Rocket - Chapter 8
Naida - US/Mexico Border
The caliche released her and she didn’t remember burrowing in.
Naida pushed up through twelve feet of earth that shouldn’t have moved like water but did, emerging into desert night with her head full of static.
WRONG! WRONG! WRONG!
She had a massive headache, and thinking hurt.
Something happened. Something with, No. Don’t.
Her legs folded and she caught herself on hands that sank into something that wasn’t just dirt. The texture was wrong. Sticky. Chemical. Her palms came away coated in residue that gleamed dark under the moonlight.
The world swam at the edges, colors bleeding wrong, sounds arriving delayed like her brain was buffering like a YouTube video. Starving. Dying. The words kept circling.
She focused on her palms, on what coated them.
Okay what the fuck. Ground’s all... foamy? Pink shit everywhere. No wait, red. Pink again? Mierda, am I seeing things?
Her palms were coated in it. The chemical smell made her gag: reflex she couldn’t stop even when breathing was optional. Wrong. Everything about this was wrong. The whole area around her emergence point looked like someone had carpet-bombed the desert with Pepto-Bismol and napalm. Thick. Wet in some places. Crusted in others.
Paint? No, smells like chemicals. That retardant stuff they drop on fires?
The implication clawed toward consciousness. Her brain slammed it back down before the thought could complete, sliding away from the connection like oil on water.
The desert around her looked bombed. Not metaphorically. Actually bombed. Great swaths of creosote flattened and blackened. The caliche itself scorched in patterns that radiated outward from: from somewhere she wasn’t looking at. Tire tracks carved deep into earth that should’ve been too hard for that kind of impression. The geometric precision of heavy equipment. Military equipment maybe.
What? where am I? Was I running? Why can’t I remember…
Pink residue everywhere. Coating the burned creosote. Pooled in tire ruts. Splattered across rocks in patterns that said it came from above. Dropped from aircraft. Carpet bombing with: with,
¿Qué mierda es esto?
The smell hit her harder as she stood. Brimstone. Burned creosote. Aviation fuel. Something that looked like the chemical that planes drop on: on fires? Is that what this is? The pink shit they use when things burn out of control?
But why would planes come here? What was burning? When did…
The thought fragmented. Her brain refusing to track it further.
She’d seen news footage before. Wildfires in California. Forests burning. Planes dropping red slurry to stop the spread. But that was: that was massive fires. Acres burning. Not: not whatever happened here in the middle of nowhere desert.
Unless something really fucking bad happened. Something that needed planes and military response and hazmat procedures and…
No. Don’t think about it. Can’t think about it.
This didn’t make sense. None of it made sense.
She turned in a slow circle, vision contracting. The devastation extended maybe sixty yards in every direction from a center point she wasn’t looking at. Couldn’t look at. Her body physically recoiling when her eyes tried to track toward the epicenter of whatever had happened here.
Yellow hazmat tape fluttered from a creosote bush twenty feet away. The kind with official warnings. DANGER. AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY.
They were here. Emergency response. Fire department. Probably military too. Probably evacuated the whole area. Probably investigated for, for…
Her brain shut down the thought.
I go underground. That’s my thing. Burrow into caliche and hide from the sun. That’s what I do. That’s all I do. Nothing else.
But the pink retardant coating her hands said different. The scorch patterns said different. The tire tracks and hazmat tape and the smell of aviation fuel said very fucking different.
Voices carried on the wind from somewhere east. Male. Authoritative. The register of uniforms and protocols, someone who’d already decided she was a problem.
“burn pattern doesn’t match anything natural...”
“need samples from the origin point before...”
“calling in arson investigation at first light...”
The words filtered through her compromised awareness like white noise. Fire investigators. Military maybe. Government. The kind of attention that meant questions she couldn’t answer and scrutiny she couldn’t afford.
Move. Have to move. Can’t be here when they come back.
Her body responded before conscious decision, stumbling away from the voices, away from the evidence, away from the center point her eyes refused to see. Northeast. Just go northeast. Away from whatever happened. Away from questions.
