Rocket - Chapter 12
Rocket - Bisbee, Arizona to Sierra Vista, Arizona
Rocket woke up after sunset to the smell of coffee brewing.
For half a second her mind supplied the yellow walls and Disney Princess sheets, Carlos in the doorway with that smile that meant another lesson. Then reality snapped back. Bisbee’s guest room. Clean sheets. Locked door. Safe.
First night waking without that raw, exposed sensation.
Bisbee was up first, didn’t try to disturb her, just... started his routine with military efficiency. Some habits die hard when you’re dead.
Is this what normal feels like? Waking up and the first thought isn’t escape routes or threat assessment? Just... coffee smell and darkness ensured with blackout curtains?
She lay there testing the feeling, one careful toe in the bathwater before she committed the whole body, the way a person who had been hurt enough by surfaces tested every new surface that promised to be safe. No nightmares. No frenzy. No hunters. Just the sunset and the fact of surviving another day, which was a sentence she had not allowed herself to think clearly since the police shootout that took her parents and which now rose in her chest like a small old animal that had finally found a place warm enough to come out of hiding.
Coffee smell deepened. Bisbee’s ritual: brewing for ghosts fifty years buried.
She ran fingers through tangled hair, still in yesterday’s flannel. Survival instinct: stay dressed, stay ready. The lock clicked open.
Bisbee stood in the kitchen exactly like he had the night before. Pouring coffee into a mug. Not drinking it. Just holding it while he stared out the window at the canyon walls catching the last dim light, the high stone faces taking what was left of the day and turning it into the small private sunset that mountain towns got, the one the lowlanders down on the highway never saw because the canyon kept it for itself.
“Morning,” he said without turning around. “Or evening. Whatever we’re calling sunset these days.”
“Evening.” She leaned against the doorframe.
“You hungry?” he asked.
“I’ll manage.” She wasn’t ready to hunt yet. “I guess I’ve been using it a lot slower now that things aren’t... crazy.”
“Coffee’s fresh if you want the smell. Won’t stay down if you drink it, but the aroma’s still good.”
She crossed to the counter, picked up the pot. Let the smell hit her. Rich and dark and completely wrong for a body that didn’t process anything except blood. But the scent carried memories. Her mother’s kitchen in Managua. Mornings before school. Before everything went to shit. The kitchen gave her senses more than she had asked it for, the element ticking inside the coffee maker, the propane sigh of a pilot light somewhere behind the stove, the canyon air sliding in under the back door carrying creosote and cold stone and the iron of the mine tailings the whole town was built on top of, every smell arriving sharp-edged and separate now where a living nose would have blurred them into morning.
“We should talk about tonight,” Bisbee said.
And there it was. The thing she’d been avoiding since she woke up.
“Sierra Vista.” Not a question.
“Sierra Vista.” He turned to face her. “Abuela’s expecting us.”
She set the pot down. Her hands wanted to shake.
“I don’t want to go. I know we agreed to it, but let me stay one more night. Please?”
Bisbee was quiet for a moment. “I know you’re scared. And I get wanting to delay. But this band-aid isn’t going to get any easier to rip off.”
“But I just got here. Just one night. And after everything that happened: the bathroom thing, the whole...” She gestured vaguely. “Shouldn’t I get more time before you pawn me off on strangers?”
“Is that what you think I’m doing? Pawning you off?”
“No, maybe... I dunno. Look, papi, I trust you.” The words came out flat. Simple. But her eyes: she looked up at him through her lashes. Hopeful. The look that always worked on boys. “You know that, right? I trust you.”
Bisbee’s expression went flat. “Don’t do that.”
“Do what?”
“The ‘papi’ thing. The performance. We’re past that, Rocket.”
“Fine. But... just don’t... get rid of me like I’m some cochinada.”
“You’re not.” Bisbee pulled out a chair. Sat. “Now sit down and tell me what this is really about.”
Rocket sat. Wrapped her arms around herself. Started to speak, stopped. Started again.
“His name was Señor Morales.” A breath went out of her, one she didn’t need. “Mateo’s father. Mateo era mi plato de segunda mesa. Not my first choice. Just the boy I kept close in case everything went to shit.”
Bisbee stayed quiet. Listening.
“My parents died. Crossfire between policía and some gang members. Wrong place, wrong time.” The words came easier than she expected. Like she’d rehearsed them. “Three days later I had no apartment, no family was willing to help, and about two weeks before I’d be on the streets.”
