"None yur’s gonna beat me,” Bunt sneered at the small, determined group of Home Runners. “Some yur gunna die trying. That sucks for your mamas.”

Bunt was a big bald man who walked like he was stuffed with thick pudding, not the kind of man who could outrun anything. But he’d win, he always did.

“You know the game. Stay inside, vampires can’t get you. Take stupid chances, you die that much earlier. But!! You get to the goal before me, if yur wettin’ there fur me, you win.”

His eyes glared at each of theirs for a moment. They lingered on one dark-haired Chinese girl and he smirked. But she stared back with stony eyes and he moved on.

Then he said, very quietly, “Goal’s comin’ right … now.” The seven Home Runners looked at their phone screens and gasped. “Shit, no way, I’m out,” said one, and sat on the floor. Bunt had tricked them.

The Home Run goal was supposed to be two blocks away. If you could reach it without leaving a home of some kind, you were safe as a rock. The minute you passed beyond the boundary of door or window, the protection ended and the vampires could grab you.

Sally Yan’s teeth clamped tight. Bunt had the key she needed and she had to win. She had prepared for days and she’d still need a lot of luck. But he had tricked them all: the goal was four blocks away, not two.

Bunt walked stiffly to a corner, his body moving like congealed grease. He smiled his nasty, pleased smile at nobody in particular but Sally knew he had a special spike of malice for her. She hadn’t wanted anything to do with these obscene Home Runs. She’d been training to be a vampire hunter when the messenger arrived with the offer she had to take.

She looked with loathing around the place where Bunt had gathered them: the ratty red carpet falling apart with age, the dusty golden dragon on the walls of this former Chinese restaurant. She hated the other Runners, thrill seekers and trend followers who would all be dead within a couple of hours. She hated the two who were quietly climbing the stairs to the roof. What good was that going to do them? The roof of a building was not inside a house. And she hated Bunt with his cold smile and his stiff walk.

An association flittered into her mind: she expected him to hop rather than walking. Hop on two feet, like a stiff rabbit. What was that about? But as she tried to tease the thought out, it flittered away again.

Her lips tightened and she walked to the grimy windows where some twenty or thirty vampires stood in surreal poses, looking with haggard longing at the living blood inside. They blocked her view of the sewer lid for which she’d brought a crowbar. Sewers weren’t houses either but Sally knew something about this one. At least, she prayed she did as she strapped on her headlamp: her hope was based on a conversation three days ago with a wine-sodden old bum, but it made sense.

She would need a diversion. The three vials of blood had cost her some pain: it was her own, obtained with the help of an exercise buddy who was a registered nurse.

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Ignoring the other players, Sally flung wide the front door and held up the first vial. A crowd of vampires pressed close but they fawned on her. Several opened their mouths like baby birds. She was taken aback but decided to follow her plan. She uncapped the vial and hurled it over their heads.

Now they did snarl, cursing her in cold voices as they swiveled and hurled themselves after the sparkling liquid arc. Quickly she dived toward the manhole. Growls and splatting fists erupted from where the vial landed.

No house protected her as she jabbed the crowbar, flipped the lid up and scrambled into the opening, the lid clanking to the pavement. A rush of cold hands snapped shut inches away as she half fell and half climbed down iron rungs but the locust horde plugged the opening and they fought each other. She recovered as she thumped the bottom and ran along a reeking corridor filled with dusty smears where vampires slept during the daylight.

Her hands throbbed. She ran toward a wavering light and skidded around a tight corner to where an old man slept beside a small fire. The horde was an icy breath at her back and three vampires crouched in silhouette, watching the old man.

She shoved the watchers aside and passed the invisible boundary into the old man’s territory.

The vampires following her slammed back.

She’d been right! “Nah, sweet cheeks,” the old man had told her three days ago, “Ain’t homeless. Cain’t be. Down that hole, that’s home for Old Norbert.” The vampires couldn’t enter even this patch of grimy tunnel if someone called it a home.

The old man looked vulnerable in his sleep, smelled sharply of cheap booze and piss, and had a face of red-grey stubble. She stopped to tuck into his ragged dress shirt pocket the ten dollars she’d promised him for welcoming her in. She felt a sudden rush of sad love: he was more of an outsider than she would ever be.

She stood up too quickly and was dizzy.

Vampires crowded ahead and behind but as she’d hoped, Norbert’s home protected the side tunnel to the Kressler building. Her running shoes drummed quietly on the aging concrete. Steeled for anything, she darted around a corner.

Ten feet away was a metal utility door spotted with rust and nothing was between it and her. She ran up and gave a sharp push. It screeched open, just enough for her to wriggle through into a musty basement. She’d scouted that basement yesterday and snapped off a crumbling padlock; she should have left the door propped open too.

Leaning against the door and panting, she reveled in the knowledge that she was damn good. She hadn’t been training for these stupid Home Runs but she was naturally good at them. That was why Bunt had sent her younger sister –

“Hellooo?” an elderly woman’s voice called.

Sally froze. The voice was from inside, it couldn’t be a vampire trick but it was better not to be seen because of what she had to do next. She crouched.

A wavering flashlight beam played around the basement. “Hello, who’s down there please? You’re not supposed to be down there. You shouldn’t be in this home.”

Something slithered in Sally’s gut. Would those words null out the protection the building gave her? There were no reports of vampires entering a public building if one person called it home. (Every office building now had some minimum-wage slob whose job was to live there 24/7.) But could a vampire pluck out someone for being “cast out” by a resident?

For a moment she fantasized inviting the vampires to eat this old woman. She would never have done it: the old woman was just scared. But what a knife edge everyone lived on, every night! You didn’t dare let your mind get close to the words, “Welcome, come in” – had she thought them too clearly just then?! But no, you had to say them out loud.

The flashlight flicked off and the door upstairs closed. And locked, kuh-click. Oh, shit! Sally’s sympathy vanished and her hands twitched with the fantasy of strangling that old biddy. All her careful planning, down the toilet. She was locked in the basement and her sister was going to die.