“How?”
“I think that they infected the body, left it for us. They knew that we were looking for answers. They couldn’t get in. The biology building was built to contain all manner of nasty bugs in the event of a grad student dropping a petri dish full of Ebola. So . . . they sent something in. And that’s what got us.”
“The corpse became a vampire?”
“I told them that it would.” His hands balled into fists in the straw, broke the hollow stalks. “I told them what our ancestors did . . . that they stuffed the mouth with garlic, cut off the head, cut out the heart and burned it . . .”
“They didn’t do that.”
“No. Their microscopes told them that the pathogen was dead. And they believed what their microscopes showed them.”
“Cassia didn’t believe you?” I couldn’t understand believing a machine over a person.
“Not at first. I pleaded with her to let me sever its head. She wouldn’t allow me to damage their evidence. She believed . . . she believed that they were close to an answer when that damn thing crawled out of the cooler and chewed the head off of her dissertation advisor. I think she believed me then.”
He lapsed into an opaque silence.
I prodded him. “And then? How did you escape?”
“Not everyone did. The monster woke up just before dawn. I was able to get my bike out of the basement, tried to convince Cassia to leave. She wanted to stay, study that monster that was sucking her advisor dry in the next room.”
I couldn’t fathom it. That kind of loyalty to an idea. I had felt some loyalty to my community, but not enough that I would never leave it. I would leave it for anything as entertaining as Rumspringa. For a moment, I was ashamed.
“What did you do?” I asked, dreading the answer. Had he left her behind? I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.
“She was wearing one of those plastic suits. She’s small, so she swam in it. The sleeves were extra-long. Long enough that I could straitjacket her in it. She fought me, kicking and screaming, all the way down to the bike. I heard gunshots upstairs, breaking glass. I knew that we didn’t have much time, that if we had any future, we could work on the forgiveness part.” His mouth turned up darkly.
“The vamps are fast. But not as fast as a motorcycle. Not that they didn’t try. We got past the stadium just as the sun rose.”
I stared at him, hard. He was here now. Without his bike, and without the girl. “That wasn’t the last time you saw them.”
“No. I had thought to head north, back to Canada. There are enough unpopulated places there . . . I thought we could evade them until someone figured it out. Somewhere.” He shook his head. “We avoided the cities, stuck to the rural roads, slept during the day.
“But I underestimated them. We were riding not too far from here, at night, when we were ambushed. At first, I thought that it was a herd of deer blocking the road. I slowed down. And that’s when I saw . . . I saw that they were just corpses of deer, propped up on the road. I tried to weave around them, but I saw the figures of men around them, like ghosts.
“I went off the road, through a meadow. They followed. I hit a barbed-wire fence, wrecked the bike.
“Cassia was easy to see in the dark, wearing that white plastic suit. They attacked her like vultures. I had a knife, but . . . it wasn’t enough.” He swallowed hard, and his gaze glistened. When he spoke again, his voice was low. “I ran. I ran until I couldn’t hear the screaming anymore.”
The hair lifted on my arms. “They didn’t follow you?”
“They tried. But I stumbled, inadvertently, into a place they couldn’t catch me.”
“Where?” My brows knit together.
“An old family burial plot. A farmer’s cemetery. Not more than six or seven graves, no larger than a small room. It was marked off by unkempt grass, no fence . . . but they couldn’t go in. I passed in and out of consciousness. They circled me all night, like wolves, until they slunk away before dawn.”
I wasn’t sure whether or not to believe him. “They left you alone?”
“It wasn’t me. It was the cemetery. It was holy ground. Vampires aren’t supposed to be able to cross into it. Someone must have still believed in it. I found the skeletons of wildflowers there . . . I imagined that there was maybe a child who still visited the place, left flowers on those Civil War–era stones.”
“And you found your way here?”
“I don’t remember much after that.” He touched the wound on his temple.
He saw me looking at him with dubious, fearful eyes.
“I’m not infected,” he insisted.
I backed away, allowed the sunshine that had warmed my back to strike him in the face. He squinted through it quizzically, unlike the creatures I’d seen at the Laundromat.
“I’m not,” he said. I don’t know if he was trying to convince me or convince himself. He reached into the light, let the dust motes and sunlight drift over his fingers.
“It doesn’t matter, anyway,” I said. “They’re in town.”
He looked at my disheveled appearance. “They found you.”
“I escaped.” I shook my head. “It won’t be long before they find us.”
“They probably already know. Like I said, they seem to be pretty intelligent.”
“Then why haven’t they eaten us alive?”
“If I had to guess . . . your community is holy ground. Like the cemetery.”
“Holy ground?”
“Well, yeah.” He stared up at the barn. “If I recall my comparative religions courses, you Amish are pretty strict about the sacredness of the everyday, right?”
“Ja. I guess so.” I’d never heard it put like that.
“Prayer services rotate from house to house, not held in a central church?”
“Of course.”
“Your land may be holy enough to keep them away. You may just have the last fortress against the Undead. Right here.”
I sat back against the wall of the barn, hard. “We’re safe?” For the first time since the attack in the Laundromat, I began to feel the warmth of certainty again. Much like having God’s favor made tangible.
“Well . . . if I’m right. As long as you don’t do anything stupid.”
“Like going outside the gate,” I whispered. The Elders had known, on some visceral level.
“And don’t invite them in. They can’t get in any other way.”
Chapter Ten
I took my time returning to the house, absorbing everything I had seen and heard. I felt numb, unable to process all the information. My mother saw me crossing the backyard to the water pump, where I washed my hands until they were red and raw.
“Katie! What happened to you?” she cried at my filthy appearance.
“I . . . one of the bulls knocked me down. He didn’t mean it. He just didn’t see me.” I bit my lip down on the lie.
She grabbed my shoulders. “Are you hurt?”
“No. Just a bit shook up.” The smear of blood had dried brown, indistinguishable from mud.
She put her arm around me. “Come and wash up. You’ll feel better when you’re clean.”
My mother sat me down at the kitchen table and gave me a glass of fresh milk while she carried wood to the basement to heat the water for a bath.
I stared into the milk for what seemed like a long time before lifting it to my lips. It tasted cold, rich, and pure. It grounded me, brought me back to myself.
My mother returned to take me to the spring room in the basement beside the root cellar, leading me by one hand. The other held a small kerosene lamp. We had a spring on our property, which was a blessing, but no natural gas well. Many Plain folk were able to jerry-rig a system that provided hot water with a natural gas well, but we relied on a wood stove in the corner of the spring room to heat water for the scarred clawfooted bathtub in the center of the floor. I remembered bathing in it since I was a child, feeling the cold porcelain under my hands and chin.