Teeth_ Vampire Tales - Ellen Datlow [39]
Amos felt the heat as he stepped off the porch and into the sun. But as he looked up the mountainside, a great white, wet cloud was already beginning to descend. Theodore was right, as usual. Within an hour the village would be blanketed in fog.
But an hour left Amos plenty of time to complete his task. He set off down the road, tipping his hat to Young Franz, who was fixing the shingles on his father’s roof.
“Off to the mailbox?” called out Young Franz, pausing in his hammer strokes, speaking with the ease of long practice past the three nails he held in the corner of his mouth.
“Yes, brother,” answered Amos. Of course he was—it was one of his duties, and he did it every day at almost the same time.
“Get back before the fog closes in,” warned Young Franz. “Theodore says it’s—”
“Vampire weather,” interrupted Amos. He regretted doing so immediately, even before Young Franz paused and deliberately took the nails out of his mouth and set down his hammer.
“I’m sorry, brother,” blurted out Amos. “Please forgive my incivility.”
Young Franz, who was not only twice as old as Amos but close to twice as heavy, and all of it muscle, looked down at the young man and nodded slowly.
“You be careful, Amos. You sass me again and I’ll birch your backside from here to the hall, with everyone looking on.”
“Yes, brother, I apologize,” said Amos. He kept his head down and eyes downcast. What had he been thinking, to interrupt the toughest and most short-tempered brother in the village?
“Get on with you then,” instructed Young Franz. He kept his eye on Amos but picked up the nails and put them back in his mouth. Every second nail had a silver washer, to stop a vampire breaking in through the roof, just as every chimney was meshed with silver-washed steel.
Amos nodded with relief and started back down the road, faster now. The fog was closer, one arm of it already extending down the ridge, stretching out to curl back around toward the village like it usually did, to eventually join up with the slower body of mist that was coming straight down the slope.
He liked going to the mailbox. It was the closest thing the community had to an interface with the wider world, even if it was only an old diesel drum on a post set back twenty feet from a minor mountain road. Sometimes Amos saw a car go past, impossibly swift compared to the horse buggy he rode in once a month, when they visited with the cousins over in New Hareseth. Once a bus had stopped, and a whole bunch of people had gotten out and tried to take his photograph, and he had almost dropped the mail as he tried to run back and keep his face covered at the same time.
The flag was up on the box, Amos saw as he got closer. That was good, since otherwise he would have to wait for the mail truck to get back out on the main road. Sometimes the postal workers were women, and he wasn’t allowed to see or talk to strange women.
He hurried to the box and carefully unlocked the padlock with the key that he proudly wore on his watch chain, as a visible symbol that while not quite yet a man, he was no longer considered just a boy.
There were only three items inside: a crop catalog from an old firm that guaranteed no devil work with their seeds; and two thick, buff-colored envelopes that Amos knew would be from one of the other communities, somewhere around the world. They all used and reused the same envelopes. The two here might have been a dozen places and come home again.
Amos put the mail in his voluminous outer pocket, shut the lid, and clicked the padlock shut. But with the click, he