Rocket - Chapter 11
Naida - Bisbee, Arizona
The shower ran hotter than anything Naida had experienced since her embrace, steam rising in clouds that fogged the small mirror and wrapped around her like something that remembered warmth. She stood under the cascade for long seconds, letting water hammer against skin that registered temperature without pain, watching desert grime and dried blood swirl down the drain in dark spirals.
This is what safe feels like. Forgot that was even possible.
The bathroom was military-neat. Clean towels folded with geometric precision. Single bar of soap, worn smooth. Everything functional, nothing decorative. The space belonged to someone who’d learned to live with essentials and found comfort in simplicity. Her sharpened senses pulled the room apart as they pulled apart everything now, cataloguing the cheap pine soap and the iron tang of well water and the faint chlorine ghost of a town supply mixed in somewhere upstream, the fine canyon dust that worked its way under every door in this country, and the clean cotton of towels washed so many years in the same unscented detergent that the fabric had forgotten it ever smelled like anything else.
She started with her hair, working cheap shampoo through tangles that had accumulated a week of survival. The water running off her shoulders carried dirt and blood and the physical residue of everything she’d done to stay alive since clawing out of that grave.
Then her hands moved lower, washing arms and torso with automatic efficiency, and that’s when the wrongness hit.
Her fingers brushed the small black letters on her inner left wrist: CDS. Cartel de Sinaloa. Property marker. Ownership brand. The three letters were not even particularly large or particularly elaborate, just the small economical signature of an organization that had been doing this paperwork for so long it had stopped bothering to make the paperwork beautiful, the way a slaughterhouse did not need to make its tags pretty for the cattle to read.
Three little letters that say I belong to monsters. That I am just inventory.
The tattoo pulsed against pale vampire skin like it had its own heartbeat, and suddenly Naida wasn’t standing in Bisbee’s clean bathroom anymore. She was back on the Disney Princess sheets with hands that weren’t hers touching places that made her want to crawl out of her own skin. Then back in the truck with Carlos calling her noviecita...
Her palms burned. Heat welled up from somewhere deep inside, crawling up her forearms like fire trying to find oxygen. The shower water hissed against her skin, steam thickening, but she didn’t notice. Didn’t register the wrongness.
She was back in a dozen cramped spaces where grown men had treated her like she existed for their convenience, where resistance meant elimination and she had learned to smile through it, where they taught her exactly what merchandise was expected to endure.
The heat faded as quickly as it came, buried beneath the flood of remembered violation.
“Muy bien, mija. You’re learning. The pretty ones always learn fastest.”
The memories crashed through her like flash floods through desert arroyos: brutal, unstoppable, carrying everything she’d been repressing since the embrace.
The taste of chili-coated candies afterward, sweet and burning, trying to scrub bitterness from her mouth. Fluids leaking down her thighs that weren’t hers while someone praised her cooperation. Bruises shaped like fingerprints on places no one would see. The hollow ache of homesickness mixed with betrayal when she realized no rescue was coming. Her own voice saying “Ay, Papi” when inside she was screaming.
“Noviecita, you’ll learn. They all learn. The ones who don’t learn don’t make the crossing.”
Naida’s legs gave out.
She collapsed to the shower floor, eighteen years old and naked and sobbing as months of suppressed horror flooded through defenses that had finally found a place safe enough to crumble. Hot water kept falling, washing away bloody tears she hadn’t allowed herself to shed, carrying crimson traces of grief down the drain with desert dirt and grave soil.
They broke me. Broke me down like livestock getting processed for market. And I let them because dying in a ditch seemed worse. Just another dead girl, anonymous in the desert, food for vultures. And now I can’t even cry right. It’s all just stolen blood. Robert’s blood.
She wrapped arms around her knees and let the breakdown consume her completely, the dam she had been holding up since the moment Señor Morales picked up his phone in his quiet courtyard finally giving way to the water it had been built to hold. Every violation. Every casual degradation. Every moment when they’d used her like property and she’d learned to perform because survival required it, all of it now arriving at once in the small humid box of Bisbee’s bathroom, none of it interested in waiting in line, all of it competing for her attention the way a crowded marketplace competed for a tourist’s money.
