Chapter 12

"Where did the last egg go? There were four here last night!"

I supposed there could be worse things than having Holly Pit Bull Xu in charge of rations. She showed no mercy even though Jack managed to get the cable box working again. Unfortunately, that morning the only working channel was a Home Improvement channel.

The skies were overcast the next day, which meant we had to be extra careful. We ate what was left of the food in Andrew's fridge. Jack and Holly discovered an enormous box of protein bars in the cupboard, and we rejoiced for all of five minutes.

Jack complained about his peanut allergy, and Holly told him there was no place for people with allergies at the end of the world. I bet just to spite her; he ate two eggs even though we all agreed to eat one each. Holly followed him from room to room, calling him names like "scrotum for brains." Jack grinned to himself and kept tapping away on his cellphone.

I ate one of the protein bars and washed it down with another beer for breakfast. There was a carton of milk in the refrigerator, but it was expired. Before coming here, I never had a corona before, but I remembered the commercials on TV of a couple lying on a tropical beach with a lime wedged into the mouthpiece of a corona bottle. I always wanted to go to a beach like that, but now, as the world fell to pieces around us, this would have to do.

I remembered that when I was a kid after my mom just had Grace, we went to the beach, and I tried to swim in the ocean. I didn't get very far before I started feeling weak, and the waves pulled me further and further from shore. My dad had to swim out to get me. He caught me by the foot and dragged me back onto land. As we drove home, I remembered him joking that Gong Gong, the water god, was trying to kidnap me and make me his bride.

I spent weeks after that, having flashbacks of drowning and being stolen away to an underwater palace with a red-headed serpent king. One night, as I awoke crying from another nightmare, my mom explained to me that Gong Gong was too busy ruling the Yellow River to come after me here in Southern Florida.

Eventually, I got over my fear of water. As I sat there, staring at the flickering television screen, I started to wonder if my fear of being dragged under had returned.

*

Finally, as the sky became brighter, we went outside to see what was going on. As soon as we opened the front door, we were approached by a man holding a duffle bag in one hand.

"Do you have room in your car for one more?" The homeless man asked. He smelled like urine and had circles under his eyes. I saw sweat stains under his armpits and needle tracks on his inner arms. He must be one of the party-type, heroin users that had accidentally gotten left behind in a Downton nightclub on by his crew. "My car died, and I need to get home to Chicago."

"Sorry, buddy," Jack said without hesitation. "No room here. Try down the street."

"No one has any room in their cars!" The man complained, and then his bloodshot eyes fixated on Holly and me. "How about you two girls? Care to help?"

"Listen to what the gentleman said and get lost," Holly retorted with her hands firmly on her hips. For once, I was grateful I was with the two of them. No one could get past these two to take our car. I don't think I would have stood firm. I probably would have offered him a seat, and then he probably would have slit my throat before we got to the nearest checkpoint.

"Thanks," Jack said to Holly after the car-seat-monger ran off. "I guess this means we're patched up over the lost egg thing?"

"You wish," Holly retorted and kept walking. "Find me a carton of eggs, and then maybe we'll talk."

"She drives a hard bargain, doesn't she?" Jack whispered and playfully elbowed me in the shoulder.

The world outside was pure chaos. Although I imagined the smarter people had already left yesterday when the evacuation was announced, there were still people left who had taken their time to get their act together. Up and down the street outside, stragglers were loading up their cars and fighting to evacuate. I saw a little girl with frizzy hair and pasta stains down the front of her sweater sitting inside a Jeep Wrangler, guarding a pile of Ramen. She pointed a baseball bat at me, so I backed off.

Her parents were standing a few feet away, arguing with each other about whether to pack the crystal candlestick holders. Just down the block, I saw an old woman sitting in a rocking chair by her window. She stroked the rifle in her hands as we went by. I hoped she had more than that to fight off the vampires.

The streets were covered in garbage and possessions that the evacuees had left behind. We stared in silence as we came on the body of a man lying on the ground. He had charcoal-colored vomit streaming down his chin and onto his shirt. He must have been a businessman in another life. Judging by the round of bullets I saw in his chest, he must have been the target of the shootout we heard last night.

"They really shouldn't leave these bodies here," Jack muttered and wrinkled his nose at the corpse. "Who knows if they are really dead."

"Where would the police take them all?" Holly snarled back. It was clear from the cutting edge to her voice that the gruesome sight was getting to her. "Make a huge bonfire on the shore to warn the other vampires not to approach? It's not like there is an environmentally friendly vampire recycling plant just down the street."

"Yeah, I guess you're right," Jack conceded. "You know what? Let's walk to the shore. Maybe we'll get some more news in the busier, ritzy part of town."

"I think the rich people are a hundred miles away from here by now. Maybe we should join them," Holly said as we walked past a couple of families who were frantically loading cardboard boxes into their cars. "This place will be a ghost town when it gets dark tonight."

"It's your car, Ailith, what do you want?"

I wished Jack hadn't put me on the spot. I knew what Holly was thinking. If we left now, she might still be able to reunite with her family at the evacuation center. Maybe she was right. It made sense for her to go where everyone else was going. Me, on the other hand, I knew if I left, my mother and sister were lost to me.

"Let's go to the shore," I said. "Maybe the Levarsi has a way of communicating with our families. I wonder if my dad is alive, at least."

"What do you know about those people?" Jack asked. "Why do you think they will help you?"

"It's worth a try, at least."

Jack and I studied each other silently. He didn't like the Levarsi. I could tell by the suspicious way he spoke about them. His tone said he thought they were a cult who were out on the beach brewing poisonous Kool-Aid. I noticed the hard edge to his voice, the same one he used last night when he warned me that my dream was not just a dream.

What did Jack know?

Holly didn't seem to care. Her eyes kept darting from car to car, heading down Ocean Drive. Holly wanted to evacuate. She didn't say the words out loud, but I knew she had already begun to change her mind about coming here to Miami. She just didn't want to have the cowardly role of being the first to suggest it, especially since she was the one who had brought us to South Beach in the first place.

I guessed that we all had some secrets. I didn't tell them that my father worked for Ianus medical labs in South Florida, a medical facility that experimented with cloning animals before the US government shut them down for falsifying data. I remembered him talking about the Levarsi before. He always had kind things to say about them, as though he owed them a great debt. They were the ones who got him in touch with the doctors who transplanted the cells into my heart.

"We should hurry," Holly said, glancing at the sky. "By noon, we need to decide if we're staying or evacuating. I have a feeling the vampire attacks are only going to get worse from now on."