Let Go (2 page)

Everett was curious, and he had to fish his wallet out of his back pocket anyway, so what harm could scooting over do? He wanted to take a look. The other patrons, most of them older than he was, seemed just as interested. Based on the hushed but animated conversations at the other tables, he figured this was probably the most exciting thing to have happened in their vicinity in quite some time.

He found his wallet, in his back pocket where it always rested, and dug out an unsigned credit card and his ID. In plain block writing, he had written on the back of the credit card, “PLEASE ASK FOR ID,” but hardly anybody ever did.

The ID and credit card went into the small plastic pocket at the top of the bill holder, and he stood it upright at the edge of the table to catch Maddie’s eye.

“What’s going on out there?” he asked when she came by the table.

“Nothing to worry about, I’m sure,” she said, a bright, cheery smile on her face. “Probably somebody ran a red light. We’ve had a few teens think they’re in a drag race before, so could be that.”

He was glad to see that she did check the credit card and ID first thing, and she even offered him a brighter, more authentic smile.
 

“Well, hey there, happy birthday!”

Everett blushed and smiled.

“Seventy-one?” she said, disbelieving. “You don’t look it, hon. Good for you. How’s retirement treating you?”

“It’s good,” he lied. Everett wasn’t retired, but there was no point going into that with her. No reason to tell her how the crash back in ’08 had wiped out a healthy bit of his retirement savings, and he’d had to work longer to save more.

He could tell she was about to say something, but then a gunshot rang out. And then another. A scream sounded too close and ended too abruptly. More shots were fired, and more sirens were approaching.

“What’s going on out there?” he said, pushing himself out of the booth and forcing Maddie to step back. He turned toward the front of the restaurant and the cacophony outside. An officer stepped into view, pointing his gun toward something beyond the stretch of window, still hidden from Everett, the cop walking backward and pulling the trigger.

“Oh no,” Everett said.

There was a crack in the sidewalk there, and Everett had tripped over it more than once. He’d never fallen, but the crack was just big enough to make him stumble and break his stride. The cop walking backward, though…

Sure enough, the officer’s heel caught the break in the cement where part of the sidewalk jutted up, and he went down hard. The man he’d been shooting at lumbered into view and dropped below the window.

The screams were loud, and Everett could barely believe his eyes. It had all happened so fast. A bloody hand reached up, its fingers grasping for the edge of the restaurant’s brickwork, but it found only the smooth stretch of glass before falling limply away. Four red lines ran down the window where those fingers had been.

Another flash of movement grabbed Everett’s attention as two bodies hurtled themselves toward the front glass door, slamming their way through. A man and a woman, both in their twenties, he guessed. The man turned on his heel quickly, throwing the door shut and turning the dead bolt before collapsing. The woman was red-faced and breathing heavily, and she fell beside him, wrapping her arms around him.

“What the hell?” Everett said, his voice husky and confused.
 

A loud thump slammed against the window, gory hands and a dirty, bloody face pressing tightly against the pane. The man’s mouth was working overtime, opening and closing, leaving fresh, wet streaks against the glass. The eyes were completely white, the retina milky, and the exposed flesh was pale. Deathly pale.

Behind Everett, a shrill scream drew his attention. Somebody fainted. Or at least, he hoped they had fainted rather than dropped dead. Maddie was standing over the prone body, yelling for someone to call 911.

As he drew nearer the door, he saw that outside was unbridled chaos. Whatever the two kids had been running from—and to Everett, they were just kids, even if in their twenties—the guy had been smart to lock the door.

The girl’s mascara was running, and her blond hair had bright pink and green highlights. The boy’s dark skin was lined with sweat, his afro, cut high and tight, shiny with perspiration. Both wore jeans and hoodies, and both looked terrified and in shock.

Everett was too old to kneel, but there was a cushioned bench opposite the door, and he lowered himself onto the seat, hunching forward to get a better look at them.

The girl had her face buried in the boy’s neck, one hand holding the front of his shirt in a death grip. The boy had a consoling arm around her and appeared too dazed to even notice the old man across from him until Everett spoke.

“What’s happening out there?”
 