The water ran over her until temperature dropped degree by degree, the heater struggling to keep up against the small body that had no warmth of its own to contribute to the contract, against the small body that had been pulling heat off every surface it touched since the night it climbed out of the dirt. When the shaking finally passed, when her vampire physiology reasserted enough control to function, when whatever it was that ran her instead of a heart had finished its private negotiations with whatever had just happened, Naida forced herself to stand on legs that felt like they belonged to someone else, on the borrowed scaffolding of a body that had been hers for eighteen years and was now being used by something that signed the same name to all the same paperwork.
The memory fog began to return as she finished washing mechanically. Rinsed hair. Turned off water. Reached for a towel.
Avoided looking at the mirror.
But her eyes caught the tattoo again as she dried her arms. CDS. Still there. Still marked. Still carrying their claim even though they were ash and bone in the desert.
Something shifted in her chest.
No. No more. Belonged. Past fucking tense. They marked me like livestock, but they’re dead now. I killed them. I’m not property anymore. I’m not inventory. I’m the monster they created, and jodido nobody owns me. Not the Coyotes, not Sinaloa, not anyone. This mark doesn’t mean shit anymore.
Bisbee had left clean clothes outside the bathroom door while she’d been breaking down: flannel shirt that looked like it would hang loose on her small frame, jeans that appeared like they would need a belt, socks too big but soft. Everything smelled like laundry detergent and something indefinably masculine: not cologne, just the scent of someone who lived alone and kept his space clean through habit.
The towel stopped moving.
Warmth between her legs. Slick. She froze, hand on the towel.
Verga.
She pressed her fingers to her sternum. No pulse. Nothing moving from anywhere to anywhere. Dead women did not flush. Dead women’s bodies did not do what her body was currently doing.
I wasn’t doing anything. I was washing my hair.
She hadn’t been running the play. No pitch, no angle, no eye contact calibrated for effect. She’d been having an actual breakdown, as far from performance as she’d been since Managua, and her conditioning had apparently decided that a man being decent to her - clean clothes, no demands, treated her like something worth an honest answer - was the precise input required to fire subroutines she hadn’t summoned.
It hadn’t asked.
It never asked.
And Bisbee said this doesn’t work. Vampires don’t. Dead from the waist down, full stop.
Color was returning where there shouldn’t be any. Warmth accumulating without a source. Her nervous system overriding the physics of what she was through sheer force of repetition.
So either he lied. Or I’m the specific one broken enough to make a corpse do this.
Both answers were bad. If he’d lied, he’d given her the biology speech to shut something down she hadn’t even been running - assessed her and declined before she’d made an offer. She could have handled a rejection she’d earned. She hadn’t been working him. She’d been bleeding on his shower floor. And he’d still said no.
To me. Specifically. Even though it apparently can work.
The flush spread, and she hated it for spreading.
She grabbed the clothes. Did not put them on.
Bisbee was exactly where she’d left him, seated in his worn leather recliner with coffee cooling on the side table. He looked up when she appeared in the doorway: froze when he saw her.
“Kid, what the...”
“You said this didn’t work.” She gestured at herself, at the evidence her body had just provided. “So, what the fuck is this?”
His eyes went to her face first, then dropped involuntarily when she gestured at herself. What he saw drained the color from his face. Flushed skin on a body that had no blood to flush it. The specific evidence of arousal visible where arousal had no biological mechanism to come from. Warmth and color and physical response where there should have been nothing but cold dead tissue. Physical evidence of something that should have been flatly impossible.
“Jesus Christ, kid.” His voice came out quiet, horrified. “That shouldn’t be possible.”
“But it IS.” Naida’s voice shook with anger and vindication. “So, you lied. You said vampires can’t...”
