Free Bloodfire by John Lutz

the beast; we should ride it while we can before it turns on us.”
    “That seems more applicable to wild horses.” He crushed the empty beer can and tossed it at the wastebasket. Missed. The can clattered on the floor. He’d pick it up later, in the morning.
    He limped over to Edwina and leaned down and kissed her lips. She was quietly crying. Not like her to cry.
    She sighed and stood up. “C’mon, Fred.” She leaned on him as they made their way to the bed.
    He made love to her with a passion that knew its time was limited. Used his hands, his mouth. Lost himself in her soft warm flesh while the ocean rushed and ebbed outside.
    Afterward, he lay back silently while she slept. He stared out at the darkness and knew that it inevitably consumed love and life and there were no exceptions. Delusions kept people alive, and they were perishable.
    But hadn’t he always known that? Carver the cynic?
    The hot black night enveloped him, and he tried without luck to sleep.
    The next morning he woke up alone and miserable. Edwina had left a note on her pillow saying she needed to get back to Del Moray early for a sales meeting. The sun, glaring like a malevolent orange eye, sent slanted morning light crashing through the wide window to wash the cottage in heat and brilliance.
    Carver crumpled up the note and dropped it back on the pillow. Clenching his eyes shut against the aggressive sun, he ran his tongue around the inside of his mouth and grimaced at the terrible taste. He used his cane to help him stand up and hobble to the bathroom, where he immediately brushed his teeth.
    He took a hot shower that he gradually adjusted to ice cold, then toweled himself dry and was feeling somewhat human again as he got dressed. Up to the Paleolithic era, anyway.
    Carver limped to the breakfast counter and the Braun coffee-maker Edwina had given him as a birthday present. He rooted in a drawer and saw that there were no filters, just an empty cardboard box. Not that it mattered; there was no coffee, either. Twisting his torso, he reached for the refrigerator door and swung it open. He was looking at three cans of beer, some inedible cottage cheese, a glass decanter with a dribble of orange juice in it. There was some month-old bacon in the meat keeper, he was pretty sure. He closed the door. The refrigerator began to hum, doing what it could to keep things fresh and compensate for his irregular eating habits. GE trying to save him from food poisoning.
    He drove to a restaurant on the main highway and had a breakfast of pancakes and sausage, drank three cups of coffee. Carver decided against smoking a cigar, though he felt like it. The Surgeon General and countless cancer studies were hard to shake off. He left a generous tip for the flawlessly efficient and friendly Hispanic waitress, then paid the cashier and limped back out onto the parking lot.
    Heat radiated up through the thin leather soles of his moccasins. It was only ten o’clock and the temperature was already in the nineties.
    He brushed away a large mosquito that wanted blood from one of his nostrils, then limped toward the Olds. The mosquito followed; he heard it drone past his right ear, felt it light on the back of his neck. He slapped at it and heard it buzz away. It seemed discouraged, anyway.
    As soon as he got the Olds’s engine running, he put the top up and switched the air conditioner on high.
    Then he got back on the highway and stopped at the B&B Fast Food Market just as the car’s interior was beginning to cool down. He needed coffee and more beer.
    As he was picking up a can of Folger’s coffee, he noticed a woman staring at him from the other end of the aisle, near a display of pickles that were on sale. She was black and had on an oversized cheap gray dress. Flat white shoes like the ones nurses wore. Amber-tinted sunglasses. There was a wide-brimmed white canvas hat pulled low on her head, the kind a lot of boaters in the area wore, that concealed most of her