Excerpt of The Cowboy and the Vampire: Blood and Whiskey by Clark Hays, Kathleen McFall

Tucker and Lizzie sat in a booth at the truck stop along the edge of the highway, staring silently out into the night, both looking in different directions. Lizzie was hungry, of course, but not for anything on the menu. Tucker was bewildered and heartsick. The place was practically deserted, no locals at all, just a few long-haul truckers sitting by themselves reading paperback westerns or, in one case, a smut magazine carefully folded into a day old copy of the Star Tribune. In the pale glow of the fluorescent lighting, Lizzie looked more dreamily beautiful than ever but the light made Tucker look washed out, old and vulnerable, and burdened by the weight around his heart. She glanced worriedly over her shoulder at the empty booth behind them and then around the restaurant, her gaze settling at last on the waitress leaning on the counter by the coffee pots. She was texting, holding her hands awkwardly to compensate for her extra long nail tips. “Red Arbuckle? Jesus, honey,” Tucker said. “I went to school with his younger cousin.” She drummed her fingers on the table top nervously. “Please don’t tell me about him. No details. All that really matters is he was a bad man. He was doing bad things to his wife and daughter.” “I believe that,” Tucker said, swirling his straw through the remnants of a chocolate malted, melted down to a watery paste. “That little girl always looked scared. Guess we know why. She’s probably even more scared now that she’s seen two strangers eating her dad.” Lizzie turned even paler. “There’s something about it though, something hard to describe. It’s like they didn’t even register that we were there, that we were, you know, doing anything.” Her eyes glittered with uncried tears. “They seemed kind of numb to the whole thing. Something made them quiet and resigned. Except for the man.” “Red. His name was Red.” She dabbed her eyes with a napkin. “I talked to Bart,” he said. “They think maybe Cindi did it out of self defense, but she doesn’t remember anything and he’s not so sure. Probably doesn’t matter because no jury will likely convict if he was molesting that little girl. Lizzie, I can’t believe you killed someone. And then ate them.” “I didn’t eat them,” she said indignantly. “I’m a vampire, not a cannibal, not a zombie. I drank his blood and took his life force. He was a bad man. He deserved to die.” “Really? Because that’s usually only something that God, or possibly the government, gets to decide.” “What are you saying, that either I’m a god or some kind of monster?” “I don’t know what to say. I’m totally unequipped to have a conversation about the morality of my pregnant girlfriend sucking the life out of one of my neighbors.” “I didn’t ask for this. And I don’t like the fact that,” she paused as the waitress appeared with a coffee pot. The young woman shrugged at the coffee pot in a silent question and Lizzie nodded for her to top off their cups. “I don’t want to be in charge of the Council, I don’t want to be a murderer and I certainly don’t want to be able to tell you that someone in this room gets off when animals are in pain,” Lizzie said. The waitress caught her breath and flinched, slopping coffee onto the table. She looked at them both, horrified, as Lizzie caught her arm in a vice-like grip. “Stop it. Stop what you are doing,” she said. “They deserve better. I mean it. No more.” The girl stifled a shriek and scurried back to the safety of the kitchen. “All I really want is to have our baby and grow old with you and fight about stupid stuff like why you floss so goddamned loudly,” Lizzie said. “But that’s not going to happen, is it? I can’t grow old, I can’t have a normal life, I can’t not kill people and the only possible solution I can think of is to just take my own life and be done with it. Is that what you want?” Her fury subsided and she focused on the French fries suffocating under a congealing mass of brown gravy, stabbing them angrily with a fork. The silence stretched on between them until Tucker took a deep breath. “I really floss too loud?” he asked. She choked out a sound that was half laughter, half anguish. “Yes, you do. It sounds likes you’re playing the fucking violin with your teeth. But I don’t care. I mean, I do care — it drives me bat shit — but those are the kinds of things I want to fight about. Not all of these huge, ridiculous, impossible things like how do I keep the Reptiles from killing off humans and who do I feed on to keep our baby alive without feeling like a sadistic freak. And I can’t bear it that you think I’m a monster.”