Rocket - Chapter 6
Naida - US/Mexico Border
The radio crackled with increasingly desperate coordination as the contractors tried to make sense of the silence where Lobo-Seis’s voice should have been, the kind of silence that turned trained operators back into the boys they had been before someone taught them protocol, the kind of silence that ate confidence the way the desert ate water. Naida pressed herself against the boulder’s shadow, blood from Lobo-Seis’s feeding still warm on her chin where the night air had not yet stolen the heat from it, the iron taste of him still folded under her tongue like a coin she hadn’t decided whether to spend or save, and listened to professional hunters realize their tactical situation had deteriorated beyond recovery parameters.
“Lobo-Seis, report status. Lobo-Seis, acknowledge.”
They’re scared now. Good. They should be.
“Command, this is Lima-Three. Lobo-Seis is not responding on any frequency. Last known position was sector nine, grid four-seven-alpha. Permission to investigate requested.”
“Negative, Lima-Three. Maintain your current position. All units switch to defensive posture and await backup protocols.”
Chase them. Kill them all before they scatter.
The urgency made sense for once. If the Coyotes bunched up together, she’d have to go through all of them at once. But spread out like this? She could eliminate them one by one.
Her enhanced hearing tracked four heartbeats across the desert, fast but steady, trying to hold formation. They’d positioned themselves to cover each other, which would have worked great against another human.
Too bad she wasn’t human anymore.
They were operating on outdated intelligence.
“Lima-Four, I’ve got movement in the arroyo system. Something’s... Christ, did you see that?”
“See what?” his partner asked.
“Target just fucking vanished into solid rock. One second she’s there, next second the stone swallows her like water.”
“Impossible. Check your NVGs, you’re seeing ghosts.”
The radio frequencies erupted with overlapping transmissions as trained skepticism collided with witnessed impossibility. Naida smiled against the darkness, tasting copper and vindication in equal measure. Let them understand what they were hunting. Let the fear season their blood before she took it.
Cabrones finally seeing what I can do. Still think I’m cargo? Still think you can process me like merchandise?
She pressed both palms against the limestone and sank into the stone, letting it swallow her whole. The earth closed around her like a grave, warm and dark and safe. She couldn’t move while merged, the caliche held her in place twelve feet down, but sound still reached her. Boot strikes passed directly overhead. Radio chatter drifted through the rock as they coordinated their search pattern, never realizing their target was buried right beneath them.
The organization was escalating. More resources, better equipment. Helicopter rotors approached from the south, louder every minute, their sound cutting through the desert wind that had been pushing palo verde branches against each other all night.
They had stopped treating this like routine cargo recovery. It was a supernatural crisis now.
She waited until Lima-Three’s footsteps moved past, then emerged thirty yards behind his position. He never heard her rise from the desert floor. The contractor crouched behind a natural fortification of stacked limestone, attention focused outward on expected threat vectors, radio pressed against his ear as he coordinated with teammates scattered across the killing ground.
He was looking the wrong direction entirely.
“Command, we need immediate extraction. Target demonstrates capabilities that exceed...”
Naida’s hand closed over his mouth with crushing force, vampire strength rendering every drill obsolete before he could complete the transmission. His rifle clattered against stone as she dragged him backward into the shadows, vampire speed making his desperate struggles feel like slow-motion theater performed underwater.
Why waste it?
Don’t need it. Lobo-Seis topped me off. But... why leave good blood lying around?
His neck broke with a wet crack that sent his body twitching.
Not like Lobo-Seis. No rage this time. Just... work.
Clean. Efficient. Professional.
And she watched herself do it from the cold half-step back she lived behind now, the place she’d run the whole desert from, narrating her own hands like a girl describing a dream that belonged to someone else. The eighteen-year-old who used to keep this body would have thrown up. The thing wearing it took inventory.
This is the part that’s supposed to feel like something. It feels like restocking.
Maybe that was allowed. Maybe you didn’t get to have opinions about the only thing still keeping you on your feet. But she’d seen what the men became when killing was the last thing that answered when they called, the coyotes who’d quit pretending the cargo was anything but a way to spend an afternoon. Power with nothing behind it but appetite. Hers had somewhere to point. A sunset, and a man inside it. That was the whole difference, and she meant to keep it.
Her fangs extended as she lowered herself to his throat, but this was deliberate refueling, not the desperate consumption from Lobo-Seis: sipping from the corpse with controlled efficiency. The blood carried residual heat and the chemical signature of adrenaline, and she took only what the moment offered.
Smart hunting means not passing up easy calories. Desert survival 101.
When she pulled away after perhaps thirty seconds, the body retained most of its blood. She had spent minutes on it. The long stretches were what got hunters killed.
Three targets remained. She could eliminate them all if she moved efficiently, but any delay or complication would leave survivors to report her capabilities to leadership that would deploy countermeasures accordingly.
Rápido, pendeja. Hunt fast or let them escape to tell Carlos exactly what his merchandise became.
