Rocket - Chapter 9
Naida - Bisbee, Arizona
The ground released her at sunset, soil cascading from her hair and clothes as consciousness returned like a switch being thrown.
Naida clawed her way up through caliche that moved like water, emerging into desert twilight with her senses screaming information she couldn’t fully process. The empty lot. Chain-link fence. Scattered vegetation. Bisbee’s outskirts stretching away in both directions under the first stars.
She pulled herself onto solid ground, dirt falling from her clothes in streams. Her hands were,
Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck.
The damage was catastrophic. Multiple layers of dried blood: some brown and ancient-looking from days ago, some still dark and relatively fresh. Her shirt was more hole than fabric, shredded from three days of desert survival and combat. Scorch marks painted black patterns across the cloth where fire had singed but not quite ignited. A bullet hole torn through the shoulder, the fabric around it stiff with old blood even though the wound beneath had healed.
Ash and caliche crusted everything, mixing with blood stains in patterns that painted a story of sustained violence across multiple days. This wasn’t evidence of a single incident. Three distinct layers of violence written into the fabric itself, each stratum a different night she’d survived.
I look like I fought a war. Fuck, I look like I lost a war.
Fresh blood; Robert’s blood, though she couldn’t let herself examine that thought too closely: coated her from chin to waist, the newest layer on top of everything else. Her hands were the worst, crusted dark under her fingernails, staining every crease and line of her palms like evidence that would never wash completely clean.
Someone had been murdered. Robert. The man at the Chevron who’d tried to help.
She remembered it clearly: too clearly. Fluorescent lights. Silver Challenger. His concerned face turning toward her asking if she needed help. The way his blood had tasted like salvation after days of starvation.
I killed him. Drained him completely. And I’d do it again if I had to.
She should have felt worse about it. But compared to everything else: the fire, Carlos burning, the memories she was actively trying not to examine; Robert’s death felt almost clean. Necessary. Survival rather than murder.
Have to clean up. Can’t walk around like this. People will see. People will know.
But know what? The thought fragmented before it could complete.
She stumbled away from the burrow site, heading deeper into Bisbee’s sparse outskirts where houses gave way to empty lots and industrial remnants. The sunset painted everything in colors that would have been beautiful if she could process anything beyond the immediate demands of survival.
Her body felt wrong. Not weak: the opposite, actually. Stronger than she’d ever felt, every sense operating at impossible clarity. But wrong nonetheless. Like she’d traded something essential for this predatory efficiency, this supernatural awareness that mapped the world in ways human perception never could.
The hunger was gone. Her stomach turned when she tried to examine the cost.
Can’t go there. Not now.. Just keep moving. Find somewhere to clean up. Figure out what comes next.
But what came next? She had no plan beyond immediate survival, no goal except avoiding forces hunting a blood-covered teenager in the desert dark.
A gas station appeared ahead: different from the one she’d: from before. She veered away automatically, some instinct warning her that returning to any kind of commercial surveillance was dangerous in her current state. The blood evidence alone would trigger responses she couldn’t handle.
Instead, she followed residential streets that wound through Bisbee’s outer edges, moving through pools of streetlight and shadow with increasing confidence in her ability to avoid detection. Her enhanced senses rendered the world in perfect detail: sound, scent, every small movement of nocturnal life in cooling desert air.
Behind her, somewhere in the darkness, evidence remained of what she’d done. A body. A crime scene. Questions that would eventually draw attention from law enforcement and probably others, people who specialized in things that normal police wouldn’t understand.
But that was future problem. Right now, she needed to deal with the blood.
A park materialized: small, barely maintained, with a bathroom structure decades past its prime. The door hung slightly ajar, and no lights showed through the gap.
She slipped inside, pulling the door shut behind her with a screech of warped metal that she winced at in the desert quiet. The bathroom was a single room barely large enough to turn around in, block walls painted the specific shade of institutional green that seemed to exist only in spaces where no one was meant to linger: rest stops, drunk tanks, the room off the kitchen in the safe house, places designed for function and not a single thing else. A single bulb hung dead overhead. A hand-painted sign above the toilet said NO DUMPING TRASH, the paint cracked and water-stained to near-illegibility. The sink ran cold regardless of which handle she turned, and the soap dispenser produced a thin pink slurry that smelled like artificial roses and industrial solvent mixed in roughly equal measure.
The mirror showed her what she’d avoided: a girl drenched in violence, dried blood painting predator instead of victim.
Dios mío, is this what I look like now?
