The minister often spoke of the dangers of vampires, as well as the more insidious spiritual threat of things like the internet, television, and any books that weren’t on the approved list. Apart from the vampires, Amos was quite interested in seeing the dangers the minister talked about, but he didn’t suppose he ever would. Even when he finished school next year, his life wouldn’t change much. He’d just spend more time helping out at the sawmill, though there would also be the prospect of building his own house and taking a wife. He hoped his wife would come from some other community of the faith. He didn’t like the idea of marrying one of the half dozen girls he’d grown up with. But, as with everything, his parents would choose for him, in consultation with the minister and the elders of the chapel.
Amos felt the heat as he stepped off the porch and into the sun. But as he looked up the mountainside, a great white, wet cloud was already beginning to descend. Theodore was right, as usual. Within an hour the village would be blanketed in fog.
But an hour left Amos plenty of time to complete his task. He set off down the road, tipping his hat to Young Franz, who was fixing the shingles on his father’s roof.
“Off to the mailbox?” called out Young Franz, pausing in his hammer strokes, speaking with the ease of long practice past the three nails he held in the corner of his mouth.
“Yes, brother,” answered Amos. Of course he was — it was one of his duties, and he did it every day at almost the same time.
“Get back before the fog closes in,” warned Young Franz. “Theodore says it’s — ”
“Vampire weather,” interrupted Amos. He regretted doing so immediately, even before Young Franz paused and deliberately took the nails out of his mouth and set down his hammer.
“I’m sorry, brother,” blurted out Amos. “Please forgive my incivility.”
Young Franz, who was not only twice as old as Amos but close to twice as heavy, and all of it muscle, looked down at the young man and nodded slowly.
“You be careful, Amos. You sass me again and I’ll birch your backside from here to the hall, with everyone looking on.”
“Yes, brother, I apologize,” said Amos. He kept his head down and eyes downcast. What had he been thinking, to interrupt the toughest and most short-tempered brother in the village?
“Get on with you then,” instructed Young Franz. He kept his eye on Amos but picked up the nails and put them back in his mouth. Every second nail had a silver washer, to stop a vampire breaking in through the roof, just as every chimney was meshed with silver-washed steel.
Amos nodded with relief and started back down the road, faster now. The fog was closer, one arm of it already extending down the ridge, stretching out to curl back around toward the village like it usually did, to eventually join up with the slower body of mist that was coming straight down the slope.
He liked going to the mailbox. It was the closest thing the community had to an interface with the wider world, even if it was only an old diesel drum on a post set back twenty feet from a minor mountain road. Sometimes Amos saw a car go past, impossibly swift compared to the horse buggy he rode in once a month, when they visited with the cousins over in New Hareseth. Once a bus had stopped, and a whole bunch of people had gotten out and tried to take his photograph, and he had almost dropped the mail as he tried to run back and keep his face covered at the same time.
The flag was up on the box, Amos saw as he got closer. That was good, since otherwise he would have to wait for the mail truck to get back out on the main road. Sometimes the postal workers were women, and he wasn’t allowed to see or talk to strange women.
He hurried to the box and carefully unlocked the padlock with the key that he proudly wore on his watch chain, as a visible symbol that while not quite yet a man, he was no longer considered just a boy.
There were only three items inside: a crop catalog from an old firm that guaranteed no devil work with their seeds; and two thick, buff-colored envelopes that Amos knew would be from one of the other communities, somewhere around the world. They all used and reused the same envelopes. The two here might have been a dozen places and come home again.
Amos put the mail in his voluminous outer pocket, shut the lid, and clicked the padlock shut. But with the click, he heard another sound. Right behind him, the crunch of gravel underfoot.
He spun around, looking not ahead but up at the sky. When he saw that the sun was still shining, unobscured by the lowering cloud, he lowered his gaze and saw. a girl.
“Hi,” said the girl. She was about his age, and really pretty, but Amos backed up to the mailbox.
She wore no crosses, and her light sundress showed a bare neck and arms, and even a glimpse of her breasts. Amos gulped as she moved and caught the sun, making the dress transparent, so he could see right through it.
“Hi,” the girl said again, and stepped closer.
Amos raised his bracer-bound wrists to make a cross.
“Get back!” he cried. “I don’t know how you walk in the sun, vampire, but you can’t take me! My faith is strong!”
The girl wrinkled her nose, but she stopped.
“I’m not a vampire,” she said. “I’ve been vaccinated like everyone else. Look.”
She rotated her arm to show the inside of her elbow. There was a tattoo there, some kind of bird thing inside a rectangle, with numbers and letters spelling out a code.
“Vacks. vexination.,” stumbled Amos. “That’s devil’s work. If you’re human, you wear crosses, else the vampires get you.”
“Not since maybe the last twenty years,” said the girl. “But like you said, if I am a vampire, how come I’m out in the sun?”
Amos shook his head. He didn’t know what to do. The girl stood in his path. She was right about the sun, but even though she wasn’t a vampire, she was a girl, an outsider. He shouldn’t be looking at her, or talking to her. But he couldn’t stop looking.
“I don’t have a problem with crosses, either,” said the girl. She took the three steps to Amos and reached over to touch the crosses around his neck, picking them up one by one, almost fondling them with her long, elegant fingers. Amos stopped breathing and tried to think of prayers he couldn’t remember, prayers to quench lust and. sinful stirrings and.
He broke away and ran a few yards toward the village. He would have kept going, but the girl laughed. He stopped and looked back.
“Why’re you laughing?”
She stopped and smiled again.
“Just. men don’t usually run away from me.”
Amos stood a little straighter. She thought he was a man, which was more than the village girls did.
“What’s your name?” asked the girl. “I’m Tangerine.”
“Amos,” said Amos slowly. “My name is Amos.”
Behind the girl, the fog kept coming down, thick and white and damp.
“It’s good to meet you, Amos. Are you from the village up the mountain?”
Amos nodded his head.
“We just moved in along the road,” said Tangerine. “My dad is working at the observatory.”
Amos nodded again. He knew about the observatory. You could see one of its domes from the northern end of the village, though it was actually on the crest of the other mountain, across the valley.
“You’d better get home before the fog blanks the sun,” he said. “It’s vampire weather.”
Tangerine smiled again. She smiled more than anyone Amos had ever known.
“I told you, I’m vaccinated,” she said. “No vampire will bite me. Hey, could I come visit with you?”