American Vampire Read Free

to English to notice that he’d passed it. He pulled a U-turn and headed back. He’d only gone about a quarter mile before the ruined gas station loomed to his left, and he passed a W ELCOME TO P ENANCE sign on his right.
    “What the…” Up ahead, a figure walked at the shoulder of the road, her head hanging, arms wrapped around her middle. He slowed beside her, double-checking the odometer. He’d driven fifteen miles. Itwas right there, in black and white on the little dials that worked just as well as the rest of the car.
    The girl shot him an angry look over her shoulder, then faced forward again, tossing her long, brown hair.
    He drove past her and waited, watching in the mirror as she tried to look anywhere but at the car she approached. He couldn’t help but notice her long, suntanned legs sticking out of a nice, short pair of denim cutoffs. Country girls. Yum. He rolled down the window as she walked by. “Something strange just happened.”
    She didn’t answer, but kept walking. He gave her a little room, then rolled after her. When he pulled up even again, he continued, “I just tried to drive back to county-road-number-whatever-that-number-was, but I don’t seem to be getting anywhere. Got any idea what that’s about?”
    Still no answer.
    He let her get ahead again, then drove up beside her once more. “You can either get into this car, or stay out here with whatever that was that just wrecked a building.”
    She laughed humorlessly and kept walking. “You didn’t seem to care about leaving me out here when you thought you were going to be able to drive away and never see me again.”
    “Well, yeah,” he said, creeping slowly alongside her. “But that’s only because I thought I was goingto drive away and never see you again… Why didn’t that work out?”
    “You’re a real gentleman.” She shook her head, still walking. “You can’t leave because It keeps us here.”
    “It?” She’d said the word like it was a name, like it should be obvious what she was talking about, but Graf had no clue. “What do you mean, ‘It’?”
    There was something hard about the way she wrinkled her nose, as though she had been defeated a long time ago and didn’t like talking about the fight. Whatever bad memories were associated with the subject, they made her voice a little less strident. “I don’t know. No one does.”
    “Well, what do you mean I’m—” His foot slipped on the accelerator, and the car lurched forward. He hit the clutch and downshifted into Neutral. “Damn it, get in! This is ridiculous.”
    To his surprise, she walked around the front of the car and opened the passenger door. “Are you going to drive me home, or just abandon me on the side of the road a little farther down?”
    He ignored her. “You told me to enjoy my stay. So, I take it other people have had this same trouble?”
    “No. You’re the first.” She wasn’t being sarcastic. She dropped into the seat and pulled in her long legs as she closed the door. “The rest of us have been trapped here, but outsiders never stop.”
    Trapped. Well, that sounded great. “‘Never’ meaning…how long exactly?”
    “Five years.” She pointed to a dirt road ahead. “Turn there.”
    He complied, too confused to do much other than ask questions and take orders. That wasn’t like him at all, and it made him uncomfortable. “Five years, no one has been able to…”
    “To leave Penance, or get in. No visits to or from. No one with car trouble on the side of the road.” She closed her eyes. “No ambulances.”
    “So, I’m the first person to come to Penance for the past five years?” There was a fallow field to one side of the road, a swamp to the other. “What is this?”
    “A town.” She looked at him like he was crazy. “A small one, but a town. And everything within the city limits has been trapped for the past five years. No one gets in, no one gets out.”
    That explained the lack of cars on the road, the