Sparrow Hill Road 2010 By Seanan(8)

He's in his early twenties, older than I look, but still so damn young. He's dressed like a thousand other roadside runaways, ripped jeans, combat boots, beat-up old leather jacket over a stained red flannel shirt. It's the jacket that gives him away. It should have been the eyes, but it's the jacket, because after fifty years following the rules that bind the hitchers to the road, I know my outerwear. I can only take jackets from the living. And the man in the doorway, the man with the gun, the man holding this entire diner of terrified, living human beings hostage?

Yeah. He's dead.

***

His eyes skip up and down the length of me with forced hunger, a leer twisting one corner of his mouth at an angle that's more pathetic than predatory. He's trying to make me uncomfortable. He's succeeding, but not because I'm afraid he'll take advantage of the fact that I'm female, smaller than him, unarmed. No; what makes me uncomfortable is the gun in his hand, which looks as solid as I do. It's clearly solid enough to wound the living--the bleeding waitress and the body or bodies I haven't seen are proof enough of that--and I don't know what a gun like that could do to me. I've never encountered anything like this before.

"Aren't you a pretty one?" he says, rhetorical question with a sneer underneath it. There's a quaver to his voice that all his painted-on confidence can't quite conceal. "So are you here for a cup of coffee, or for a cup of cock?"

The people behind me are silent, all the fire frightened out of them. The waitress in the bloody uniform is close enough that I can feel her shaking, the terror coming off her skin in waves. None of them will raise a hand to save me. That realization cuts through my own fear, turning it into fury. How dare he? This is the daylight. He has no business here.

"Coffee," I reply, canting my chin up, a challenge in my eyes. "You the fry cook on duty?"

His snort of derision is too quick, too tight with his own terror. I am not the only frightened ghost in the Starbright Diner tonight. "Do I look like a fry cook, lady? Maybe you should try talking nice to me. I have enough bullets for everybody here."

I'm running down the encyclopedia of the dead in the back of my mind, trying to find the round hole that connects to this square peg. He's not a hitcher; that coat's his own, and has no heat to loan, no solid skin to clothe a shadow in. He's not a pelesit, either; if he had a master, they'd know me, and they wouldn't be letting us talk. Too bad that leaves a couple of hundred options for what he might be, how he might have died, how he can be laid to rest and get the fuck out of my face. "No, you don't look like a fry cook." I cross my arms, cock my hip, level a flat stare in his direction. "You look like an idiot. Is this any way to hold up a diner? I mean, really. The door isn't even locked. I just walked in here like nothing was the matter. You have enough bullets for the entire highway? Because that's what it's going to take if you keep on this way."

Brief disquiet flashes across his face, there and gone like a cloud sliding past the moon. "You really think it's a good idea to sass me?"

"You really think it's a good idea to leave those doors unlocked?"

One of the hostages grabs my arm--a white-faced college boy with eyes the color of day-old coffee. There's blood splattered across the front of his University of Michigan sweatshirt. None of it's his. "Shut up," he hisses. "You're making it worse."



"I wasn't aware there was anything worse than this." I pull my arm away from him, still watching the man with the gun, still running silently through the lists of the dead. He's not a bela da meia-noite; they only come in one flavor, female, and they don't take hostages. He's not a toyol, they're always the ghosts of children, and they never seem this solid. Most of them can't even be seen by the living. "So what do you say? Can we lock the doors?"

I'm not needling him for nothing, however much it might look that way. He may posture like a living man, but he isn't one, and I need to know how far his mimicry of the human condition goes. A pissed-off ghost won't care how many people stumble into this diner; whatever grudge he has will spread to cover as many of the living as he can catch. A confused one, on the other hand, a ghost that doesn't know what's going on...

"Yeah." He licks his lips, once, before jutting out his jaw in a display of exaggerated machismo. "I think this is all the guests we need to have a real kick-ass party, huh? A real blast."

The other hostages look to me as he turns to lock the door. Some of them are glaring. Others just look lost. The air is heavy and cloying with the taste of diesel fuel and shadows, joined now by the funereal scent of lilies and the sharp-spice smell of rosemary. There's an accident ahead. For the sake of these people--for the sake of this place--I have to hope that it's an accident that I can find a way to steer us clear of.