by Jonah Hewitt
Lucy looked at him and felt sorry for him. He was trying to be tough, but she could tell he was really hurt. Lucy could only imagine what potential foster parents would say if they found out she could talk to the dead. Her mom had known though. If she were alive, maybe they could have adopted Yo-yo. Maybe he could have joined the family and they could have been a great big freaky family with freaky powers. Then she realized that aside from that psycho Amanda and those creepy vampires, well two vampires and an orderly, who weren’t exactly the best role models, she was the only other person that could ever understand what he was going through.
Lucy took a few quick steps and got ahead of him, stopped and faced him. He came to an abrupt stop and let the yo-yo run out to the end of its string and just looked at her nervously for a moment. She stood there not knowing what to say to him, until she threw her arms around him and pulled him into a tight hug. He stood there awkwardly, but eventually he hugged her back. When she let go they started walking again, but she held on to his arm. After walking for a while she decided he needed to hear something.
“You’re not evil, Yo-yo,” Lucy said at last.
“W-What do you m-mean…” he started to stammer.
“Your powers don’t make you evil. They aren’t evil – they just…are.”
“H-how do you know?”
“Because,” she said, confidently cutting him off, “You didn’t leave after the accident. You came to the hospital to see if I was okay, didn’t you?”
He shrugged at this and Lucy could tell he needed some more convincing.
“You could have left after we jumped out of the car and those creeps grabbed me but you didn’t, did you?”
“No. I guess not,” Yo-yo said meekly.
“And you could have left me when that thing chased us over the embankment, but you didn’t.”
Yo-yo nodded.
“You didn’t leave me and I’m not going to leave you now.”
Yo-yo seemed to cheer up a bit at this news.
She smiled back and had a sudden thought. “Hey…you know what? We’re like superheroes, Yo-yo!!” She bumped him with her hip the way her mom did her when they used to go on walks together and her mom was trying to get her attention. “We both have superpowers!! You and your shadow-thing and me and my magic, anti-vampire finger!” She pointed her finger like a pistol and made a ‘kapow’ sound. She wasn’t very good at it, but Yo-yo laughed anyway. She got a little more serious. “That’s why they’re after us, Yo-yo, but we won’t let them get us will we?!” She reached down and slid her hand into his. Her mom always sounded most confident when things were at their worst. She wasn’t certain if this was an act or not, but it did make her feel better. She tried to act that way now for Yo-yo. “That’s why we have to depend on each other now. We’re family now.”
Yo-yo looked at her especially keenly when she said the word ‘family.’ She decided he needed a little more convincing.
“Soooo… it’s a deal?” she said expectantly.
There was a short pause. “Deal,” Yo-yo said quietly.
They walked on a little while longer silently hand in hand before she said something else she had meant to say.
“Thank you,” she said quietly and she gave his hand a little squeeze and leaned her head onto his shoulder for a moment.
“For what?” he said, somewhat confused.
“For saving my life…back there.”
He gave a timid squeeze back and smiled. She smiled to, but as she sneaked a peak at him out of the corner of her eye, he returned to that far-off, impassive, dead-eyed stare he always seemed to get whenever he thought she wasn’t looking.
“Oh I needed this,” Tim said as he dunked another fry into his vanilla shake. Miles looked on with mixed feelings of envy and revulsion. Tim had got quite a spread. A vanilla shake, fries, a short stack of pancakes with a side of scrapple and a bacon double cheeseburger and a large diet Pepsi.
Tim caught Miles looking at him. “Oh, I’m sorry, dude,” Tim said, licking the shake off his fingers, “Do you want some?”
Miles sighed, “Nah, mate, it’s fine. Couldna taste a thing anyway.” Miles looked into the rapidly cooling cup of black coffee he had ordered. He couldn’t taste that either, but he didn’t want to stand out so he had to order something.
“Dude, that stinks,” Tim said taking another bite of his cheeseburger, “So you can’t twaste a theen?” Tim asked around large mouthfuls, wiping the mayo and ketchup from the corners of his mouth.