“My aunt, la bruja, said I was old enough to work. Old enough to deal with my own jodida problems.” She laughed without humor. “Her son used to put his hands down my pants when I was younger. I told. He got sent to other family. She chose him over me then, too.”
“So, I went to Mateo’s house.” She stared into the coffee. “Late at night. Threw rocks at his window. Played the desperate girl card. Asked if I could hide in his room. Just until I figured something out.”
“Let me guess,” Bisbee said. “His father caught you.”
“Yeah.” Bitter laugh. “Caught me standing too close to his son near midnight, asking for help I had no right to ask for. He saw right through me. Saw I was trying to manipulate Mateo into sheltering me. Maybe sleep with me. Make it impossible for them to throw me out once I was pregnant or attached or whatever.”
She paused.
“I wasn’t a puta, not really. But I was desperate enough to act like one.”
“He saw me for what I was. He knew I was a threat. Knew what I had planned. Couldn’t have a girl like me anywhere near his son. Said I needed to disappear before I ruined everything.”
Bisbee nodded slowly. A silent encouragement to Keep going.
“But then he said he could help me.” The words tasted like ash. “Said he had business associates. People who moved cargo north. Who needed young, pretty workers without family asking questions. He made it sound like opportunity. Like I’d be grateful.”
Bisbee’s expression went very still. “He sold you.”
“Yeah, he sold me.” Simple. Factual. “Called his cartel contacts while I walked away with my tail tucked, disgusted with my own desperation. Told me to be ready at dawn. That his associates would pick me up. That I’d work off the debt for transportation and papers and housing.”
“I thanked him,” she said, voice dropping to almost a whisper. “Thanked him for the opportunity. For not calling the police. For giving me an opportunity at a better life in America.”
Bisbee went still. His jaw tight. Hands flat on the table.
“Next morning I met the truck. Week later I was in the safe house with yellow walls and these childish Disney Princess sheets. I don’t remember much of what happened. Next thing I know, I’m crawling out of my own grave.”
She looked up at Bisbee. Held his gaze.
“So yeah. Last person I trusted who said he’d help me? Sold me to the fucking cartel for profit. Sent me straight into hell. And now you’re asking me to trust that Abuela’s different. That she’s not just a prettier version of the same transaction.”
He stayed quiet. When he spoke, his voice was careful. Measured.
“You’re right.”
She blinked. “What?”
“You’re right to be scared. Right to see the pattern. Right to question whether this is another handoff that ends badly.” He leaned forward. “Señor Morales fucked you over. Used your desperation against you. Profited from your pain. And there’s no guarantee that won’t happen again.”
Wait. He’s agreeing with me? Not telling me I’m being paranoid or that I need to trust more or any of the bullshit adults usually say when you point out they’re asking too much?
“But here’s what I can tell you,” Bisbee continued. “I’ve known Abuela for twenty years. She’s taken in more abandoned vampire kids than anyone in the Southwest. Fed them, housed them, kept them alive when the rest of our world wanted them dead for existing. And in twenty years, I’ve never seen her sell anyone. Never seen her use them. Never seen her do anything except protect kids who had nowhere else to go.”
“Twenty years is a long time to run a con.”
“It is.” He didn’t argue. “But it’s also a long time to maintain a lie. And I’ve seen what she does when Elders come sniffing around her girls. I’ve seen her tell ancient vampires with real power to fuck off and die when they suggested her kids might be useful assets.”
She protects them. Like actually protects them. Not collects them for later use.
“I can’t promise you absolute safety,” Bisbee said. “I can’t promise Abuela’s girls will like you or that you’ll fit in or that everything will work perfectly. What I can promise is that if it doesn’t work, if you get there and something feels wrong, you come back here. No questions. No judgment. Door stays open.”
“But you can’t keep me here long-term.”
“No.” Honest. Direct. “This town’s got one vampire’s worth of feeding territory. We’d both starve or turn it into a crime scene inside a month. You need what Abuela offers: community, education, people who understand what you’re going through.”
Rocket stared into the coffee mug. Steam had stopped rising. Going cold like Bisbee’s nightly ritual.
“What if I get there and can’t leave?” The question came out smaller than she intended. “What if it looks safe but isn’t?”
“Then you fight your way out and come back here.” Simple. Certain. “You survived a week in the desert fighting the cartel. You can sure as hell handle escaping one old woman’s house if it comes to that.”
She almost smiled. Almost.
“I’m not asking you to trust them,” Bisbee continued. “I’m asking you to trust my judgment. Trust that I wouldn’t send you somewhere dangerous. Trust that if I’m wrong, you’ve got the skills to survive long enough to get out.”
