by N. M. Brown
This upbringing, or lack of it, meant Vicki was both self-reliant and forgiving of other people’s flaws. Without the financial security of her family, she had managed to complete all of her assignments, whist maintaining an almost full-time job as a cocktail waitress in Jimmy Love’s Restaurant.
One Halloween, during the Social Studies Spooktacular Ball, Vicki and Laurie had excitedly dressed in matching zombie costumes purchased from Walmart, which made it impossible for anyone to tell them apart. Over the course of the evening, they had relished switching identities – Laurie was able to fade comfortably into the background, and Vicki got to adopt an air of confidence entirely foreign to her. She had moved crazily on the dance floor and made out at least two masked men.
Now, in the sterility of the silent beach house, Vicki’s past seemed like another life - one she yearned to somehow recreate.
Vicki hesitantly dialled the number, brushed her fringe from her eyes, and held the phone to her ear.
‘Hello?’ the voice sounded unchanged since the last time Vicki had heard it.
‘Hi, Laurie?’
‘Yep?’
‘It’s Vicki.’ She paused. ‘Vicki Reiner.’
In the momentary silence that followed, she anticipated the horror of Laurie failing to remember her at all. Perhaps the friendship had been nothing more than the convenience of sharing a living space, and Vicki had magnified it her mind. However, her doubts were dispelled, when she heard Laurie squeal with delight.
‘Oh my god, Vicki, how are you, girl?’
On the other end of the line, Vicki felt a mental sigh of relief.
‘I’m good,’ she lied. ‘How are you doing? What you up to?’
‘Ah, you know me. Same old underachiever, but with a little bit of style. I’m flipping burgers for six bucks an hour. Where are you?’
‘Still in Oceanside, still being a parasite, and still bumming around at my parents’ empty house.’
‘Well, honey, don’t you go beating yourself up about it. If I was down there on the Californian shore, I’d never want to leave, either.’
‘Actually, that’s why I’m calling,’ Vicki said, and took a deep breath.
‘Yeah?’
‘You fancy coming down to stay for a break, just for a change of scenery?’
‘You mean it?’ Laurie said in a breathless voice.
‘I really, really mean it.’
‘Hell yes!’ Laurie screeched.
2
At the same time as the sausages were starting to brown beneath the gas grill, Dennis McLean poured a ladle of golden corn oil onto the large griddle, and spread it around with an old three-inch paint brush he kept in a plastic jug next the hob for just this reason. He was a big man, and at sixty-seven years old, he was starting to carry his spreading weight like an uncomfortable burden. His wife was forever telling him to lay off the red meat, but with his own walk-in cold store filled with every type of animal, cutting back on the flesh was not an easy option.
As the oil began hiss and splatter, Dennis went to the double refrigerator and removed a rectangular Tupperware box. He then laid out several slices of streaky bacon on the hot griddle, and glanced through the emerging smoke at the numerous bodies filling the booth seats. Eddie Gee’s Diner had, as far as the chef could recall, never been so busy at 10:00 a.m. on a Monday morning. It was a small place, located three miles off the interstate, and run solely by Dennis. He would take care of the place up until noon, when his temperamental sister-in-law would help out. Although her version of helping basically involved standing at the back of the fire escape, smoking menthol cigarettes, and occasionally carrying plates of food to ravenous customers - if she felt like it.
Most early mornings the diner had a steamy rush of customers – mainly fruit pickers and farmhands - from around 7:05 a.m. until 8:40 a.m., after which things usually died down until around noon. But for some reason, today was different.
Just as Dennis had been using a grey cloth, peppered with coffee grounds, to wipe down the counter after the last of the breakfast customers had departed, the gruff rumble of the coach engine had caught his attention. He glanced up through the sheet glass windows to see the trembling silver vehicle sitting out on the parking lot, dominating the space like a big metal cuckoo. At first, he thought it was a Greyhound, lost off the highway, but on closer inspection he realised it was an older model than that.