“Lima-Three, respond. Lima-Four, do you have visual on Lima-Three’s position?”
“Negative, Command. Last transmission cut off mid-sentence. Something’s wrong.”
The radio frequencies carried sounds of professional discipline cracking under supernatural pressure. These weren’t cartel foot soldiers; these were military contractors trained to hunt humans. Vampires who could vanish into stone didn’t exist in their playbook.
Fear made prey stupid. Naida intended to exploit that.
She located Lima-Four by dead-still listening. His heart was racing, panic bleeding through his radio voice. The contractor had abandoned his defensive position and was moving through creosote toward higher ground, looking for a better vantage point.
He’d forgotten she didn’t attack from expected directions.
Naida emerged from the caliche directly beneath his path, rising from the desert floor as he passed overhead. Her hand closed around his ankle with supernatural strength, yanking him off balance before he could process where the attack came from. He hit the ground hard, rifle skittering away across loose stone while she dragged him into the arroyo with inhuman speed that made his struggles futile.
“Target acquired! Target has...”
She crushed his radio with her free hand, plastic and electronics shattering like paper. The contractor went for his sidearm fast, training kicking in despite the chaos, but vampire reflexes made human speed look like slow motion.
Naida caught his wrist mid-draw and twisted, bone separating from socket with wet precision. His scream was raw agony. Every remaining hunter would hear exactly where he was: and what was happening to him.
Take it.
All that burrowing and fighting burned calories.
Yeah, yeah, fine. I’m getting hungry anyway.
Naida’s fangs found his throat with practiced efficiency. She fed with controlled purpose, measured sips, refueling and nothing more. The taste exploded across her tongue, and she maintained enough discipline to stop while she still wanted more.
Take what I need. Leave the rest. Professional hunting, not massacre.
Kill more when not starving.
When she pulled away, Lima-Four’s corpse still had plenty of blood left. Wasteful by some standards, but she’d rather save time for hunting than spend it draining corpses dry.
The feeding topped off what the night’s work had burned. She wasn’t desperate anymore, wasn’t running on fumes. The difference showed: her hands steady, her thinking clear, her speed smooth and unhurried.
Desperation made hunters sloppy. Confidence made them deadly.
“All remaining units, consolidated defensive position at rally point alpha. Repeat, fall back to rally point alpha for coordinated extraction. Target has eliminated at least three operators and demonstrates supernatural capabilities. This is now a withdrawal under contact situation.”
Running. Good. Makes the hunting easier when prey abandons defensive positions.
She’d fed twice tonight, quick refueling not desperate gorging, and the difference was obvious. Her speed felt smoother, burrowing came easier, her head stayed clear, hunger quiet for once.
This was what it felt like to hunt at full strength. That was new.
Two more. Kill them both. Make them understand.
The voice inside wanted them all dead, not because she was starving, but because they’d dared to hunt her.
Two heartbeats converged toward the rally point. The last two contractors were falling back together, covering each other as they moved. Smart tactics against a human opponent.
She wasn’t human.
Naida tracked them by sound alone: fast heartbeats, controlled breathing. She could close the distance in seconds, take them both out before they reached the rally point where extraction helicopters waited.
But dawn was coming. The sky was getting lighter, that pre-sunrise gray that meant she had minutes, maybe less. Her body knew what sunlight meant: total annihilation, ash, and nothing left behind.
Time’s running out. Kill them both or let them go and burrow before the sun turns me into fucking charcoal.
The tactical mathematics shifted as helicopter rotors grew louder from the south, close now, immediate mechanical thunder that put extraction minutes away. If she pursued the remaining targets, she might complete the elimination before dawn forced her underground. Or she might get caught in the open when sunrise arrived, trading tactical victory for true death.
Kill them anyway. Complete the hunt. Leave no witnesses.
But the math didn’t work. Dawn was coming, and chasing two retreating targets across open desert meant risking exposure when the sun rose. She’d fed well tonight, Lima-Three and Lima-Four keeping her strong, and the smart choice was saving that strength for tomorrow night’s fight with Carlos, banking it for when it counted.
She turned away from the retreating heartbeats and moved through the creosote toward the arroyo system where softer caliche would welcome her body during daylight dormancy. The brittlebush along the bank had gone silver in the pre-dawn gray, every branch motionless now that the wind had died. The decision left a bitter taste, an incomplete victory, but survival meant choosing which battles to fight.
Four dead contractors. Two survivors to report to Carlos Mendoza.
“Command, this is Lima-Two. We’ve reached rally point alpha. Everyone else is gone, Lobo-Seis included. It’s just us. Request immediate extraction before we join them.”
“Roger, Lima-Two. Extraction inbound, ETA three minutes. Hold position and maintain defensive perimeter.”
Let them run. Let them tell Carlos exactly what I became while buried in the desert he chose for disposal.
