Draculas

"So where you going?" the Indian asked her.

"Salt Lake."

"I already asked her that, bro."

"No, I mean what for?"

"See some family."

"We're going to Tahoe. Do some snowboarding at Heavenly."

"Already told her that, bro."

The two men broke up into laughter.

"So you play guitar, huh?" Ke

"Yes."

"Wa

"Not just yet."

They stopped at a filling station in Moab. Matt pumped gas and Ke

Ke

"What are you talking about?"

They sped through a country of red rock and buttes and waterless arroyos.

"What we smoked."

"I don't think so."

"Man, I don't feel right. Where'd you get it?"

"From Tim. Same as always."

Lucy leaned forward and studied the double yellow line through the windshield. After Matt drifted across for a third time, she said, "Would you pull over please?"

"What's wrong?"

"I'm going to be sick."

"Oh God, don't puke on our shit."

Matt pulled over onto the shoulder and Lucy opened her door and stumbled out. As she worked her way down a gentle embankment making fake retching sounds, she heard Matt saying, "Dude? Dude? Come on, dude! Wake up, dude!"

She waited in the bed of the arroyo for ten minutes and then started back up the hill toward the car. Matt had slumped across the center console into Ke

She turned off of I-70 onto 24. According to her map, this stretch of highway ran forty-four miles to a nothing town called Hanksville. From her experience, it didn't get much quieter than this barren, lifeless waste of countryside.

Ten miles south, she veered onto a dirt road and followed it the length of several football fields, until the highway was almost lost to sight. She killed the engine, stepped out. Late afternoon. Windless. Soundless. The boys would be waking soon, and she was already starting to glow. She opened the guitar case and retrieved the syringe, gave Ke

By the time she'd wrangled them out of the car into the desert, dusk had fallen and she'd drenched herself in sweat. She rolled the men onto their backs and splayed out their arms and legs so they appeared to be making snow angels in the dirt.

Lucy removed their shoes and socks. The pair of scissors was the kind used to cut raw chicken, with thick, serrated blades. She trimmed off their shirts and cut away their pants and underwear.

Ke

"I didn't think you were ever going to wake up," Lucy said.

"What the hell are you doing?" Matt looked angry.

Ke

She held a locking carabiner attached to a chain that ran underneath the Subaru. She clipped it onto another pair of carabiners. A rope fed through each one, and the ends of the ropes had been tied to the handcuffs on the boys' ankles.

"Oh my God, she's crazy, dude."

"Lucy, please. Don't. We'll give you anything you want. We won't tell anyone."

She smiled. "That's really sweet of you, Matt, but this is what I want. Kind of have my heart set on it."

She stepped over the tangle of chain and rope and moved toward the driver's door as the boys hollered after her.

She left the hatch open so she could hear them. Kept looking back as she drove slowly, so slowly, along the dirt road. They were still begging her, and occasionally yelling when they dragged over a rock or a cactus, but she got them to the shoulder of Highway 24 with only minor injuries.

The moon was up and nearly full. She could see five miles of the road in either direction, so perfectly empty and black, and she wondered if the way it touched her in this moment felt anything like how the beauty of the those mountains she'd seen this morning touched normal people.

Lucy buckled her seatbelt and glanced in the rearview mirror. Matt had climbed to his feet, and he hobbled toward the car.

"Hey, no fair!" she yelled and gave the accelerator a little gas, jerking his feet out from under him. "All right, count of three. We'll start small with half a mile!"

She grasped the steering wheel, heart pumping. She'd done this a half dozen times but never with helmets.

"One! Two! Three!"

She reset the odometer and eased onto the accelerator. Five, ten, fifteen, twenty miles per hour, and the boys already begi

She eased off the gas and pulled over onto the shoulder. Collected the spray bottle from the guitar case, unbuckled, jumped out, and went to the boys. They lay on their backs, blood pooling beneath them. Ke

"Please," Matt croaked. "Please."

"You don't know how beautiful you look," she said, "but I'm go

She made it five miles (no one had ever lasted five miles and she credited those well-made snowboarding helmets) before the skeletons finally went quiet.

Lucy ditched what was left of the boys and drove all night like she'd done six blasts of coke, arriving in Salt Lake as the sun edged up over the mountains. She checked into a Red Roof I