Page 26 of Venom's Sting

I explain the hard truth of our situation to her. “We have a better chance of picking up heat signatures at night. When it’s cooler, there’s more contrast between a human body and their surroundings. What I can’t do with the equipment I have is distinguish between men and woman.”

“That means if we pick up a heat signature somewhere suspicious, we’d have to go investigate in person, right?”

“Absolutely, fucking not. It means that me and my club brothers would go and investigate it. I won’t risk you turning up missing like your mother, or worse. Leave the daring rescues up to the men with fighting experience,” I say grudgingly.

“Okay, big guy. Don’t get bent out of shape. I’m not wild about being shot at anyway. Your mom suggested you teach me self-defense. Will that eventually be on your radar? If you’re not going to teach me, you have to be the one to tell her, ‘cause I’m not lying to your mom. She’s too nice.”

“We’re definitely doing to work on self-defense. Until I’m convinced you have some hope of protecting yourself, I’ll stayright by your side. If I have to go on a mission, you’ll need to stay at the clubhouse where the prospects can protect you.”

“Yeah, that all works for me,” she tells me. I’m not sure I believe her because her tone is light and dismissive.

She follows up with, “So can I ask my first question?”

I decide to try to outsmart her. “Well, we both gave each other kisses, so maybe we could take turns answering questions to each other. It would be a great way to get to know each other better.”

Her eyes narrow on me but when I don’t respond she sighs. “Sure. Why not?”

Gleeful that I get to ask questions too, I quickly say, “Since this was your brilliant idea, you can ask the first question.”

She asks without hesitation, “Why worms? Of all the things that could have caught your notice at an early age, why worms?”

I hesitate to tell her the truth, so I go with a sanitized version of the truth. “I was in an accident once and they had to put me in an MRI machine. I was scared, but my mom told me to pretend I was a worm, and it was my special wormhole and that nothing could hurt me while I was safe inside it. It worked, and after that I started to get interested in worms. For my first science project at school I made a huge worm farm. Though all the kids teased me about it.” I pause, I don’t want to bring the mood down and tell her the real story, about how me and my dad were in his truck, and it got run off the road by a drunk driver, that I was seriously hurt, and my dad was killed.

Once I returned back to school after four months in hospital, the other children bullied me about having no dad anymore—because little kids can be cruel—and that to make up for having no friends I ended up fascinated with my worm community.

“So when did you move from worms to snakes?” she asks without missing a beat.

Since I was comfortable talking about that, I answer, although it was supposed to be my turn to ask. “Worms are invertebrates. At first, I thought snakes were bigger worms. Then I learned they’re in the reptile family and vertebrates because they have a spinal column. Once I learned they shed their skin, I was hooked. Eventually after a lot of bugging, my mom relented and let me get a pet snake, as long as I didn’t keep their food in the restaurant refrigerator.”

Amy’s eyes widen as she suddenly realizes what snakes eat. She swiftly moves on, “What happened to your boa constrictor? Rage said you had one when you were a teen.”

Glancing away, I respond, “He died of septicemia. I didn’t know he was sick until it was too late to save him.”

“That must have been traumatizing.” The kind and compassionate tone of her voice makes me feel vulnerable. “I was seventeen. It was awful because at that point I’d had him for coming up on five years.” I don’t tell her that I didn’t have a lot of friends back then, and my snake was the one I told all my secrets and fears to, the one I shared all my small victories with.

“That’s when you transferred all your time and energy to electronics. It’s hard to bond with a toaster or a clock, right? It was safer to pour all your time and energy into things instead of living creatures.”

Damn, this woman is all too perceptive. I’m saved from having to answer her question by my drone picking up motion below. “I’ve calibrated my drone to focus in on vehicle-sized movement.”

She leans over to look at my screen. “Where are you? I’ll bring my drone there as well.”

“Yes. Two sets of eyes are better than one,” I tell her. “I’m on the northern part of your grandfather’s farm about two miles from here.”

“Got it. Give me a minute to get there.” Within a few minutes, she alerts me that she’s near. “I see your drone.”

“Stay high. If they see us, they will shoot our drones out of the sky.”

“Really?”

I frown as I keep tracking the van down below. “Yeah, ask me how I know.”

“I see. That’s how you lost your old drone, right?”

I nod. I haven’t told her that I saw her grandfather’s dogs chasing her that day in the cornfield, I was worried it would make me sound like a creeper—and now that so much time has gone by, I’m worried how she’ll react. So instead I change the topic, “They’re branching off on a dirt road on the left. I’m going to note the GPS location so we can find it again later. Don’t let them out of your sight.”

“I’m on it,” she says with determination.

I get a lock on the GPS coordinates and then zoom out to follow her drone. We follow the van for what seems like hours,since her grandfather owns several thousand acres, that’s not surprising. We chat as we keep track of the van, excited that we might be getting somewhere with finding her mother. If not that, then maybe I can figure out where all these vans are going.

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