“You know him?”

Shirl gave him the kind of laugh that said that she not only “knew” Billy Trout, but could tell you stories.

“He comes in here every now and then,” she said with a wonderfully coquettish slant of her eyes that made Gericke smile. He’d already planned to base a character on Trout, but he was starting to sniff a juicy subplot about the seedy newsman with a soul and the lonely but still sexy diner waitress. Maybe she pines for the guy, or maybe she’s the one that got away. Something like that. Gericke knew he could take that and run with it. Put some desperate sweat-in-the-dark sex into the book.

“I’m planning on writing him into the novel,” said Gericke. “Not under his name, of course, but a character based on him.”

Shirl laughed. “Well, that wouldn’t be a stretch, mister, ’cause Billy is a character.”

At the other end of the diner the door opened and a man in a rain-soaked hoodie stepped inside.

“Damn, Sonny, close the door!” yelled Shirl, then she dropped her voice and in a confidential tone said to Gericke, “Speaking of characters. This one never did have enough brain cells to know when to come in out of the rain.”

Gericke hid a smile behind his coffee cup as he turned to look at the man. He couldn’t see Sonny’s face, but he was still standing in the doorway, his foot propping the door open. Rain was already pooling on the red tile floor.

“Come on, Sonny,” barked Shirl in a voice used to yelling out orders during packed lunch crowds of truckers. “In or out. Jeez … were you born in a damn barn?”

Sonny took a step forward, and Gericke frowned. The man moved heavily, awkwardly. Drunk, this early in the day? He figured he could get some mileage out of a character like that, too.

The door swung shut as Sonny took another couple of steps into the diner. He turned right and left as if uncertain of where he was.

“Come on and sit down,” said Shirl, affection tempering her annoyance. “Get some hot coffee into you before you catch your … death?” Her last word came out crooked and weak because at that moment Sonny lifted his head and the fluorescents washed away the shadows inside his hood. Gericke froze. The face inside the hood was two-toned: wax white and dark red. The skin was bloodless, but blood poured down from a ruin of a mouth and between broken teeth.

“Holy Christ!” yelled Shirl. She grabbed a clean towel and hurried down the counter as she yelled over her shoulder for Gericke to call the police. “Sonny … good lord, what happened to you? Were you in an accident?”

She came around the end of the counter, raising the hand with the towel, her face showing both a clear revulsion and a take-charge strength. Sonny staggered toward her, reaching out as if to accept the towel. Or a hug. Or …

“No…” said Gericke. The word escaped his mouth before he knew why he said it. A visceral, instinctive reaction. Then he said it louder as he came off his stool. “No!”

Shirl flicked a confused look at him.

Sonny leaped at her, slamming her back against the counter, his fingers tangling in her hair, pulling her head back, stretching her throat wide and pale. There was a scream, a deep moan, and then a flash of bright red that shot all the way to the overhead lights.

By then Gericke was moving, running down the length of the empty diner. He had no weapon, he was not a fighter, but none of that mattered. He dove at Sonny like a defensive tackle, knocking the man sideways, breaking the ugly contact between him and Shirl. Hot blood sprayed the side of his face and as he bore Sonny to the ground, Gericke heard the wet, choking, burbling sound as Shirl tried to speak. In a weirdly disjointed and detached part of his brain, Gericke wondered what the dying waitress needed to say so badly that she would try and force the words out through a torn windpipe. He would like to have put that in his next book.

He and Sonny crashed to the floor and suddenly all thoughts of writing and dialogue and curious characters were swept away. The only thing on Gericke’s mind then was keeping those red-smeared teeth away from his own throat.

He never heard the door open. Did not hear the wind and rain whip in, or the slap of slow, shuffling feet on the soaked red tiles of the diner.

* * *

Nick Pulsipher hated the place. The motel had been seedy when it was built back in the seventies and it had lost ground since. On the best nights he got a couple of decent family types looking to break up a long drive in a cheap room. Once in a while there were some bikers worth talking to. Sometimes even somebody from his home state of Nevada—people who had actually heard of Henderson, where he grew up. Though never anyone from Caliente, where he’d lived before moving east to this place. Nick thought that it might be an upward move, going from desk clerk to manager in the same chain of roach motels; but after three years here it was his opinion that if Caliente was the absolute asshole of America, then Stebbins was the “taint.” As career moves go, this one wasn’t going into the history books.