She ran the water until it achieved something resembling temperature, then began the brutal process of washing away evidence. The blood came off slowly, reluctantly, her torn crop top and shredded jeans taking forever to rinse clean under the weak stream.
Can’t throw these away. Only clothes I have. Just get them clean enough not to scream “murder.”
She wrung out the fabric as best she could, putting the damp clothes back on. Better to look like a drowned homeless teenager than leave evidence in a park trash can where someone might find it.
When she emerged from the bathroom, the night felt different. Less threatening. More like territory she could navigate if she stayed careful, stayed smart, stayed ahead of whatever consequences were building behind her.
Bisbee’s streets wound through the darkness ahead, carrying her deeper into town where buildings clustered closer together and streetlights painted everything in sodium amber. She moved through pools of light and shadow, her enhanced senses cataloging this small Arizona town.
Somewhere ahead, lights blazed against the darkness. Not residential: something commercial. Open late.
Her feet carried her toward it automatically, some combination of instinct and aimless wandering leading her deeper into whatever came next.
The Safeway Food parking lot stretched like a sodium-lit ocean under the desert night, its asphalt surface painted in harsh amber that leached color from everything it touched. Fluorescent store lights blazed behind plate glass windows, but out here in the vastness of painted lines and empty spaces, the towering light poles created pools of artificial day separated by gulfs of shadow.
A handful of vehicles sat scattered across the expanse like abandoned islands: a tired Corolla near the pharmacy entrance, a pickup truck with contractor equipment parked far from the building, a minivan with car seats visible through tinted windows. The kind of sparse population that belonged to the small hours when most of Bisbee slept and only shift workers, insomniacs, and creatures that preferred darkness moved through the world.
Naida found herself drawn toward it without conscious decision, crossing the highway’s shoulder through a strip of pale scrubby desert where creosote and drought-killed grass gave way to the asphalt edge of the lot, the ground still radiating stored heat through the thin soles of her shoes. The western perimeter offered concealment where the lot hadn’t bothered with landscaping: a commercial dumpster the color of dried rust, positioned at an angle that blocked sightlines from the pharmacy entrance, a concrete pillar rising from a planter box that had given up on its contents and filled itself with sand and cigarette butts and a crushed Baja Blast can that caught what little wind there was and skittered against the concrete in a thin metallic rattle.
She settled into the shadow behind the dumpster, back to the wall, and watched. The sodium light from the nearest pole sat maybe forty feet out, painting everything in that particular amber that made blood look black and faces look like they belonged in old photographs. The Safeway’s automatic doors were visible from here, the plate glass beyond them blazing with the clean indifferent fluorescence of a place that existed to serve people who still had ordinary problems: groceries, pharmacy pickups, whatever people bought at this hour in a small Arizona town that didn’t know what crouched at its edge in the dark.
The automatic doors exhaled their rattling mechanical sigh as a woman emerged, her scrubs identifying her as medical personnel ending another long shift. Mid-thirties, exhaustion written in the set of her shoulders and the careful way she navigated her overloaded cart across uneven pavement.
Something moved at the edge of Naida’s vision. A flicker in the darkness beyond the light poles, pale and wrong.
¿What the mierda es esto?
The boy stumbled into the amber glow, and every instinct Naida possessed started screaming warnings.
He couldn’t have been more than twelve, his clothes torn and stained with substances that looked black under the sodium light. But it was his movement that registered as fundamentally wrong: jerky, erratic, like a marionette operated by someone who’d never seen human locomotion.
His head snapped toward the woman with mechanical precision, and even from this distance, Naida could see his eyes reflecting light like polished glass.
No. No, that’s not: he’s not…
The boy’s mouth opened, revealing teeth that caught the light wrong.
Then he moved.
Not running: something beyond running, something that covered forty feet of asphalt in a blur that made Naida’s enhanced vision struggle to track the motion. Supernatural speed without control, predatory focus without consciousness behind it.
The woman barely had time to register shock before fangs tore into her throat with savage efficiency.
No, no, no: not here, not like this.
Naida found herself halfway out of concealment before conscious thought caught up, some instinct screaming that she needed to stop this, needed to prevent,
The crack of the rifle shot split the desert air and echoed through the canyon.
To Naida’s enhanced vision, the glowing projectile streaked across the parking lot like a falling star, incandescent tracery bright against the sodium-lit darkness. The round impacted the boy’s skull with surgical precision, and he exploded into ash and screaming, his form disintegrating in flames that consumed vampire tissue with supernatural efficiency.
The woman collapsed, wounded but breathing, as her attacker simply ceased to exist in a cloud of dissolution and fire.
