Chapter 13

Frank turned his car onto the two-lane blacktop. From here it was a two-hour drive through several valleys and a couple of mountain ranges. After that, it was a two-mile hike up to Béla’s cabin. As they drove, he filled Tanya in on what had happened in the last several days, including his finding the map in the vampire hunter’s motel room along with the old news articles, and finishing up with Detective Mike’s nocturnal visit last evening. As he talked, Tanya sat half turned around with her chin resting on the back of her seat. She liked traveling backwards, she said, when Frank asked her about it.

“So she really is a vampire?” Tanya asked, “Like what you see on TV?”

“Yes,” Frank answered, “she is really a vampire. No, not like what you see on TV. Béla is a sex vampire. She feeds on sex. In the years that I’ve known her, she has fed on blood a few times. From what I could figure out from those old newspaper articles, she killed and fed in self-defense or in revenge for someone her victim raped or murdered.”

“Like the last time...” Tanya said, suddenly saddened with the memory of her lost childhood friend. “That butcher deserved what he got. I hope it took him a long time to die.”

The sound of the engine and the tires on the desert highway filled the silence between them for the next half-hour as they sped through the night, Tanya quietly watching the view through the rear window as she sat, still twisted around with her chin resting on the back of her seat, her eyes seemingly half closed.

“Frank,” Tanya murmured quietly, causing him to jump slightly.

He thought she had gone to sleep. He looked over to see her beautiful face framed in the dim lights of a distant car behind them. Her body was still turned sideways in the seat with her breasts pressed up against the seat back and her legs folded under her. Her arms now cradled her head as she gazed through the back window.

“What?” Frank asked, his voice sounding strange, as if disrupting the background sounds of the road beneath them had annoyed some deity of travelers.

‘How can she sit like that for so long without cramping her back muscles or having her legs go to sleep?’ he wondered. As those thoughts occurred to him, he smiled at the thought of massaging any tight muscles in her legs that might need relief.

“We’re being followed,” she said quietly.

“How can you tell,” he asked. “That might just be somebody using the road, like we are.”

“They’ve been there for twenty minutes,” she said, “almost exactly a mile behind us.”

“Oh, come on!” Frank said derisively, “How could you tell?”

“I counted the distance, from hill rise to hill rise, ten times,” she stated flatly, looking at him. “They are fifty seconds behind us. You have the speed control set on seventy five miles an hour. That comes out to a distance of one mile and maybe two hundred feet.”

“Well!” Frank stated, having no idea how correct her math was, “a dumb blonde, you’re not! Any other secrets I don’t know about?” He smiled at her as though to apologize for his earlier disbelief.

She smiled back, a smug look on her face and said, “That’s on a ‘need to know’ basis, darling. After we crest the next hill, stop and get off the road while they’re out of sight. Keep your speed steady until then.”

“Sure thing!” Frank said, wondering what she had planned. He left the speed control on, allowing it to control the car’s forward motion to keep his speed steady like Tanya had suggested, then the distant headlights of the car behind them vanished behind the crest of a hill.

“Now! Hit the brakes and pull over!” Tanya told him.

He did.

“Drive over behind that grove of trees and kill the lights!” she said, pointing off to the side of the road, “Before they come over this rise.”

They sat in silence for several minutes before Tanya spoke again.

“It’s been over two minutes,” she said quietly. “They should have passed us by now.”

“Maybe they turned off,” Frank suggested.

“Where?” Tanya asked. “Did you see any roads back there?”

“No,” Frank admitted. But that didn’t mean there weren’t any. There were dozens of dirt roads leading off the highway and into the wilderness, allowing access to homes and farms and ranches and ... sometimes ... they went nowhere at all.

“Well,” she said, sighing in defeat. “Let’s go.”

Frank started the car. It sounded deafeningly loud after the silence they had been sitting in. He squinted as he turned on the lights, illuminating their surroundings brightly. He drove the car back onto the highway and, speeding up to seventy-five miles an hour again, set the speed control and relaxed.

After ten minutes of driving, Tanya quietly cooed, “Fraa-aank.”

“Hmm?” he answered, knowing what she was going to say.

“They’re baa-aack...” they both said it together, imitating the little girl in the Poltergeist movie.

“Hold your speed steady,” Tanya said, then started squirming around in her seat.

Frank kept shifting his eyes between watching the road and trying to figure out what she was doing. By the time she had finished maneuvering her body around, her long, bare legs were over the back of the seat and her head was under the dashboard on her side of the car. From somewhere, she had produced a penlight and was shining it under the dash. Her filmy, transparent skirt had hiked around her waist and she wasn’t wearing underwear. Frank nearly ran off the road and corrected the car’s direction abruptly.

“Hey!” Tanya yelled, her voice sounding muffled under the dash. “Keep your mind on your driving! You’re not Fred!”

“Fred?” Frank asked, not understanding.

Tanya hummed a few bars, ‘Keep your mind on your driving, keep your hands on the wheel... ‘

“Oh, that Fred.” Frank said, then laughed, embarrassed.

He still kept shifting his ‘snoopy’ eyes between the road and her magnificent gold-tuffed pussy softly lit by the dashboard lights.