Vampire High Sophomore Year - By Douglas Rees Page 0,27

bet it won’t. I’ll bet once we get the lights on and the windows replaced, people will be showing up to help. This is just waiting to happen. You can feel it.”

I didn’t feel anything except the dank cold, and maybe a kind of loneliness seeping out of the walls. Like the building missed the old days and wanted to be filled with people again. Or maybe I was just getting hungry.

Turk kept a flashlight in her car. Using it, we wandered through all the floors and found the bathrooms, some of which had very artistic vines growing in them. We found the old cafeteria, which had a good-sized kitchen attached to it. There was an old walk-in freezer and a couple of old-fashioned iron ranges. We went into the dispensary, which still had its red cross on the door, though nothing was left on the other side of it. Down in the basement, we found the old furnace, the generator, and a pair of big old turbines.

“I knew this place would have its own electricity,” Turk said. “Turbines. When we get those working again, we can do anything.”

More and more, I was getting the feeling that the Simmons Mill had been a world all its own. And that it could be again.

I wanted to do everything at once. Sweep, fix the windows, get the lights back on and the furnace working, then go to Ileana and say, “It’s yours.”

I must have been imagining it really hard, because just then a voice started singing in jenti. It was a powerful, dark voice, and it came from somewhere above us.

“Damn,” Turk said. “What is that noise?”

“Jenti music,” I said.

“Come on,” Turk said. “Let’s find out who’s in our place.”

We climbed up the metal stairs that led to the second floor, then to the third. The sounds of the music got louder and louder. I was almost sure I knew who was making them. But what would he be doing here?

At one end of the third floor was a big wooden door. It probably led to offices. On it, handwritten on a long sheet of paper, was this:

I fly.

High above this small, smug place which I hate. Where the streetlights shine down on the bland roofs of Cape Cod cottages and ranch houses, I fly at night.

I fly.

I fly under the sun, daring it to roast me, casting my shadow on the streets. I swoop low over the trees, over the small yards that contain the small lives.

They pretend not to see me, the gadje. But I span twenty meters. My shadow falls on them and they tremble.

Sometimes I shriek my war cry.

We are not supposed to do any of this here in New Sodom. There are civic codes against flying without a license. They look like they were written for airplanes. But they were written for us.

We are supposed to behave ourselves here, we of the jenti. It is an old tradition that we do not upset the gadje.

I no longer care.

Gadje, jenti, they are all alike to me.

And I cannot love this place. I will not love it.

I fly because it is the one thing left to me.

When I can find one, I fly into a thunderhead. The winds in the tall tower of cloud tear at me, send me climbing high on a blast of air fast as the coming of a new hate. I struggle just to keep flying. To keep from being torn apart. The air rushes me up, up, until ice forms on my wings. Until the air becomes too thin to breathe, and a black shroud drops over my mind.

Then I plummet. Thrown by the wind, blinded by the clouds and my own oxygen-starved brain, I fall through the maelstrom, through the lightning. The thunder shakes my bones.

Then at last I fall out of the storm. I may be anywhere by then. The storm moves, and takes me where it wills. No, not where it wills. It wills nothing for me. It does not even know I am there.

In rain or hail, in wind and shadows, I try to figure out where I am. Then I fly in the direction I came from.

No matter how tired and beaten I am, I never stop until I return to New Sodom. That is my game. I will not allow myself to rest.

If the day comes when I fall exhausted from the sky and lie on some patch of stranger ground, gasping out my last breath, slowly changing