The patrons loved the new menu specials, too. A few of the items had been so popular that Ronnie made brand new menus for the restaurant. Gone were the ten year old laminated menus that were so coated with grime it was hard to read the food descriptions, with prices crossed out and raised every few years in the margins to keep up with the ever-rising costs of ingredients. The new menus were pleather-bound with Ronnie’s written in gold, flowing script across the front at a jaunty angle against a background of deep red, and had three whole pages inside. The Chef’s Special section had a blank space where special-made cards could be inserted to proudly display that week’s culinary concoctions. Herb’s creation of the weekly specials had even sparked some new life for the other cooks. Coming up with something new for the menu had become a running contest. Even Bill had whipped up a couple of winners, like his Mama’s Boy PB&J, white bread with the crusts cut off and crushed up cheddar puffs sprinkled across the top of the chunky peanut butter and Concord grape jam, served with half a banana and a side of string cheese. It was all paying off, and even without the classic car show in town, Ronnie’s was doing more business than ever before. Everyone was happy. Ronnie, obviously was on cloud nine, but the wait staff were bringing in more tips, the cooks were having fun and Ronnie had even given everyone a generous raise. All in all, thought Herb, things were going pretty well.
“Order up Herby! It’s my last table, and I’d love to end on a high note. They’ve got a lot of add-ons and subs, but if you can swing it, I’ll split the tip with you,” Lois called though the window. Herb turned to see her face framed in the window, an easy smile on her cherry-red lips. Willfully banishing thoughts of her and Dallas from his mind, he smiled back.
“You bet, Lois. I’ll jump on it right now.” Snapping the ticket off the wheel, he gave it a quick glance, dropped it in the “order up” pile, and started grabbing ingredients. “They do know we have a menu, right?” he asked Lois with a laugh.
To his delight, she laughed in return. “I know, I know. But like I said, it’s my last table and I’m outta here for the night. Thanks for being a sweetie.”
Herb responded with a good natured wave as he turned back to the grill. The entire exchange had only lasted a few seconds, but the whole night had been that way. Fun, pleasant banter, Lois complimenting him on her happy tables, even a little bit of good-natured ribbing. It had been one of the best nights of Herb’s life. A quick glance at the clock on the wall told him it was quarter to one in the morning. He was scheduled until five, but there were two of them in the kitchen since they were so busy. Lois usually stayed after her shift to have a light meal. Maybe tonight, Herb could cook her up something special, and then wash up quick, throw on a clean shirt, and join her for a meal. It wouldn’t be a date, he thought. Just two coworkers enjoying a meal before she went home for the night. They’d share a meal, he’d tell jokes, she’d laugh. Just the two of them, together.
Order finished, Herb grabbed the hot plates and turned to put them up in the window, calling out, “Order Up!” and scanning the diner, waiting anxiously to meet Lois’s eyes as she wove her way back through the tables toward the kitchen. But as he laid the plates down on the stainless steel and looked out, it wasn’t Lois he saw. Instead, at a stool directly across the counter from him, sat Dallas.
Chapter 36
“Herby! How are ya?”
Herb’s heart thudded and his smile froze. Pure habit forced a, “Oh, hey there Big D,” through his clenched jaws. Lois swooshed by, grabbing the plates he’d just set in the window.
“Oh my god, Herb! These look amazing! You’re the best and you’re definitely getting half the tip!” Lois gave him a wink as she turned, plates in hand. “Hey Dal, let me drop these off and I’ll be right over,” she continued, flashing Dallas the smile Herb had coveted for himself.
“No worries, babe. Just thought I’d surprise you. I’ll jaw with Herby for a bit. Take your time.” Turning back to face Herb, he continued. “What’s up buddy? You missed a helluva good show. Me and Stanley actually got to put a ‘54 Chevy up on a lift and get underneath her skirts. Sexy sexy! Oh she was a beaut. Looks like you guys are jumping here, though. Guess it’s good you got a good day’s sleep!” Dallas gave a guffaw. “Day’s sleep. So weird. I mean, I get that you like working nights and all, but it’s still funny. Have you even seen the sun in the past month?”