The trembling got worse with each step. Not cold. Not fear exactly. A metabolic storm made her muscles fire wrong, her coordination slipping as if her nervous system were fractured.
FEED FEED FEED FEED FEED
The hunger wasn’t normal hunger. Wasn’t even vampire hunger like she’d felt before. This was cellular. Every fiber of her body screaming in a frequency that bypassed thought entirely.
Her stomach cramped even though she had no digestion. Her veins felt like they were collapsing inward. The trembling intensified until her whole frame shook with micro-convulsions that made walking feel like operating a broken puppet.
Okay. Priorities. Blood first. Then shelter before dawn. That’s it. That’s the plan. Don’t think about anything else.
She pushed herself faster despite the coordination issues, despite how the world kept swimming at the edges, despite how her enhanced senses kept misfiring: sounds arriving before or after the things that made them, scents mapping to wrong locations, her night vision flickering like a dying bulb.
The desert looks different. Wrong angles. Shadows falling in directions that don’t make sense. Or maybe my eyes aren’t working right. The world had a haze like staring through gas fumes.
She tried to focus. Her knees buckled after three steps. Her palms hit the ground, trembling like she’d been electrocuted.
Fuck.
Last thing I remember is: is…
Nothing. Static. A wall of nothing where my memory should be.
Great. Amnesia. That’s completely fine. Vampires get amnesia. Normal vampire night.
She stared at her palms in the moonlight. Still coated with pink residue.
My hands are clean. That seems important somehow.
What was I expecting? Evidence of something. But they’re just hands. Shaking. Pale. Clean underneath the retardant.
The smell hit her senses again on a shift in the wind. Brimstone and burned creosote and something else, and the scent made her stomach lurch even though she didn’t have normal digestion anymore. Chemical. Wrong. The scent of…
Don’t look. Don’t go back. Forward. Just go forward.
She didn’t know why she thought that. But her body was already moving northeast, stumbling over terrain her feet knew by instinct even though her brain was three seconds behind processing each step.
She stumbled over a rock she should’ve seen, caught herself on a creosote bush that stabbed thorns into her palm. The pain felt distant. The hunger was the only solid thing.
Blood-starved. That’s what this is. I fed recently, I remember feeding, but now it’s gone. Burned through. Used up.
Used up on what?
Don’t think about it.
Maybe I was running from someone. That would explain why I’m starving. Explain why my body feels like it burned through a week’s worth of energy in: in however long. Hours? Minutes? Can’t remember.
Probably the Coyotes. They’ve been hunting me for days now. Must’ve pushed me hard, made me use too much energy burrowing or running or…
Or something.
The Coyotes. Days of running. Tactical gear, night vision, no sleep. Three nights straight. That explains it. Exhaustion. Blood-starvation. Stress. Normal stuff.
That’s all this is. Exhaustion. Blood-starvation. The stress of being hunted.
Her foot caught and she went down hard, hands hitting caliche that was still warm from the day’s heat. She stayed there for a moment, on hands and knees, going through the motions of breathing, trying to make her brain work right.
Still alive. Still refusing to die in the dirt.
Get up. Have to get up. Dawn’s coming.
The dawn pressure was building. Not visible yet but she could feel it pressing against her supernatural awareness. Maybe an hour. Maybe less. Maybe more. Her internal clock was fucked, couldn’t tell anymore.
She pushed herself up. Kept walking.
The terrain started showing signs of human presence. Graded roads in the distance. The geometric patterns of property lines carved into wilderness. Lights on the horizon that meant civilization, meant people, meant blood.
The hunger intensified at the thought. The controlled predator awareness she’d been learning was gone. Just desperate. Frantic. The demon inside her consciousness wasn’t calculating anymore: it was demanding.
FEED NOW OR DIE.
Her vision tunneled slightly. The haze got worse. She couldn’t tell if she was walking straight or veering, couldn’t track distance properly, couldn’t…
Focus. Just focus on the lights. Get to the lights. Find someone alone. Feed. Then find shelter before sunrise.
Simple plan. I can do simple.
