For two weeks now he felt the pull, an itch he couldn’t quite scratch. Then he saw her while cleaning one of the pumps. She stood at the edge of the woods across from his gas station, her form and long dark hair silhouetted like a shroud. From that shroud protruded curved thorns. Her breath misted forth into the cold night followed by a guttural utterance that brought goosebumps to his skin. What rose his pulse most was he knew her eyes bore into him, her sole focus.
He slowly backed from the pump, turning to not trip from the gas cord. When he glanced in her direction, she was gone. Something inside told him to run now, no longer a pull to join her, a need to escape her vicinity. But where was she? He strode for the storefront, reaching for the lock key in his pocket. He heard the crunch of something on the gravel, close then far. A car approached to fill up. It pulled up to the pump. He was at the door now. The driver got out looking around, then the screaming started.
That pull he felt grew stronger then, though his conscience ruled. He ran to help the poor man whose scream echoed in the night. The gas attendant rounded the Ford and by then the quiet resumed save for the she-thing feasting on her new victim. He could see her deep amber colored eyes glowing like the fading lamp pole near the station. He could not stop himself as he approached her, holding out his arm. The fangs sank into his flesh and from that point forward, business dropped but food doubled.
She became his partner and their hunger for each other and their victims never subsided. When the police came snooping they packed up and left. There were plenty other lone pump stations on the fringes of towns where the road met dark, harboring woods filled with hideaways and secrets.
About Nolan Yard: Nolan Yard is a writer whose work appears in Aphelion, Blood Moon Rising, Mystery & Suspense Magazine, Weekly Humorist, Points in Case, Defenestration, The Copperfield Review, History & Fiction, Wingless Dreamer, Robot Butt, Little Old Lady, and others. His Sherlock Holmes story “The Case of the Midnight Assassin,” https://copperfieldreview.com/?p=4730, was nominated by The Copperfield Review for the 2021 Best of the Net, a literary prize competition run by Sundress Publications. His humor piece “Columbo Gets a Tennis Lesson,” http://weeklyhumorist.com/columbo-gets-a-tennis-lesson/, made it on Weekly Humorist’s Best of 2021 List. He loves his family and eats lots of burritos.
