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  Myke didn’t even blink as Pax rushed him. Pax kicked the knife away so that it skittered across the floor, spinning, as he yanked the man to his feet, swinging him around and snapping the man’s arm into a tight arm lock that would have made most men howl. Myke didn’t utter a word but just stared calmly at the diners. Pax knew the hold must hurt, but he was scared and nervous about this.

  A woman in a booth recoiled from Myke’s dirty, red-stained teeth.

  In a second, Coral had Ed in the same position. “Get some table cloths, and rip ‘em into strips so we can use them as rope, hurry.”

  Annie, Lydia, Dana, and a few others sprang into action, ripping and making strips of the cloth, yanking and jerking each strip to test the knots. While neither man tried to get away, it was if everyone expected both to try soon.

  “Bugles out of the frogs now, Ed? Worms out of the cake?” Pax shook as he snapped the words. “What a mess. What in the hell are we going to do with all this mess?”

  Chapter5

  Both Pax and Coral, using the strips of cloth as makeshift ropes, securely tied the men’s hands behind their backs. After tossing the men into booths, Pax tied their ankles as well. Neither captive reacted but lay in the booth seats complacently, their eyes dead. “Ed? Hey, Ed? Myke?” Coral tried, but he got no reaction.

  “What happened? Give me the story?” Coral asked. He sat for a second on a stool and drank strong tea that Annie slid to him, swallowing half of the glassful as fast as he could. His mouth was like cotton.

  Everything had happened so fast, and the situation wasn’t good, but Pax couldn’t help but replay in his mind what Coral had done. The man may have retired from playing professional football, but he had lost none of his power and grace. When Coral tackled Ed, the tackle was perfectly executed, and for those seconds, Coral had been fully in charge.

  Dana shivered. “Ed came in dripping wet, and his family was behind him with the umbrella, okay? They were huddled under it to keep dry. I could tell he must have been complaining or yelling at them; they looked upset and nervous, his family I mean. Not bad upset, just uncomfortable you know as if they were tired and needed something to eat and drink.”

  Coral nodded. A lot of time, tourists had little problems as they went from the spa to shops to shops; mostly, they needed to either warm up or cool down and to hydrate. It was fairly amazing how many people felt poorly simply because they failed to stay hydrated. Once they had some water in them, Coral’s good cooking did the rest: gave them energy, comforted the body and senses, and afforded them a chance to feel better. A short time off their feet, and a bathroom break did the rest.

  Dana continued, “He shook off like a dog, and I could see he was really pissed off. I dreaded serving him ‘cause he was gonna be a complainer, but maybe he was just being hungry. So I was about to offer to seat them, but then he just looked right at the knife sitting on the counter, grabbed it off the plate, and stabbed the little girl. He didn’t say a word first, just shoved it into her chest as if the action was the most natural thing on earth.”

  “He didn’t say anything?” Pax asked.

  “Not a thing.”

  From a booth, a man named Dan, nodded. “I saw it, but it was as if I was seeing a nightmare, not real. I thought I had to be hallucinating ‘cause Dana’s right, he didn’t say a thing, just glared angrily, and the little girl…her mouth opened in a big O-shape like she couldn’t believe it either.”

  Dana rubbed her arms as if she were cold. “I thought I was the only one watching it particularly…and I thought…well, like Dan said…it wasn’t real. It couldn’t be real, and I saw it, but I just froze.”

  “My, God,” Coral said, half in prayer.

  “It was really fast…a blink, and it was over, but it was also very slow. I could see a raindrop fall from the man’s nose and onto the little girl’s shirt. That damned drop fell for…it seemed like weeks…so slowly….”

  “I couldn’t move, Boss, even if I wanted to stop him or run away. I was frozen to the spot. All around me, I could hear people eating, silverware clinking, and everyone talking, but I was frozen and felt as if I were the only one watching him.”

  “You were in shock, I guess,” Coral said. “I guess you both were.” He looked to Pax. “No one expected to see that, and sometimes people freeze with fear.

  The body chemicals do something, I guess.” Pax didn’t know, but it made sense that it could be true. He wanted to agree with Coral anyway and keep them all calm.

  “Maybe so. He killed the teen kid who was just staring and making this guh guh guh sound, and then next was the little boy. It was like Dan said, very fast, so fast I could hardly see it all, but it was also very, horribly slow, too, and his wife yanked at him and screamed.”

  “She let loose a big scream,” Dan agreed, “That’s when everyone noticed.”

  Dana sniffled and wiped her nose with her arm. “They stopped eating and talking. I didn’t feel so alone then. Lydia dropped the tray she was carrying; Coral, it was as if time started acting normal again.”

