Lizzie smiled at the barrage of questions. "I don't want to, baby girl, but there's no one else to cover Roberto's shift. I can't let the boss down; besides we can always use the extra money."
Birdy searched for the right words to convey the fear she felt lurking just below the surface of her senses. "But you'll be alone," she said finally.
Lizzie turned and smiled sweetly at Birdy, as if sensing her concern. She reached out a hand and cupped her child's cheek.
Birdy, closed her eyes and pressed against the soft skin of her mother's palm.
"I'll be behind the security screen all night," Lizzie said. "There's nothing for you to worry about." The gas station store had an area behind the counter screened off by glass that was supposed to be shatterproof and even bulletproof, but Birdy wasn't convinced of either of these claims. The night sales clerks were supposed to lock themselves away behind it.
"You promise?" Birdy said.
"I promise," Lizzie replied. She looked at her watch and frowned. "Now let me finish making myself look respectable. It's going to take forever to get anywhere in this weather." She took another couple of sips from the tea and Birdy felt a little tingle of happiness at the obvious pleasure her mom took from this simple act of love on her behalf.
Lizzie smiled back then checked her watch. "I don’t have time to change," she said. "I’m going to be late if I don’t leave now." She walked back to where her raincoat still dripped water into a small puddle on the linoleum, took it from its peg, shook it, and slipped into it. "You going to be okay here on your own for a while?" she asked.
"'Course," said Birdy. Being on her own was what she did best, apparently.
"You're a good girl, Annabelle." Lizzie downed the last of the tea and handed the empty mug to Birdy. She took her daughter's face in her hands again, and smiled, "I'll see you for breakfast, Chiquita." She bent down and took the small retractable umbrella from where it leaned in the corner crease of the wall. With a final kiss blown to her child she was gone through the door.
Birdy was once again alone.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Elizabeth Finch watched the rain gather in ever larger pools on the concrete forecourt of the Gas 'N Go. For the first hour or so, as the remnants of the evening sun struggled weakly through the clouds choking the sky, she had allowed herself to imagine she was sitting on the shore of a lake, not behind a Plexiglas security screen in some hovel of a gas station on a forgotten plot of Los Angeles.
Lake Tahoe. Yeah, that's where she was. Sitting in the trees watching the water ebb and flow against the shoreline. It was somewhere she had never been, but had always wanted to take Annabelle. One day, she told herself, before the kid grows up and gets on with her own life, we'll sit together on that shoreline and talk about how we made it out of here. Together.
Lizzie smiled at the thought. Her daughter was so damn smart, and if Annabelle continued to apply herself there was no telling what she could achieve, where she might end up. It was why Lizzie worked so hard; to put away enough money so her child, her only flesh and blood, would get the kind of education she had never had the chance at, an education that would help her escape the crippling poverty that came with growing up in one of the poorest areas in Los Angeles county. Who knew, maybe she might make—
Lizzie's reverie was broken by a sharp tapping on the Plexiglas screen.
"Hey! You awake in there?" A man, a biker judging by the look of his sodden black leather jacket, long greasy-looking hair that still held droplets of rain, and an unruly salt-and-pepper beard lined with a nicotine-yellow demarcation zone stood in front of her. "Gimme a soft-pack of Marlboros," he growled, with what sounded like an accent from somewhere east of Colorado. He nodded toward the shelves of cigarettes at Lizzie's back.
Lizzie swiveled in her chair and reached behind her for the cigarettes, her eyes automatically falling to check that the security bolt of the booth she sat in had not somehow mysteriously unlocked itself while she was not looking. It hadn't. She deposited the pack of cigarettes into the two-way drawer. "That'll be six twenty-five."
The man held her gaze for two or three seconds, a slimy smile on his face as he eyed her up and down. He reached slowly into the inside pocket of his jacket as if he was reaching for a weapon... and pulled out a bunch of singles, with a smirk.
He was going out of his way to try to mess with her, scare her even, Lizzie realized. She did her best to look like she hadn't noticed and didn't care.