Herb’s brain clicked like the stuck gears of a ten-speed. What was Dallas doing here? Why tonight? Did he and Lois have another date? Why didn’t Lois say anything? “Oh, um. You know. Guess I’ve turned into kind-of a night owl these days. Nights. I guess,” he answered. Frozen in place, he simply stared at Dallas as Lois, returning from delivering her order, took a seat at the counter next to Dallas.
“What a surprise, you stopping in. Causing trouble as always?” she jibed, propping an elbow on the table and resting her chin on her fist.
Dallas’s oily grin made Herb’s blood boil. “You know me! Always up for some trouble. I was at the car show all day, worked up a thirst, and thought you might want to, you know. Grab a little night cap after your shift. We could swing over to Stein’s. Maybe pick up on our last conversation,” he offered, wiggling his eyebrows.
Lois laughed in return. “Ok, let me see if Dee is ok with wrapping up my last table and I’ll take you up on that drink. Gimme one sec, okay hon?” As she stood to find Dee, Lois reached out a hand, placed it on Dallas’s arm. It was only there for a second, but the sight of it filled Herb’s insides with vipers and scorpions. Woodenly, he waved at Dallas, mumbled, “Well, better get back to cookin’,” and shuffled back to the grill. When Lois called in to him a few minutes later to say goodbye and to make sure Dee gave him half that table’s tip, he couldn’t even turn to face her. Head down, he focused on the food on the grill, hiding the bloody tears streaking down his cheeks.
Chapter 37
Whereas before the steady stream of orders had kept Herb in a zone of perfection, thoughts of Lois and Dallas now made each order seem like an arduous ordeal, a strain his taxed psyche could barely manage. Every time he dropped a plate on the serve-through, he’d hope for Lois’s smile and instead see Dee’s frown. Every laugh he heard from the people in the diner made him think of Dallas saying something funny and Lois lighting up in response. He could picture every minute detail of her laugh, from the way her eyes would crinkle and her perfect teeth would shine out from those cherry red lips, to the way her hair would ripple and sway across her shoulders as she turned her head. Yes, Herb could imagine every detail, but it was Dallas who was getting the actual experience. He was the one that got to bask in the glow of her smile, reap the fruits of making her laugh. Thinking of it made Herb want to punch him in the throat, shove his eyeballs back into his head and set his hair on fire. That’d be a sight, no doubt. Dallas with his rugged mane aflame, eyes bleeding, mouth opened in a scream of pain and terror. Herb could smell the singed hair, he could taste the acrid smoke, could feel the heat on the skin of his own face, pulled tight against his cheekbones in a rictus grin. The fantasy drew him in, wrapped him in rage, and fanned the flames that seemed so real now that his eyes were starting to water.
“Sonofabitch Herb! Put that out. Put it out!” Dee screamed in from the serve-through. Herb looked down to see the steak that he’d been cooking had become a shriveled, blackened lump spewing smoke and a few threatening flames as the fat and gristle started to ignite. Yelping in surprise, Herb grabbed a pot cover, slapped it over the incinerated steak and slid it to the far side of the grill. Grumbling about having to remake the steak, he waved off Dee’s complaints and stalked back to the walk-in cooler for a fresh piece of dead flesh. Standing in the cooler, his fists clenched and unclenched as he fought to control his breathing and will his fangs back to normal size. Dallas. It was Dallas. He was ruining everything.
Herb couldn’t take it. He had to get out of Ronnie’s, out of the kitchen, away from everyone. The rush had tapered off, so they really only needed one cook
in the kitchen anyway. With the blackened steak in the food scraps bin as evidence of his foul mood, Herb told Dee and Hector he needed to leave early and stomped across the pavement to the side of Ronnie’s parking lot, where his Pinto waited patiently. Sliding behind the wheel, Herb cranked the starter, gunned the engine and whipped a tight circle toward the road, the little car’s wheels brong brong bronging as he turned. Hands clenched on the steering wheel, he decided it was time to feed.
A few miles toward town, Herb was cruising down a dark stretch of the highway wondering who he would eat tonight. Maybe he’d swing by Stein’s, see if any left-over classic car aficionados were playing pool and talking mufflers and running boards, 8-ball gear shift knobs and fuzzy dice before calling it a night. Or he could linger in the shadows outside of Nekked’s, and nab some unsuspecting trucker or frat boy with his drunken friends. While appealing, he quickly discarded the idea. His last visit to Nekked’s had not gone well.
