Nowhere to Hide (2 page)

“Hello?” the customer spoke again, waving his hand in front of her face. “Are you even alive in there?”

Nancy’s heart jumped a little. It was the same thing the teen had asked the crazy woman...

She forced a smile back on her face. Almost everyone who came to Deja Vu knew her, and she knew most of them as well, but Ken was her secret favorite. The young ambulance driver came in almost every night. He’d jokingly told her once that he needed whiskey to drown the stress of his job, and she suspected that there was more to that than simple jest. Some nights he came in with a quiet, handsome smile on his face; other nights he came in looking as though it was taking every ounce of his willpower not to vomit. Nancy had initiated their acquaintance with each other for this very reason. She couldn’t stand seeing such a nice-looking guy look so rattled, so she’d taken to cheering him up when he came in looking upset. As time had gone by, he’d started sitting at the bar to chat with her rather than hanging out in the back where he’d once chosen to lurk.

“I’m a little preoccupied,” Nancy finally explained. Subconsciously she folded and unfolded her dish towel several times. “I’m worried about my neighbor. One of her students lost his older brother yesterday, and Terri-Lynn is the kind of person who gets depressed easily.”

Ken’s jaw stiffened as he took this in. “It was the young fella, wasn’t it?” he guessed. “The kid who got bitten by the crazy homeless woman?”

Nancy nodded and averted her eyes. She looked casually around the bar. It was emptier than usual, with only a few of the regular patrons sitting against the far wall. They were laughing with a raucous tone at what was probably a very dirty joke. Focusing on their drunken grins made it a little easier for Nancy to push away the memory of the gruesome news broadcast.

“I wasn’t on duty when they brought him in,” Ken shared. “But I heard all about it the next day. They said they couldn’t fix up his throat fast enough. Lost too much blood. From the descriptions I heard it seems like he was pretty much drowning in it.” Nancy shuddered and Ken immediately sputtered out an apology. “I’m sorry, you probably don’t want to hear about that.”

With a nervous cough Nancy leaned down against the bar. “If I’m going to be honest with myself,” she admitted with a frustrated frown, “I
do
want to hear about it. It’s just so creepy and weird that it’s fascinating, you know? Like how you can’t turn away from a car crash even though it’s morbid as hell to be staring at it.”

Ken’s lips twitched upward a little. He glanced around the bar to make sure no one was listening - unlikely since the closest customer was sitting at least fifteen feet away. Even though their privacy was pretty secure, he leaned in close. “You wanna hear something
really
weird?”

Nancy hesitated for a moment and then bit her lip and nodded.

Ken took a swig from his glass and motioned for her to move closer. Though her heart raced a little and her hands began to sweat, she obeyed. She stared into Ken’s dark eyes, framed by a mop of shaggy black hair, and couldn’t help feeling intimidated by him.

“The woman,” he said quietly, “was brought in with a fatal head wound. One of the kid’s friends stabbed her with a broken beer bottle when she started attacking.”

Nancy nodded. She’d already heard that bit from Terri-Lynn.

“Well, they did an autopsy,” Ken continued in a low voice. “You know, to see if she had anything infectious that she could have passed on. And you know what they found?”

Nancy didn’t say a word, but her eyes told Ken that he better get to the point before she lost her mind.

“She’d already been dead for two days when she attacked that boy.”

Nancy’s face changed. Her eyebrows knitted. Ken continued to stare directly into her eyes, unflinching. He seemed to be entirely serious. After a long moment of silence Nancy burst into laughter and picked up a new glass to clean. “Nice, Ken, but I’m not
that
messed up in the head!” she scoffed. The dish towel danced along the surface of the already-clean bar.

Ken was chuckling a little to himself. “Well, clearly something must have gone wrong,” he admitted, “but that
is
what they said they found.”

Nancy looked back up to see that his face was still totally earnest. She raised an eyebrow. “You’re putting me on,” she insisted without the hint of a smile.