But her body knew something her mind wouldn’t touch. The trembling got worse. Her hands tingled with heat that made no sense, made her look down at her palms again.
Why am I looking at my hands again? What am I expecting to see? I burrow. That’s what I do. Superhero fast and strong. I’m not... I’m not... Some kind of Xiuhtecuhtli.
The thought dissolved.
Survived five months of being cargo. Survived waking up dead. Survived whatever the hell happened back there. Still moving. That’s the job.
Walking is safer than thinking.
Back there in the desert night, she’d left something. Evidence of something. But her mind slid away from it like oil on water, couldn’t get traction, couldn’t examine what,
Movement. Her enhanced hearing caught it before conscious thought did. Footsteps. Human. Male. Moving through brush about two hundred yards south.
Coyote? Hiker? Doesn’t matter.
Her body crouched automatically, predator instincts cutting through the fog.
I can hunt. That’s simple. That’s survival.
But the footsteps moved away, fading into the distance. Not hunting her. Just passing through.
She relaxed slightly. Kept moving northeast.
Tonight something happened. Something bad.
But I can’t remember what.
Don’t want to remember what.
Exhaustion. Blood-starvation. Days of being hunted. Normal stuff. I’ve already accepted what I have to. That’s enough.
Not thinking about fire or screaming or…
No.
She stumbled again. Caught herself. Kept walking because stopping meant thinking and thinking meant remembering and remembering meant,
Don’t. Just don’t. Get blood. Get underground. Deal with everything else later.
Later when my head is clear. Later when I’m not dying. Later when the static clears and I can think straight.
The smell of rotten eggs and burned creosote followed her no matter which way the wind shifted. The heat in her hands refused to fade. The gap in her memory sat there, and she set it aside, and it sat there again.
Not if I want to stay functional. Not if I want to survive.
She pushed the voice down. Focused on the lights. On the hunger. On the simple immediate needs that didn’t require examining the impossible.
The desert stretched ahead of her, marked by creosote and palo verde. But now the landscape felt changed. Like the desert had recalibrated around her in ways she couldn’t read.
Probably just the blood-starvation. Probably just exhaustion. Probably.
She kept walking. The lights got closer. Dawn pressure built behind her eyes. And somewhere in the darkness behind her, evidence smoldered. She didn’t look back.
But I’m not looking back. Can’t look back. Forward is all that matters. Blood. Shelter. Survival. The rest could wait for a later that might never come.
The terrain shifted under her feet from wild desert to the marginal spaces where civilization tried to take root. Fence posts and dirt roads threading between them, someone’s land, someone’s boundary, claimed even out here.
Naida’s coordination was degrading further. She caught herself listing left, overcorrected, nearly walked into a barbed wire fence she should’ve seen from twenty feet away. Her body lagged three steps behind her brain’s commands; visual information arrived fragmented and incomplete.
Fuck I’m not going to make it. Too far. Too weak. Can’t…
A new sensation cut through the haze: something that bypassed her body entirely.
She stopped. Tried to focus her vision on the horizon.
Lights. Big lights. Not the yellow-white of street lamps or the harsh security floods, but something softer. Warmer. Illumination that seemed to pulse with its own rhythm against the night sky.
Her body recoiled before her brain caught up.
The revulsion hit like physical nausea: not fear exactly. Cellular. A rejection so profound it felt like the thing she’d become was trying to rip itself free to escape whatever was generating that light.
WRONG. SACRED. DANGEROUS.
She veered away automatically, her stumbling path taking a hard turn east. Whatever that light was, her body wanted nothing to do with it. Needed to separate herself and: and,
Her enhanced vision focused through the haze. Made out shapes. A massive structure rising from the foothills. A cross. Stone, enormous, arms outstretched against the hillside, crowned with illumination that made her stomach turn.
The cross. Had to be. One of those roadside monuments or: or bigger. Much bigger. Lit up visible for kilometers around.
The revulsion intensified. Her skin crawled like insects were burrowing underneath. Heat flashed through her palms: not fire, not yet, just warning tingles that said danger; danger stay away. Her fangs extended involuntarily. The headache spiked into migraine territory.
