Humphrey’s Kountry Kitchen was on the west end of town, past a Shell station minimart. There were two vehicles in the restaurant parking lot, a Buick LeSabre and a Ford pickup hauling a trailer with a pair of camouflaged quad bikes. I didn’t see Gino’s silver Nissan Titan.
I was deliberately ten minutes late. Where was he?
I went down a block and turned around. I parked on the shoulder where I could check out the restaurant and the neighborhood.
The rain started again. I looked through the arcs my wipers swished across the windshield. People wandered around the Shell station across the street, moving about the cars and gas pumps, or in or out of the minimart. I studied the dark windows of the buildings facing me, a real estate office and a honey wholesaler.
Maybe Gino had been dropped off at Humphrey’s. Either the Buick or the Ford could be his wheels. I flipped open my cell phone and punched his number. His voice mail picked up again.
Where the hell was Gino? He might be sleeping off a hangover, playing errand boy to Uncle Sal, drilling some tail…or had the zombies gotten him?
Frustrated and more than a little paranoid, I snapped the phone closed and dropped it into my coat pocket.
Without Gino, I’d be playing Whac-A-Mole looking for clues.
Then again, Gino might be in Humphrey’s waiting for me.
I drove to the restaurant and parked beside the Ford pickup. I got out of my Toyota and stepped into a muddy puddle. Goddamn weather. I pulled the collar of my barn coat tight around my neck. Fighting zombies was trouble enough without the misery of getting soaked and cold. This was too much like being back in the army.
A For Sale sign sat in the front window of the restaurant. Guess even mountain views and country living get old.
I started through the front door of the restaurant when the hallucination of the girl came to me, the apparition so real I could almost feel the heat of her body.
If this was a psychic attack, I wouldn’t give in.
I planted my feet and stood strong. I imagined swatting the image out of my head. But the hallucination tore into my thoughts.
She called my name. Her voice filled my head, drowning out all other sounds. Its echo bounced inside my skull, gathering volume until her voice became a deafening shriek as loud as a fire alarm.
The top of my spine buzzed. I pressed one hand across the back of my neck to dampen the sensation. The vibration continued down my psychic column and my spine shook.
Panic and fear gouged me to the bone. I stumbled into the restaurant and collapsed on the wooden bench in the foyer.
The shriek halted like someone had turned off a spigot of noise. My head held the fading echo. As my helplessness and panic subsided, my strength returned-and my anger.
Psychic energy attacks. Zombies. Gino’s mysterious cousin. The loose ends in this mystery tangled around me.
A woman appeared in the doorway to the dining room. She wore an apron and had a pen stuck in her mop of henna-colored hair. Her eyes and forehead crinkled in worry. “I saw you keel over like you had a seizure or something. You okay?”
“Yeah.” On the outside. Inside I was a mess.
“You waiting for somebody?”
Gino, but it wasn’t her business. “Sorta.”
“Sorta yes or sorta no?” Her tone went from concern to a hard scold. “Either get in or get out. No loitering.”
Feisty shrew needed a kick in the butt to learn about customer service. I followed her inside to see if Gino was here.
A pair of elderly couples sat at a square table in the middle of the room. The old women unsnapped clear plastic bonnets they had cinched over their blue hair. The four geezers complained that they couldn’t remember when it had been this cold and rainy. Try last year.
Two beefy guys wearing down vests over camouflage hoodies-hunters, I was sure-occupied a booth at the far corner.
No Gino.
The waitress fanned a laminated menu toward the empty booths along the wall. “Your pick.”
I took a seat facing the front window and ordered coffee. I sneaked the bag of type O-negative from my coat and squirted the remaining blood into my cup. I stashed the empty bag back into my pocket. I sipped the warm brew and it comforted me like a hug from a chubby hooker.
What now? Where was Gino? Where were the zombies?
My ears tingled, then my fingertips.
Danger.
I set the cup down.
My kundalini noir coiled, like a viper ready to strike. I curled my fingers to hide my extending talons.
The hairs on the nape of my neck stood up. A shadow glided across the fogged restaurant window. My fangs pushed down from my gums and threatened to poke out from under my lip.
The front door opened. A figure entered the foyer and stood behind the window separating the foyer from the dining room.
The figure wore a blue hooded slicker. The feminine outline suggested a woman.
It was her.
I could feel it.
The girl in the psychic attacks.
How was this possible?
A prickly sensation trickled from my head to my fingertips and toes.
Her rain-shellacked slicker glistened in the fluorescent light from the foyer ceiling. The brim of the slicker’s hood cast a shadow across her forehead to the middle of her face, masking her eyes. Moist strands of brunette hair curled from under the hood.
She clasped the hood in both hands and pushed it up and back as if lifting the visor of a helmet. As she did this, the anticipation turned my stomach into mush.
Her face was on the mature side of adolescence, a woman yet still retaining the soft lines of a girl’s features. The elegant sweep of her nose matched the trace of an elongated face and a delicate chin. Her nose and cheeks were rosy from the outside chill.
This was her.
The girl.
The adolescent girl from my hallucinations. That phoenix who had risen from the ghost of the little Iraqi girl.
The prickly sensation became centipedes digging at my skin. I’m an undead bloodsucker; this creeped-out feeling was not supposed to happen to me.
Her right eye twitched. She rubbed the heel of her hand against the eye. When she brought her hand down, the right eye remained open and still.
Her two dark eyes rested on me, as if I was the only object in the world. The gleam in those eyes bore deep-probing, knowing, menacing.
My kundalini noir twisted like it wanted to find a hole and hide.
For a moment, all I could see were her eyes.
The eyes that had haunted me across the oceans and years since I first saw them in Iraq. Deep as wells, dark as the night I’d last seen them.
My fear became cold, heavy, and paralyzing, like I’d been trapped under a giant block of ice.
Her right eye twitched again.
I am vampire-a seasoned warrior, a supernatural killer-and this woman, this ingenue, this girl with a nervous facial tic, made me shrink in terror.