“It’s crazy,” the boy said. He shook his head and screwed his eyes tightly shut. “It’s like a horror movie or some shit, you know? Like the end of the world.”

Everett’s mouth fell open, at a loss for words. What could he even say to something like that? It was crazy. Right?

Looking out the door and window of Brown’s, he wasn’t so sure.

The scene was like something out of Lucille’s crazy horror books. The books he’d begun reading to help keep Lucille around, the books he’d even kind of begun enjoying.

A police car braked and swerved, the tail end, with a stink of burning rubber, sliding around to block the road. The cops got out, drew their guns, and crouched beside the driver’s side, using the car as a shield. They took turns popping up and firing, but Everett couldn’t see at what.

Then the bloodied man at the window turned toward the noise and began to shamble off. One of the cops, the one nearest the rear tire, seemed to catch sight of the movement and shouted for the man to stop. The man kept moving, though, and the officer opened fire. A slug tore through the man’s shoulder, and Everett watched as blood and bits of bone and pink tissue exploded out of the man’s back, but the man didn’t fall. No, he kept walking. Another bullet passed through his belly, and still he kept walking.
 

“This is impossible,” Everett said.

The man was nearly on top of the car now, and the policeman stood up and took careful aim. The back of the bloodied man’s head exploded, his skull whip-cracking back as he finally fell, finally stilled.

The policeman collapsed, too, pressing the side of his gun to his face, his shoulders shaking.

“Jesus,” Everett said. “Okay, look. We need to get away from the windows. This is stupid to be so close. If one of those bullets goes astray…”

He stood, holding his hand out to the young couple. “Come on. Let’s go back. It’s safer in the back.”

As he helped the girl to her feet, and then the boy, he saw a pair of raw, bony digits rise up in front of the window, seeking out the brick sill’s edge. The hand was short a few fingers, the bloody stubs tapping against the glass. The crown of a head appeared, the hair clotted in a thick black sheen, and then a face. The nose had been torn away, and the cheeks were a pulpy mess. His lips were gone, revealing objectionably white teeth that opened and shut of their own accord, a loose string of frenulum dangling from the stripped gum of his lower jaw.

It was the policeman, the one Everett had seen trip and fall only moments before. He was somehow still alive.

Not alive
, Lucille said, the echo of her voice in his mind sound and sure. She was convinced of what was happening, and he believed her. Trusted her.

The policeman was standing tall now, looking into the restaurant with too-large, too-white eyes.

“C’mon, then,” he said, the couple both on their feet again. “We’re going to the back.”

Everett hadn’t noticed the crowd of loose-skinned old-timers at the edge of the dining room. They stood well enough away from the windows, but the way they were all bunched up made passing difficult. He caught snatches of their worried, overlapping speculations as he huddled with the couple, passing them through.

“It’s that Zika virus. I been hearing about that all over.”

“Glenn Beck said the Rapture was coming. Listened to him on the way over. Ted Cruz was on there, talking about how we’re due for a holocaust cause we’ve lost our way. Not enough Jesus, and ’cause of the gays getting married. This is what we get now.”

“It ain’t the gays or Zika or nothing like that,” one man said. He sounded supremely confident, but if he had anything else to offer, Everett missed it.

“Terrorists then,” the Zika guy said. “Or them Chinese.”

Gunshots were coming fast and steady. Until they weren’t. The dining room grew darker as a mass of bodies passed the restaurant, a crushing wave of people, deformed and disfigured, shambling by, practically falling over one another. Falling over the police, overwhelming them with their sheer numbers.

Maddie and Teeg—the tall black chef dressed in jeans, a white T-shirt, and apron—stood on either side of a pale old woman slumped in a chair. Maddie was helping her drink water, and Everett surmised it was the person who had fainted. A sweaty pitcher of ice water sat on the table in a pool of condensation, and he grabbed two empty glasses from another table and poured for the couple before sitting them down around a table farther back.

“We gotta get out of here.”

“Let’s stow that shit,” a thick, deep voice said. The cook. “I can’t let any of you leave now. Too dangerous. You see what’s going on out there, don’t you?”

“Teeg,” Maddie said. “C’mon. Maybe the back is clear, and we can all leave.”

