Authors: Jonah Hewitt
Tim leaned in closer and whispered, “How do you know?! Can you read his mind?”
“No,
doofus!
I just know the ‘cop voice’ when I hear it!” Sky whispered back.
“But why send a plain clothes cop?!”
“To flush out the morons! They are counting on the criminals being stupid! Now shut up!”
All three of them cautiously leaned over out of the booth to take a closer peek at the stranger. Sure enough, two uniformed state troopers walked in right behind him. They slowly retreated back into the booth and out of view.
“What do we do now?!” Tim’s hoarse whisper revealed a hint of panic.
“Nothing! Just be cool for once! Okay?!” Sky admonished him.
The two state troopers started to fan out across the room. The man kept talking.
“We would really like to talk to the owner of that vehicle if he’s here.”
The customers responded with silence.
“The vehicle in question was involved in a possible hit and run in Harrisburg this evening not far from the Harrisburg Hospital.”
Tim winced. Sky didn’t react until he heard what the cop had to say next.
“The same vehicle was possibly involved in the theft of several bodies from the morgue of Jefferson University Memorial Hospital in Philadelphia yesterday.”
Sky’s eyes widened on Tim who was cringing under the withering gaze.
Tim tried to defend himself, “Dude! I was having a hard enough time showing Hokharty how to use a zipper! How was I supposed to tell him about surveillance cameras?!!”
“You might have told
us
!” Sky whispered from behind his coffee mug.
The cop went on, “There were also several bodies stolen from the Harrisburg Hospital morgue, so we suspect it may be the same culprit.”
Sky shot an accusatory look at both of them, but Tim and Miles just gave back looks that said, “Don’t look at us!” or “We had nothing to do with that!”
Unfortunately, the cop wasn’t even close to finished. “Is there anyone here by the name
Miles
Killam
? Anyone?”
Miles didn’t think Sky’s eyes could get any wider, but they did. Miles shrunk further into his seat. Sky didn’t need to speak for Miles to know exactly what he was thinking. “HOW. ON. EARTH! Do they know your name?!!”
Miles realized Sky was waiting for an explanation.
“Um, mates, I might have left me jacket in the hospital.”
“And it had your NAME written in it?!” Even though he didn’t have a pulse, Sky still looked like a vein was about to burst in his forehead.
“Aye…it did.” Miles winced as if awaiting a blow from Sky.
Instead, Sky became strangely calm as if the horror of that revelation had made him numb to its stupidity. “What? Did your mommy not want you to get it lost on your first day of vampire pre-school?” he said sarcastically.
“Sky…” Miles started to explain, but he didn’t get very far.
“No, Miles!” Sky’s anger returned. “We are vampires!! We are shadows! We are legends! We do not exist! We do not carry ID and we sure as heck don’t write our names in our underwear!!”
“Well, technically it was his jacket,” Tim added.
“Shut up, Tim!!” Sky shot back.
The cop dropped one more revelation. “Well folks, this is more than just a case of a couple of sickos stealing bodies. That would be bad enough, but we have an amber alert situation here.”
Sky went rigid, but Tim put his head in his hands. The cop went on.
“A young girl was abducted from the Harrisburg Hospital a little over three hours ago. A doctor was assaulted as well. We believe the victim is in the custody of the same characters who stole those bodies and drove off in that Impala, so if you have any information, we would very much appreciate it.”
No one in the diner volunteered anything.
The cop took a breath. “Well, we’d really like to nail these two scumbags, so if you don’t mind, we’d like to interview each and every one of you in turn, ask you a few questions. So just sit tight, don’t worry, and we’ll hopefully have you on your way in a few minutes.” He then turned to the man at the counter and asked, “Do you got a back door here?”
“Yeah…it’s in the
back
.”
A few exchanged nods later and one of the state troopers was already following the cashier back into the kitchen to secure the back door, while the other stood directly in front of the main door, barring the last exit. The cop in the tweed jacket then went to the nearest booth and started asking questions.
Tim started freaking out. “This is bad…this is really, really bad!”
