Dead Stop (19 page)

“Well,” Marisa
spoke up from her place beside Benny, “I remember that Harley’s hand was
bleeding, but I think it was just a barked knuckle from punching the one out in
the store.”

“Okay,” Rachel
pondered for a second, “That’s not critical enough for immediate attention, but
I’ll remember it if I get a chance at him later. Anybody else?

For a moment
nobody answered, then Gerald’s girlfriend raised her hand.

“You’re
injured?” Rachel frowned

“No,” the girl
blushed and shook her head in obvious embarrassment, “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean
to imply that. I just have a question. It’s completely unrelated to injuries.”

“No problem,”
the veterinarian shrugged…at least the girl was polite, no matter how bad her
taste in boyfriends. “It looks like everybody is patched up for the moment, so
what’s your question?”

“Where do they
come from?”

“Huh?” Rachel
gave the girl a puzzled look. “What are you talking about?”

“The dead
things…the zombies,” Holly swallowed. “They’ve got to come from somewhere,
right? I’m not from around here, but we passed this place on the highway before
turning around and coming back, and I don’t remember seeing a graveyard.”

A graveyard?

Rachel gaped at
the girl as her mind violently twisted away from being preoccupied with
treating people and focused on the question.

A graveyard?

 She had
been so busy trying to help people, it had never occurred to her to question
the origin of these monsters. Up until now, she hadn’t had the time. She had
simply considered them a hideous threat and not put much more thought into them
than that. But now…

…now they were
something worse.

“Oh…no…” she
moaned as the only possible source for these “zombies” rose in her mind. She
vaguely saw Marisa coming to her feet with a similar look of horror on her
face, apparently realizing at the same time where these things must be coming
from.

Only they
weren’t “things”.

They used to be
people…their people.

People who had
lived, loved, and had families. People who had died and were buried at the
Mazon County Memorial Cemetery a mile up the side road beside the truck stop.

And one of those
people had been Matt.

###

“Doc? Marisa?
What’s going on?”

Rachel saw
Harley turn in his bar stool towards them as they crowded to a stop in the
kitchen door. The door opened from behind the counter, and she had expected to
have to slip past him to get into the room proper. So it came as a bit of a
surprise to see him sitting out in the open on a stool in front of the counter,
instead of the station he had assumed behind it when everybody first retreated
to the kitchen.

The young man
had tilted the scruffy hat back on his head and was lounging on the stool next
to the back wall, drinking coffee that he had been serving himself from the
nearby pot. For a hopeful moment Rachel wondered if things had changed out here
and the big lout simply hadn’t gotten around to telling them.

A quick glance
at the windows revealed that not to be the case. As a matter of fact, things
were worse than before.

They were
surrounded.

Water sheeted
down the big panes of glass, distorting the figures in the unending row
grinning back in at them. The motionless forms stood side by side in a line
stretching from the window closest the kitchen wall, to the glass fire door,
then the windows all the way to and around the front corner…stretching across
the front windows as well. The light from inside the diner shimmered out
through the streaming sheets of glass, almost glowing off the bone and bare
teeth of the watcher’s mutilated faces. At the same time, it made their sockets
look black and utterly empty of both eyes and humanity alike.

They wore dark
suits and pale dresses, all drenched and hanging off their frames like
overdressed scarecrows at a dinner party for the damned.

There was no sign
the storm howling around the building discomfited them, or if they even noticed
it.

They simply
stood out there.

Waiting.

Rachel hesitated
at the sight of them, causing Marisa to bump into her from behind before
allowing herself to be slowly edged into the room. She tore her eyes from the
motionless wall of dead people and fixed them back on the man at the counter.

“Harley,” she
whispered urgently, “We need to see something. We’ve got to know if something
is true about these…things. It’s important. Is it safe to come out here?”

The young man
gave a speculative glance over his shoulder at the windows, then looked back at
the two women with a fatalistic shrug. He picked up a bottle of sugar and
started pouring it into his coffee as he answered.

“It’s alright,”
he cautioned softly, “As long as you move real slow and don’t get too close to
the window, they don’t seem to react. But stay out of sight of the ones at the
door if you can. They seem to see better. I think it has something to do with
the water on the glass.”

“Oookaayyyy,”
Rachel replied doubtfully. 

Part of her
still insisted this had to be a trick or an illusion of some kind. Maybe some
form of disease that wasted an individual and drove them to self mutilation and
violence. The doctor knew what she had seen at the back door, but still felt
tempted to write it off as a quick but unreliable impression in the heat of a
violent confrontation. She clung to a small sliver of hope that a closer look
would reveal an all too mundane nature of their attackers.

All it took was
one flash of lightning to shatter that hope, once and for all.

As she reached
the end of the counter, the sky flared with light and cast the line of
besieging horrors into stark relief. The man looking in directly across the
room from her must have had his suit torn a recent altercation, for it hung
half off him and revealed the desiccated chest underneath…along with the
autopsy scar. The incision must have also been torn loose in the same fight,
for it hung open on one side and revealed the cracked ribcage underneath.

The woman next
to him might have died in a car crash or some other violent manner, for the
face of her skull was half crushed in. Only one eye glared back from its lone
intact socket, and the jaw didn’t hang exactly straight underneath either. She
was missing an arm from the elbow down, and she stood at an odd angle that
suggested hip or leg damage as well.

These people
were dead.

Very dead.

And the only
question left was their point of origin.

Rachel moved up
to the end of the counter, and barely noticed as Marisa brushed past her and
started moving down the room, peering at the ghoulish figures one at a time.

