Bottom of a Bottle
Annie’d had… not a great night. Getting blind drunk on cheap beer was never a good idea. By the time she managed to drag herself to her laptop to dig into her email, she had a blinding headache and was desperate for an early bedtime.
Her mother’s words were ringing in her ears, hours after the phone call she had made in trying to puzzle out all she had learned in recent days.
“Vampires? You stay away from that mess, you hear?” her mother had said over the line, voice sharp and alarmed. “We can’t help what we are, baby, but they’re something all the worse. They gotta kill people to stay alive. That’s all they are. Killers. Don’t you get involved.”
But how could she not? Knowing what she now knew, the missing persons case files brought back to active case status with Derek’s anonymous tip, knowing that these things were out there… how could she not get involved? No matter what she had promised her mother.
Thankfully, much of her email was tedious daily garbage from the Vegas field office, Brett bitching about this or that, a request to pitch in for a present for the baby shower for a tech analyst she didn’t know and wouldn’t be invited to… and then there was one more.
She had vain hope, for a moment or two, that something coming from Washington could be her ticket out of Searchlight. All in all, it was too obtuse and lacking in detail to mean much to her at all; she responded with a more professionally polished version of ‘okie dokie’, and then closed her inbox. Perhaps it was time to go back to bed.
Or…
Annie opened a browser and pulled up a search engine, quickly typing in “vampires”. A wikipedia article, some terrible History channel videos, more films and books… all pretty useless information. How was she to know what was real and what was total garbage?
But, then, who else could she add? She eyeballed her phone, resting beside her computer on the desk. There was a contact saved as ‘Decade’ that could probably set her straight, but Annie was uncertain. If her mother had been right, she couldn’t trust him at all.
She sighed, cleared her search, and for a moment thought of the blonde he had called Veronica, and all the dead she had left in her wake.
Annie sighed again and sat up a little straighter, blinking against the too-bright light of her computer screen. She re-opened the search engine and entered a new search: how to kill a vampire...