“Has your medication worn off?”
“The hell with my medication.” Jenny rubbed her foot up my sock and between my trouser leg and shin. “Wanna make it twenty-six feet? Assuming that you’re average, of course.”
“Twenty-six feet of what?”
“This.” Jenny reached across the table and grabbed my belt buckle. I pulled away, but she kept her grip and caused me to drag her slender body against the table. We knocked over her cup and spilled coffee on the sidewalk.
I needed to subdue her before she started stripping. I turned my face downward and squeezed the contacts into my empty hand.
“Come on, Felix,” she cooed. “Don’t get shy on me. I hear you combat veterans can get really perverted.”
I palmed the sides of Jenny’s head.
Her aura burned a hot cadmium yellow. The nymphomania was in control.
“You demented bastard,” Jenny sneered, eyes closed. “The rough stuff, huh? Right here in public? I can take it.”
With my back to the parking lot, in the reflection of the café window I saw a passing BMW slow down. The driver’s window retracted and a woman’s anxious face peered out at us.
“What’s going on?” she asked.
I kept my back to the BMW, didn’t want to subdue that woman as well, and brought my nose against Jenny’s.
Her eyes opened and bore into mine. “Holy…” She went limp, her tongue drooling over her slack jaw.
Hurriedly I folded Jenny’s tongue back into her mouth and shut her jaw. I sat her in my chair and pulled my sunglasses from my coat pocket. Covering my eyes with the glasses, I approached the BMW and explained in my most professional, soothing voice. “There’s no trouble, ma’am. My patient’s had a seizure. She’s okay.”
The woman scowled. “Like hell. I know what I saw.” She lifted a cell phone against her cheek. “You can explain it to the police.” I was close enough to touch her door when the BMW accelerated away. The woman tossed one look back at me.
I lifted my sunglasses and zapped her.
Her eyebrows rose in astonishment and her lips formed an oval around the gape of her mouth. The BMW zoomed through the pedestrian crossing. Shoppers jumped out of her way. The BMW veered to the right and crunched into a parked Cadillac SUV, spraying the asphalt with the shattered red plastic of the tail lamps. The Cadillac’s alarm screamed as if wounded.
Under the cover of this distraction, I gave Jenny another vampire glare to refresh the hypnosis. Jerking her by the arm, I tugged her around to the alley behind the strip mall. She stumbled behind me. Her flip-flops slapped the pavement.
The alley reeked of urine and rotting food. Piles of flattened cardboard boxes stood along the walls. I pulled Jenny toward the Dumpster.
“Uhh, inside the Dumpster-now that’s kinky,” she whispered excitedly. Pheromones gushed from her body. How did this nymphomania burn through my hypnosis?
I whipped Jenny ahead of me and sent her tripping over a stack of wooden pallets. My fangs sprouted. After a glance to see that we were alone, I knelt to hold her by the shoulders. I pulled her head back and curved her delicious throat toward me.
Afterwards, I walked her back to the sidewalk tables and left her slumped in a chair, her sweater buttoned tight to her neck to hide my bite marks. Within a few minutes she’d wake up, confused and oblivious to our meeting.
On the way home I couldn’t keep my thoughts from careening into one another like bumper cars. So much had happened that didn’t make sense. Once back in my apartment, I sat in the armchair with an old-fashioned glass in my hand, scotch and boar’s blood served neat. Midway through the second glass, my thinking had calmed enough for me to analyze with some degree of coherence what I did and didn’t know.
My first break had been the revelation from Tamara that Dr. Wong possessed the Tiger Team report about Building 707, but that in turn raised more questions. Why would the head of Radiation Safety keep the report from his boss, Gilbert Odin? Who was the report intended for, and what did it describe? Tiger Teams were special national-level committees convened to investigate serious concerns about nuclear-weapons safety. They never issued a finding that didn’t cause someone’s head to roll in the dust. I hadn’t heard of any heads rolling at Rocky Flats…yet. Maybe my friend Gilbert Odin was afraid that ax would fall across his own neck.
The second revelation was this mysterious yellow aura emitted by the nymphomaniacs and their ability to resist vampire hypnosis.
Third, someone had come after me with a rifle. Why? I doubted they were soliciting memberships for the NRA.
Last, and equally troubling, was Jenny’s mentioning that someone had been asking about vampires. This someone knew about the nymphomania, and yet what he queried Jenny about was vampires. A human asking about vampires? Impossible. Or maybe he wasn’t human. And why would he make the connection between the outbreak of nymphomania and us vampires?
I set my empty glass on the end table. Tomorrow I would keep digging into the nymphomania until I found out who was asking questions about me.
CHAPTER 8
AFTER A RESTLESS NIGHT, I commuted to Rocky Flats the next morning. During the drive, I ate my usual morning pick-me-up, an apple and a low-fat cinnamon scone washed down with a blend of dark Sumatran java and goat’s blood.
I “worked” in the same building as Dr. Wong and knew him in passing. I was one of many health physicists at Rocky Flats, most of whom were contractors or on loan from another DOE facility, so my presence was no novelty. As a government contractor, it didn’t take much for me to look gainfully employed. I walked around with a notebook full of whatever papers I had found in my desk. I signed up for meetings I would never attend. In general, I kept a lower profile than a bedbug in a mattress.
Dr. Wong was the key to the next step in my investigation. To bait him into revealing the Tiger Team report, I created a bogus excerpt from an incident summary about Building 707. Using details Tamara had given me, I entered the names of the three RCTs, their contamination levels, and a description of their survey.
I printed out the document and knocked on Dr. Wong’s office door. He invited me in.
The room smelled of talc and miconazole nitrate, the active ingredient of antifungal foot spray. Stacks of binders, spiral-bound reports, and thick folders covered every horizontal surface of his office except the floor, flotsam created in the wake of any bureaucracy.
Dr. Wong sat hunched at his desk, reading a book and finishing a chocolate snack cake. His comb-over flopped away from his brown, bald head. A computer monitor and in- and out-boxes formed a barricade across the front of his desk.
Arranged left to right on the wall behind him were his framed diplomas: a bachelor of science in chemical engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; a masters in health physics from Georgetown; and a doctorate in health science from MIT. On an end table in the right corner of the room rested a gray safe the size of a single-drawer cabinet. A magnetic placard on the safe’s door read: CLOSED.
Narrow-shouldered and with a sloppy gut, Dr. Wong’s pear-shaped body settled into the chair. As a senior health physicist, DOE paid him well, yet he wore clunky government-issue black-framed glasses, a cheap short-sleeved shirt, and a clip-on tie. Dr. Wong dressed like he was moonlighting at Radio Shack.
He crinkled the empty cellophone wrapper of the snack cake and looked up from his book: Pathological Effects of Thermonuclear Weapons, Volume IV-Maximizing Civilian Mortality. He tapped the cover. “Oh for the good old days, when working here had a purpose.”
“Sorry to disturb your nostalgia, Doctor, but I found something that might concern you.”