Trust his judgment. Trust that he’s trying to help instead of hurt. That’s all.
“And if Abuela turns out to be another Señor Morales?”
“Then I’ll help you burn her house down.” No hesitation. No diplomacy. Just flat certainty. “But she won’t be. Because she’s spent decades proving who she is, and she is someone who protects kids nobody else wants.”
She tested the logic. Looked for holes.
“Okay.” Quiet. Tentative. “Okay. I’ll go. I’ll meet her. I’ll try.”
“That’s all I’m asking.”
She rose. Set the mug in the sink. Turned to face him.
“But if this goes wrong, if she’s not what you think she is, I’m coming back here and you’re making me more coffee I can’t drink while I figure out plan C.”
“Deal.” Bisbee stood too. “Now get ready. We leave in twenty minutes. And Rocket?”
“Yeah?”
“Thank you. For trusting my judgment even when your survival instincts are screaming that trusting anyone is stupid.”
Trusting anyone IS stupid. That’s how she got trafficked. But not trusting means staying alone forever. Means never having family or safety or anything except survival. And I’m so fucking tired of just surviving.
“Don’t make me regret it,” she said.
“I’ll do my best.”
Twenty minutes later, the Harley sat in the pre-dawn dark, engine ticking as it cooled from Bisbee’s prep work. Rocket stood next to it wearing borrowed clothes that still smelled like detergent and safety, and tried very hard not to think about yellow walls and Disney Princesses and men who promised help while planning how to profit from her pain.
This was different.
It had to be.
Because if it wasn’t, she’d already used up all her fight getting this far, and she didn’t have another escape left in her.
Bisbee swung his leg over the bike, settled into worn leather with the ease of decades. Kicked the engine to life with the small practiced motion of a man who had kicked this same engine to life ten thousand times before. The rumble echoed off canyon walls, mechanical heartbeat in the desert silence, the only heartbeat anywhere in this small mining valley tonight, since neither of the two riders preparing to ride out had a heartbeat of their own to contribute.
“Helmet’s in the saddlebag,” he said. “And hold on tight: these mountain roads don’t forgive inattention.”
Rocket pulled on the helmet, the borrowed weight of it foreign on her head, the smell of someone else’s sweat and sunscreen still living inside its foam padding from a thousand previous rides. Climbed on behind him. Her arms circled his waist automatically. Survival instinct. The leather jacket was worn soft from years of desert rides, broken in by decades of wind and sun and someone’s body heat negotiating with the same square footage of cowhide for longer than she had been alive. Motor oil and sage and that dry Arizona smell that clung to everything, arid and unapologetic about it.
“I’ve never done this before.”
“Just lean the way I lean.”
“This is a big one.”
Bisbee’s voice stayed flat. “Rocket.”
“What? I’m talking about the motorcycle.” Pause. “Obviously.”
“Uh-huh. Hold on.”
“How fast are we talking?”
“Fast enough that being undead matters if we crash.” Dark amusement in his voice. “But I’ve been riding these roads since before you were born. Vampire reflexes make it interesting instead of suicidal.”
The Harley lurched forward, that hard pull at the small of the back that every motorcycle gave you the first time you sat on one and were not the one driving it, the world rearranging itself around the new shape of your travel without consulting your stomach about it. Bisbee didn’t ease into speed. He opened the throttle and let the bike scream, and the canyon walls picked the scream up and threw it back at them in pieces, every echo a fraction behind the original, every fraction reminding her that the canyon had been built to hold sound the way a bowl held water.
¡Ay Dios, mierda!...
The town fell away behind them. The headlight peeled the road out of the dark a few yards at a time, mining terraces stacked up the canyon walls on either side in benches a century of dynamite had cut and then abandoned, the pale scars of the tailings glowing faintly under the stars where nothing had agreed to grow back, the whole ruined geometry of the old workings sliding past at the edge of the beam and gone again before her eye could finish reading it. Switchback turns carved through old mining terraces. Bisbee’s headlight cut through darkness so complete it made the desert killing ground look civilized. No light pollution. No ambient glow. Just stars overhead and the immediate pool of visibility created by the motorcycle’s beam.
And speed.
So much speed.
The bike leaned into curves at angles that should’ve scraped metal against asphalt, a lean that turned the bike into a held breath at thirty degrees off true, an angle her mortal body would have refused and her vampire body simply received like a temperature reading. Bisbee took them with casual precision. No hesitation. No fear. Just muscle memory and supernatural reflexes and the absolute certainty of someone who’d been riding these roads for fifty years.
