to a real test. The idea that she would cheerfully eat three healthy meals a day so her flesh would taste better was just a little too much before breakfast, and I turned away again. But happily for my appetite, a practical thought nudged its way in. "How many of them will come?" I asked.
She looked at me, then looked away. "I don't know," she said. "It's usually just two guys. In case, you know, I decide to change my mind and run. But…" She looked at me. And then down at her feet. "I think Vlad is coming with them this time," she said at last, and it did not sound like a happy thought.
"Why do you think that?" I said.
She shook her head but did not look up. "When it was going to be Tyler," she said, "he started to come with them. And he would, you know… do things to her." She licked her lips but still did not look up. "Not just, you know… Not sex. I mean, not normal sex. He, um. He really, really hurt her. Like that was how he got off, and…" She shuddered, and at last she looked up. "I think that's why they put stuff in my food, some kind of tranquilizer?" she said. "So it keeps me, you know, kind of calm and quiet? Because otherwise…" She looked away again. "Maybe he won't come," she said.
"But at least two guys will come?" I said.
She nodded. "Yeah."
"Are they armed?" I said, and she looked up at me, blank. "You know, knives, guns, bazookas? Are they carrying any weapons?"
"I don't know," she said. "I mean, I would."
I thought that I would, too, and although it might have been uncharitable, I also thought that I would have noticed what weapons my captors were carrying. Of course, I didn't think of myself as a banquet, and that would almost certainly affect my powers of observation.
So there would be two of them, probably armed, which probably meant guns, since this was Miami. And it might mean Bobby Acosta, too, who would have some kind of weapon, since he was a wealthy fugitive. And I was in a small room with no place to hide, and I was burdened with Samantha, who would probably yell, "Watch out!" at them if I tried to surprise them. On the plus side, my heart was pure and I had a bent tire iron.
It wasn't much, but I have learned that if you examine the situation carefully, you can almost always find a way to improve your odds. I stood up and looked around the room, thinking that someone might have left an assault rifle lying on a shelf; I even made myself touch the jars and look behind them, but no such luck. "Hey," Samantha said. "If you're thinking, like, you know-I mean, I don't want to be rescued or anything."
"I think that's wonderful," I said. "But I do." I looked at her, sitting there hunched up in her blanket. "I don't want to be eaten. I have a life, and a family. I have a new baby," I said, "and I want to see her again. I want to watch her grow up, and read her fairy stories."
She flinched a little bit and looked uncertain. "What's her name?" she said.
"Lily Anne."
Samantha looked off to the side again, and I could see her trying to swim through the doubt, so I pushed a little. "Samantha," I said. "Whatever it is you want, you don't have the right to force it on me." I felt remarkably hypocritical preaching to her, but after all, there was an awful lot at stake, and in any case I had been practicing hypocrisy all my adult life.