She pressed against the arroyo bank and let the earth swallow her whole, caliche flowing around her body like warm honey as she sank deeper, every grain rearranging itself around her shape as if it had been waiting for someone to figure out the trick of it, as if the desert had carried this option in its inventory for centuries while no one bothered to ask. It still felt weird as hell, the way swimming through gravel ought to feel and somehow didn’t, how the dirt knew her now like the boulder shadows knew her, like the smell of creosote knew her after two nights of running through it. But she was getting used to it. The rock would keep her safe from the sun, and that was a sentence she had never expected to think in any version of her life, the desert and the dawn for once on the same side of her, no longer stacked against her with the rest of the world.
The last thing she heard before everything went dark was the radio chatter.
“Command, this is Extraction-One. We’re collecting Lima-Two and Lima-Seven. What’s our next deployment protocol?”
The answer came in Spanish, a voice the contractors hadn’t heard before. Quieter than the jefe’s. Colder. A man who stood close enough to Don Carlos to speak in his place.
“Ya no es asunto de ustedes. Regresen a base y no toquen nada.” A pause. “El patrón baja al atardecer. La quiere viva, entera, y la quiere para él solo. Lo demás no les incumbe.”
Carlos. He came himself this time. Good. Saves me the trouble of hunting him down in Nogales.
That was the cold part talking, the part that had run the whole night from a half-step behind her own eyes. The rest of her heard la quiere para él solo and went to work without consulting her, the way it had the first time his voice crossed the radio tonight, and would every time his voice found her from now on, reliable as the dawn currently packing her into the ground. Twelve feet of caliche held her arms at her sides and her knees where they’d folded and would not give her back so much as an inch to flinch with. So the heat had nowhere to go. It climbed through a corpse that could not shift, could not clench, could not even close itself against the having of it, and stayed, and waited, as she was about to wait, the two of them shut in the same dark together for the length of a desert day.
He is not here. He is a dead man’s radio and a sunset away and not here, and my own body did not get the memo.
The smell came up as it always did, the one her mind had bricked over and her body had kept the key to. Mango and chili powder, gone sharp and wrong. And behind it, because there was always something behind it, a wall painted a cheerful yellow she knew was there without looking. The first time, it had ambushed her. Now she knew its name before it arrived, and it arrived anyway, on schedule, indifferent to being recognized.
She had spent her whole mortal life learning the shape of the thing without the words for it. Boys did her homework for a kiss on the cheek. The coyote’s son drove her north for a debt she never agreed to owe. Carlos had handed her a better life and then itemized it. Every kindness was an invoice with the total left blank until you’d already taken delivery, and the lesson was so deep in her now that her dead flesh footed the bill before her mind could read the line.
That’s the whole trick of him. He never took anything. He gave, and gave, and made the giving the debt.
Personal handling. She knew exactly what it meant, knew it in the part of her that obeyed, the part her mind had no say over. Her brain had walled off the specifics of those weeks. Her body had kept every page, and it was reading her one now, here, in the grave, where she could not get up and walk away from it.
He still thinks he owns this. And the piece of me I’ll burn to ash before I say it out loud is the piece that hasn’t finished disagreeing.
Tomorrow night he’d find out some students learned too well. Come nightfall, the body that answered to him would answer to her, and whatever was banked in the dark behind that bricked-over smell, whatever had no name yet and ran hot, she’d let him be the one to find out she’d stopped keeping it locked.
The caliche sealed over her, dense and lightless, while the sky above brightened and mattered not at all. She’d fed twice tonight, clean and controlled, and she could feel the difference. Strong. Clear-headed. Ready. Tomorrow night Carlos would come. She’d be waiting at full strength, ready for him this time. The smart choice was resting now, letting her body process the blood while she slept, so when sunset came she’d be exactly what he never expected. Apex predator. Not merchandise.
Her last thought before darkness took her was fire. Not anger-fire or revenge-fire, but something else, something with its own pulse and its own appetite, banked the way a coal banks under ash through a long cold night, waiting in the space where her worst memories lived because that was where it had always lived, fed by whatever she would not yet look at directly. It waited there still, and the space was bigger than she wanted to admit, lined with cheerful yellow walls she could feel without seeing, walls that her mind would not open the door to but that the fire knew its way around without needing her permission.
Carlos wanted to handle her personally.
Fine. Let him try.
The desert swallowed her whole. The sun rose over terrain marked by four corpses and the retreat of two survivors who’d have to explain the impossible to their bosses.
In twelve hours the specialist would arrive. He’d learn what his merchandise had become.
And somewhere deep in the caliche, buried twelve feet down where no equipment could find her, the desert closing over her with the slow inevitability of tide returning to a stone it had carved a thousand times before, where no helicopter sensor could parse the difference between her body and the limestone matrix it slept inside, Naida’s body waited for sunset, dreamless and heavy, the long mineral patience of the earth lending itself to an eighteen-year-old corpse that had finally found a bed nothing alive could pry her out of.
Carlos had taught her plenty during those weeks. Tomorrow night, she’d show him how well his lessons had stuck.
© 2025 E L Frederick | Published by Veridian Studios