The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires - Grady Hendrix Page 0,51

yards were landscaped. All the trees were encrusted in vines. A skinny black man in shorts with no shirt sat on the front steps of his trailer drinking water out of a plastic one-gallon jug. Some little children in diapers stopped running through a sprinkler and pressed up against a chain-link fence to watch them drive by.

“Look for number sixteen,” Patricia said, concentrating on the potholed road.

They nosed forward beneath a scrub oak whose branches scraped the roof, then emerged into a big, sandy clearing. The road made a loop around a small, unpainted cinder-block church shaped like a shoebox. A sign out front proclaimed it to be Mt. Zion A.M.E. Neat little white and blue houses surrounded it. Down at the far end, some boys ran around a basketball court in the shade where the trees started, but here in front of the houses there was no shelter from the sun.

“Sixteen,” Kitty said, and Patricia saw a clean white house with black shutters and white, pressed-tin porch columns. A sun-faded cardboard cutout of Santa’s face sat inside a plastic holly wreath on the front door. Patricia parked at the end of the drive.

“I’ll wait in the car,” Kitty said.

“I’m taking the keys so you won’t be able to run the air conditioner,” Patricia said.

Kitty gathered her courage for a moment, then heaved herself up and followed Patricia outside. Instantly, the hot sun pierced the crown of Patricia’s head like a nail and bounced off the Volvo, blinding her.

In the next sandy driveway over, three little girls skipped rope, double Dutch. Patricia stood for a minute, listening to their rhyme:

Boo Daddy, Boo Daddy

In the woods

Grabbed a little boy

’Cause he taste so good

Boo Daddy, Boo Daddy

In the sheets

Sucking all your blood

’Cause it taste so sweet

She wondered where they’d learned something like that. She walked around the hood of the car and headed for Mrs. Greene’s, Kitty falling in beside her, and then she sensed movement behind them. She turned and saw a crowd of people coming their way, walking fast from the basketball courts, and before she or Kitty could move there were boys in front of them, boys behind them, boys leaning on the hood of her car, boys all around them, adopting lounging postures, fencing them in.

“What are you doing here?” one asked.

His white T-shirt was covered in random blue stripes and his hair was cut into a big wedge with straight lines shaved into one side.

“Nothing to say?” he said. “I asked you a question. What, the fuck, are you doing out here? ’Cause I don’t think you live here. I don’t think you got invited here. So what, the fuck?”

He performed for the boys around him and they made their faces hard, stepped in close, crowded Kitty and Patricia together.

“Please,” Kitty said. “We’re leaving right now.”

A few of the boys grinned and Patricia felt a flash of anger. Why was Kitty such a coward?

“Too late for that,” Wedgehead said.

“We’re visiting a friend,” Patricia said, clutching her purse tighter.

“You don’t have any friends out here, bitch!” the boy exploded, pushing his face into hers.

Patricia saw her pale, frightened face reflected twice in his sunglasses. She looked weak. Kitty was right. They never should have come out here. She’d made a terrible mistake. She pulled her neck into her shoulders and got ready to be stabbed or shoved or whatever came next.

“Edwin Miles!” a woman’s voice snapped through the sizzling air.

Everyone turned except Wedgehead, who kept his face so close to Patricia’s she could count the sparse hairs in his mustache.

“Edwin Miles,” the voice called again. This time he turned. “What are you playing at?”

Patricia turned and saw Mrs. Greene standing in the door to her house. She wore a red T-shirt and blue jeans and her arms were covered with white gauze pads.

“Who are these bitches?” the boy, Edwin Miles, called to Mrs. Greene.

“Don’t you use that language with me,” Mrs. Greene