“Nah, nothin’ but blood…the rest jus’ tastes of dust or ashes.”
“Bummer.” Tim took a big slurp of the shake to wash down that monstrous bite of cheeseburger. “That’s gotta suck.”
Miles nodded. Miles had never even had a milkshake or cheeseburger before he was turned. A century of American food had passed him by. At first there hadn’t been much more than the roasts and potatoes of home, but come the fifties there was suddenly pizza and Chinese food, then cheese curls and Twinkies. Every year there was some new snack he wanted to try, but it never mattered. It was all tasteless to him.
“You must get tired of it, just salty and acrid all the time?”
Miles waggled his head and slid the coffee mug back and forth between his hands. “Mostly…but there’s a bit more to it than that.”
“Like what?” Tim said, shoving another five french fries into his mouth simultaneously.
Miles shrugged, “I dunno, it duzzint always taste the same, everyone is different.”
“Really?!” Tim sounded surprised as he folded a whole pancake into his mouth and rammed it down with a fork.
Miles widened his eyes at this, but he wished he could do the same. It took him a second to remember what they were talking about. “Oh, yeah,” Miles went on, “Blood is blood, but everyone tastes a wee bit different.”
“How?”
“Oh, Sky coulda tell ya better stories. He’s a right connoisseur he is. Picks out his victims like hoighty-toighty prats pick out wines or cheese.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, he likes them college girls, the rich ones that take care of themselves. He sez some taste like flowers or coconut, some saffron and others strawberries, but he keeps a better clientele than I do. Most of me own just taste like what they bloody got pissed on last…bad beer, heroin or thunderbird usually.”
Tim snorted. “You’re making this vampire gig look really glamorous you know that?” as he shoveled the grey, gelatinous scrapple into his maw.
Miles raised his cold mug of coffee to him in mock salute.
Just then, Sky walked up and slid into the booth beside Tim.
“Well, that does it. We’re cooked. Might as well stake us out in the sun and take the easy way out before Hokharty gets to us.”
“No luck?” Tim said talking around the scrapple.
Sky just looked at him with disgust. “What part of ‘we’re cooked’ do you not understand?”
Tim swallowed and went back to his shake and fries.
“I asked the waitresses and the guy tending the cash register. They all knew Lucy and her mom, maybe not by name, but they came in here every month or so, usually for late-night snacks, but nobody knows where they lived.” Sky picked up his own coffee and pretended to sip it. Even shirtless, in a white blazer, with a plastic lollipop he was much more convincing at looking normal than Miles.
After a short pause, Tim asked the question on everyone’s mind, “So now what?” But there was no answer.
Miles thought over his options and from the nervous way Sky was pretending to drink his coffee and the way Tim was shoving down the scrapple like it was his last meal, he could tell they were doing the same. They could run. If it had been Wallach, they wouldn’t have gotten far. He doubted Hokharty and Graber would be any easier to escape. They could go back and admit failure. Wallach would have killed them for that too. Hokharty seemed a lot more placid a master than Wallach, so maybe he wouldn’t flip out and kill them all. But then Hokha
rty seemed bloody calm right before he turned Ulami and Forzgrim into a pile of butchered, undead meat too. Truth was, no one knew what Hokharty would do or even what he was up to.
Miles looked around the small diner. It had about a dozen booths and a few seats at the counter. It wasn’t much more than a grill and a cashier tacked on to a convenience store and a gas station. There were maybe another fifteen other people there, mostly truckers or people coming on to the late shift or stopping on their way for a coffee or a meal. If anyone thought the three young men in the corner were a bit odd, they didn’t show it. It was a place where people came and went unnoticed, and they undoubtedly had many customers they saw once and never again. It seemed the perfect place to contemplate the end of his life, well the end of his undead life. No one would notice him when he was gone either.
The diner door opened and a man with a mustache, broad gut, white shirt, tweed jacket and tie walked in. He stepped around the room and went over to chat with the guy at the register before stepping into the center of the small restaurant.