The group of people who had emerged from the silver bus appeared to Dennis to be part of some tour, or maybe a business. The latter seemed less likely, given their mismatched appearance and lack of interaction with each other. Forming a steady stream of bodies, the visitors had come through the door, and spread around the place.
The travellers were all males, and had mostly asked for coffee – which was great, because this meant they could simply help themselves from the three Sunbeam coffee pots located on a hotplate to the side of the serving counter. However, two or three of the visitors had also requested hot food – bacon, sausage, and grits, mostly.
Dennis used a single, practised hand to break six eggs into a plastic jug, then stirred in half a quart of cream, and added a couple of handfuls of Longhorn cheese. He poured this into a cast iron frying pan, walked to the counter, and glanced at the cheques pegged on the wire. If it had been a normal morning, he wouldn’t have used paper orders – relying instead on his rusty old brain - but today, it was a necessary evil, with two dozen strangers descending on the place like a plague.
Dennis turned off the grill and plated up the food, placing each dish under the hot lights. He came around front and carefully carried the meals to the customers. Once he was finished, he returned to the service bar, took down each of the paper orders, and - with a sense of accomplishment - impaled them on the brass bill spike at the far side of the counter.
Waddling back into the tiled kitchen area, Dennis poured himself a half cup of thick, black coffee, and grimaced as he swallowed the bitter liquid. He could remember a time when he could drink a litre pot dry in one morning, but three decades of fried food washed down with coffee and Jim Beam bourbon had eroded his guts.
He picked up a cloth and erratically wiped grease stains from the various surfaces, as he glanced curiously across at the group seated by the window. He was most fascinated by the role of the younger man, who sat with the coach party.
He had arrived on a green motorcycle about ten minutes after the bus. When he walked into the diner, all of the other customers nodded to him in acknowledgement, but he didn’t appear to recognise any of them. He walked confidently to the counter, and asked Dennis for a coffee, then, while he was waiting for it, an elderly man came over to him and led him to a red leather booth seat where another two men were already seated.
The elderly man had instructed the newcomer to join them in taking a seat. For a moment, he glanced cautiously around, before he finally sat down on the opposite side of the table from the three men, whereas all of the others from the bus were scattered around the diner.
The elderly man, a larger one in a Hawaiian shirt, and a scrawny figure in a Mickey Mouse hat sat opposite the young guy. It almost looked like the young buck was being interviewed for a job. As opposed to the rest of the customers, who looked on quietly, the three amigos - as Dennis called them - seemed much more animated.
At one point, the young guy brought some type of flat computer from inside his jacket and laid in on the table. He worked his fingers across the screen, as the three amigos looked on with wide eyes. There was a great deal of explanation going on, with the young guy frowning and nodding.
Suddenly, the elderly man said something, and the youngster laughed loud enough to draw the attention of everyone in the building. The kid shook his head and stood up for a moment. Dennis figured the young guy was just about to leave, but the elderly man leaned towards him and quietly said something. Then, it was the turn of the large man in the Hawaiian shirt to laugh, and the young guy’s expression changed as he sat back down again.
They
got talking again, only this time Dennis figured the young guy looked much less comfortable than before. He said little, but nodded enthusiastically in response to everything the other three said to him.
At one point, mid-conversation, the Mickey Mouse guy glanced up, and spotted Dennis looking in their direction. He turned back to the group, and scribbled something down on a paper napkin, folding it in two and handing it to the large man. After skimming the napkin, he turned his head to look at the Dennis, and tapped his head in small salute. Dennis acknowledged the gesture with a small, self-conscious nod and focussed his attention on gathering up grease smeared plates and empty coffee cups.
Although Dennis stopped watching the group in the booth, the last thing he noticed was the elderly man slide a manila envelope across the table to the younger man. After that the youngster left, without touching his coffee, climbed back on his bike, and left in a cloud of dust and fumes. In his absence, the three amigos invited a few others from around the diner to join them at the table. When several new members had taken their seats in the booth, they all spoke quietly and intently. As Dennis busied himself with a mop – disinfecting the tiled floor behind the serving counter - he could only hear the general murmur of voices.
