Living Dead in Dallas

blasting lasted. Glass shattered, vampires roared, humans screamed. The noise battered at me, just as the tidal wave of scores of brains at high gear washed over me. When it began to taper off, I looked up into Eric’s eyes. Incredibly, he was excited. He smiled at me. “I knew I’d get on top of you somehow,” he said.
    “Are you trying to make me mad so I’ll forget how scared I am?”
    “No, I’m just opportunistic.”
    I wiggled, trying to get out from under him, and he said, “Oh, do that again. It felt great.”
    “Eric, that girl I was just talking to is about three feet away from us with part of her head missing.”
    “Sookie,” he said, suddenly serious, “I’ve been dead for a few hundred years. I am used to it. But she is not quite gone. There is a spark. Do you want me to bring her over?”
    I was shocked speechless. How could I make that decision?
    And while I thought about it, he said, “She is gone.”
    While I stared up at him, the silence became complete. The only noise in the house was the sobbing of Farrell’s wounded date, who was pressing both hands to his reddened thigh. From outside came the remote sounds of vehicles pulling out in a hurry up and down the quiet suburban street. The attack was over. I seemed to be having trouble breathing, and figuring out what I should do next. Surely there was something, some action, I should be taking?
    This was as close to war as I would ever come.
    The room was full of the survivors’ screams and the vampires’ howls of rage. Bits of stuffing from the couch and chairs floated in the air like snow. There was broken glass on everything and the heat of the night poured into the room. Several of the vampires were already up and giving chase, Joseph Velasquez among them, I noticed.
    “No excuse to linger,” Eric said with a mock sigh, and lifted off of me. He looked down at himself. “My shirts always get ruined when I am around you.”
    “Oh shit, Eric.” I got to my knees with clumsy haste. “You’re bleeding. You got hit. Bill! Bill!” My hair was slithering around my shoulders as I turned from side to side searching the room. The last time I’d noticed him he’d been talking to a black-haired vampire with apronounced widow’s peak. She’d looked something like Snow White, to me. Now I half-stood to search the floor and I saw her sprawled close to a window. Something was protruding from her chest. The window had been hit by a shotgun blast, and some splinters had flown into the room. One of them had pierced her chest and killed her. Bill was not in sight, among the living or the dead.
    Eric pulled off his sodden shirt and looked down at his shoulder. “The bullet is right inside the wound, Sookie,” Eric said, through clenched teeth. “Suck it out.”
    “What?” I gaped at him.
    “If you don’t suck it out, it will heal inside my flesh. If you are so squeamish, go get a knife and cut.”
    “But I can’t do that.” My tiny party purse had a pocketknife inside, but I had no idea where I’d put it down, and I couldn’t gather my thoughts to search.
    He bared his teeth at me. “I took this bullet for you. You can get it out for me. You are no coward.”
    I forced myself to steady. I used his discarded shirt as a swab. The bleeding was slowing, and by peering into the torn flesh, I could just see the bullet. If I’d had long fingernails like Trudi, I’d have been able to get it out, but my fingers are short and blunt, and my nails are clipped close. I sighed in resignation.
    The phrase “biting the bullet” took on a whole new meaning as I bent to Eric’s shoulder.
    Eric gave a long moan as I sucked, and I felt the bullet pop into my mouth. He’d been right. The rug could hardly be stained any worse than it already was, so though it made me feel like a real heathen, I spat the bullet onto the floor along with most of the blood in my mouth. But some of it, inevitably, I swallowed. His shoulder was already healing. “This room reeks of blood,” he whispered.
    “Well, there,” I said, and looked up. “That was the grossest—”
    “Your lips are bloody.” He seized my face in both hands and kissed me.
    It’s hard not to respond when a master of the art of kissing is laying one on you. And I might have let myself enjoy it—well, enjoy it more—if I hadn’t been so worried about Bill; because let’s face it, brushes with death have that effect. You want to reaffirm the fact that you’re alive. Though