Naida’s enhanced vision followed the tracery path backward through the night air, tracing the bullet’s trajectory to its source. Somewhere up the mountain, north of the Safeway: the muzzle flash afterglow had already faded, but the trajectory painted the approximate firing position with perfect clarity.
Professional. Clinical. Efficient.
Is that how I looked?
The thought struck her with physical force, remembering her own fumbling desperation at the gas station, the way hunger had overridden every survival instinct until nothing remained except feeding frenzy.
They could have put me down. They might have even been right if they had.
She could still be ash scattered across some anonymous parking lot, just another mistake cleaned up by whoever was maintaining order in this shadow world. The realization settled into her bones like ice water: she wasn’t an apex predator. She was barely controlled disaster, one bad night away from the same fate as the boy who’d just been eliminated with clinical precision.
The woman rose on shaking legs, terror, and shock written in every movement as she abandoned her groceries and fled toward her car. Engine starting. Tires squealing. The sound of someone’s entire worldview shattering in the space between one heartbeat and the next.
Naida forced herself to retreat deeper into shadow, survival arithmetic immediate and simple: distance, now, before whoever had taken that shot decided to investigate further. Professional snipers didn’t work alone. There would be cleanup crews, evidence collection, protocols for dealing with situations that officially didn’t exist.
She moved through the darkness with increasing urgency, putting blocks between herself and the Safeway parking lot, leaving behind evidence of a world she was only beginning to understand.
Behind her, sirens were already building in the distance, emergency services responding to reports of gunshots and screams that would never make sense in any police report.
And somewhere up the mountain, a sniper was probably already relocating, mission accomplished, another threat neutralized before it could spread.
That could have been me. That should have been me.
But it wasn’t. She’d fed and retained enough consciousness to burrow before dawn. Had avoided becoming whatever that boy had been: mindless, feral, operating on nothing but hunger and predatory instinct.
For now.
The question was how long she could maintain that control, and what would happen when hunger returned with the same existential crisis that had driven her to drain Robert completely.
She kept walking into Bisbee’s darkness, terrified and alive in ways that defied every natural law she’d once believed governed existence.
The night stretched ahead with questions she had no answers for, and behind her, the consequences of her transformation continued accumulating in ways she couldn’t predict or control.
But she was still herself. Still Naida, still capable of being horrified by what she’d witnessed, still something more than reflex and appetite.
Not yet reduced to whatever he’d been.
Highway 92 curved northwest from the Safeway, winding through desert that felt less hostile now that she was fed. Sirens were fading behind her. Distance and darkness providing cover she desperately needed.
Don’t go there. Keep moving.
Robert’s blood had done its job. She was stronger, faster, her senses strung razor-tight, the dark neighborhood mapped in her skull with no gaps. But the cost of that strength followed her through Bisbee’s sparse outskirts persistent as shadow.
She remembered his face turning toward her under the fluorescent lights. “You okay, sweetheart?” Like she was someone worth saving instead of something that would drain him dry two minutes later.
Dios. Stop. Can’t think about that. Think about the kid instead.
The feral boy at the Safeway: that’s what happened when you didn’t feed in time. Pure instinct, no consciousness left. Just hunger with fangs until someone put you down. She’d watched him explode into ash and flame, professional marksmanship ending the threat cleanly.
She looked at her hands. The blood was old now, dark under her nails, dried into the creases of her palm. She’d been on her knees in it. And then she’d stood up.
That had to mean something.
The Lavender Pit opened up ahead: massive scar in the earth where they’d torn copper from the mountain for decades. Terraced walls dropping down in geometric steps, creating a spiral descent into darkness that went deep enough to hide damn near anything.
Three concrete structures sat near the rim. Cylindrical buildings maybe thirty feet tall, industrial relics from when the mine was active. They looked like oversized grain silos, built solid and abandoned to weather and time.
Good place to think. Away from people. Away from heartbeats.
The easternmost building offered the best angle: positioned to block sightlines from both highway and residential areas. She circled it twice, enhanced senses cataloging details. No recent human scent. No surveillance. Walls intact despite years of neglect.
The entrance had a padlock. She grabbed the chain and yanked. Metal snapped with a sharp crack that echoed once before dying in the desert silence.