Eventually, the conversation in the window booth seemed to draw to a close. Without any specific announcement, the smattering of customers stood up and drifted out of the door towards the silent bus.
‘Hey,’ Dennis called to the departing travellers. ‘What about the bill?’
‘It’s okay,’ said a deep voice from over his shoulder.
Dennis turned around to find the large man in the Hawaiian shirt, standing a bit too closely behind him.
‘I’ll settle up for all of us,’ he said, with a broad smile, and pulled out a brown leather wallet from his back pocket.
‘Ah, that’s good.’ Dennis smiled, his face creasing into a labyrinth of wrinkles. ‘For a moment, I thought I was about to get hustled.’
‘Not at all,’ the large man said. ‘I just wanted to query one thing?’
‘Yeah?’
‘Who ordered that?’ the large man asked, and pointed to the last bill on the spike.
As Dennis leaned over the metal sliver, narrowing his eyes, the large man moved with the speed and agility of experience. He grabbed Dennis’s head in both hands and slammed it face-first on to the vertical spike. The large man twisted the head slightly, and held it there for a moment, the chef’s legs twitching. Then, when the legs gave way completely, the large man allowed the body to fall backwards. He leaned across the hot plate and picked up a piece of fried meat.
Tearing at the meat with his teeth, the large man stood over Dennis McLean’s body, until the spasms had dwindled to nothing. He bent down, taking the body by the feet, and dragged it through the kitchen to the walk-in refrigerator.
Before the large man in the Hawaiian shirt left the diner, he dropped the lock on the door and tilted the hanging sign to “CLOSED.”
3
At the dusty bus stop, on the edge of the cluster of lifeless homes known as Burke’s End, Laurie-Ann Taylor sighed with relief, and blew her damp fringe away from her face. Her feet were hot and she badly needed to pee. But, now, relief was within sight - she could finally see the approaching bus in the distance.
The Greyhounds and Intercity coaches that occasionally growled along Route 15 through the parched landscape were generally fitted with air-con and toilets. There remained, however, a degree of uncertainty, because today19 she would be travelling with a lesser known bus company.
It had been almost one week since Vicki had called out of the blue, and invited her down to the coast for a break from small dusty boredom. In the fourteen months since graduating college in San Diego, Laurie had done nothing other than serve coffee and burritos in the sun-bleached diner of her home-town. Her patrons were mainly locals or the occasional marine from the military camp over at Barstow.
When she had first accepted the job, she had optimistically imagined she could bring her Nikon SLR to work, and between orders, she could take dramatic portraits of American diner life. In reality, any time between orders was spent cooking, mopping, and washing. The camera only came to work for one shift, and was subsequently returned to a crushed shoebox at the back of her cramped wardrobe.
With each passing month, Laurie’s bright and ambitious college life seemed more like a vague dream than an actual memory - so the phone-call from her friend felt like a life line, thrown from the past. Vicki’s parents were both professionals, who owned a holiday apartment on Oceanside, which she apparently practically lived in now.
After an hour of reminiscing about campus life, Vicki had promised Laurie she would drive up to meet her off the bus in Escondido, and they could catch further up on the road back to the beach.
Following the call, Laurie had sat cross-legged on her bed, with her laptop in front of her, and a large glass of cheap wine on the bedside table. She had performed a search on coach prices for her intended trip.
The route from Barstow, the nearest town to Burke’s End, to Escondido was almost four-hundred miles, and a journey of over four hours. Most of the large companies charged similar prices for similar services. Laurie tried some smaller sites, too, but eventually, she settled upon taking a Greyhound, which at forty dollars for four and half hours of transport, seemed more than reasonable
However, as Laurie typed in the details of her location and ticket type, a new pop-up box appeared on the screen in front of her. It was a bright yellow window, featuring a cartoon image of a bus grinning with dust clouds coming off its wheels. The text beneath the image said, “click here for a cheaper ticket.” Laurie hit the “x” to close the window, but this only caused a full screen window to open featuring a business called Route King.