Already dead already dead we’re already dead what’s the worst that happens we get deader?
She tightened her grip. Wind tore at her clothes. Engine vibration ran through her bones. Alive in a way she hadn’t felt since crawling out of that grave.
Fast. Reckless. Free.
Nothing to lose because they’d already lost everything that mattered.
By the time they reached Highway 90, Bisbee had the throttle wide open. Conversation became impossible. Wind and engine noise drowned everything else. Out past the cone of the headlight the San Pedro valley opened flat and enormous on both sides of the highway, grassland and creosote running off toward mountains she could feel more than see, low black masses that held the last warmth of the day in their stone and breathed it back at her enhanced skin as the bike tore through the gap between them, the whole basin lying under a cold wash of stars indifferent to the two dead things crossing it at ninety miles an hour.
Speed and darkness and painted lines flashing past in the rhythm that highway lines flashed past at speed, fast enough that they stopped being individual lines and became one long line, fast enough that the eye gave up on counting and the body started keeping time to them instead.
Rocket stopped thinking about the speed.
Started thinking about what came after.
Normal vampires. Travel between safe places. Make connections. That’s what he said. Normal. I can be normal. I can...
But the thought twisted. Brought anxiety flooding back.
What if I don’t fit? What if they see it? See how broken I am? My body doing impossible things? They’ll know. They’ll see I’m worse. Más jodida than actual survivors because even death can’t fix what...
The bike hit a straight stretch. Bisbee opened it up even more.
Faster.
The wind screamed. The world blurred.
Stop. Stop thinking. Just ride. Just hold on. Don’t...
But fear had teeth now. She sank deeper the closer they got.
Don’t bail. Don’t make him turn around. You agreed. You said you’d try. Don’t be a coward. Don’t...
Every mile closer to Sierra Vista felt like running toward a cliff edge.
Twenty years. Remember. Decades. That’s evidence. Real evidence. Abuela protects kids. She doesn’t sell them. Doesn’t use them. Twenty years of not being Señor Morales. That matters. That’s real. Believe that.
But what if...
No. Stop. Trust his judgment. Not them. Just his judgment. He wouldn’t send me somewhere dangerous. He wouldn’t lie. Gave me the out. Door stays open. I can leave. Can fight my way out if it goes wrong.
The bike roared through darkness.
Survived the desert. Survived Carlos. Survived contractors with guns. I can survive meeting some girls. Just meeting them. Just trying. That’s all. Just try.
Her grip on Bisbee tightened.
It’s okay it’s okay it’s okay. You can do this. You’ve done worse. So much worse. This is just people. Just vampires like me. Bisbee says they’ll understand. Believe him. Believe that. Trust him.
The fear didn’t disappear.
It kept circling. She was clawing for equilibrium. It demanded attention she tried to drown in speed and engine noise.
Don’t panic. Don’t run. You’re not trapped. Just trying. Door stays open. You can leave. You can leave. Remember that. You can...
The desert landscape rushed by in peripheral darkness, the same desert that had been holding her for a week now without ever quite explaining why, the same flat empty stretch that had been keeping her grave and her hunters and her bullet wound and her first feeding all in the same square miles of caliche. Familiar and alien at once. The same vast indifference that had nearly killed her, the same vast indifference that had buried her and let her crawl out and let her drink and let her burrow and let her hide, the desert as a great unsigned contract she had not understood she was inside until she was already inside it. But out here, traveling at highway speeds with someone who knew where they were going, the emptiness felt different.
Almost peaceful.
If she could just stop her thoughts from spiraling.
Breathe. You don’t need to but breathe anyway. In. Out. Like Bisbee showed you. Like he said. In. Out. You can do this. You can...
Eighteen minutes later they were decelerating through Sierra Vista’s suburban streets. Hospital. Gas stations. Residential neighborhoods that screamed middle-class normalcy.
Her eyes cut to the cross streets, marking exits she hadn’t meant to look for.
Too close. Too real. Still time to tell him to turn around. Still time to: no. No. You promised. You already promised. Don’t.
“Almost there,” Bisbee called back as they turned onto Desert Shadows Drive.
Mierda mierda mierda...
The street curved through an established neighborhood where mature mesquite trees provided actual shade, trees somebody had planted forty years ago and watered through forty desert summers and stayed around long enough to see grow big enough to mean something. Houses that looked permanent. Rooted. A place where people stayed, where the same family answered the same door for thirty Christmases in a row, where children grew up and came back and brought their own children to the same kitchen, a permanence she had seen in other people’s lives and assumed she would never live inside.
