“Sit up and keep your voice low,” I said to the gunman. “What’s your name?”
He put his hand to his neck. “What did you do?” he whispered.
What’s your name?” I repeated.
“Raleigh Curtis.”
“Who else is in this house?”
“My brother. My sister-in-law. Their kid.”
“So is this their house?”
“Yeah. I got laid off my job, so they let me stay here.”
“All right. Why did you shoot me, Raleigh?”
He squinted, trying to see me in the dark, then reached for his bedside lamp.
“No,” I said. “No light. Just talk to me.”
“I didn’t know what you were,” he said. “You just shot out of nowhere. I thought you were some kind of wild cat.” He paused. “Hey, do that thing again on my neck.”
I shrugged. Why not? He would definitely be sick the next day, but I didn’t care. I took a little more of his blood while he lay back trembling and writhing and whispering over and over, “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God.”
When I stopped, he begged, “Do it some more. Jesus, that’s the best feeling I’ve ever had in my life.”
“No more now,” I said. “Talk to me. You said you shot me because I scared you.”
“Yeah. Where’d you come from like that?”
“Why were you aiming your rifle at the man? He didn’t scare you.”
“Had to.”
“Why?”
He frowned and rubbed his head. “Had to.”
“Tell me why.”
He hesitated, still frowning. “He was there. He shouldn’t have been there. It wasn’t his property.”
“It wasn’t yours either.” This was only a guess, but it seemed reasonable.
“He shouldn’t have been there.”
“Why was it your job to drive him off or kill him?” Silence.
“Tell me why.” After three bites, he should have been eager to tell me. Instead, he almost seemed to be in pain.
He held his head between his hands and whimpered. “I can’t tell you,” he said. “I want to, but I can’t. My head hurts.”
Something occurred to me suddenly. “Did you see the man in the helicopter?”
He put his face into the pillow, whimpering. “I saw him,” he said, his voice muffled, barely understandable.
“When did he come? Thursday night?”
He looked up at me, gray-faced, and rubbed his neck, not where I had bitten him, but on the opposite side. “Yeah. Thursday.”
“Did he see you, talk to you?”
He moaned, face twisted in pain. He seemed to be about to cry. “Please don’t ask me. I can’t say. I can’t say.”
The man, the male of my kind, had found him, bitten him, and ordered him to guard the ruin and not tell anyone why he was doing it. But what was there to guard? What was there to shoot a person over?
In spite of myself, I began to feel sorry for Raleigh. His head probably did hurt. He was torn between obeying me and obeying the man from the helicopter. That kind of thing wasn’t supposed to happen. Just thinking about it made me intensely uncomfortable, and, of course, I didn’t know why. I waited, hoping to remember more. But there was no more, except that I began to feel ashamed of myself, began to feel as though I owed Raleigh an apology.
“Raleigh.”
“Yeah?”
“It’s all right. I won’t ask you about the man in the helicopter any more. It’s all right.”
“Okay.” He looked as though he hadn’t taken a breath for too long, and now, suddenly, he could breathe again. He also looked like he was no longer in pain.
“I want to meet the man in the helicopter,” I said. “If he comes to you again, I want you to tell him about me.”
“Tell him what?”
“Tell him I bit you. Tell him I want to meet him. Tell him I’ll come back to the burned houses next Friday night. And tell him I didn’t know that you … that you knew him. If he asks you any questions about me, it’s okay to answer. All right?”
“Yeah. What’s your name?”
Good question. “Don’t bother about a name. Describe me to him. I think he’ll know. And don’t tell anyone else about either of us. Make up lies if you have to.”
“Okay.”
I started to get up, but he caught my hand. Then he let it go. “That thing you did,” he said, touching the spot I’d bitten. “That was really good.”