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Then whooht, and she was just full of so waroing to die, Baby Jenks, not ever!" She had her teeth in his goddamn neck, and boy, was that heaven!

But the never dying part? She wasn't so sure now

Before she'd lit out of Dallas, giving up on the Fang Gang for good, she'd seen the coven house on Swiss Avenue burnt to tilass blown out of the s It had been the same in Oklahouys in those houses? And they were the big city bloodsuckers, too, the smart ones that called themselves vampires

How she'd laughed when Killer and Davis had told her that, that those Dead guys went around in three-piece suits and listened to classical music and called thehed herself to death Davis thought it was pretty funny too, but Killer just kept warning her about them Stay away from them

Killer and Davis, and Tim and Russ, had taken her by the Swiss Avenue coven house just before she left theo to Gun Barrel City

"You got to always knohere it is," Davis had said "Then stay away from it "

They'd showed her the coven houses in every big city they hit But it hen they showed her the first one in St Louis that they'd told her the whole story

She'd been real happy with the Fang Gang since they left Detroit, feeding off the men they lured out of the roadside beer joints Tiuys, but Killer and Davis were her special friends and they were the leaders of the Fang Gang

Now and then they'd gone into town and found some little shack of a place, all deserted, with ,bill caps and with real calloused hands from the work they did And they'd have a feast in there on those guys You could always live off that kind, Killer told her, because nobody gives a da the blood quick, draining theht down to the last heartbeat It wasn't fun to torture people like that, Killer said You had to feel sorry for them You did what you did, then you burnt down the shack, or you took the a hole real deep and stuck the like that to cover it up, you did this little trick: cut your finger, let your Dead blood run over the bite where you'd sucked them dry, and look at that, the little puncture wounds just like to vanished Flash! Nobody'd ever figure it out; it looked like stroke or heart attack

Baby Jenks had been having a ball She could handle a full-sized Harley, carry a dead body with one arm, leap over the hood of a car, it was fantastic And she hadn't had the damn dream then, the dream that had started up in Gun Barrel City-with those redheaded twins and that wo?

What would she do now if she couldn't find the Fang Gang? Out in California the Vahts frouy in creation would be there, leastways that's how she figured it, and that's how the Fang Gang had figured it and they were all supposed to be together So what the hell was she doing lost fro and headed for a jerkwater city like St Louis?

All she wanted was for everything to be like it had been before, goddaood, even now that she was alone and had to work up her nerve, the way it had been this evening, to pull into a gas station and lure the old guy out back Oh, yeah, snap, when she'd gotten her hands on his neck, and the blood caers and french fries and strawberry shakes, it was beer and chocolate sundaes It was ! It was all of it

But everything had been better when the Fang Gang ith her And they had understood when she got tired of the chewed-up old guys and said she wanted to taste so and tender No problem Hey, it was a nice little runaway kid she needed, Killer said Just close your eyes and wish And sure enough, like that, they found hi on the main road, just five miles out of some town in northern Missouri, nay black hair, just twelve years old, but real tall for his age, with so to pass for sixteen He'd climbed on her bike and they'd taken hientle like, and slurp, that was it for Parker

It was delicious all right, juicy was the word But she didn't know really whether it was any better than the ot down to it And with them it was more sport Good ole boy blood, Davis called it

Davis was a black Dead guy and one dauy, as Baby Jenks saw it His skin had a gold glow to it, the Dead glohich in the case of white Dead guys ht all the time Davis had beautiful eyelashes too, just da and thick, and he decked hiold rings and watches and chains and things off the victims