This page featured a list of bullet pointed benefits - unbeatable prices, fully air-conditioned buses, refundable tickets, and local pick up point. It was this final detail which appealed to her the most. It meant there was no need to get herself two miles east to the centre of Barstow. At the bottom of the page, in flashing red text, it stated the price of a ticket from Burke’s End to Escondido was only twenty-five dollars. The offer was just too good to refuse. Laurie took a gulp of sweet pink wine, and clicked on the button marked “purchase tickets.”
As the bus approached, Laurie checked her purse to secure her keys and cell phone whilst taking a step towards the baking road. The heat haze from the black-top was distorting the shape of the moving vehicle, melting it into little more than a grey and black mass. There was no wind to carry the distant rumbling sound, so as she narrowed her eyes against the afternoon sun the City King bus appeared, like an approaching shark, moving silently through rippling air towards her.
As the bus reached within a hundred metres or so, Laurie slung her travel bag over one shoulder, and shielded her eyes. At first, she thought the bus wasn't going to stop. In her mind, she saw it sliding smoothly by, leaving her stranded in a cloud of cartoon dust – just like their logo. However, it began to slow and as the vehicle rumbled jolted to a stop, the doors hissed open. She stepped into the darkness and smiled – the interior of the vehicle was thankfully cooler than outside.
‘Hey there.’ The driver grinned at her from behind mirrored aviator sunglasses. He wore a denim shirt and Mickey Mouse baseball cap. ‘Where you heading, sweetheart?’
‘San Diego - Escondido,’ she said, as she pulled a crumpled piece of paper bearing the Route King logo from her pocket and held it towards the man. ‘I booked online.’
Taking the paper from her, the driver lowered his glasses and peered at it intently. His eyes scoured the details. Beneath his foot, the engine continued to growl impatiently.
‘The website said to print off the details, and hand it to the driver,’ Laurie said nervously.
A frown creased the man’s face for a moment, then, the grin returned, and he slid his glasses back up his nose.
‘Well, that all looks fine,
miss. You go get yourself a seat and relax. Should be a fun trip.’
With that said, the driver turned back to the tinted windshield, pushed the gear stick and the bus lurched forward, leaving Laurie to stagger up the aisle. Having lurched from side-to-side, she slumped into the only available seat, and removed her bag. As she slipped her worn sandals from her hot feet, she had a brief glance around at her fellow passengers to check no-one appeared particularly offended by her actions.
The other travellers seemed to be oblivious to her – most were sleeping, listening to music, or staring out of the windows at the parched landscape. Directly opposite her, an elderly man with a neat moustache was reading a battered paperback edition of some Robert Bloch novel. He glanced at Laurie, smiled momentarily, then slipped back into the book.
Laurie glanced back up the aisle of the bus to see there was a bathroom halfway up. She decided she would give it a couple of minutes before she went. As she considered this, a man in the seat directly behind her leaned forward, and placed his hand on Laurie’s headrest.
‘Hi there,’ he said, his voice deep and quiet.
Laurie said nothing.
‘I said hi,’ he continued, undaunted by her resistance.
‘Hi.’ Laurie turned around quickly, then back again. It was a quick gesture designed to show disinterest. There wasn't enough time to see his face, but she got the impression of a ruddy-faced man, with lank sandy hair and a wispy moustache. She reached for her bag and removed her iPod, unravelling the headphone cable. In her experience, earphones were a great way to shut out creeps.
‘Where you heading?’ he persisted.
‘Nowhere,’ Laurie said flatly, hoping he would take the hint and piss off.
‘Looks to me like you’re travelling all alone.’ He whistled through his teeth. ‘You’re a brave young lady.’
‘I won’t be alone; I'm meeting my boyfriend.’
‘But, not your only boyfriend, though…’