At least the motel office had cable, if the storm didn’t knock that out. The lights had already flickered and he wouldn’t have bet a torn dollar bill on making it through the night with lights, power, and cable all intact.

The rain was like a constant animal roar. The customers in the six rented rooms might as well have been on the moon. He hoped none of them needed anything from him. Nick did not want to go out in this shit. Winds like that, you don’t hold on to something, next thing you know you’re wearing ruby slippers and skipping down a yellow brick road.

He went around the counter and peered out through the window. The awning kept the rain from hitting the glass, but even with that it was hard to see all the way across the parking lot. The Crescent Motel was actually built like a blocky letter C, and Nick could see lights glowing in a few windows. And one doorway. Nick bent closer. Yep, the door to Unit 18 at the far end was wide open, and the damn wind was blowing that way.

“Son of a bitch,” he muttered. The carpet would be soaked, and when it dried it would smell like old underwear. He saw three people run in through the open door, but with the failing light and the rain it was hard to make out who they were. 18 was rented by a woman traveling with her grown daughter, heading to Washington, D.C., for some political thing. At least that’s what they told Nick during check-in. One-nighters. All well and good, but not if that one night left him with a soaked carpet and a mother of a cleanup job.

He saw two more people come out of the rain and enter the unit. Then another. And another.

“What the hell are they doing over there?”

What was it? Some kind of party to celebrate the storm? Ditzy broads.

The carpet was going to be ruined. That came out of his maintenance budget. His bonuses were based on a percentage of the budget leftover at the end of the month. Replacing carpets for a whole unit was going to cut that down to chicken shit.

Nick debated what to do. Call them or go the hell over there?

He called.

The phone rang and rang. He slammed down the phone, looked up their cell number on the register card, and called that. It rang three times and went right to voice mail.

“Shit.” He grabbed his raincoat off the peg behind the counter and pulled it on, then crammed a Pirates baseball cap down hard on his head. Even with that he knew he was going to get soaked, but he was so mad that he didn’t care.

He pushed the door open and had to force it closed against the claws of the wind; then he hunched his shoulders and bent into the blow, trudging through the rain like a man walking through mud. The gale winds were intense and the rain was numbingly cold. By the time he was halfway across the parking lot he was drenched, with lines of water running down inside his clothes. Rain pelted his face with the stinging force of hail, and runoff dripped from the tips of his long chin beard. Through squinted eyes he could see the crowd of people gathered at the open door, some of them inside Unit 18, some outside. None of them had umbrellas or rain hats. They stood in the rain like they didn’t give a shit and Nick was twenty yards away from then when that fact started to bother him.

He was ten yards away when he realized that everyone was chewing. They stood with their hands cupped and held to their mouths, each one totally absorbed in whatever they were eating.

“The hell—”

What was this? Some kind of crazy storm tailgate party? Beer and ribs and…?

He was five yards away when he realized that he was wrong. About the nature of the gathering. About the menu. About everything. The people closest to him raised their faces from their meals and stared at him with eyes that were far too dark and mouths that were far too red.

Nick was three yards away when he stopped walking and turned to run.

That was two yards too late.

* * *

Jillian Weiner felt the darkness closing in. The calm-down drugs were taking her below the level of pain and stress, and soon the big, dark, soft wave of anesthesia would roll over her and she would go down into a sweet nothingness. She wouldn’t feel the scalpel as the doctors went in and removed her appendix. Who needs an appendix anyway? She knew that there would be pain when she woke up, and more pain during the recovery, but for now … it felt like rolling down a hill that was lined with silk and covered with pillows.

Sounds were becoming muted, distorted, softened so that they made little sense other than as background noise. She could hear the doctor and the nurses speaking, and even understand snatches of what they said, but if it made any sense to Jillian, she was too deep to care.

“… the hell’s going on out there…?”

“… someone’s hurt out in the hall…”

“… oh my God … my God!”

“… please … oh, sweet Jesus … please, don’t let it in here…”

The screams became the cries of seagulls over a lazy beach. Even when blood splashed her, it was nothing more than salt spray from the summer waves.

It’s nice down here, she thought. So sweet, so soft …

Jillian felt hands on her. Nurses? Doctors? Who cared?

She couldn’t exactly remember what a doctor was.