The Girl Who Would Be King(115)

Everyone – even the couple, though not split from each other - seem split from the world. As if this diner is the only place on Earth awake. Or maybe we aren’t even on Earth anymore. Maybe we’re all in some abandoned space station truck stop in the empty universe on a space road to nowhere.

I sit, confused, drowning myself in the bitter warmth for a good five minutes before I start to feel the heat in my chest again. With the heat comes the inevitable nausea. Not as strong as the first time, but it must be showing on my face because the kind waitress comes over and touches my hand.

“You okay, honey?” she asks, genuinely concerned. I look past her to the man walking into the diner. And there it is.

It rises off him like the stench of barnyard animals packed together in summer heat. I think even the waitress feels it a little bit because I see gooseflesh bump up on her delicate skin where she has reached out to me, and her breath catches somewhere in her throat. She shakes it off though, smiles like a consummate professional, and moves to greet him. But I grab her arm, a little too hard, perhaps.

“Don’t,” is all I say, never taking my eyes off him. She’s surprised, but her instincts must be good because she doesn’t panic and she doesn’t pull away from me. I look away from him only to gaze into her eyes. She looks back at me and understands on some level. She nods almost imperceptibly and gives me a crooked half-smile, pouring a little more coffee, her hand shaking just enough for the glass carafe to bang lightly against my ceramic cup. He’s walking toward me, and I feel myself tensing up, trying to figure out the perfect math equation that’s going to make this all go away.

I’m over-thinking, for sure.

He sits down at the counter, one stool away. I can reach out and touch him if I want to. Something about him reminds me of Lola, but I can’t put my finger on what. He turns over his coffee cup on the saucer, silently soliciting service. The waitress, ‘Pam,’ according to her nametag, stands uncertainly in front of me. I nod at her lightly to go ahead and she slides the short distance over to him and wordlessly offers up the coffee. He shakes his head no and points to the decaf carafe, which has just finished brewing at the other end of the counter. Pam nods politely and fetches the decaf for him and dutifully pours. I wait as if balancing on the edge of a razor blade, unsure if one way or the other is better to fall, but certain that standing directly on the blade is no damn good. When she’s done Pam’s gaze flicks over to me briefly and then she retreats to the kitchen.

I’m racking my brain trying to figure out how to play this. The sound coming off of this guy is so intense it feels thick between us. I wonder, for a moment, if he can feel it too.

When the burning hot liquid hits me in the face I had no idea it was coming.

Where the hell my great senses were to avoid that I have no idea.

I don’t know how much time has passed before I get myself back together, it can’t have been long, but it feels like an eon. I’ve never been burned like that before and it’s horrible, almost worse than the drowning. It feels like somehow my body is both dying and rebuilding itself at once. I don’t remember screaming, but when I finally look up everything has gone to shit. I’m not where I should be if I fell off the stool, but I don’t know why anyone would have moved me. It seems like things shouldn’t be this bad if I was only out for a minute and it shouldn’t have taken longer than a minute for me to get myself together after the boiling water. But then I feel my forehead.

I think he shot me in the head.

Sure enough, I look up at my reflection in the chrome of one of the stools and I can see the wound slowly healing itself, a raised red scar where the bullet must have entered and a smattering of blood on my face mixed with the grotesque, healing burned flesh. “Sonofabitch,” I say to myself. I’m suddenly offended and pissed that he would just shoot me in the head. It seems very planned and I don’t understand what that means. But there’s enough screaming that I’m forced to turn my attention back to the chaos in the diner.

The man has moved away from me and, of course, because nothing is ever easy, he has the child in one hand and the child’s mother literally under his boot. I don’t know how long he’s had them this way, but long enough that the diner is eerily absent of the child’s screaming and he’s turning a bit blue as he dangles from his own little hoodie sweatshirt.

There’s a gun on the counter, which he must have used on me, but he also has some kind of automatic weapon. Looking at this man, paying closer attention to him, I realize that unlike the junkies I’ve dispatched in my past, or the petty thieves and thugs, and even the would-be rapists, this man is something different. There’s something more deliberate and thus scarier about him. It doesn’t feel as if I’ve just been called to the scene of something horrible. It feels like I was drawn here, deliberately. I shake off the paranoia look at my burned hands to see the flesh knitting itself back together again like magic skin. It doesn’t feel good, and it looks terrifying. I get an idea.