Page 79 of Love Bites

I headed out the back door of the restaurant. Even if that creep from earlier was sticking around waiting for me, it was unlikely that he’d think to come to the back. And there was a pretty obvious security camera right over the door that would make anyone think twice about trying to pull anything.

I stepped into the cold night and took a deep breath of the fresh air.

Fresh was probably a relative term, Pottsboro wasn’t exactly a picture of bucolic splendor. But the air was free of the greasy weight of the diner, which made it fresh enough for me.

I cut through the little alleyway that led toward home.

When I reached the end, I had a choice - walk the long way on the sidewalk and be home in twenty minutes, or cut through the cemetery and be home in ten.

My Chem book seemed to weigh about a hundred pounds in my backpack and the styrofoam box with my dinner was warm in my hands. It would be so nice to eat it before it fully congealed.

I marched forward through the black metal gates of the cemetery.

The fronds of the weeping willows at the entry wavered, though there was no breeze. The trees in the cemetery were so beautiful. The first hints of the coming explosion of fall colors had just begun to creep in. I had always loved all kinds of trees, even though we lived in places where they were rare.

Other people might be spooked by cemeteries, but in towns like Pottsboro, they were like an oasis of nature. Jon and I had played in the one at the old churchyard near our apartment in Philly as if it were a park.

Most of the gravestones here in the Pottsboro cemetery were low-lying granite, or old-fashioned marble. The few larger monuments and sculptures served as my landmarks.

I had just reached the marble angel at the center of the cemetery when I heard footsteps.

My heart thudded in my chest and a sudden wash of adrenaline already had sweat prickling at my brow.

My first thought was to run.

Well, my actual first thought was that I was an idiot.

I had risked my safety for a warm grilled cheese sandwich - another clear case of going from believing something was important to wondering what the hell I’d been thinking.

But my second thought was to run.

I spun, expecting to see the creep from the diner. I had a pretty good hunch that I could outrun him.

But it wasn’t him.

The figure behind me was silhouetted in moonlight. It wore a hat and trench coat, but there was something strange and stooped about its posture.

More than that, there was an aura ofwrongnessall around it that brought back my unease from earlier, but a thousand times stronger. The breeze carried a hint of something rotten and sickly-sweet, like the time the power went out at the diner, and I had to help Daniel clear the spoiled meat out of the walk-in.

I didn’t so much forget about the idea of running as I just completely forgot how my legs worked.

Run, run, run,my mind screamed.

But my feet just wouldn’t obey.

The thing lurched toward me, its movements jerking and odd, like a lagging video game. The limbs moved at the wrong angles, as if its bones were broken, or maybe it didn’t even have bones at all.

Whatever this thing was, it wasn’t human. And something deep inside me told me that it never had been.

It was only pretending.

The whole world blurred and then slowed.

The man-creature moved toward me like it was underwater. My pounding heart thudded once, the sound too deep in my ears.

A familiar sensation filled me - something I had only felt once before, and tried my best to forget.

I tried to blink away the memory of falling, falling…

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