“Excuse me!” he announced in a commanding voice, “Is the owner of a cream colored Chevy Impala in here?”
Tim made a slight movement as if to turn around and stand up, but before he moved an inch, Sky put his hand on his shoulder and slowly guided him back in his seat.
“What?” Tim said, annoyed.
Sky cautiously raised his coffee mug and used it to conceal his mouth. “He’s a cop,” he said in a low sing-songy voice.
Tim whipped around to take a look before Sky hoarsely whispered, “Don’t look, you moron!”
Tim leaned in closer and whispered, “How do you know?! Can you read his mind?”
“No, doofus! I just know the ‘cop voice’ when I hear it!” Sky whispered back.
“But why send a plain clothes cop?!”
“To flush out the morons! They are counting on the criminals being stupid! Now shut up!”
All three of them cautiously leaned over out of the booth to take a closer peek at the stranger. Sure enough, two uniformed state troopers walked in right behind him. They slowly retreated back into the booth and out of view.
“What do we do now?!” Tim’s hoarse whisper revealed a hint of panic.
“Nothing! Just be cool for once! Okay?!” Sky admonished him.
The two state troopers started to fan out across the room. The man kept talking.
“We would really like to talk to the owner of that vehicle if he’s here.”
The customers responded with silence.
“The vehicle in question was involved in a possible hit and run in Harrisburg this evening not far from the Harrisburg Hospital.”
Tim winced. Sky didn’t react until he heard what the cop had to say next.
“The same vehicle was possibly involved in the theft of several bodies from the morgue of Jefferson University Memorial Hospital in Philadelphia yesterday.”
Sky’s eyes widened on Tim who was cringing under the withering gaze.
Tim tried to defend himself, “Dude! I was having a hard enough time showing Hokharty how to use a zipper! How was I supposed to tell him about surveillance cameras?!!”
“You might have told us!” Sky whispered from behind his coffee mug.
The cop went on, “There were also several bodies stolen from the Harrisburg Hospital morgue, so we suspect it may be the same culprit.”
Sky shot an accusatory look at both of them, but Tim and Miles just gave back looks that said, “Don’t look at us!” or “We had nothing to do with that!”
Unfortunately, the cop wasn’t even close to finished. “Is there anyone here by the name Miles Killam? Anyone?”
Miles didn’t think Sky’s eyes could get any wider, but they did. Miles shrunk further into his seat. Sky didn’t need to speak for Miles to know exactly what he was thinking. “HOW. ON. EARTH! Do they know your name?!!”
Miles realized Sky was waiting for an explanation.
“Um, mates, I might have left me jacket in the hospital.”
“And it had your NAME written in it?!” Even though he didn’t have a pulse, Sky still looked like a vein was about to burst in his forehead.
“Aye…it did.” Miles winced as if awaiting a blow from Sky.
Instead, Sky became strangely calm as if the horror of that revelation had made him numb to its stupidity. “What? Did your mommy not want you to get it lost on your first day of vampire pre-school?” he said sarcastically.
“Sky…” Miles started to explain, but he didn’t get very far.
“No, Miles!” Sky’s anger returned. “We are vampires!! We are shadows! We are legends! We do not exist! We do not carry ID and we sure as heck don’t write our names in our underwear!!”
“Well, technically it was his jacket,” Tim added.
“Shut up, Tim!!” Sky shot back.
The cop dropped one more revelation. “Well folks, this is more than just a case of a couple of sickos stealing bodies. That would be bad enough, but we have an amber alert situation here.”
Sky went rigid, but Tim put his head in his hands. The cop went on.
“A young girl was abducted from the Harrisburg Hospital a little over three hours ago. A doctor was assaulted as well. We believe the victim is in the custody of the same characters who stole those bodies and drove off in that Impala, so if you have any information, we would very much appreciate it.”
No one in the diner volunteered anything.