The biker placed the damp bills on his side of the security slot. "You alone here, Mama?" he asked nonchalantly, following Lizzie's hands with his eyes as she pulled the tray with his money to her side of the security booth.
Lizzie said nothing. She deposited the money into the cash register, counted the biker's change out next to the pack of cigarettes, then slid both to the man.
"Thank you. Have a nice night," Lizzie said.
The biker pocketed both the cigarettes and the money into his leather jacket but did not move. He leaned in, folded his arms, and rested them on the ledge running along the front of the booth. He moved his face closer to the Plexiglas until his forehead touched it. Lizzie could see the grease stain it left. "You didn't answer my question, mamacita!"
He spat the last word with such venom that it made Lizzie flinch.
"I'll give you ten seconds to get your sorry ass out of here, Mister," Lizzie replied, trying to keep the buzz of nervousness from her voice. She was used to these kinds of losers; you could usually count on at least one every week who thought she was as loose or as stupid as the women they usually hung around with. These guys were pretty harmless, mostly, and usually went back to whatever scummy thing it was they did after a few minutes of her ignoring them or threatening them with the cops. But this guy wasn't budging. He fixed her with an intimidating stare, his bloodshot eyes flicking from her face to the swell of her breasts beneath her work blouse and back again.
"How 'bout I just stay here till you get off work? You can show me what you got hiding under that pretty little uniform. Sound good to you?" He leered at her.
Lizzie reached for the phone, but as she did so she heard the ding-dong chime of the door opening. She leaned her head around the biker to get a better view and found herself smiling. Two cops, both regulars, had just walked in. She exhaled a silent sigh of relief.
The biker glanced nonchalantly over his shoulder, spotted the cops who were now eying him suspiciously, and when he turned back to Lizzie he was pouting—actually pouting for God's sake. Like the cops had ruined his playtime or something.
"Everything okay here, Lizzie?" the younger of the two police officers asked, but his stare was fixed on the scumbag.
"All good," said the biker, raising both hands in mock surrender. "I was just leaving. It's allll good."
The cop's eyes flicked from the biker to Lizzie. She smiled, and nodded that she was okay. Nothing I'm not used to, her eye roll said.
The biker was almost at the exit when the door alarm chimed again.
Roberto, three hours late for the shift Lizzie was now covering, stood in the doorway, blocking the biker's exit. Lizzie felt a spike of anger; Roberto could at least have called. Now here he was, showing up out of the blue half-way through his shift. Well he sure as hell had better not think she was going to just walk out of here. She needed the money and she would be more than happy to let him know.
Roberto took a single step over the store's threshold toward the biker. Lizzie squinted. She didn't have her distance glasses on, so she couldn't be sure, but she could swear Roberto was dressed in only pajama bottoms. And he was soaked through, his black hair plastered to his head. Streams of rainwater dripped over his bare chest and down his legs, forming a small puddle at his feet. And he was oh so pale. In fact, he looked really sick.
"Roberto, are you—" The sentence lodged in Lizzie's throat like broken glass as Roberto reached out a hand toward the smirking biker. The biker batted it away.
Roberto was a portly guy i
n his late fifties. The biker on the other hand, had a good four inches in height over Roberto. The biker looked like he was solid muscle, judging by the tightness of the leather jacket against his back.
The biker called Roberto a derogatory name. "What you think you're—"
It was so fast, Lizzie barely had time to register what happened. One second the biker and Roberto—pudgy, soft-spoken, never-hurt-a-fly Roberto—stood almost face to face. The next, Roberto launched himself forward and lifted the surprised biker off his feet with a single hand beneath his throat. The two men staggered into the store and fell behind a rack of snacks, with a muted thud. Lizzie saw the biker's booted feet sticking out from behind the rack. They shook and jostled as though the man was having an epileptic fit... then they disappeared completely behind the shelving.
