Paid in Full - Joey Quintero

Josefina stands outside the loading bay door and watches moths flitter around a flickering lamp. Drawn to danger, even if it burns them. Even if it kills them.
She hopes it’s not an omen.
This is the address that was scrawled on a napkin and slid along the bar to her with a shot of cheap tequila. The one man in this town who will take her and her siblings across the border for the paltry amount of cash still tucked away in the bottom of her purse.
And for a little something on the side.
All she could find out about that was that their transport is a secretive sort who doesn’t like people talking about his business.
She’d borrowed garish pink lipstick and the scuffed red heels from another woman in the tent city they’re calling home right now. It can’t hurt to make herself seem a little more appealing. They have to get to Tía Patricia in Los Angeles, so they can get a doctor for Olivia, a good one whose hands aren’t dirty and who isn’t half doubled-over from a smoker’s cough. 
The door creaks open, and a figure steps into its frame.
“Step into the light.” The lisp in his words makes his English even harder to understand. She steps under the lamp, ignoring the moths that now try to tangle themselves in her hair.
“I need to cross the border. Three people.” She doesn’t tell him two of them are less than 18. The less a sleazy man like this knows about her family, the better. “They gave me your name at the Soledad.” 
“Show me your arms.”
She frowns, but holds them out. What he wants from this, she doesn’t know. Maybe he doesn’t like to take his chances with drug users. Not with everything someone can get from a needle.
“They tell you my price?”
“They said you’re the only man in town who’ll do it for a hundred.”
“Not just the money.”
“Yes.”
A hand, nails long and grease-stained, shoots out of the doorway and drops a piece of paper in her palm. “Be here tomorrow at nightfall. Bring this with you.”
When she shows up, Mauri and Olivia’s hands clutched in hers, the sunset is painting the semi-truck parked outside the warehouse in blood-red. She knocks on the door, but no one answers, and instead, she paces the length of the cargo trailer for several minutes, wondering if this is all some kind of trap. If she’s led her siblings here to die, or worse. 
Just as the sun dips below the mountains, the door opens again. The same hand she saw the night before, twisted and clawlike, is extended, and she hands back the folded paper. 
The stranger, a grease-stained hat pulled low over sharp features, opens the back of the truck and settles them in behind a false front of the trailer. The space is small and stuffy, and even though Josefina can see the occasional street light through the few breathing holes, and smell the engine exhausts from passing cars, she feels like she’s been buried alive.
Olivia is shaking. She’s taken her meds already, but this can’t be good for her. Josefina pulls her close, resting her sister’s head in her lap and stroking her tangled, greasy hair. She hums softly, a song Mami used to sing. 
She stops only when the truck does, at the border. There’s lots of yelling in English and lights flashing around them, fists banging on the sides of the truck. She covers Olivia’s ears so she doesn’t panic and scream from the sound, and she sees Mauri covering his own. 
Then there’s another thud, and the truck rolls forward. Josefina releases a breath she didn’t realize she was holding. 
The truck travels on through the night, finally stopping somewhere pitch black. The doors are opened and then the false front too, and Josefina looks up, blinking in the dim moonlight. It feels too bright. 
The warehouse is almost a carbon copy of the one she visited in Mexico. Blacked out, boarded up windows, a lamp over the door surrounded by fluttering wings. 
The three of them stand on shaky legs, Olivia blinking awake as Josefina moves her off her lap, and stumble out of the truck.
“This is as far as I take you,” the driver says. His voice sounds strange, the lisp even more pronounced. “And now, you pay.”
“I pay for all three of us,” She says, firmly, not that it will do any good. He’s wiry, and taller than her, and she’s cramped and stiff and tired and weak from hunger and fear. 
“Of course.” 
“They don’t need to see this.”
He nods. “They can sit in the cab. Your boy might like to pretend he’s driving. The girl will probably sleep.”
Mauri is, as predicted, ecstatic about sitting in the driver’s seat, reaching for the horn pull and frowning when the driver unhooks it before he can make it make sound, but eventually content to pull on it and make fake honks himself. Olivia looks at Josefina sadly as she’s settled into the seat.
“Te vas?”
“No te estoy dejando. Cinco minutos, mi luz del sol.” 
Olivia leans back against the seat, breathing evening out, head falling sideways to rest on her shoulder.
“Okay. Time to go.” The man leads her toward the warehouse door.
Josefina takes a shaky breath. 
This is for her family. This is how they survive. What happens to her doesn’t matter. It can’t matter. 
She’s not quite sure what happens next. Only that between one breath and the next, hands have closed around her wrist, and then teeth, and then there’s a sharp pain and the hot wet sensation of a mouth locked around her arm. 
She barely has time to realize she’s misread the entire situation before her world narrows to the pinprick of light, and then it’s as if a whole swarm of moths collects around it and plunges it into blackness.
When she wakes up, it’s to sunlight beating on her face, feeling like it’s scorching her eyelids. She rolls over and groans. Everything hurts.
Mauri. Olivia. 
She tries to call out for them, but the sound comes out of her dry mouth as a croak. I left them with that monster. That madman.
She’s failed. She wanted to protect them. And now, she’s lost them.
Burning tears slide down her face, searing her sun-inflamed skin. 
“Jose!” someone shouts.
She knows that voice.
Small hands tug and pull at her blouse and hair.
“Mauri?! Olivia?!” She reaches for them both, but her arms don’t seem to be working. “Dónde estabas?”
Mauri holds up the canteen he was given at one of the camps. “Necesitabas agua. Encontramos un arroyo.”
Water. She does need it. She doesn’t care where it came from. She feels parched. Like someone drained the water from her body like pulling the plug from a sink.
The man. The teeth. Her blood.
She looks down at her arm. It’s wrapped in a strip of cloth with dried brown stains.
Who was he? What was that? What is this?
She can hear a highway in the background, but faintly. Not as close as they were last night. 
She needs several sips from the canteen before she can ask Mauri if he knows how they got here. He tells her the man from the truck said she was tired, and that they needed to take her somewhere else. Mauri had followed him, holding Olivia’s hand, and they’d all walked to this place, some kind of field. The man had said something about the sun coming, and that they should walk west from here, follow the highway, and there would be a town with a building that had a red chicken on a window. He’d said there would be people there who could tell them where to go.
It’s all too strange. Josefina can’t understand what happened at all. She’d imagine she dreamed it, if not for the pain in her arm and the paper blowing across the field with its English words in black bold headlines. 
They’re in America.
But somehow, she feels like she’s crossed a border into another world entirely.
Because now that she can think, there’s only one thing that makes sense of what they encountered last night.
The man who brought them across the border was no man at all.
Un vampiro.