The cop took a breath. “Well, we’d really like to nail these two scumbags, so if you don’t mind, we’d like to interview each and every one of you in turn, ask you a few questions. So just sit tight, don’t worry, and we’ll hopefully have you on your way in a few minutes.” He then turned to the man at the counter and asked, “Do you got a back door here?”
“Yeah…it’s in the back.”
A few exchanged nods later and one of the state troopers was already following the cashier back into the kitchen to secure the back door, while the other stood directly in front of the main door, barring the last exit. The cop in the tweed jacket then went to the nearest booth and started asking questions.
Tim started freaking out. “This is bad…this is really, really bad!”
“No, Tim, it’s worse than that,” Sky interjected, “They have the registration on your car. It won’t take them that long to match that up to your file at the hospital. After that it’s just a matter of time before they come up with a photo of you and you’re nailed.” Tim blanched, but Sky wasn’t finished. “But, oh! It gets worse!”
“Worse?” Tim seemed horrified.
“Don’t you guys remember?!!” Sky was really annoyed now. “I just spent the last twenty minutes asking people about a thirteen-year-old girl and her mother! How long before you think someone in here passes on that little piece of information and fingers us?!”
“Omigosh!” Tim went to bite a french fry and bit his finger instead. He was not handling this well.
“We have minutes, MINUTES! At most before we get nailed. We have to get out of here. NOW.” Sky began nervously eyeing the room but all the obvious avenues were blocked. Miles could tell his mind was working furiously but there weren’t many options left.
“Well, you’re vampires right?!” Tim asked desperately, “Can’t you just, y’know, move at superhuman speed and blow right by that guy?!” Tim tossed his head in the direction of the large state trooper barring the front door.
Sky sighed,“Yeah, I can blow by Smokie the Bear over there, no problem, and chances are, even a lousy vampire like Miles could too.”
“Oy!” Miles protested. After the last two fights this evening he didn’t think he deserved that. Maybe Sky was just jealous he couldn’t turn into a smoke-dog-monster-thing.
Sky ignored him. “But what about you?! What are we supposed to do with you? Stand in front and back of you like the bread in a Tim sandwich?! I may be a vampire, but I ain’t bulletproof!”
“Oh,” Tim said with dawning reali
zation.
“And what if we do bust you out of here?! They still have your name, Tim!” he said ‘Tim’ especially snidely. “They’ve probably got warrants with reckless driving, stealing corpses, and kidnapping a minor all written up with YOUR name on them.” He ticked the charges off on his fingers as Tim shuddered with each new horror. “Do you really want to add evading arrest and assaulting an officer to that list?! Or are you still under the delusion that you could ever go back to your old normal life.”
“But…Hokharty said…”
“He’s a vampire, Tim! We lie to people and then we bleed them, first for favors and then for actual blood. It’s what we do.”
Tim had just put a french fry into his mouth, but it fell out onto his plate when his jaw went slack and his lower lip started to tremble.
“Oh good grief, don’t tell me he’s gonna start crying.” Sky rolled his eyes and shot a glance at Miles. “Do something, will you?”
Miles reached across the table and punched Tim in the arm hard. That seemed to bring him back around.
“Ow….um thanks,” Tim said rubbing his arm. Then he quickly shoved another pancake into his mouth and topped it off with a bite of cheeseburger and some more shake. If this was his last meal as a free man, he was going to enjoy it. The cop was already making his way to the next table. Sky stiffened a little.
“Don’t lose it yet, Tim,” Sky said.
Tim nodded weakly.
Miles could tell Schuyler was nervous. Sky was running his fingers through his hair but not in his usual vain way. “What we need is a distraction…and fast.” His eyes were darting around the room looking for an exit, but Miles could tell nothing was coming to him. That’s when they heard it.
“So you guys are vampires?”
All three of them stiffened and looked at each other. The voice had come out of nowhere. The cop wasn’t anywhere near them yet. Besides it wasn’t a man’s voice. It was younger, and stranger, with a weird foreign accent Miles had never quite heard before.