  Lydia nodded her head. “I couldn’t take it all in.”

  Dan made a motion with his hand, as if he were stabbing with an imaginary knife across the air. “He stabbed at her…at his wife, and then she fell, and you ran in, Coral. I don’t think anyone could have done a thing; it was a bad thing for sure.”

  “Happened really fast?”

  “Super fast, but I couldn’t say a word or do anything. I froze, and blood was all over, and when Lydia dropped the tray, everyone turned around and saw the whole thing. You’d think people would have been screaming, but the situation was as if it were not real….” Dana was repeating herself. “I wish….”

  “What happened with Myke? How did he get into this mess?”

  Dana looked at Myke, trussed up and lying in the booth. “Myke came in almost at the same time, a half minute behind, I guess, when that Ed guy was stabbing his wife, and he…Myke, I mean…grabbed the kid and dragged him over there and….” she gagged. “They didn’t say anything. It happened really fast, Coral.”

  Pax was a little confused. “You know that guy?”

  “Sure we do,” Coral answered.

  Dan squinted a little. “When I saw it, I thought that Myke was here to help and wasn’t that a splendid turn of events to have him rush in and pull the boy to safety. It was as if everything were going to be fine because we had help. I wanted to jump up and help, too. I was going to, but then you came in, Coral, and that guy said all that stuff; I just don’t know.”

  “We didn’t move. He might have come after us,” a man added.

  “Yup. He had a wicked look on his face; he would’ve,” Dan added again. There should be more to talk about, and police would have questions, but the topic was fizzling. With Ed not talking anymore and the action being over, and its having ended on a bad note, there wasn’t much else to say. No one could think of what to add unless he repeated it all.

  “Coral, oh, hells bells, lookit that,” a man yelled.

  Chapter 6

  “Oh, my God,” a woman yelled, “Look out there.” She was pointing to the big picture window where she sat.

  One end of Coral’s Diner faced Hickory where the parking lot was; the door was at that end. The long side of the place faced 2nd Street, across from the farmer’s market and the park. The other end faced Main, the Catholic Church, and Clothes Horse, a clothing store.

  All turned to look out the window where they watched two men beating on each other but with a certain lack of enthusiasm; their fight brought them alongside the diner’s window. Both men had hit one another enough that both had bruised faces, swollen noses that bled, and squinting, blackened eyes.

  Yet they were either tired of the fight, tired from the fight, or just bored. Both the original fury and interest were gone.

  It may have looked like a normal brawl where possibly one man was drunk, or they were fighting over a female; however, the intensity and then focus that each man h
ad towards the fight were unmistakable.

  In a last burst of energy, one of the men surged forward at the other, gouging at the other man’s eyes with his nails as they fought under the lights.

  The second man collapsed under the new assault, sinking onto the wet ground, howling and throwing his arms to his sides in a gesture that made it seem as if he were giving up.

  The bigger man crawled onto the other man’s chest to hold him down on the wet ground; both of his thumbnails sank into the man’s sockets, popping the eyeballs loose as he worried and worked at them. It wasn’t easily done; in fact, it took a lot of hard work and determination.

  The attack was less an assault than a behavior that was inflicted with a definite need, passion for the job, and anger at the other person. It wasn’t a random act but a duty to do this to one another.

  Someone in the diner screamed, and another yelped as they watched. It seemed less real than something that might be on the television.

  “What is going on?” someone demanded.

  Coral didn’t have an answer. Besides hating to see the violence, Coral was curious and wondered why the men were fighting to the death, but you couldn’t have paid him to go out there in the falling rain. Like everyone else, he knew something was terribly wrong.

  The man with torn-out eyes reached blindly for his adversary, but the other man seemed to have lost interest and stood in the rain as if he were showering, rubbing the water into his skin, and letting the rain clean the blood from his hands.

  In a few seconds, he turned and walked away into the gathering dusk as if nothing had occurred, taking his time, but not looking around as he walked down the street.

  The man on the ground turned his head to the side, away from the onlookers, and didn’t move any more.

  Over kitty-corner to Coral’s Diner at the Clothes Horse, a trendy clothing shop, a car drove into the front windows, reversed, and drove back again into the rubble. The movements were slow and methodical.

  Among the clothes, a mashed mess on the hood, and spider-webbed windshield was probably a body but was too banged up for anyone to be sure.

  A second figure, waving arms and crying out, was mashed into the bricks and glass; each time the car reversed, the figure weakly waved an arm, and when the car surged forward, the figure tensed as it was shoved

  “We need to do something,” Dan suggested, but no one responded.

  He might have repeated his statement, but something new occurred.