It only took
Rachel one look at the window to drive home the numb certainty her own intent to
search for Matt…to settle once and for all if her lost husband walked out there
in the storm this night…was doomed from the start. Almost all the male figures
wore dark suits that appeared identical in the night time downpour, and without
faces there was nothing else to go by…just a chorus line of stick figures with
leering skulls and hanging suits, anonymous in their shared mutilation.

He could have
been any one of them…or none o them.

It was almost a
relief.

Maybe he wasn’t
out there. Maybe this nightmare had nothing to do with Matt at all. Just maybe
these things came from some military or government vehicle that had crashed
nearby, or was parked behind the truck stop right now with its back gate forced
open. Seriously, who knew what cargo any eighteen wheeler out on the road might
be carrying? Hell, this was already like some kind of bad movie…was there any
certainty where these things really came from?

“Oh, no.”

Marisa’s soft
gasp jarred Rachel out of her reverie and back into the room with the hellish
view.

The waitress had
dropped the bat and covered her mouth with both hands. A single tear started
down her cheek as she stared at the window.

Rachel tracked
her horrified gaze to a wraithlike figure in a white dress. It was hard to see
much through the streaming window, but the older woman could tell even in the
rain it had a full head of thick black hair very much like the girl staring at
it, and its garment looked like some kind of formal gown…or perhaps a prom
dress.

“Vicky?” Marisa
choked out. “
Madre de dios! Vicki
?
”

The girl took a
halting step towards the window.

“Doc!” Harley
called while coming off his stool, “Grab her! Don’t let her do that!”

Rachel recovered
and moved towards the girl just as she stumbled toward the window.

“Vicki!” the
tears now flowed.
 
“
Soy yo, Marisa! No te recuardas de mi
?”

Rachel caught her just as the
thing in the window came alive.

The two women shrieked as the
dead woman gaped her jaws in what was becoming a familiar prelude to attack and
slammed herself against the window. The whole pane shook as the monster now
focused in on them, withered hands splayed against the glass. For one heart
stopping second Rachel thought the horror would come crashing through the weak
barrier and land on them both. And if that window broke there would be more of
those things piling through in a heartbeat.

The sound of the pane creaking
in its frame sounded like imminent death in her ears.

But evidently it was made of
sterner stuff than she realized. The window held…for the moment…and the veterinarian
grabbed Marisa as the girl cried out at the specter.

 
“
Vicki!
So yo! Marisa! Tu hermana, Marisa! Lo siento! No hagas esto
!”

Not knowing what
else to do, Rachel put herself between the young woman and the window and
embraced her tightly. She couldn’t understand what the girl was saying, but
from the sound of her voice she was bordering on hysterics. She could also hear
more hands thumping and squeaking on the glass behind her and feared all their
luck would soon run out. A look to her left revealed Harley had halted on his
way over, obviously not wanting to add any more motion to the scene.

It was up to
her.

 With
gentle care, Rachel eased herself and the girl two small steps away from the
glass. A glance back revealed the dead woman to be pressed up against the
window…her teeth and cheekbone making an audible “scritch” as they slid across
the pane’s surface…but at least she wasn’t slamming up against it anymore…much.
The distraught waitress must have seen enough, because she felt Marisa bury her
face into her shoulder and start to cry.

“
Lo siento,
Vicki
!” she sobbed into Rachel’s shoulder, “
Lo siento! No sabia! Por
favor, lo siento! No sabia
!”

“Easy,” Rachel
soothed, and hugged the girl tighter. “Easy, Marisa. We’re not out of this
yet.”

She could still
hear the scratching on the glass behind her, and could see Harley staring at it
with hair trigger intensity. Behind him, she spotted Deke and Stacey standing
frozen behind the counter and Gerald and Holly in the kitchen door. Nobody
moved, and another series of thumps from the window told her that the thing was
still focused on her back. The tension hung thick in the air, and Rachel knew
their luck couldn’t hold out much longer.

“Marisa,” she
breathed into the crying girl’s ear, “we need to take another couple of steps
away from the window. Okay?”

For a moment she
didn’t know if the girl didn’t hear her, or if she was simply having to much
trouble catching her breath to talk. Then, just before she intended to repeat
herself, Marisa nodded her head.

 “Okay,
good,” Rachel continued, still holding the young woman for all she was worth,
“We’re just going to take a couple of really slow steps backwards, and then I
want you to tell me who that was. Okay?”

No answer.

“Okay?”

“Okay,” came the
muffled reply.

“Alright then,”
Rachel murmured as she gently guided the waitress backwards. “Just one
sloooowww step.”

The two moved in
unison, almost as if dancing.

“Now another.”

The sounds
behind her faded.

“And one more.”

The two stopped,
still embraced, beside a booth on the far wall from the windows. Neither moved
for a moment, and Rachel maintained her tight grip on the girl. The tall
waitress had not shown one ounce of fear during this whole ordeal, but the sobs
escaping her now were those of a deep and reawakened grief.

She didn’t know
what else to do but continue to hold her until sounds behind them ceased. It
took a few minutes but, as Harley had mentioned, the dead didn’t seem to see
through the window well, and once they lost sight of their prey it wasn’t too
long until they reverted back to their still vigil at the streaming glass.

Another flash of
lightning cast their shadows on the diner wall, revealing them to be once again
standing in their grim cordon.

The danger had
passed.

“It’s okay,
now,” she murmured and tried to get a look at the young woman’s face. “They’ve
gone quiet again. Are you alright?”

It surprised
her, but Marisa actually straightened up and wiped her eyes.

“Yeah,” she
sniffled, seeming to struggle between embarrassment and the grief that had
gripped her earlier. She sat down in the booth behind her and took a shaky
breath. “Yeah…just give me a second. I’m a little messed up.”

Rachel slid into
the bench across the table from her. She watched quietly as the young Latina
brought herself back under control, before gently asking the obvious question.