“No, Tim, it’s worse than that,” Sky interjected, “They have the registration on your car. It won’t take them that long to match that up to your file at the hospital. After that it’s just a matter of time before they come up with a photo of you and you’re nailed.” Tim blanched, but Sky wasn’t finished. “But, oh! It gets worse!”
“Worse?” Tim seemed horrified.
“Don’t you guys remember?!!” Sky was really annoyed now. “I just spent the last twenty minutes asking people about a thirteen-year-old girl and her mother! How long before you think someone in here passes on
that
little piece of information and fingers us?!”
“Omigosh!” Tim went to bite a french fry and bit his finger instead. He was not handling this well.
“We have minutes, MINUTES! At most before we get nailed. We have to get out of here. NOW.” Sky began nervously eyeing the room but all the obvious avenues were blocked. Miles could tell his mind was working furiously but there weren’t many options left.
“Well, you’re vampires right?!” Tim asked desperately, “Can’t you just, y’know, move at superhuman speed and blow right by that guy?!” Tim tossed his head in the direction of the large state trooper barring the front door.
Sky sighed,“Yeah, I can blow by Smokie the Bear over there, no problem, and chances are, even a lousy vampire like Miles could too.”
“Oy!” Miles protested. After the last two fights this evening he didn’t think he deserved that. Maybe Sky was just jealous he couldn’t turn into a smoke-dog-monster-thing.
Sky ignored him. “But what about
you
?! What are we supposed to do with you? Stand in front and back of you like the bread in a Tim sandwich?! I may be a vampire, but I ain’t bulletproof!”
“Oh,” Tim said with dawning realization.
“And what if we do bust you out of here?! They still have your name,
Tim
!” he said ‘Tim’ especially snidely. “They’ve probably got warrants with reckless driving, stealing corpses,
and
kidnapping a minor all written up with YOUR name on them.” He ticked the charges off on his fingers as Tim shuddered with each new horror. “Do you really want to add evading arrest and assaulting an officer to that list?! Or are you still under the delusion that you could
ever
go back to your old normal life.”
“But…Hokharty said…”
“He’s a vampire, Tim! We lie to people and then we bleed them, first for favors and then for actual blood. It’s what we do.”
Tim had just put a french fry into his mouth, but it fell out onto his plate when his jaw went slack and his lower lip started to tremble.
“Oh good grief, don’t tell me he’s gonna start crying.” Sky rolled his eyes and shot a glance at Miles. “Do something, will you?”
Miles reached across the table and punched Tim in the arm hard. That seemed to bring him back around.
“Ow….um thanks,” Tim said rubbing his arm. Then he quickly shoved another pancake into his mouth and topped it off with a bite of cheeseburger and some more shake. If this was his last meal as a free man, he was going to enjoy it. The cop was already making his way to the next table. Sky stiffened a little.
“Don’t lose it
yet,
Tim,” Sky said.
Tim nodded weakly.
Miles could tell Schuyler was nervous. Sky was running his fingers through his hair but not in his usual vain way. “What we need is a distraction…and
fast.”
His eyes were darting around the room looking for an exit, but Miles could tell nothing was coming to him. That’s when they heard it.
“So you guys are vampires?”
All three of them stiffened and looked at each other. The voice had come out of nowhere. The cop wasn’t anywhere near them yet. Besides it wasn’t a man’s voice. It was younger, and stranger, with a weird foreign accent Miles had never quite heard before.
“I’ve never met a vampire before.”
It was the voice again. This time Miles could tell it came from the booth behind him. The booths were rather tall, so Miles slid to the end of the seat and craned his neck around the edge of the booth to take a look. There in the booth behind him was an odd-looking boy in heavy eyeliner. He was thin but not too old, maybe twelve or so. His head was nearly shaved except for a single, long black lock on one side. He was wearing a white robe and he had a pile of food bigger than Tim’s in front of him. There was a cheeseburger, fries and onion rings, but also a plate of meatloaf and mashed potatoes, sides of bacon and hash browns
and
a country fried steak, biscuits and gravy under what looked like a large lake of mustard, a half-eaten slice of apple pie with ice cream and a stack of pancakes he was currently squeezing ketchup on to. This was in addition to several plates that were already empty. He wasn’t using utensils of any kind but he was just shoving it in with his hands with even less decorum than Tim had when eating. He looked up at Miles and smiled with a mouth full of ketchup-covered pancakes. His eyes were brown, but dim and cloudy like he was half blind. It was bloody creepy weird and Miles began to back away before he bumped into Tim and Sky who had slid up right behind him to take a closer look themselves.