Herb toyed with the idea of popping into the local jail, putting the whammy on the overnight deputy, and munching on one of the drunks sleeping off a bender. Drink-a-drunk had become a sort of weird indulgence. Ever since his first bloody Mary, Herb had developed a bit of a taste for mixing alcohol and blood. Through experimentation, he had recently discovered he could get a little tipsy if he drank from a thoroughly inebriated sot. Yeah, he thought, a little nightcap would be just the thing. Take the edge off. And sneaking a drunk from right under the nose of the local authorities was exactly the kind of rebellion Herb’s bruised soul needed this night.
Destination set, he continued down the darkened highway, wondering which of Trappersville’s finest would be passed out in the drunk pen tonight. Dark, heavy clouds matched Herb’s mood as they rumbled with deep-voiced threats high above and began dumping rain on the world below, but Herb didn’t bother slowing down. His preternatural eyesight and inhuman reflexes more than made up for the car’s balding tires as they occasionally skidded on the slick pavement. A reckless drive through the building summer storm was a welcome distraction from his earlier thoughts.
Despite the sluicing rain, Herb saw the tail lights far down the road. In addition to the solidly burning red of the tail lights, he could discern a rhythmic amber blinking. It wasn’t long before he realized that he wasn’t just catching up to a vehicle. Rather, the lights were off the side of the road a ways, immobile. Squinting just a bit, he could make out the shape of the rear of a vehicle, a pickup truck. Mostly upside down, it listed at an angle in the roadside ditch. Pushing the struggling Pinto past its limits, Herb raced down the final stretch toward the scene of the accident. Despite the rain and his dangerous speed, his keen eyesight was able to pick out the swerve marks in the highway, first left into oncoming traffic, then right toward the ditch, left again and once more to the right where the truck crossed the dirt shoulder into the taller grass alongside the road. Deep ruts in the soil, softened by the rain, showed two more tight swerves. Slamming on the breaks as he neared the tumbled truck, he was able to see the large chunk of rock half buried in the dirt just off the road, a remnant of the old glaciers that had carved out the landscape thousands of years before even Herb’s Maker had cried for his all-too-human mother’s ministrations. The unfortunate truck’s front tire must’ve struck the small boulder when it was turned mid-swerve, bucking the truck into the flip and tumble that had left it testicles-up in the night-shrouded ditch.
Testicles up? thought Herb, realizing that the strange blinking he’d noticed a couple mile earlier was the result of a turn signal being reflected by a giant pair of chrome testicles attached to the truck’s trailer hitch. Who would put testicles on a truck for Chrissake? That’s just trashy...
As the Pinto finished its squealing stop alongside the truck, Herb’s eyes opened wide in shock. His headlights caught the reflective sign on the truck’s front door, proclaiming it as the property of That Blows HVAC.
Deloris. Dallas’s truck Deloris. The pieces fell like tumblers in the gummy lock of Herb’s brain. If that was Dallas’s truck, and Lois was with Dallas...
Not allowing himself to think any more, Herb climbed out of the Pinto and leapt into the air, landing on the far side of Deloris. Bending over, his worst nightmare took focus before his eyes, only to go all fuzzy again as his eyes welled up with bloody tears. Just inside the mud spattered glass was Lois. She dangled upside down and unconscious in the passenger seat, trapped by the seatbelt that had kept her from smashing through the windshield. Herb could see Dallas just past her, stuck in the same gravity-defying pose, a hell-bound roller-coaster passenger frozen at the top of the loop de loop. Airbags hung toward the inverted truck’s ceiling, looking like the sloughed off skins of bloated, molting lizards. Lois’s arms hung at awkward angles above her head, one shoulder bare and lace bra showing through where her t-shirt had been stretched and torn by the neckline. Lois’s golden locks also hung down, streaked now with blood that flowed slowly but steadily from a nasty gash stretching from just over her ear, across her temple and along her waxed eyebrow. Dizzy with the scent of so much fresh blood, Herb shook his head to clear the fog of indecision. He’d been through more than a few fender-benders over the years and was fairly adept at trading insurance information, but nothing had prepared him for how to handle an upside down pickup trapping the unconscious girl of his dreams inside. Herb knew that he had to do something and he had to do it fast, but had no idea what specifically to do.
