Chapter Thirty-Five
I’m at the wheel of my truck, parked in a sequestered lot. Tucked behind the shadows of the town's hardware store, I sit directly across from the glowing red and pink building of Devil's Diner.
“Rosemary” by Deftones is low through my speakers, the guitar echoing softly in my ears. My eyes are bone-dry, and I have to force myself to blink.
I’m watching Laiken carry a clear decanter filled with swamp water toward the far back wall. Though, I’m not quite sure where she is taking it, the place had emptied hours ago.
I grit my teeth, straighten in my seat. With a raised chin, I clasp onto the battered wheel in front of me, pressing my core to the center. My blurry eyes attempt to follow the path she takes, but it proves to be my one and only blind spot.
With an agitated exhale, I slump back into my seat, sling my wrist over the wheel and begin bouncing my left knee. It is an anxious tic, a ‘get in there motherfucker’ tic.
My eyes razor to the dash, my face heats, and in glowing orange, 5:51 stares back at me.
The ache in my chest grows, I attempt shifting it with my thumb when I clock the time again.
5:59.
Eight minutes too long.
My heart, I realize, is drumming too hard in my throat. I rip the keys from the ignition, fold myself out of the truck.
The beat-up soles of my Vans brush the blacktop as I jog across the road, straightening the weathered gray tank hanging loosely off my shoulders.
I spear my trembling hands through my wind-rustled hair, shoving it behind my ears and when my fingers skim the entrance door to the diner, a sound I knew all too well forces my body to turn stone still.
A sharp crack.
A gunshot.
I feel the haunted vibration deep in the tips of my fingers, and where most people would hear the same sound and run in the opposite direction, take the warning, listen to the threat, my only instinct is to run toward it…toward her.
The way I couldn’t, three years ago.
The door flies open, crashing against the glass panel with force, and the smell of gunpowder instantly hits me like a punch to the nose.
I’m through the room faster than I can register, until the scene freezes me.
It’s as though I hit a double-glazed wall of glass and bounce right off it. Because what my eyes see next is a memory I’d much rather forget.
A drop of sweat slides down my back and my heart tumbles like a stone to my stomach.
Laiken’s back is to me.
She’s not moving, sitting opposite a…corpse in the same booth.
The back of a guy's skull is blown open. There is blood splattered everywhere and dangling bone, and I swallow so hard I hear my throat tick.
Did she? Fuck.
I stumble forward and I’m beside Laiken, skidding on one shaky knee, my trembling hands reaching for her, becoming a bracket to the sides of her ashen face. She doesn’t turn toward me though. I’m unsure if she even feels me.
Her eyes are jammed closed, blocking out the gruesome scene that now paints every wall and surface in front and around us.
“Laik,” I rasp, pausing when my voice gets stuck. “Look at me, Laik, look at me.”
Her head swivels toward me and it’s almost robotic. Her eyes remain closed. Tears roll streams of red down her cheeks.
Her chest doesn’t move though.
Her cries are soundless.
Clumps of flesh and pieces of bone and gray matter, and so much blood cling to her, buried in her hair, dangling at her eyelashes.
I reach for the bottom of my tank to help clear some of the mess away, at the same time she reaches for my wrist.
“Ch-ch-chase,” she whispers, voice wobbling, barely there.
The storm in her hand coils around my every bone, sinking beneath my skin.
I unknowingly brush my thumb across the high point of her cheekbone, scraping a piece of…something away, threading my fingers into her hair.
“It’s me, Laik. You can open your eyes.” My voice trembles when her wet lashes slowly peel open, revealing her familiar haunted green irises.
They clash with my dark ones, and there’s a brief pause, a stilted moment where silence fills the cracks left between us. Her eyes oscillate back and forth, and I expect she might shove me away.
Instead, she says, “He-he shot himself.” Her bottom lip quivers, and without thinking, I place my thumb to the center.
Instantly, it stops. Her mouth pops open slightly at my touch, her eyes dropping to my thumb against her bottom lip. She swallows, her mouth not moving, only her throat, then her eyes, as they flick back to mine.
She looked so different. So broken, so scared, so familiar, so unfamiliar.
Who was she now?
A heightened and frenzied voice comes from behind me, and I blink, letting my hand slip away.
“Yeah, some crazy fuck just shot himself inside the diner.”
I turn over my shoulder to see the Devil’s Diner head chef, Randy, with the corded landline pressed to his ear. He’s watching me and Laiken, while I watch him.
I know Laiken hasn’t taken her eyes from me though. I can feel them set like concrete on my neck.
“Yeah, okay, can do, thanks,” Randy says, voice raspy.
I turn back to Laiken at the same moment she whispers, “It sounded so much like I remember.”
At that, the organ in my chest severs right down the middle.
I bite my lip, and fight back the guilt.
I couldn’t protect her then, and I couldn’t protect her now. The one night I promised myself that I would.
I should have kept her closer.
All words evade me and I find myself reaching for her instead, pulling her against my thumping chest and pushing my nose to the top of her head. I sink my fingertips through her snow-white hair, which is now stained a pale shade of crimson.
And this time, when I reach for her, she doesn’t reach for me. But she doesn’t pull away either, and I have to be okay with that.
Her arms remain pressed to her side, head to my chest when one controlled, yet quiet cry slips through her lips. I feel it push beneath my ribs at the same time a splinter of cold recognition wedges into my spine.
I lift my chin and squint when I notice the rust-colored blanket from the night I spent in lock-up, draped around the guy with his brain now plastered across the light pink wall.
My brows pinch together, face contorting as the vivid memory of his words settle like an anvil on my chest.
“Pray, boy, all we can do is…pray.”
Reeling pictures of him spinning around and running himself into the opposite wall follows.
Who was he?
I force myself to swallow, trying my best to dislodge the tightness in my throat.
And why did he blow his head off?
A shiver, then a ghostly voice whispers, and I realize as the words stutter…they are his.
“Doomed, doomed, doomed.”