Ken shook his head, threw back the last of his whiskey, and motioned for another. Nancy grabbed the glass and poured another shot while Ken talked. “Scout’s honor,” he told her. “The examiners insisted. First of all, when they began looking her over it had only been about ninety minutes since the altercation in the park, but her body was already room temperature, which should have taken almost half a day to happen. So they started looking closer and found that the acids and gases in her lungs and stomach were too far advanced for someone who was supposed to have been dead for less than two hours. They figure the levels coincided with someone who had been dead for closer to two
days
.” He accepted the glass from Nancy’s outstretched hand and shot the entire thing in one gulp. “Obviously they must have screwed up somehow, or someone did something to the body before they got to it. Their manager sent them both home for the rest of the week while they send the body away to a bigger lab for more testing. The unofficial conclusion right now is that the woman had some as-yet-unknown disease with symptoms that reflect what the examiners saw.” He shrugged in a way that suggested he thought that the conclusion was complete bullshit.

Nancy stared at her customer for a few more moments, sure that he must be making the whole thing up to try and freak her out, but she saw no physical evidence on his face to suggest that he might be lying. “How long have those particular examiners been on the job?” she inquired, her voice quiet.

“Ah,” Ken replied, twirling a finger around the edge of his empty glass. “That was the first thing I thought as well, but one of the two has been working in the morgue for seventeen years now. The other has only been at our hospital for about ten months, but she worked at another for six years before moving here.”

Nancy nodded. How could a seventeen-year veteran on the job make that kind of insane mistake? Nearly seven years of experience was nothing to scoff at either. But of course it had to be a mistake. The woman had clearly been very much alive when she’d taken a chunk out of that boy’s neck. Nancy found herself leaning toward the somewhat-less-insane idea of an unknown illness.

They thought in silence for a long while after that. Ken stared at his empty glass, trying to decide if he’d have another. Eventually Nancy broke the silence, opting to change the subject and get her mind off the creepy story of the unknown woman. “Doing anything interesting this weekend?” she asked as nonchalantly as she could.

Ken shrugged. “There’s a hockey game I’ll probably watch, but that’s about it. You?”

Nancy thought for a moment before answering. “I think I’ll take Terri-Lynn out, maybe go shopping or something. Cheer her up, you know?”

“You’re a good friend,” Ken said with a smile. “Maybe I’ll move into your building so you can take me out when I’m sad.”

Nancy smiled and felt her face grow warm. Her brain went into overdrive, filing through all the possible clever things she could respond with, but instead she just mumbled incoherently.

“Hmm?” Ken asked, leaning forward.

With her heart skipping a beat or three, Nancy simply grinned and pretended that she hadn’t said anything at all.

Nancy had to give herself a mental pat on the back; Terri-Lynn looked significantly more cheerful after spending $300 on new clothes and shoes. Nancy, who’d settled for a nice pair of light blue runners and a cheap digital watch, shook her head and smiled at her neighbor as they lugged their purchases back to Nancy’s red four-door clunker.

“How big is your closet, exactly?” Nancy asked, laughing. “Do you have a bigger apartment than me or something? Seriously, I couldn’t fit all your clothes in my entire living room.”

Terri-Lynn snorted and grinned. “I find a way, my dear. Perhaps my wardrobe leads to Narnia!”

Their school-girlish giggles echoed off the walls of the nearly-empty underground parking garage. They’d shopped right up until closing time, and Nancy’s was one of the few vehicles left in the poorly-lit cement structure.

As Nancy squashed the bags into her trunk, she noticed that Terri-Lynn had stopped chuckling and was being unusually quiet. “What’s wro-?” she began to ask, but then she followed Terri-Lynn’s gaze. In the far corner of the lot, some sixty feet away, a tall, dark figure was shuffling very slowly in their direction. For a moment Nancy couldn’t even tell that he was moving, but as she stared she could see the small movements of his feet dragging along the cement floor.

“Hello?” Terri-Lynn called out in a meek voice. The figure didn’t reply.