He didn’t want to smash the door’s window for fear of hurting Lois more than she already was. The windshield was a web of cracks and would probably be easy to kick in, but again he worried about shoving more broken glass toward her. The back window was an option. If he punched it in, most of the glass would fall to the rear of the upside down truck’s ceiling, but dragging her across the broken glass and pulling her out the much smaller rear window seemed like a rotten option as well. Focusing instead on the door, grasping the handle, he pulled, but couldn’t get it to budge. Bracing his feet in the slippery grass, he planted one palm on the side of the doorframe and wrapped the other around the door’s handle. Taking a deep breath, he pulled with all his more-than-human strength, groaning with the strain as the tendons in his shoulders popped and creaked and the veins on his neck stood out like cables. After a few tense moments, all he was rewarded with was a sudden snap as the handle wrenched free from the door, tumbling Herb into the ditch. Scrambling back to his feet, he clawed his way back up to the side of the truck. Hand placed against the glass, panic started to boil up as he watched the droplets of blood run down strands of blond hair and drip onto the felt cover of the ceiling, like grains of liquid sand flowing inexorably through the hourglass.
Herb had to get in there, he had to save her, but the door wouldn’t budge. The frame must’ve bent when the truck rolled, jamming the door. Herb roared in frustration. What good was being super strong if he couldn’t even open a pickup truck door? She’d be dead soon if he didn’t do something. All that blood...
Blood.
Herb whipped around and crawled under the bed of truck to the back window. Curling his fingers, his fist shot out and shattered the pane of glass. Lying on his side, he stretched his arm into the truck, reaching toward the back of Lois’s chair. Ducking his head inside the window, ignoring the sharp pain as shards of glass gouged his armpit and scalp, he reached forward and grasped the headrest. Pulling and sliding and wriggling forward, his groping fingers finally found their destination and traced along her temple, above her ear. Drawing his bloodied fingers back, he stuck them in his mouth and sucked. Reaching forward again, he covered his fingers in Lois’s blood, moving more aggressively now as the blood started to keen in his veins. Bringing the fresh blood back to his mouth, he sucked hungrily again on his fingers. The cuts and scratches he’d suffered sliding through the broken glass started to close of their own accord, and Herb had to reduce his frantic suckling to one finger at a time to avoid biting off his own fingers with his spear-sharp fangs.
&nb
sp; Whispers rumbled in his head as the now-familiar quickening consumed Herb. Pushing himself back out of the window, coiling back like a viper preparing to strike, he cleared the truck bed and rose to his full height. Veins thrumming, he moved back to Lois’s door. Herb’s clawed fingers grabbed, his shoulders flexed and pulled, and the door wrenched open with a vicious screech. Another yank and the door snapped from its hinges. Twisting to the side, Herb flung the door across the ditch into the woods on the far side. He was distantly aware of a sharp clang and muffled thud as the door struck a tree trunk and rebounded into the dirt, but Herb was too focused on Lois to give it much thought. Reaching in, he used one hand to free the seatbelt clasp while the other arm caught her falling body. Careful not to move her too much, he rolled her into his arms and hunched over, backing out of the truck.
Herb set Lois gently on her back on the rain-soaked grass. He leaned in close, pressed his ear against her chest and was rewarded with the faint but regular tha-thump of her heartbeat. A shuddering exhale wracked Herb’s body as he pulled back. Her beautiful face was drawn and pale, dark circles rimmed her eyes and her hair clung in blood-soaked tendrils. The gash across her temple and brow still oozed sticky red. Putting a finger gently to the cut, Lois moaned in pain. The sound went through Herb, twisting his insides into knots of fury. To see her in pain was more than he could bear. Without another thought, he raked his hand across his incisors and opened a gash across his palm. Reaching forward before the gash could start to heal, he pressed his bloodied palm to her forehead, ran his hand gently along the cut in her scalp. When he first made contact, Lois groaned again, her still-unconscious features contorting in pain. But suddenly, the pained grimace was gone, almost as if the steady rain had washed her face clear of emotion, leaving behind peaceful repose. As Herb’s hand passed, the wound on Lois’s skull mended and closed, leaving behind unbroken skin and smears of blood which the rain was steadily erasing with each new drop.
Monsters in the Midwest ( Book 1): Wisconsin Vamp Page 19