“We can’t.” Bisbee stood, movements careful, deliberate. “I was turned in 1974. Dead from the waist down ever since. Every vampire I know. Not one exception. And none of the other girls can do what you just did.” Turned his back to her, giving her privacy she wasn’t asking for. “For the love of God. Get dressed, Naida. Please.”
“No. I don’t believe you.” She stayed in the doorway, defiant. “Not until you explain what the fuck is so wrong with me that you’d rather lie about biology than...”
“There’s nothing wrong with YOU.” He cut her off, voice harder now, still facing away. “Under different circumstances. Both of us not dead. You not so God-damned young. Yeah, I would have. And I do miss it.” He paused. “But whatever that response was you just walked out here with? That’s not you making a choice. That’s something somebody else built, running without you. I know the difference. I’m not that guy.”
The admission hung between them. Naida stood frozen in the doorway, anger draining into confusion.
He... would have? If circumstances were different? So, it’s not that I’m repulsive, it’s just...
“But what you’re showing me right now?” Bisbee continued, still not turning. “That’s not your body working normally. That’s conditioning so profound it defeats the undead biology. Your body forcing stolen blood to flow where there shouldn’t be any, because that’s how you survived.”
“You don’t know that.” Smaller than she meant it, and defensive. “Maybe I’m just different. Maybe...”
“Naida, I’ve known vampires for seventy years. Including other young women who went through hell before they were turned. None of them have that happen. Because what you’re doing isn’t supposed to be fuckin’ possible.”
The room held still. Naida could feel the physical evidence of her body’s response cooling on her skin. She’d been through worse men for worse reasons. The nakedness wasn’t the problem. It was the specimen feeling. Something being examined, categorized, labeled.
Other girls who went through hell. But none as broken as me. None damaged enough to make their corpse mimic life just from feeling safe. What the fuck did they do to me that even death can’t erase it?
“Get dressed, kid.” Bisbee’s voice came out quieter now, almost gentle. “Please.”
This time she didn’t argue. Pulled on the borrowed clothes with mechanical efficiency, fingers shaking slightly. The flannel shirt hung loose, jeans needed the belt pulled tight. She looked like a kid playing dress-up in adult clothes.
Bisbee waited until he heard the rustle of fabric before turning back around. His expression was carefully neutral, but something in his eyes looked... sad. Tired.
“Better?” he asked.
“Yeah.” It scraped on the way up, rougher than she meant. “Thanks for the answers. And for the clothes.”
“No problem.” He gestured to the couch. “You hungry?”
The question triggered automatic defensive responses before she remembered vampire hunger wasn’t something Bisbee could address with conventional hospitality.
“I’ll handle that later,” she said, settling onto the couch across from him with movements still too careful, too aware of escape routes. “Not really in the mood to hunt right now.”
Silence settled between them, heavy with what had just occurred.
He said I was damaged. That my body’s so broken it can override death itself. That none of the other girls, whoever they are, can do what I just did. So, what does that make me? More fucked up than trafficking victims who became vampires? How is that even possible?
“Can I ask you something?” The words were out before she’d decided to speak them.
“Shoot.”
Naida took a breath she didn’t need. “Earlier. When you said there were other young women. Who went through similar experiences before they were turned.” She forced herself to meet his gaze. “Are they... the family you mentioned? The ones in Sierra Vista?”
“Some of them. Blondie in particular had quite the adventure on her way from Colombia. Copal and Marigold didn’t tell me much. And besides, it’s really not my place...”
He trailed off, leaving the implication clear. Their stories were theirs to tell, not his.
Blondie. Colombia. Trafficking route, probably. Like me but different. And even she doesn’t... her body doesn’t do what mine just did. So, I’m worse. More broken than girls who survived the same shit.
“But none of them...” Naida gestured vaguely at herself, unable to finish the sentence. “Their bodies don’t...?”
“No.” Flat, the way he said it. Certain. “What you’re experiencing is unique. And that should tell you something about how deep the damage goes.”
The words landed like stones. Naida wrapped her arms around herself, suddenly cold despite the borrowed flannel and the desert heat still radiating through the walls.