Normal people. Functional families. And I’m about to walk in there broken and wrong and they’ll see it they’ll see how fucked up I am they’ll...
The address matched a single-story ranch house, a mass-built southwest property thrown up in the eighties by a developer who had stamped the same blueprint onto a thousand other lots between Phoenix and El Paso. Beige stucco. Red tile roof. Her senses sorted the place while she was still swinging her leg off the bike, old candle wax and dried herbs worked into the stucco itself, the faint sweet rot of fruit left out as an offering somewhere around the back, the tick of a swamp cooler cycling down on the roof, and under all of it the cold mineral stillness of other vampires, more than one, awake and waiting somewhere inside. Desert landscaping, gravel and saguaro and the small rosette agaves that suburban water restrictions allowed. Motion sensors activated as they pulled into the driveway, the small porch lights coming on like the house had been waiting up for them.
Last chance. Last chance to run. Could jump off the bike. Could disappear into the desert. Could...
No.
No. You promised. You try. That’s all. Just try.
Rocket slid off the motorcycle and pulled off the helmet. Immediately self-conscious about her appearance after the wind and ride.
Something else registered. Uncomfortable awareness. Wetness that had no business being there.
Mierda. Not now. Fuck. They’ll see. They’ll know how broken I am.
She pushed the thought away. Focused on the house. On Abuela waiting. On anything except her body doing impossible things again.
Normal. It looks so fucking normal. Functional families. She wanted to talk instead of fight. Maybe safety is possible. Maybe. Por favor, Dios, let it be possible.
“She knows we’re coming?” Suddenly aware that showing up at someone’s house in the small hours of the night might not qualify as appropriate social behavior.
“Called her while you were in the shower yesterday.” Bisbee shut off the bike. “She’s expecting us.” Pause. “Fair warning; Abuela’s got strong opinions about damn near everything. But she’s also kept more vampire kids alive than anyone I know. Her opinions tend to be worth hearing.”
More vampire kids. Kept alive. Not sold. Not used. Kept alive. Remember that. Believe that.
The front door opened before they’d finished walking up the pathway, opened on a timing that meant the woman inside had been listening for the bike since the first switchback off the highway. The threshold itself had been keeping a list of who would and would not be allowed across it tonight.
An elderly woman stood in the doorway. Her presence filled it despite her size, the way a small candle filled a small room when the rest of the house had been turned off.
Rocket’s supernatural senses identified her immediately. Vampire. The stillness. Room-temperature skin. Predatory awareness masked by grandmotherly concern.
But there was something else.
Something that spoke of age and accumulated power and the kind of authority that came from decades of making life-and-death decisions and living with the consequences.
Just being.
Like the desert. Like time. Like something that existed before her and would exist after.
She’s not Señor Morales. She’s not pretending. Not calculating profit. She’s... actually glad I’m here?
“Mija,” Abuela said, her voice carrying warmth that felt too generous for a stranger, the kind of warmth Rocket had not heard in any voice since her own mother had been alive and would not have believed she was hearing again from a woman she had never met. “I was wondering when you would find your way to us.”
Not surprised. Not evaluating. Not calculating risk.
Glad to see her.
She called me mija. Like I’m already family. Like I belong here before I’ve even...
“Abuela, this is Rocket,” Bisbee said with matter-of-fact formality. “Rocket, this is Abuela. She runs this sanctuary. Might actually be able to help you figure out what comes next.”
Rocket froze.
Impulses warred in her chest.
The urge to perform: smile pretty, say the right things, manipulate her way to safety the way she’d learned with every adult who held power over her.
Versus something newer. Harder.
The growing awareness that manipulation wouldn’t work here. That Abuela would see through it the way Bisbee had seen through her desert bravado. That maybe, possibly, she didn’t need to perform because these people weren’t looking for a show.
Don’t try the tricks. Don’t weaponize the pretty. Don’t perform survival. Just... be honest. Be Rocket. See what happens. Please let it work. Please.
Abuela recognized the internal conflict. Stepped back and gestured them both inside without waiting for a response.
“Come in, come in.” Her accent carried traces of border Spanish mixed with decades of American English. Authority and maternal care occupying the same space. “Bisbee, the girls are in the living room. They have been anxious to see you again. Go visit with them while I speak with Rocket.”
© 2025 E L Frederick | Published by Veridian Studios