“Come on,” Nancy insisted. She grabbed Terri-Lynn’s arm with authority. “Let’s go get some ice cream before the shop closes.” She didn’t know why she felt so nervous about the figure. It wasn’t as though he was rushing toward them. In fact, at his current rate of travel he might not reach them for hours.

Terri-Lynn was still staring across the lot, but she allowed herself to be pushed into the passenger side of the car. Nancy ran to the driver’s side and jabbed the key into the ignition, turning it so hard that her car cried out in protest before the engine flared to life. A Rolling Stone’s song, just loud enough to give her a mini heart attack, blared through the stereo speakers.

They had to drive past the shambling figure in order to get out of the lot. Nancy drove much faster than was necessarily safe to get away from it as soon as possible, but she couldn’t help glancing toward it as they whipped by. It was a man; he turned his head toward them as they passed, but the movement was too slow for Nancy to really see his face, and then they were gone.

The drive to the nearby Dairy Queen was a quiet one. Nancy ground her teeth the whole way, annoyed that the creepy man had freaked them out when they’d been having such a good time. He had probably just been drunk, she thought. Then again, he reminded Nancy irresistibly of the woman from the news video. She told herself that there was nothing to it, that his demeanor had just seemed coincidentally familiar enough to make her uncomfortable. The mental reassurance didn’t calm the racing of her heart.

And, unfortunately, ice cream did not offer the escape Nancy had been hoping for. The women knew something was wrong the instant they stepped into the restaurant. Though the lights were on and the door was open, the place seemed to be deserted. While leaning over the counter to see if any workers were hiding near the drive-thru window, Nancy noticed a sundae container that had been dropped and left on the floor beneath the soft-serve machine. The ice cream had long since melted and was a sticky mess all over the floor.

“Let’s just go home,” Terri-Lynn suggested. The nervousness in her voice was palpable.

Nancy turned to her friend and tried her hardest to smile reassuringly, though she thought it came out more as a frightened grimace. “Just a sec,” she insisted, and then she leaned back over the counter. “Hello?” she called, tentative. “Is anyone there?”

Terri-Lynn stood back near the garbage bins, glancing around with an uncomfortable and upset look on her face. She shifted her weight from foot to foot as though preparing to make a break for it at any moment.

Nancy thought she heard something from back behind the kitchen. After considering for a moment she lifted a leg and began to slide herself across the counter.

“What are you
doing
?” Terri-Lynn hissed.

“Shh!” Nancy shot back with a finger to her mouth. “I’ll be right back.”

Walking through the abandoned kitchen was strange and surreal. The fryers were still running, the fries in the bottom of the baskets burned black as coal. A burger was in the heating tray, waiting for the rest of the meal that would accompany it. A mop was propped up against the wall, having been slid across the floor between late-night orders.

A whimpering sound was coming from what looked like a broom closet. Nancy turned the handle slowly, paused for a second to take a breath, and then pulled the door open. A young girl, maybe sixteen or seventeen, was sitting on the floor. She had her back pressed up against the far wall of the closet, as far back as she could make herself go, and she was sobbing into her hands. When the door opened she looked up at Nancy with huge, glistening eyes. “Don’t hurt me!” she squeaked.

Nancy tried her best to smile a warm smile. “I’m not going to hurt you, hon,” she assured the girl. “It’s okay, I’ll help you.” She offered a hand and after a few long moments the girl moved one shaking arm to reach for it.

Nancy had enough time to process that the girl’s shoulder was bleeding through her crisp, white and blue work shirt when a shriek echoed through the restaurant. Terri-Lynn came hurtling toward them. Nancy stared at her with her heart in her throat and the young Dairy Queen employee shrank back into the closet. Terri-Lynn had tears brimming in her eyes and appeared to be holding back a violent gag reflex. She tried to speak as Nancy raised her eyebrows, but she could only gesture frantically toward the industrial freezer in the back.

The young employee grabbed at Nancy’s hand as she began to walk toward the freezer. “I-I had to!” she sobbed miserably. “H-he attacked me! H-he bit my arm!”