Unique. Special. The most fucked-up girl in a house full of trafficking survivors. That’s my claim to fame now.
“What does that make me?”
Bisbee was quiet, considering the question with the same deliberate attention he gave everything else.
“Honestly? I don’t know yet.” He bent forward, hands locked between his knees. “What I do know is that you survived something that broke you in ways most people, most vampires, couldn’t survive. Your body’s doing impossible things because of how thoroughly they rewired you. That’s not weakness, kid. That’s your system adapting to survive conditions that should’ve destroyed you completely.”
Adapting. Like it’s a feature instead of a bug. Like being so broken I override death is somehow... what? Impressive?
“But it also means you’ve got a long road ahead,” he continued. “Learning to recognize when you’re responding from trauma instead of choice. Figuring out who you are when you’re not performing survival. Finding out what’s actually you versus what got programmed into you.”
Long road. Great. Like I haven’t already walked far enough.
She stared at him. The math running and not resolving.
“There are things that work.” Her voice came out flat. “That don’t need that.”
Bisbee set the coffee cup down on the side table with careful precision. Turned to face her.
“No.”
He said no. Men don’t say no. That’s not - men don’t say no. That’s the one thing that’s always true. You offer, they want. He said no twice. I don’t have a third move.
She stared at him long enough for the silence to get heavy.
Then she gestured at herself. The same gesture she’d made in the doorway.
“This.” The word landed stripped of everything. “This is the only currency I have. The only thing that has any - any damn value since I left home. And you won’t take it.”
He drew a breath in through his nose. Let it out slow. Both hands settled flat on his knees.
“So how am I supposed to stay. How do I convince you to keep me.” The anger was gone. What was underneath it was worse. “What do you want from me.”
“That’s not currency here, kid.”
That doesn’t mean anything. Everything is currency somewhere. He just isn’t telling me the rate.
“Then what is. Men always want something. Just name it.”
His eyes stayed on her. His expression didn’t change.
“Nothing. You stay because I said stay. That’s it.”
That’s not how anything works. That has never been how anything works.
I just found a place I could fall apart. I’m already being moved. I don’t want to lose this place. I don’t want to go back to sleeping burrowed in the ground.
“If you’re just passing me down the road...” Level, the way she said it. Quiet. “I’ll put out, I’ll clean. Whatever you want.”
She looked at him. Blood tears at the corners of her eyes, her face still.
“I’ll be good.”
Bisbee was quiet. He picked up the cold coffee, held it, set it back down.
“You’re already good, kid.” He met her eyes. “And Sierra Vista isn’t a hand-off. You go there, you have sisters. If it doesn’t work out, you come back here. This doesn’t go away because you met them.”
He’s saying that now. They always say something now. And then the road changes and the something turns into something else and you wake up somewhere new with new rules you didn’t get to read first.
“How do I know that.”
“Because I just told you.” Said like it was simple. Like his word was a thing that held.
“Men say lots of things. Doesn’t mean they mean it.” Level. Tired underneath. “A comfortable lie to get me cooperative - that’s been my life since Managua.”
Bisbee sat with it.
“You already offered everything you have. I said no.” He held her eyes. “What am I lying to get.”
“I don’t know, you won’t tell me what you want.”
He looked at the cold coffee on the side table.
“Someone to brew coffee with.” He said it like it was the whole answer. “Fifty years from now. Still there.”
That’s - that’s not a thing men say. I don’t have a category for that. He told me something true. Didn’t ask for anything back.
He gestured vaguely at the bathroom door behind her. “But Jesus Christ, kid. You came charging out of there ready to tear my head off for lying to you. Didn’t even stop to get dressed first. Just went off like a rocket: zero to fury in half a second.”
Because I thought you were full of shit. Still kind of do.
Bisbee leaned back, something almost like approval crossing his features. “That’s what I see when I look at you. Not some broken victim. Someone who moves fast, fights hard, doesn’t let anyone feed her bullshit. High speed, low drag.”
He paused, then nodded to himself.