Inside, the circular space held its own particular silence, the kind that wasn’t the absence of sound so much as the presence of containment: the concrete walls rising thirty feet to a rusted conical roof that had pulled away from the structure in places, leaving gaps where the desert sky showed through in thin slivers, where stars were visible if she tilted her head at exactly the right angle, where the wind moved through at a pitch just below hearing and made the whole structure feel like something half-alive and breathing. The floor was covered in drifted sand and dried vegetation that had blown in through those same gaps over years, maybe decades, building up in the corners and against the curved walls in smooth dunes that smelled of old rain and mineral dust and the small animal bones scattered where scavengers had dragged things in to eat in the dark. The walls themselves were rough aggregate, poured in another era, their surface a map of cracks and mineral staining and old graffiti in Spanish that had faded to ghost-marks she could barely read even with her enhanced vision. Underneath all of it: solid concrete foundation, bone-cold against her palms when she pressed them flat, so far removed from living earth that her instinct for soil and caliche found nothing to hold.
She settled onto the floor, back against the wall, and let her body stop moving for the first time since sunset.
Okay. So, what the fuck am I now?
Her hands looked normal in the moonlight coming through high windows. Same scars from childhood, same basic shape. Blood had crusted under her fingernails despite the bathroom cleaning: evidence that soap and water couldn’t completely erase. Robert’s life staining the creases of her palms like permanent reminder of what she’d done.
Vampire.
The word surfaced with the scent-memory of cheap receipt paper, gunpowder, blood on someone’s fingers. A note she’d read... when? After clawing out of the grave. Someone had told her what she was. Written it down.
Fucking vampire.
The label felt ridiculous even as it fit perfectly. She drank blood. Couldn’t face sunlight without burrowing underground. Had fangs that extended when she got hungry. Enhanced senses that worked in near-total darkness. Strength that let her snap chains without effort, crush a man against a car hard enough to dent the door panel: she’d heard the metal buckle even through the roaring in her ears.
What else would you call that?
Memory flashed; Robert’s neck tearing under her teeth, copper flooding her mouth, the desperate relief of finally feeding after days of starvation. Messy and graceless and necessary. His heartbeat slowing under her hands, his struggling going weak, then stopping entirely.
His eyes had been open when she’d pulled away. Unseeing. The life that animated them consumed and digested and made part of her.
He was going to help me, and I killed him for it.
The thought should have horrified her more. But sitting here in concrete shelter with her hunger satisfied and her body safe, the horror felt distant. Intellectual. Like knowing murder was wrong without actually feeling guilty about this specific murder.
He’d been food. Just not wrapped and presented at the butcher’s counter at Mercado Oriental.
Take the warm one. Feed. Now.
It tried to take hold, guilt, self-recrimination, the full accounting she owed herself, tried to crush her under the force of it. But her mind kept sliding away from full examination, kept finding tactical observations instead of emotional ones.
She’d fed. Stayed conscious enough to burrow before dawn. Retained enough of herself to feel horror afterward: which meant she hadn’t crossed completely into what that feral kid had been.
The distinction felt important even if she couldn’t articulate why.
I’m still me. Still Naida. Just... different now.
Vampiric strength and speed. Blood instead of food. Sun meant death, darkness meant home: not because it was safer, but because it felt right in her bones.
She’d killed someone who tried to help her and couldn’t make herself care enough. Survival first. Feelings later. Maybe never.
She pressed her palms against the concrete floor, testing the connection her burrowing ability required. Nothing. The material felt dead: too processed, too far removed from living earth. Her instinct for soil and caliche had no purchase on manufactured stone.
Jodido. Probably has to be real dirt.
Frustration flared, and with it came sensation: warmth building in her chest, spreading down her arms toward her hands. For just a second the air shimmered with heat distortion, like asphalt on summer afternoons.
Then it was gone.
Qué chingados was that?
She stared at her hands, but they looked normal again. No heat, no shimmer, nothing except the dried blood under her nails and the fading memory of warmth that had felt wrong. Impossible.
Didn’t happen. Adrenaline from the Safeway or some shit. Doesn’t matter.
She went underground when daylight got close. However the fuck that worked. Dissolving into soil when dawn got too close, emerging at sunset. Her body knew how even if her brain couldn’t explain it.
Focus on what matters. Survival.
The silence in the circular space felt heavy but not oppressive. Outside, Bisbee continued its small-town existence: people sleeping in houses she could hear if she focused, cars occasionally passing on distant highways, desert life adapting to human proximity.
None of them knew what was sheltering in this abandoned mine structure. What had fed and killed and burrowed its way through the past few days.
They’d put me down if they knew. Just like that kid.
Professional marksmanship, cold precision, threat eliminated before it could take anyone else. She’d watched it happen from concealment, had traced the bullet’s trajectory back to approximate firing position through enhanced vision that made dark look like twilight.