Miles jumped. “Ach! Saints ‘n Angels, Sky!”
“Relax, Miles,” Sky said in a whisper, “He’s probably just some emo-vampire-groupie wannabe. Check out the eyeliner. They get younger every year.” Sky walked around to the end of the boy’s table. He shot a look over his shoulder, the cop wasn’t looking this way yet so he went back to looking at the boy intently. “So, kid, what makes you think we’re vampires?” Sky asked folding his arms across his naked chest.
“Well…you
are,
aren’t you?” The boy shoved a handful of mashed potatoes into his wide-open mouth and kept chewing while he was dumping mustard onto the apple pie and ice cream, all while making noises of unrestrained enjoyment. “Mmmmm! That’s wonderful!”
Sky eyed him curiously. “How do you know we weren’t just talking? Vampire’s just a word, kid. Maybe ‘vampire’ is just the name of our club, like the ‘Werewolves’ or the ‘Zombies.’”
“Or ‘Mermaids,’” Tim added out of nowhere.
Sky blinked furiously, forcing himself to say nothing, but Miles could hear his teeth grinding.
The kid got a perplexed look on his face and looked at each of them as if he was suddenly uncertain. Then he did the oddest thing. He screwed up his face, and with his eyes scrunched up tight, he turned to ‘look’ at each of them with his peepers completely closed. Then he opened them again and smiled around large mouthfuls of half-chewed food.
“Nope. Definitely vampires. Well,
he’s
not,” he said pointing a food-covered finger at Tim, “but you two definitely are.” He paused, and then exclaimed, “This food is amazing!” Then after shoving more mash potatoes into his mouth with his hands, he gave another weird smile and said, “Hey, you haven’t seen a set of bagpipes walking here around, have you?”
The three of them exchanged odd looks.
“He’s bloody barkin’ he is!” Miles whispered to Sky, but Sky smiled a wry smile and peeked over his shoulder towards the plainclothes cop and the state trooper. Miles didn’t need to read his mind to know what that meant. Sky had found his distraction. Sky quickly shoved Miles into the booth and slid in beside him. Tim grabbed his shake and the red plastic basket holding the remains of his fries and burger from their table and slid in beside the strange boy, who looked a little surprised but obligingly slid over to let him sit down.
“So, you know we’re vampires,” Sky said somewhat menacingly.
“Yes,” said the boy, who watched Tim dunk his fries in his shake with fascination.
“And you’re not scared?”
“Nope.” The boy ignored Sky but dunked his fries in Tim’s shake so far he got vanilla shake all over his fingers. Tim looked a little chagrined, but let it pass. “I thought I might be, but somehow it doesn’t bother me anymore.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’m already dead,” he said flatly. “Wow, that’s good! Better than honey-cakes!” he said, eating the vanilla shake off the fries and his fingers.
Whatever Sky expected him to say, it wasn’t that. He decided to take a different tack.
“And how can you tell we’re vampires?” Sky asked curiously.
“Easy,” he said licking the shake off each of his fingers in turn. “You don’t have souls. Well, not your whole souls anyway.”
Miles and Sky exchanged glances.
“Pardon me?” Sky said, somewhat affronted.
“Um…yeah…” the boy said distractedly, deciding what delicacy to try next. “Your chests are full of shadow where your hearts should be.” He grabbed the chicken-fried steak and went to dunk it in Tim’s shake, but Tim pulled the shake away. The kid shrugged and dunked it in the mash potatoes instead. “In vampires, the
Yib
or heart or whatever you call it here leaves at death, leaving the shadow behind to take the seat of the
Yib
.”