The cops hadn't seen anything. They stood three rows over, by the coffee dispenser talking loudly to each other, their radios squawking while they argued over which brew tasted better.
Lizzie banged on the Plexiglas window with the flat of her fist until the cops' heads twisted her way. She pointed, jabbing her finger toward the exit. She could hear nothing other than the radio playing through the store speakers and her own rapid breathing.
Both cops drew their weapons and began to move down the center aisle toward the door.
Lizzie continued to gesticulate toward the last aisle. There was no sign of the biker or Roberto now.
The younger cop signaled for his partner to move up the aisle running parallel to the one Roberto and the biker had fallen behind. His pistol held in both hands, the young cop covered the end of the aisle near the doorway until his partner reached the opposite end. With a nod to his partner, the young cop side-stepped into the farthest aisle... and staggered back, shock staining his face, his eyes wide, mouth agape in disbelief at whatever it was he saw behind the shelves of soda cans and candies. He brought his weapon up and yelled something that sounded like "Hands in the air!" or maybe "Hands where I can see them!"
His partner stepped into the same aisle at the opposite end, and Lizzie saw shock register on his face too. And something else, she thought. Horror? Or fear? She could not decide which. He began to bring his weapon up then screamed as he was suddenly yanked from his feet. His hands flew upward, sending his pistol cartwheeling into the back wall where it scattered boxes of cereal across the floor.
The younger cop yelled something that seemed to just melt together into an incomprehensible sentence. The cop was moving back and forth from one foot to the other, his weapon extended out at arm's length. He looked to be trying to position himself for a shot, but couldn't seem to get an angle. He stepped forward then back again, then repeated the steps over twice more, like some weird dance move. Lizzie almost laughed at the ridiculousness of it; he looked like a character from one of the children's shows Annabelle used to watch when she was young; like he needed to pee real bad. His voice was high-pitched, way past the normal authoritative voice she had heard cops use to move vagrants off the forecourt of the gas station or scare some punk who thought he could shoplift.
Then the young cop turned, and, almost in slow motion, began to run back toward the security booth, just as Roberto appeared from the bottom of the aisle. Roberto was on all fours, his muscles working like a big cat's; head up, hands pulling him forward, eyes blazing...
They glowed, Lizzie saw; Roberto's eyes burned with a yellow phosphorescence that fully encircled the pupil.
...as his feet slipped momentarily, skidding out from under him, leaving a smear of—what was that? Blood! It was blood. Roberto's naked feet were covered in it, hampering his traction momentarily as his toes smeared tracks across the floor. For a split second, Lizzie's eyes locked with Roberto's. She saw darkness there. And something else... desire; savage, naked desire.
Roberto sprang, lunging forward off all fours, launching himself through the air with amazing agility; agility Lizzie knew Roberto did not possess. Mid-flight, he twisted his body sideways and used both hands and feet to propel his body off an end cap of automotive oil cans to ricochet through the air. He struck the terrified cop high on the shoulder when he was less than three feet from Lizzie's booth.
Lizzie screamed as both men disappeared below the counter and out of her line of sight. She tried to lean over the counter and look, but it was just too hard an angle for her to see past, and, if she was honest, she did not want to see what she thought might be happening down there. Even so, she forced herself to lean as far as she could, then screamed wildly, as a hand, blood pouring from what looked like two deep puncture marks in its wrist, slapped wetly against the front of her bulletproof cocoon.
Lizzie staggered back, fumbling for the cell phone she kept in her handbag. Her hands were shaking so badly she dropped the phone twice then finally cupped it with both hands and held it tight while she dialed nine-one-one with her right thumb.
The bloody hand had disappeared again, but it had left behind a wet red smear across the Plexiglas.
"Help me...," Lizzie half-screamed half-sobbed as soon as the emergency operator picked up. "Help me. Please, dear God."
"Ma'am. You need to keep calm and tell me what service you require," a man's voice said calmly in Lizzie's ear.