Someone with resources and training was hunting vampires who lost control.
I can’t lose control. Can’t go feral like that. Have to stay... me. Whatever that means now. However hungry I get.
But Robert’s feeding had pushed her so close to that edge. Time had skipped, reality fragmenting as hunger overrode everything else. She’d crossed twenty feet without awareness of movement, had torn into his throat before conscious thought could interfere.
The difference between her and that feral kid might be nothing except luck and timing.
Next time I get that hungry, what happens? Do I stay conscious enough to feed and burrow? Or do I go feral like that kid, just teeth and nothing, until someone lights me up?
No answer presented itself. Just the concrete walls and desert silence and the growing recognition that she was navigating a world with rules she didn’t understand and consequences that ended in ash and flame.
She needed information. Needed to figure out if other vampires existed who weren’t feral disasters waiting for cleanup crews.
The note that had directed her toward Tucson remained her only guidance: elegant handwriting on blood-stained paper, instructions from whoever had transformed her. They had known what she would become. Had planned for it, maybe.
If they made me like this on purpose... why?
Questions without answers, stacking up like debts she couldn’t pay. But questions that demanded eventual resolution if she was going to survive longer than that kid at the Safeway.
Dawn was still hours away: she could feel its absence like negative pressure, her vampire instincts monitoring the horizon even from inside concrete shelter. Time enough to rest. To let her body process Robert’s blood and her mind compartmentalize what she’d done into boxes that wouldn’t interfere with survival.
Time enough to accept that Naida-the-victim was dead, had died in that desert grave even if what was left had been walking around for days afterward.
She was something new now. It needed a different framework. Different rules. Different relationship with darkness and blood and the predatory instincts that had kept her alive.
I’m not prey anymore. Haven’t been since I woke up with fangs.
The knowledge sat down and stayed. She’d been cargo before: valuable enough to transport, disposable enough to discard. Men had looked at her and seen something to use, to exploit, to consume for their benefit.
Now she was the one doing the consuming.
Robert’s blood coating her hands proved that. The way she’d drained him without hesitation, without mercy, just hunger, and relief when it was done. Just days ago she’d been cargo. Now she was the thing that cargo feared.
She was predator now, whether she wanted to be or not. The question was whether she could be predator without losing herself completely to the hunger that had nearly turned her into mindless feeding machine.
I came back. That matters. I fed and came back and stayed ME.
She clung to that distinction the only solid thing. Consciousness after feeding. Horror at what she’d done. Those were the markers that mattered: proof she was still herself and not just reflex and appetite and ash.
Not yet.
Concrete walls held her in circular shelter while desert wind whispered through gaps in the old structure. Above, stars wheeled through sky that held no promise of sunrise: just the patient certainty that darkness would eventually give way to lethal radiation that would reduce her to ash if she stayed exposed.
But for now, she was safe. Fed. Sheltered. Still herself despite everything that had happened.
Questioning what she was becoming, which had to count for something.
She settled deeper against the wall, letting her enhanced senses monitor the world while her consciousness drifted in the space between active thought and vampiric rest. Not quite sleep: her body didn’t seem to need that anymore. But a meditative state, awareness dimmed but functional, processing trauma and transformation in the background while surface attention tracked for threats.
Tomorrow she would emerge from this sanctuary with acceptance instead of denial. Would begin figuring out how to survive as predator rather than prey, how to navigate this shadow world without losing herself to feral hunger.
But for now, surrounded by concrete and silence and the vast empty darkness of abandoned copper mine, she let herself simply exist. No performance, no calculation, no desperate scramble for survival.
Just her, and the night, and a slow certainty: moving forward meant embracing what she’d become rather than mourning what she’d lost.
I’m vampire. I kill to survive. And I’m still me despite all of that.
The admission carried weight that settled like foundation beneath her. She wasn’t Naida-the-victim anymore, though she wasn’t sure yet what she was instead. Something that belonged in darkness. Something still figuring out what that meant.
Outside, she could hear Bisbee sleeping. Breathing in houses. Unaware of what crouched in the ruins above the pit. And high above, patient stars watched over desert and town and the small dramas of transformation that played out beneath their ancient light.
Dawn would come eventually, as it always did.
But she would be underground before it arrived, safe in earth’s embrace, carried through daylight hours in vampiric dormancy that defied death as thoroughly as her existence defied nature.
For now, that was enough.
© 2025 E L Frederick. All rights reserved. Unpublished manuscript — do not reproduce or distribute without permission.