The headache hit with jackhammer force. Why does that make me want to vomit? It’s just a cross. Just lights. People are religious, so what? Doesn’t mean…
Her body rejected the rationalization. The thing she’d become knew better. Sacred ground. Consecrated space. The opposite of everything she was now. Like matter touching antimatter. The way a vampire holds a crucifix. Her very existence screamed wrongness in proximity to that illuminated figure.
RUN. FLEE. IT BURNS IT BURNS GET AWAY.
So now I know what crosses are for. Apparently me. That’s useful information.
Her legs made the decision for her: east, fast, the cross shrinking behind her with every stumbling stride. She ran despite having no energy for it, pushing through the starvation because that cross required distance she couldn’t afford to close.
The movement triggered something. A fragment of memory trying to surface.
Candles. Safe house. Prayers in languages I didn’t understand. Crosses on the walls making my skin…
No. That didn’t happen. That was someone else’s memory. Some other girl’s experience. Not mine.
She kept running. Kilometers blurred past in darkness that felt both too fast and too slow. Her legs moved on autopilot while her brain lagged three seconds behind. Pavement. Dirt. More pavement. Fences: jumped. Cattle guards: crossed. Desert scrub tearing at her clothes.
Her vision went black for a second. Two seconds. She was still running but couldn’t see, just muscle memory and supernatural instinct keeping her from face-planting. When her sight returned she’d covered another hundred meters without conscious awareness.
Sound cut out entirely for thirty seconds. Just her footfalls vibrating through her skeleton in absolute silence. Then it slammed back: every cricket, every wind gust, overwhelming. Her brain couldn’t filter anymore.
The shrine’s glow finally disappeared behind hills and distance, but her body kept pushing east anyway.
How long have I been running? Minutes? Hours? Can’t tell. It was all fragments.
The terrain changed under her feet. More roads. More lights ahead. Different lights. Harsh and commercial instead of that warm sacred wrongness.
The fragment dissolved before it could achieve clarity. Better that way. Safer.
Dawn pressure continued building.
Maybe an hour, maybe more, maybe less. I need to feed and find shelter. Can do that. Have to do that. No other choice.
Her feet found pavement. Easier walking. Her coordination was shot enough that the flat surface actually helped. She listed less. Stumbled less. Made better time even though everything still swam at the edges.
The hunger was becoming everything now. The demon had stopped making demands. It had become her. Just hunger. Pure. Absolute. Rational thought burned away.
I need blood. Need it now. Need it more than I needed anything in my life including air when I was buried, including water in the desert, including my abuela’s tres leches cake when I was eight years old and the world still made sense.
The comparison felt wrong. Like she was mixing things that shouldn’t be mixed. But her brain was too fucked to figure out why.
Almost there. Find someone alone. Feed fast. No witnesses. Clean kill.
The words felt mechanical. Instructions her body would follow even if her mind couldn’t quite hold onto why. Survival autopilot running the body while her mind lagged behind.
Movement in her peripheral vision. She spun, nearly fell, caught herself on a road sign that cut her palm. The sign indicated Bisbee - City Limits. The words like the pain registered delayed, like the signals were taking the long way through her nervous system.
The space was empty. Shadows in the wind. Creosote branches reaching.
She was seeing things now. The haze of starvation trying to take over.
The Chevron station glowed like salvation half a mile ahead.
Get blood. Get underground. The rest later.
The mantra kept her moving. Kept her focused on immediate survival instead of the gaps in her memory, the smell of brimstone still faint on the wind, the heat that flashed through her palms when she thought too hard about…
About what?
Couldn’t remember.
Didn’t want to remember.
The gas station lights were close now. She could see the illuminated price signs. The glow of the convenience store windows. One vehicle at the pumps. Silver. The light caught the fluorescent tubes.
Blood. Shelter. Survive.
Simple.
Three words. Whatever happened back there required aircraft and fire suppressant. Three words is manageable.
She could do simple.
The Chevron station was right there now. Beacon of late-night capitalism in a desert full of nothing. One car. One person. One heartbeat she could almost hear from here.
