They Thirst Read Free Page B

twitch in the throes of death. The huge motorcycle, its shocks barely registering a shudder of quick impact, roared on to the north.
    A few moments later a sidewinder began to undulate toward the rabbit's cooling carcass.
    And on the motorcycle, enveloped in a cocoon of wind and thunder, the rider stared along the cone of white light his single, high-intensity beam afforded, and with a fractional movement he guided the machine to the center of the road. His black-gloved fist throttled upward; the machine growled like a well-fed panther and kicked forward until the speedometer's needle hung at just below ninety. Behind a battered, black crash helmet with visor lowered, the rider was grinning. He wore a sleek, skin-tight, black leather jacket and faded jeans with leather-patched knees. The jacket was old and scarred, and across the back rose a red Day-Glo king cobra, its hood fully swollen. The paint was flaking off, as if the reptile were shedding its skin. The machine thundered on, parting a wall of silence before it, leaving desert denizens trembling in its wake. A garishly painted sign—blue music notes floating above a pair of tilted, red beer bottles, the whole thing pocked with rust-edged bullet holes—came up on the right. The rider glanced quickly at it, reading JUST AHEAD! THE WATERIN' HOLE! and below that, FILL 'ER UP, PARDNER! Yeah, he thought. Time to fill up.
    Two minutes later there was the first, faint glimmer of blue neon against the blackness. The rider began to cut his speed; the speedometer's needle fell quickly to eighty, seventy, sixty. Ahead there was a blue neon sign—THE WAT RIN' H LE—above the doorway of a low, wooden building with a flat, dusty red roof. Clustered around it like weary wasps around a sun-bleached nest were three cars, a jeep, and a pickup truck with most of its dull blue paint scoured down to the muddy red primer. The motorcycle rider turned into a tumbleweed-strewn parking lot and switched off his engine; immediately the motorcycle's growl was replaced with Freddy Fender's nasal voice singing about "wasted days and wasted nights." The rider put down the kickstand and let the black Harley ease back, like a crouching animal. When he stood up and off the machine, his muscles were as taut as piano wires; the erection between his legs throbbed with heat.
    He popped his chin strap and lifted the helmet off, exposing a vulpine, sharply chiseled face that was as white as new marble. In that bloodless face the deep pits of his eyes bore white pupils, faintly veined with red. From a distance they were as pink as a rabbit's, but up close they became snakelike, glittering coldly, unblinking, hypnotizing. His hair was yellowish-white and closely cropped; a blue trace of veins at the temples pulsed an instant behind the jukebox's beat. He left his helmet strapped around the handlebars and moved toward the building, his gaze flickering toward the cars: there was a rifle on a rack in the truck's cab, a "Hook 'Em Horns!" sticker on a car's rear fender, a pair of green dice dangling from the jeep's rearview mirror.
    When he stepped through the screen door into a large room layered with smoky heat, the six men inside—three at a table playing cards, two at a light bulb-haloed pool table, one behind the bar—instantly looked up and froze. The albino biker met each gaze in turn and then sat on one of the bar stools, the red cobra on his back a scream of color in the murky light. After another few seconds of silence, a pool cue cracked against a ball like a gunshot. "Aw, shit!" one of the pool players—a broad-shouldered man wearing a red checked shirt and dusty Levis that had been snagged a hundred times on barbed wire—said loudly with a thick Texas drawl. "At least that screwed up your shot, didn't it, Matty?"
    "Sure did," Matty agreed. He was about forty, all arms and legs, short red hair, and a lined forehead half-covered by a sweat-stained cowboy hat. He was chewing slowly on a toothpick, and