“So, fuck it. Naida’s dead. Rocket... that’s your name now, I’m calling you Rocket.”
Rocket. That sounds... right.
“Rocket,” she repeated, testing the word.
“Rocket,” Bisbee confirmed. “Fast, unpredictable, dangerous when cornered. But the thing about rockets? They’re not designed to be pretty or seductive; which you are, don’t misunderstand. But they’re designed to have momentum. To break through barriers. To get where they’re going even when the trajectory looks impossible.”
The name settled around her like clothing that actually fit, replacing the performance identities she’d worn like masks, the schoolyard Naida who had learned to be desirable to boys and the courtyard Naida who had learned to be sympathetic to mothers and the truck-bed Naida who had learned to be quiet to men, all of those constructions falling away in the worn leather living room of an old man who had decided to call her something that meant momentum instead of merchandise.
“I like it,” she said. “I’m keeping it.”
“Good. Because that’s the real you when you’re not using survival strategies for dangerous men. You’re Rocket, and you’re sitting in my living room wearing my clothes because you’re figuring out what comes next.”
His eyes hadn’t left her face once while he spoke. She’d spent a year mapping the specific ways men chose not to meet your eyes when they talked to you. This was none of those.
He sees me as a person. Someone worth protecting. When did that start being... weird? Alien?
Bisbee picked up his coffee cup again, took a deliberate non-sip, just breathing in the cold aroma like it was some kind of meditation.
“Can you actually drink that? I didn’t think we could...”
“We can’t. Swallow it and it comes back up pretty quick, usually violently.” He stared into the cup. “But I still make it. Every night, same routine. Brew a pot, pour the mugs, let them go cold.”
“Why?”
“Vietnam, we’d brew coffee every morning before patrols. Shit instant crap from C-rations, but it was ours. We’d pass the canteen around, bitch about the heat, make stupid jokes.” His voice went quieter. “Most of those guys didn’t make it home. Those that did? Agent Orange got ‘em. Cancer. Lung disease. Turns out the jungle kept burning them long after they left the AO, the war crawling out of their cells one mutation at a time, paid out in slow installments to widows who never got to know which battle the bill had come from.”
He set the cup down carefully.
“Been dead longer than they were alive at this point. So, I brew coffee for people who’ve been gone seventy years. Just add to the list of ghosts in this place. Keep the ritual going even though there’s nobody left to share it with.” He paused. “That’s the sad part of immortality, kid. Everyone dies. You just... don’t.”
Fifty years of making coffee for lost friends. Coffee with the reaper. Everyone he knew before is dead or dying and he’s still here, still going through the motions. Is that what I’ve got to look forward to? Centuries of watching everyone I care about turn to dust?
She glanced around the room, half-expecting to see an ofrenda tucked in a corner somewhere. Candles, photos, maybe some marigolds. But there was nothing. Just clean, military-neat minimalism.
“No altar?” The question slipped out before she could stop it.
Bisbee looked up, confused. “What?”
“For your friends. Día de los Muertos. You’re keeping them alive with the coffee, but...” She gestured vaguely. “Where are the pictures? The candles?”
His expression shifted: an expression between surprise and pain. “Never thought of it that way. But no. No pictures. Too many faces I’ve outlived. Too... hard. Not my love language.”
He raised his coffee cup toward Rocket in mock toast. “Here’s to you, Ed, and all the pieces of you we couldn’t find.”
The casual brutality of it made her blink.
Did he just, Yeah. He did. Jesus Christ.
Bisbee took his non-sip, set the cup down. “So, what does come next?” Like he hadn’t just toasted a dead friend blown to pieces fifty years ago
Rocket stared for a second, processing the emotional whiplash. “Uh... these girls you’ve been talking about... Blondie, and the others.”
“Yeah?”
“You said they aren’t as fucked up as I am. What if they don’t want me? What if I’m too damaged, too dangerous, too whatever?”
Bisbee’s expression softened slightly. “Kid, you just survived trafficking, some sort of sexual training, transformation, and God knows what else while maintaining enough humanity to accept help when offered. If that doesn’t qualify you for a place with other survivors, I don’t know what would.”