YES. ALONE. PERFECT.
Her pace increased even though it made her coordination worse. Desperate urgency erased caution. She needed blood before dawn and before her rational thought collapsed entirely and she just became hunger with fangs.
The dirt road met pavement. Harder surface. Louder footsteps. She moved quieter, or tried to, but her body wasn’t following instructions anymore.
Almost there. Just a little further. Blood and shelter and survival. The rest could burn.
The thought triggered another flash of heat through her palms. She looked down, expecting: what? Fire? That was insane. She didn’t have fire. She burrowed. That was her thing.
Still clean. Just hands. Pale, pink residue coating them but underneath: clean.
She kept walking toward the lights while her mind continued constructing desperate alternatives to truths she couldn’t acknowledge. While her body moved on autopilot through starvation that should have killed her. The desert behind her held evidence her consciousness refused to examine, while dawn approached with lethal certainty.
There’s only ahead. Blood. Temporary safety. The fragile fiction that I’m still just a vampire learning to hunt. Not admitting what I did or what I became or what horrors my mind is actively re-repressing for the sake of functional survival.
The Chevron station materialized in harsh fluorescent detail. Empty parking lot except for the silver Challenger. One man at the pumps. Alone. Vulnerable. Unaware.
Her enhanced hearing locked onto his heartbeat even through the haze of starvation. Steady. Calm. The rhythm of someone who’d never been prey.
Perfect.
Her fangs extended fully. The hunger took over.
Her awareness collapsed to a single point: the heartbeat thrumming beneath skin thirty yards away. Consequence and morality dissolved beneath the roar of need that transcended appetite. Feed or cease to exist as anything recognizable. Feed or become unrecognizable.
NOW NOW NOW FEED FEED FEED! FEED OR DIE!
She was moving before conscious thought could interfere, vampire speed closing the distance in a blur that her fragmented awareness couldn’t track. The fluorescent lights strobed overhead. The desert air tasted like copper and desperation.
The man’s face turned toward her, confusion replacing casual disinterest, his mouth forming words that echoed from underwater.
“Hey there,” he called out, voice gentle with paternal worry. “You okay, sweetheart? You need help or...”
Time lurched. Reality skipped.
She wasn’t standing twenty feet away anymore: she was pressed against him, and her teeth were in his neck, and warm copper flooded her mouth like the answer to a question she’d never known how to ask.
When did I? how did I...
The man made sounds that weren’t quite words, weren’t quite screams. His hands pushed weakly; she was stronger now, impossibly stronger, and his resistance crumbled like paper in a hurricane. She crushed him against the Challenger, the door handle digging into his spine. The blood flooding her mouth was all that mattered, the overwhelming relief of finally, finally feeding.
She drank desperately and clumsily, blood spilling down her chin, running between her fingers. Messy. Graceless. Desperate as drowning. She bit too hard, tore rather than pierced, and still the relief that flooded through her was so intense it felt like salvation.
MORE. MORE. DRAIN IT ALL. TAKE EVERYTHING.
The demon drove her actions with single-minded purpose that bypassed every human consideration. Robert: the name floated up from somewhere, maybe his wallet, maybe the credit card scattered on the concrete: became nothing more than a container for the sustenance she required. His struggling beneath her hands was just mechanical resistance to be overcome, his weakening heartbeat just a countdown to completion.
When the struggling stopped, when the pulse beneath her teeth faltered and ceased, when the warm flow became a trickle and then nothing, awareness snapped back like a rubber band released at maximum tension.
The gas pump auto-shutoff clicked with mechanical finality.
She found herself kneeling in cooling blood, staring down at what had once been a man who’d tried to help a lost girl and received death as payment.
His eyes were open and unseeing. The life that had animated them was gone, consumed, digested, made part of her. Gray hair matted with blood. His reading glasses sat askew on a face finished with sunrises. The silver Challenger’s keys still clutched in fingers that would never turn another ignition.
I killed him. Dios mío! I fucking killed him.