“We ain’t leaving,” Teeg said. “We’re on lockdown, far as I’m concerned. I want everyone to move back into the dining room, as far away from the windows as you can get. Come on, people, let’s go.”

When none of the old-timers moved, Teeg let out a drill-sergeant bellow. “I said, let’s go!”

That got the old folks moving, if not quite scrambling.
 

The front window was crowded with leering faces, an entire row of milky eyes staring inside, watching them, smearing bloodied saliva and dirty hands all across the glass. Everett’s eyesight was bad enough that most of this vision was a fuzzy blur, but right then and there, he’d have given anything to not see it at all, blurry or otherwise.

“What happened out there?” he asked, turning his attention back to the young couple.

“How the hell do you even explain it?” the girl said.
 

The mascara had buried her puffy eyes in black rings and left long, ashy streaks down her cheeks. Everett thought she would be prettier without all the piercings in her eyebrows and the tiny ring in her lower lip. She wore a baggy Oakland University hoodie, the cuffs of the sleeves badly frayed, presumably because she worried at them with her pointy nails, as she was currently doing. A nervous habit, maybe.

“I don’t know what happened,” the boy said.
 

The young man looked a bit more put together, but one sleeve was bunched up high around his forearm, almost to the elbow, revealing a long stretch of ink that ran from his wrist and disappeared beneath the hoodie. His was a black OU hoodie, the large cartoon face of the school’s Golden Grizzlies mascot prominent across the chest, and Everett guessed they went to school together. The boy’s tattoo sleeve was devoid of color, but the black tones and negative space made the Grim Reaper plain, along with the row of tombstones and skulls rimming the work.

Kids these days
, Everett thought, and he swore he could hear a bit of his father in that sentiment. And when had that happened, exactly? Probably around the time he’d had William, maybe. He should call the boy.

The boy
, he testily reminded himself, was thirty-six. But Everett was at that stage in life when anybody younger than him qualified as a kid.
 

“You were running. What from?”

“What do you think from what?” the boy shouted, waving his inked arm toward the window. “From that, man, from that!”

“It’s all right now,” Teeg said, taking a chair beside Everett. “Just drink some water. You’re safe in here.”

Even sitting, Teeg was a tall man, his long arms hanging limply at either side, his fingers nearly touching the floor. And even though he was slender, his deep cannon-fire voice gave him instant command of the room.
 

“We’re all safe in here,” he said. He held eyes with one of the cotton-headed men until the retiree nodded, then Teeg nodded, too, as if they’d all come to some sort of agreement. Hell, maybe they had.

“This guy,” the OU girl said, “I don’t even know where he came from. Like from out of nowhere, right? We were walking down the strip, and we heard this scream. I turned around, we both did, and I saw this guy grabbing a lady.”

“I thought maybe it was a mugging or something,” the OU guy said.

“And this guy, he jerked the lady toward him and bit into her throat. Like really bit down hard. Tore her neck open with his teeth, and there was all this blood.”

“There were more, though. I don’t know where they were coming from. Four or five of them, maybe, and they were snatching up whoever was closest.”

“And one of them grabbed this baby, and—” Fresh tears ran freely down her face, and she snorted back a glob of snot, palming her eyes. “Oh, God. I can’t even.”

“So that’s why we were running. I don’t even know why we stopped here. All those police coming, maybe. I mean, the door was unlocked, and it was right here, so…”

“You did right coming in here,” Teeg said. “Locking that door. Smart thinking. That was good.”

The OU guy picked up the glass of water and held it in his hands, his fingers tightening and loosening, alternately tapping against the glass.

“I’m Kara, by the way,” OU girl said. “This is Mitch.”

“I’m glad you’re safe. I’m Teeg. Can I get you some food? A drink?”

“Nah,” Mitch said. “Thanks.”

Kara just shook her head, the tears still flowing.

“It’s good to see you, too, man,” Teeg said, looking warmly at Everett. “Been a while.”

Everett nodded. It was all he could do. He struggled to hang on, the weight of the last few minutes hitting him all of a sudden. The fried food sat like an iron weight in the middle of his belly. Then he noticed Teeg’s outstretched hand and took it.