Thorn by Fred Saberhagen (reading like a writer TXT) 📕

on his back, bound hands underneath, with open, unblinking eyes and some kind of bloody mess around his parted lips. Beside him lay the sweatshirt Helen had been wearing. Well, whatever, the kid looked dead. Making sure, Gliddon knelt down, felt a forehead that was already cold. No heartbeat under the shirt. He flicked an eyeball with a fingertip and got no reflex blink. No need to waste a shell here, either.

      With a growing sense that speed was necessary, Gliddon turned away. He had to make sure that the last prisoner, the girl called Judy, was still where she was supposed to be.

      Indeed she was, though she was working to get the door of her cell open when Gliddon got there. She was alive and still hand-tied, and satisfyingly terrified. It was reassuring to find at least one person behaving as they ought.

      Gliddon would have loved to play with her for a while, but there just wasn’t time. He set down his lantern and raised his gun and grinned. “Sleep tight,” he said.

      And whirled round, on nerves that had become hair-trigger, at the ghost of a small sound just a few steps behind his back.

      The small brown-haired girl with the bloody torso stood there, seemingly ignoring her great red wound. In the reflected lantern-light the wound now looked more like scar tissue than like hamburger. Gliddon’s eyes must have played him tricks a minute ago, the flimsy wooden table-top must after all have saved her life. Temporarily.

      “Gliddon, Gliddon.” She didn’t even sound hurt. Her little-girl voice held a tone of soft reproach, and it appeared that she was smiling at him.

      Gliddon’s nerve might have held up, would have held up, if she had been yelling, or attacking him, or crying out in pain for mercy. But he couldn’t take this kind of a reality just now. He fired both barrels right in her face. The girl’s hair blew back in the wind of the blast, but her face remained untouched. The wall behind her cratered widely and shallowly, and a choking cloud of brown adobe powder burst into the air. The girl stood there with her lovely, smiling face untouched.

      Gliddon dropped the emptied shotgun, grabbed up the lantern again, and at the same time drew his pistol. The lantern’s beam shining through the cloud of settling dust showed him Helen’s dazed and gentle smile. The great red scar along her ribs and belly looked almost superficial, like an old, half-healed burn or scrape.

      “Gliddon, no, you shouldn’t. Uncle Del’s going to be awfully angry with you. He loves me, I’m his niece. I’m just like his very own little girl, he says.”

      Gliddon couldn’t think any longer. He triggered his revolver at the figure, and behind it wood and adobe shuddered and burst, gave up flying fragments to the air.

      There was something else in the air, at Gliddon’s elbow. He sensed another presence, saw another human figure starting, trying, to take shape. He turned and ran, fleeing by instinct to the aircraft shed.

* * *

      Judy, gazing at the new apparition, almost broke down in her near-hysterical relief. “You’re here, you’re here, thank God. I was…”

      Her voice trailed off. The figure of the vampire taking shape before her eyes was not that of the man she had been expecting. She stared as the form solidified. It was that of a huge man, massively built. He looked quite young—she knew how deceptive that could be—and Judy was sure that she had never seen him before.

      He was looking at Judy oddly, in a bass voice he asked her: “Who did you think I was?”

      Before she could answer, another man’s voice screamed outside in the night, a hundred yards or more away: “Ike! Gliddon! Help!”

      Judy slumped, knowing behind closed eyelids a sudden vision: white teeth quenched in red blood. The help that she had waited for had come.

* * *

      In the aircraft shed, Gliddon hurled himself into the Cessna’s cabin. The engine would be cold, but he had kept everything as ready as possible. He was going to make it now. Mexico, here we come.

      He grabbed for the electric starter. The engine caught on the first try … then coughed, and died. He tried again. The pale figure of the girl was following him. Here she came, walking toward the aircraft through the dim shed, and in the restored silence when the engine died again he could hear her softly calling.

      Any moment now he was going to wake up. But no, this time the engine caught and held. He released brakes and grabbed the throttle, and now he was rolling for the doors…

      The slender blue-and-white figure of the girl in jeans came sleepwalking right into the path of the rolling aircraft. Gliddon could see the disaster coming but it was too late for him to do anything about it. Just at the moment of catastrophe everything seemed to be happening at once, and he had not even time to perceive it all; but he had the distinct impression that at that very moment there was yet another person in the shed. A dark-clad man with a pale face, standing near the girl and in the act of reaching for her with one outstretched arm…

      …Gliddon’s right hand had hit the switches, and was reaching for the throttle, but too late. The sound of the blow had elemental power, and Gliddon knew the wooden prop must have been sprung if not completely shattered. The aircraft shuddered with the impact, the engine dying finally in a great cough. Gliddon had a door open and jumped out of the cabin again almost before the Cessna had stopped rolling. Something lay on the floor, but he was not going to stop to decide what it was. If there had really been two people in front of the propeller, quite likely it had hashed them both.

      Moving in desperate haste he wrenched open the cargo compartment again, pulled out the awkward package and ran with it, stumbling, arm muscles