She scrambled backward, hands shaking, blood painting her palms and forearms like war paint. The man; Robert, according to his wallet scattered on the concrete: lay broken and still beneath the pitiless fluorescent lights. Somewhere in the distance, a security camera’s red light blinked with patient electronic witness to murder that defied every category of human crime.
“Fuck,” she whispered to the corpse, to the desert, to any deity keeping score. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”
Tears of blood traced dark paths down her cheeks, hot and useless and mocking. She knelt beside the spreading pool, trying to understand what she’d become, and failing.
I killed him. I jodido killed him. He was trying to help, and I...
The knowledge sat in her like caliche. Cold. Wrong weight. Robert had a daughter somewhere. Maybe grandkids. People who’d wonder why he never came home. She’d stolen all of that. Erased a human life for five minutes of desperate feeding.
The Chevron’s gasoline smell rose through the copper reek of blood, clean and ordinary and wrong. She’d missed it during the feeding. The hunger had narrowed everything to heartbeat and heat and nothing else. She could smell it now.
He called me sweetheart. Like I was someone worth saving. And I…
Dawn pressure slammed into her awareness like a physical blow.
The feeding had taken minutes: how many? couldn’t tell, time was fucked: but the eastern horizon was already showing the first hint of color that meant lethal radiation approaching. Maybe twenty minutes. Maybe less. Her supernatural instincts screamed warnings that bypassed conscious thought entirely.
Move. Have to move. Get underground or die for real.
Robert gets to be dead. I don’t. Not yet.
She lurched to her feet, blood-slick hands leaving prints on the Challenger’s door as she pushed herself up. Robert’s body sprawled beneath the fluorescent assault, already cooling. Evidence. Crime scene. Questions that would draw attention she couldn’t afford.
But dawn was coming and nothing else mattered.
Her feet carried her away from the Chevron, stumbling through sparse streets where scattered houses thinned into vacant land and creeping desert. Blood cooling on her hands, on her face, on her clothes. The taste of copper still coating her throat.
Behind her, the security camera continued its patient vigil. Seven minutes of footage. She didn’t look back.
But she couldn’t think about that. Could only think about finding earth, finding depth, finding darkness before the sun found her.
The thing inside her: sated now, no longer screaming: guided her movements with the same instinctive certainty that had driven the feeding. She moved. She dug. She burrowed. Didn’t think about any of it.
An empty lot appeared ahead, bordered by rusted chain-link and scattered with desert vegetation that had never been fully cleared. Caliche and decomposed granite. Deep enough. Safe enough.
She found herself digging, hands tearing through earth that yielded with wrong ease. Twelve feet. Fifteen. The caliche welcoming her like a womb, her grave, the only sanctuary that mattered when daylight approached with lethal certainty.
The dawn pressure intensified. Minutes now. Maybe seconds.
She dove into the hole she’d created, pulling earth over herself with desperate urgency. Soil cascading across her blood-stained clothes, covering the evidence of what she’d done, burying the horror along with her body. Deeper. Darker. Until the weight of caliche pressed against her from all sides and the distant promise of sunrise couldn’t reach her.
Her last conscious thought before darkness claimed her was fragmented, incomplete, already dissolving at the edges as her mind began burying what it couldn’t process:
Robert’s dead but I’m still here I’m still me I didn’t lose myself completely I fed in time I’m still…
The earth closed over her and awareness dissolved into darkness, memory, and horror buried together.
It took everything except the memory of Robert’s blood and the knowledge that she’d do it again if she had to.
If she got hungry enough.
If survival demanded it.
The caliche held her in darkness while above, the sun rose and painted the desert in colors that would have reduced her to ash and memory if she’d been caught in its light. But she was safe now, buried deep, fed and sheltered and protected by instincts she refused to acknowledge but couldn’t deny.
Robert’s body cooled beneath fluorescent lights while his killer slept the sleep of the dead in earth that had learned to welcome what she was.
And when she woke at sunset, she would remember just enough to function and forget just enough to survive the knowledge of what she’d become.
© 2025 E L Frederick. All rights reserved. Unpublished manuscript — do not reproduce or distribute without permission.