"Police," Lizzie cried, almost choking on the bile that now rose to the back of her throat. "I need the police here right now. Oh my God... he killed them."
The emergency operator recited the address for the Gas 'N Go. "Is that correct, Ma'am?"
"Yes, for God's sake hurry."
"The police are on their way. Right now I need you to stay on the line with me and—"
Lizzie did not register anything else the operator said because his voice was replaced by a deep base thumping in her ears—my heart, a voice somewhere deep inside her skull whispered. That's my heart—as the face of the young cop rose in front of her.
Lizzie felt bile rise to her throat. She gagged then vomited over her feet.
The cop's head had been torn from his body; Lizzie could see the ragged edges of the skin around his neck where it had been torn away from the shoulder. The dead cop's eyes were wide open; one stared directly at her, the other toward the ceiling. His mouth hung open, the tongue was missing. Whether it had been torn or bitten off, Lizzie did not know. The cop's trachea hung like a flaccid worm below the flap of neck skin, twisting and jiggling as the head was lifted higher, and higher. Blood still poured from it as the cranial cavity drained out.
Roberto appeared at the window, holding the dead cop's head by its short blond hair, raising it above his own head like a lantern... Or a trophy, Lizzie thought. Roberto's face was just inches from hers, separated by only the reinforced Plexiglas security screen.
Roberto had changed... physically. His face was gray as a corpse, his brown eyes now glowed with a preternatural yellow ring of fire, and his face seemed squeezed somehow, like it had been pressed between something heavy.
And then there were his teeth.
Lizzie felt her mind stutter when she saw them protruding between the thin, pale lips of his mouth, black snake-fangs curling from his upper and lower jaws.
And the blood, dear God he was soaked in it.
In the distance, Lizzie heard the wail of approaching sirens. Just a minute or two now, she told herself. They're almost here. She stepped back until the cigarette rack pressed painfully into her back.
Roberto fixed Lizzie with a stare. His tongue slipped from between his lips and kept coming. It was twice as long as it should be, Lizzie's inner voice observed, coldly. How can that be? Roberto proceeded to lick the blood from his face, his eyes never leaving her.
Something thudded against the floor right around where Roberto's feet should have been. He dropped the cop's head, Lizzie realized a second later, as both Roberto's hands appeared palm down against the clear plastic of the security screen.
The first hammer-like punch shook the security screen as though it was nothing.
Lizzie screamed a high-pitched sq
ueal of terror.
The second punch sent a latticework of cracks through the glass. The third punch fired a shower of shattered Plexiglas cascading over Lizzie's upturned arms as she instinctively tried to protect her face.
Roberto leaped over the countertop, landing directly on Lizzie, knocking her to the floor. His claw-like hands ripped at the collar of her uniform, tearing the blouse down one side.
Lizzie screamed in terror. She beat her hands against Roberto but it was like hitting a wall.
Roberto forced Lizzie's head back, exposing the soft skin of her neck... and bit deep into her flesh.
Two seconds later, Lizzie's scream of fear had turned to one of pain, then faded to a wet gurgle before finally being replaced by the obscene sound of the creature that had once been Roberto, sucking the life from Lizzie's already limp body.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
"Next," the desk sergeant yelled from behind the station's front desk. He didn't even look up as Genie Prescod stood up and walked over to him.
"How can I help you?" the cop asked, his eyes not leaving the pile of papers he was looking at.
"My daughter's missing."
The desk sergeant was in his late fifties, overweight by a good thirty or forty pounds. His body odor wafted to Genie's nose; he smelled like he hadn't taken a shower in a week, which might be true, judging by how undermanned the police station seemed to be. When Genie had arrived, almost six hours ago, she had been told to take a seat in the waiting area alongside twenty or so other members of the public until she could be helped. She had overheard two tired-looking detectives talking as they hung around a brewing pot of coffee about how seriously understaffed they were, something about cops not reporting in.
Genie didn't care about how undermanned they were, her baby girl was gone and she needed their help to find her.
The Darkening Page 10
