Darkheart

The Present: Mom & Pop

Mom & Pop's had years ago replaced the known-for-its-fries Deb's Diner, just a short ways out of Port Killdeer. The four of them arranged to meet around seven o'clock, desirous of avoiding too many people in town who might recognize them. It'd been difficult for Cris to convince Jeremiah to go. After he'd shrieked and scrambled out from under her crawl space going on about some feral girl and a dead animal, she'd marched inside, retrieved her shotgun, and squirmed under the house herself, but by then, the child had vanished. Cris had no doubt she'd really been there, though; for as unstable as her old friend seemed, he hadn't hallucinated or mistaken the raccoon for something more sinister. No, that damned girl had been showing up on Cris's property more and more frequently, a reminiscence of the past, a harbinger of what was to come. Her presence opened a chasm of resistance in the woman, a desire to exterminate the thing, which was no child at all but some mockery of all that had been, as if they didn't trust Cris to return, as if they'd sent their minion to watch over her.

Jeremiah, who'd not been mentally prepared for the girl, had about lost it. He'd adamantly refused to stay with Cris, even as hesitant as he'd been to return home, and she'd had a hard time convincing him the following day to get back into her truck and drive out to the diner in order to meet Kevin and Heather. But she'd managed, after much coaxing and no small amount of threatening, and they'd arrived ten minutes before their set time.

"Do you really think they'll come?" the man asked sullenly, fumbling nervously with the silverware on the table.

"For the hundredth time, yes," Cris replied, her words in competition with the gently rumbling thunder far above them, presaging rain. "There's no way they'd come back just to try to avoid this. None of us can avoid it. I know you know that."

Jeremiah slid back against the booth, closed his eyes. He looked about as on edge as a caged cat. Pressing his hands to his face, stamping one of his heels repetitively so that the table wobbled, he groaned. "I can't do this. I wanted to be dead, but it didn't work out. I just can't--I don't want to do this again."

Cris hushed him. "Don't talk so loud. Nobody wants to hear about you wanting to be dead, okay? At least you got out of this place for a while. I've had to stay here the entire time while you got to go live a normal life for a while. So don't expect any sympathy from me about not wanting to be here."

He drew his hands away, down to his knees, and quieted himself into a resignation of sorts. Turning to the windows, to the storm-thick skies outside, he sighed. "I didn't have a normal life, whatever that might mean. It was always there, always in the back of everything."

Cris didn't know how to respond to him, so she didn't. Whatever his experience had been, she envied it. Even if he'd lived in the rattiest place doing the worst job, no money, no friends, no family--she envied it. Why she'd been forced to stay behind was beyond her. Of course, none of it mattered, now. She could stop wondering whether they'd gotten away; clearly, they hadn't. All three were back. And while Cris hadn't yet seen Heather or Kevin, if they were as unstable as Jeremiah, she might be the most sane of the bunch.

Rubbing the back of her teeth with her tongue, Cris found herself staring hard at the man across from her. Some mix of empathy and vexation twisted her thoughts. Jeremiah had never been particularly strong. Oh, he'd had a self-assurance uncommon in an adolescent; unlike her, he'd never worried what others thought of him or whether he appeared attractive or weird to other teenagers. He'd been able to strike up a conversation with absolutely anyone, no regard to age or status. But the more Cris had gotten to know him, the more she'd discovered his telling quirks, particularly his possibly unhealthy interest in the post-mortem anatomy of small animals and his menagerie of indeterminate phobias, including a constant yet quiet paranoia of losing control of any aspect of his physical self. The two of them had spent countless hours as fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds watching a variety of horror movies, and while she'd used to appreciate a quality story over a quantity of gore, Jeremiah had been the opposite, expressing an almost unsettling interest in observing the ways bodies could be abused.