We reached Highway 36. Carmen whipped the Audi around the corner. The tires squealed across the asphalt. I grabbed my shoulder harness. We cut in front of a semi. The driver blasted his air horn. Smiling, Carmen straightened the steering wheel and floored the gas pedal. The turbocharger kicked in and the Audi zoomed west toward Denver.

“You keep driving like that,” I said, looking back at the driver as he flipped us the bird, “and we won’t need any vampire hunters to finish us off.”

“Sorry,” Carmen replied dryly. “I like to drive the way I like to have sex. You know, turbo-banging.” She patted my knee. “You okay, grandpa?”

I clasped her wrist. “Don’t test me.”

Carmen grinned and tugged free. She raced the Audi around a minivan. “So the vampire attacks and the nymphomania are related?”

“Have to be. There’s too much coincidence. The question is, what happened in Roswell in 1947?”

“What’s the date?”

“Of the nymphomania?” I perused Wendy’s list. “July seventh, ninth, and sixteen.”

Carmen reacted with a startled “No shit?” She pulled up the hem of her jacket and fumbled with the belt of her leather jeans. “I can tell you exactly what happened on July third of that year. The debris of a flying-saucer was found on the MacBrazel Ranch, near Roswell.”

“How would you know that?” I asked, wondering why she struggled to undress.

As Carmen tilted her muscled abdomen toward me, she brushed her left hip against the bottom rim of the steering wheel. She displayed a Star Trek insignia tattooed below her navel. “As a Trekker, I’m up on all UFO lore.”

I examined the tattoo. “Interesting way of remembering something. I would’ve just tied a string around my finger.”

Carmen buckled her pants again. “Do any of those dates mean something to your investigation?”

I thought for a moment. “Rocky Flats started operations in 1952, the same year there was an outbreak of nymphomania in Ohio. I don’t see a connection. Then in 1969, there was a plutonium fire at Rocky Flats, the so-called Mother’s Day Fire.”

Carmen took Wendy’s list and flattened it across the spokes of the steering wheel. “That outbreak of nymphomania in Denver occurred shortly afterwards-in May, June, and July. When did the vampire-hunter attacks happen?”

I glanced into the folder. “August and September.”

Carmen folded Wendy’s list and handed it back to me. During a long moment of silence, she gradually tightened her fingers around the rim. Her knuckles turned white. She pressed harder on the gas pedal. “What is it about the nymphomania that draws the vampire hunters?”

I shrugged, embarrassed by my ignorance and inability to connect the facts. “I don’t know.”

Carmen passed a Corvette. “Let me check the dates. Maybe I can find something useful.”

“Call when you do. In the meantime, I can do more than wait around Denver with my thumb up my butt.” I tucked the folders back into the portfolio. “Give me twenty-four hours.”

“Twenty-four hours for what?”

“I need twenty-four hours to complete my investigation. At the end of that time I’ll either be available for your direct action or I’ll be dead.”

Carmen eased off the gas. The speedometer needle arced down past a hundred miles an hour. “Dead? Killed by whom? Vampire hunters?”

I shook my head solemnly. “No, worse. The guards at Rocky Flats.”

I TURNED OFF HIGHWAY 93 for the entrance to Rocky Flats. At this time in the afternoon there was a line of cars heading in the opposite direction, going home. I was the only one coming in.

Low, dense clouds from an oncoming storm threatened the Front Range. The forecast called for an evening blizzard. Already, intermittent flakes of snow floated from the sky.

I continued past the administrative trailer complex where I worked and parked in the lot adjacent to the plant manager’s office.

The Protected Area stood one hundred meters to the east. A Humvee with a machine gun mounted on the roof was parked outside the gate. Within the fence perimeter remained the white trailer, the same one Gilbert Odin suspected contained the cargo that had caused the nymphomania. Guards in sage-green parkas and armed with submachine guns walked the fence. A black semi-tractor truck backed up to the white trailer. Workers in heavy overalls and yellow safety helmets motioned to one another as they guided the truck into position. More Humvees and a row of white Suburbans were parked on the road leading from the Protected Area. It seemed that the trailer was going to move out tonight by convoy, regardless of the anticipated blizzard.

My plan was simple. I was going to get answers directly from Herbert Hoover Merriweather, the plant manager. If Merriweather wouldn’t share what he knew with Gilbert Odin, Merriweather would have no choice but to cooperate with me once I put him under vampire hypnosis. Then I’d wait for the gloom of night to stalk and subdue the guards, hypnotizing them one by one until I could penetrate the Protected Area, break into the trailer, and expose the secret behind the conspiracy. Hopefully I wouldn’t contaminate myself and the Denver metroplex in the process.

I no longer had the luxury of subtlety. Gilbert would have to deal with the consequences of my trampling over DOE’s security rules. I’d tell him what I discovered, he would pay my fee, and I’d disappear into the vampire underground to lend my fangs in the fight against the vânätori de vampir.

Cracking my knuckles, I prepared myself for the unexpected. Nothing would surprise me tonight. To the attacker goes the initiative.

Flipping up the collar of my barn coat, I turned off the car motor and adjusted my knit cap. I clipped my ID badge to my coat, got out of my Dodge, and tread carefully across the icy sidewalk to the front door.

Past the second set of glass doors, a guard stood in the lobby. He wore full combat regalia, black webbed harness over a gray camouflaged uniform, a holstered pistol, extra ammo, and a gas mask strapped to his thigh. To his right, between the manager’s office and myself, stood another guard. Besides a pistol, he was armed with an HK submachine gun slung over his shoulder.

Both guards stood taller and more alert when I came in and stamped snow from my boots. They glared at me, no doubt suspicious of why I wore sunglasses on a dark, snowy afternoon.

The first guard read my badge. “What’s your business here?”

“Merriweather paged me.”

The second guard stroked the forestock of his submachine gun. “You’ll have to see him later. He isn’t available.”

The second guard took a position behind his comrade. Neither of them stood more than ten feet away from me, and their eyes stared into mine. Perfect.

“Then please give this message to him.” Carefully, so as to not provoke the guards, I removed my sunglasses.

The closest guard’s aura flared with alarm. His eyes opened wide and bugged out. “Holy-” He froze in mid-cry.

The second guard stepped back. His aura flashed bright. The two of them stood motionless like a pair of mannequins.

I didn’t know how long I’d be with Merriweather, so I would have to fang the guards to keep them quiet. I bit them and dragged their limp bodies to an empty office and shut the door.

I put my sunglasses on again and approached the thick door to Merriweather’s office. My vampire hearing caught him murmuring on the phone. He hung up.

Remembering that his desk was to the left, I opened the door, entered, and turned, locking the door before I released the knob.

Merriweather sat behind that wooden barricade he called a desk. His dark complexion matched the leather of his high-backed executive’s chair. His squat, square-shaped head looked as if it had been screwed into the collar of his off-white turtleneck sweater.