Rocket flinched at “sexual training” like he’d slapped her. The clinical term cut deeper than any crude description would have. Made it sound like a skill set instead of damage.
I’m the one who stormed out there naked and made him look. Made it a whole fucking thing. And now I’m embarrassed he’s acknowledging it? Jesus, I’m a mess.
“I didn’t...” She started, then stopped. What was there to say? He’d already explained it was trauma conditioning. Already told her it wasn’t normal. “I don’t remember.”
“I understand.” His voice carried no judgment. Just flat acknowledgment. “I have plenty of memory holes of my own from ‘Nam. Not remembering doesn’t make you less deserving of a place with people who understand.”
Other survivors. Not victims. Survivors who became more.
“And if it doesn’t work out,” he continued, “you’ve got a place here until you figure out what does work. No expiration date. Sometimes family is people who see you at your worst and decide you’re worth protecting anyway.”
Family. The word hit different now.
“Okay,” Rocket said. “Tomorrow night. I’ll meet them. I’ll meet your family.”
“Our family,” Bisbee said. “If you’re staying, if you’re part of this, then they’re your family too.”
The word our caught somewhere in her sternum. Not yours, not a place being offered like a transaction, with fine print she’d learn about later. Ours. She turned it over the way you turned over something you didn’t want to drop.
Our family. When did I stop believing that was possible?
“Get some rest,” Bisbee said, standing. “Dawn’s still a few hours away, but you look like you could use downtime. Guest room’s ready when you are.”
“Bisbee?” Rocket called as he headed toward the kitchen.
“Yeah?”
“Thank you. For seeing me instead of just what happened to me. For giving me a name instead of letting me stay broken.”
He paused in the doorway, something almost paternal crossing his weathered features.
“Like I said, kid. Enough monsters already. We don’t need to make more.”
The guest room was exactly what Bisbee had promised: clean sheets, blackout curtains, a lock that engaged with solid mechanical certainty. Rocket tested the door twice, confirmed the lock held, then settled onto the narrow bed without any intention of actual rest. The room gave up its history to her in the dark as every room did now, the dried oil of a sewing machine that had not run in decades, cardboard boxes gone soft with canyon damp stacked in the closet, the cooled iron of a radiator that predated the swamp cooler bolted to the roof, and beneath the floorboards the long slow exhalation of the mountain itself, rock that had held the same patient cold since before the town above it had a name.
Safe room. Guest room. Like I’m visiting family instead of hiding from everything that wants me dead or owned.
She lay in darkness for what felt like hours, hyperaware of every sound in Bisbee’s small house. The hum of the refrigerator. The tick of settling wood. The distant rumble of late-night traffic on the highway cutting through the canyon. Her amplified hearing laid the canyon out past the walls in widening rings, the compressor and the ticking wood giving way to a dog working a fence line three streets down, then the highway’s distant hydraulic sigh where the grade dropped toward the San Pedro, then the wind combing the open terraces of the old pit, and past all of it the enormous patient silence of country that did not care whether she slept. Normal sounds. Safe sounds. The kind of ambient noise that belonged to a world where people slept without keeping one eye open for threats.
He’s kind. He’s grumpy. But he’s not trying to kill me. I can work with that.
Safe. Actually safe. I can rest without monitoring threats, without planning escapes. When do I start believing that? When did I forget what that felt like?
Dawn pressure began building in her consciousness as sunrise approached. Her last coherent thought was gratitude for protective darkness, for locked doors and borrowed clothes and the possibility of family waiting beyond tomorrow’s sunset.
For someone who had given her a name with nothing attached to it: no debt, no conditions, no version of herself she had to maintain to keep it.
For the first time since her embrace, in the small guest room of an old soldier she had known for less than a single rotation of the earth, behind a door that locked and would stay locked until she chose otherwise, Rocket slept without nightmares.
© 2025 E L Frederick | Published by Veridian Studios