Club Dead

and the woman, a peroxide blond about my age, hung up the nozzle as I got out of the Lincoln.
    At one in the morning, the gas station/convenience store was almost empty besides the young woman, who was heavily made up and wrapped in a quilted coat. I spied a battered Toyota pickup parked by the side of the filling station, in the only shadow on the lot. Inside the pickup, two men were sitting, involved in a heated conversation.
    “It’s too cold to be sitting outside in a pickup,” the dark-rooted blond said, as we went through the glass doors together. She gave an elaborate shiver.
    “You’d think so,” I commented. I was halfway down the aisle by the back of the store, when the clerk, behind a high counter on a raised platform, turned away from his little television to take the blond’s money.
    The door to the bathroom was hard to shut behind me, since the wooden sill had swollen during some past leakage. In fact, it probably didn’t shut all the way behind me, since I was in something of a hurry. But the stall door shut and locked, and it was clean enough. In no hurry to get back in the car with the silent Eric, I took my time after using the facilities. I peered in the mirror over the sink, expecting I’d look like holy hell and not being contradicted by what I saw reflected there.
    The mangled bite mark on my neck looked really disgusting, as though a dog had had hold of me. As I cleaned the wound with soap and wet paper towels, I wondered if having ingested vampire blood would give me a specific quantity of extra strength and healing, and then be exhausted, or if it was good for a certain amount of time like a time-release capsule, or what the deal was. After I’d had Bill’s blood, I’d felt great for a couple of months.
    I didn’t have a comb or brush or anything, and I looked like something the cat dragged in. Trying to tame my hair with my fingers just made a bad thing worse. I washed my face and neck, and stepped back into the glare of the store. I hardly registered that once again the door didn’t shut behind me, instead lodged quietly on the swollen sill. I emerged behind the last long aisle of groceries, crowded with CornNuts and Lays Chips and Moon Pies and Scotch Snuf and Prince Albert in a can . . .
    And two armed robbers up by the clerk’s platform inside the door.
    Holy Moses, why don’t they just give these poor clerks shirts with big targets printed on them? That was my first thought, detached, as if I were watching a movie with a convenience store robbery. Then I snapped into the here and now, tuned in by the very real strain on the clerk’s face. He was awfully young—a reedy, blotched teenager. And he was facing the two big guys with guns. His hands were in the air, and he was mad as hell. I would have expected blubbering for his life, or incoherence, but this boy was furious.
    It was the fourth time he’d been robbed, I read fresh from his brain. And the third time at gunpoint. He was wishing he could grab the shotgun under the seat in his truck behind the store and blast these sumbitches to hell.
    And no one acknowledged that I was there. They didn’t seem to know.
    Not that I was complaining, okay?
    I glanced behind me, to verify that the door to the bathroom had stuck open again, so its sound would not betray me. The best thing for me to do would be to creep out the back door to this place, if I could find it, and run around the building to get Eric to call the police.
    Wait a minute. Now that I was thinking of Eric, where was he? Why hadn’t he come in to pay for the gas?
    If it was possible to have a foreboding any more ominous than the one I already had, that fit the bill. If Eric hadn’t come in yet, Eric wasn’t coming. Maybe he’d decided to leave. Leave me.
    Here.
    Alone.
    Just like Bill left you , my mind supplied helpfully. Well, thanks a hell of a lot, Mind.
    Or maybe they’d shot him. If he’d taken a head wound . . . and there was no healing a heart that had taken a direct hit with a big-caliber bullet.
    There was no point whatsoever in standing there worrying.
    This was a typical convenience store. You came in the front door, and the clerk was behind a long counter to your right, up on a platform. The cold drinks were in the refrigerator case that took up the left wall. You were facing three long aisles running the width of the store, plus various special displays and stacks of insulated mugs and charcoal briquettes and birdseed. I was all the way at