  Chapter 7

  Two people walked up, and one opened the door to the diner. Everyone stared at them, jumping as the door opened. Coral wished he had locked the door, but it was too late. He felt a horrible dread in his gut.

  One was Marla, a woman they knew, an exuberant, almost hyper-active woman who was always full of energy and excitable, but today, she moved slowly, shaking off rain onto the floor and rubbing at her arms.

  Brushing at the rain did nothing to dry her because she was completely soaked to the skin. She looked around at the blood and carnage with little interest, not really paying attention to it as she stepped over the blood.

  Stepping around the bodies, she walked over to the counter just as she had many times before. Rain dripped from her hair.

  The person with her was Gus from the gasoline station, and he stripped off a slicker and tossed an umbrella to one side. Gus promptly took in the scene, groaned, and nearly vomited on the floor, gagging instead. Looking away from the gore, he half-waved, “Sorry, Coral, but jeez…here, too?”

  “Too? What do you mean?”

  “I mean it’s crazy all over town. Didn’t you know?”

  “We just found out it was crazy in here,” Coral said as he looked around to include everyone watching the exchange.

  “Sorry, I almost barfed on your floor, Coral, but it’s a mess anyway…umm…it’s not just here.”

  “And out there…I mean we saw out the window…some stuff…people beating on each other and a car running back and forth to The Clothes Horse.” Coral was almost worried about being believed.

  “This?” Gus gestured around the diner. “This is what’s out there. I saw that car; it’s Marybeth Hanover in the car, and she ran over…well…not sure who it is on her windshield, but he’s dead whoever it is. I hope. And she is smashing someone right into the bricks, enough to make you sick. I did get sick out there walking over.”

  “Marybeth? Ain’t no way,” someone yelled.

  “Are you sure, Gus? Marybeth is a good person and not likely to do that.” Coral said, but then, Myke was a good person, too. His head was dizzy from trying to make sense of all the craziness. Pax, new to town, must think that all of the townspeople are insane to go around killing each other with knives and cars.

  What did it matter how low their crime rate? In one night, they had a killer with a knife butcher his family in front of an audience, a man turn cannibal, and a murderer using her car to plow through people?

  Gus went on with his news, “On the way over, I saw Rick in his patrol car, mowing down anyone on the street just…running them down, Rick! Can you imagine that?”

  Someone called out, “What have you been drinking, Gus?”

  “Nothing. I’m sober as can be.”

  “He’s drunk, Coral.”

  Coral knew Gus wasn’t drunk. Unfortunately, everything Gus said was probably true.

  “You didn’t see Rick doing that,” the heckler called out.

  “I saw him, too. He was wet-haired, but he was driving the patrol car, and he got three or four that I saw.”

  Everyone snapped heads to look at Coral.

  Coral shook his head, trying to imagine the dedicated, pleasant police officer, Rick, using his patrol car as a weapon for murder.

  It defied imagination, but Gus wasn’t one to drink or imagine things or to lie. “Let’s let Gus finish and hear him out. He ain’t one to go around lying, especially at a time like this. Let him talk.”

  “Seems fair,” Pax agreed.

  “That isn’t like Rick,” Coral told Pax.

  Gus went on, still kind of green as he walked past the mess on the floor, glanced at the tied men, curiously, and leaned against the snack bar.“

  Then I saw two people I don’t know fighting…tourists, maybe...one was beating the head of the other into the concrete. Some others were just walking in the rain as if they were out for a stroll, looking at the fight going on and not even caring. What the hell is going on?”

  “Rick is about the most normal, sane person I know,” someone said.

  “Well, he isn’t right now,” Gus said, “has everyone gone crazy?”

  “We don’t know. We had this happen and saw the trouble outside; now, you are saying that it’s all over. I don’t know what to think,” Coral admitted. “But I guess we can put our heads together and figure it out.”

  “We’ll have to,” Pax agreed.

  “I was walking up and saw Marla, so we walked the rest of the way across the street together. I have been trying to find some sane people, not attacking each other. But like I said, ‘I saw Marybeth with that body on the car and got sick, but Marla, she didn’t even react,’ ” Gus said.

  Coral looked at the woman curiously, wondering what was wrong with her.

  Marla looked at the bodies casually, surveyed the diner, and sat down on a stool with her face a total blank.

  Coral looked her over. “Hi, Marla.”

  She barely lifted a hand in greeting. “Meat loaf,” she said dully.

  “You want meatloaf?” Coral asked, concerned with her tone and body language. “Are you injured, Marla?” Had she seen something to make her behave this way? Was she okay or not?

  “Everything is fine,” she said.

  “Shock?” Pax asked, “ maybe we need to do something for her….”

  Coral looked her over, stared into Marla’s eyes, and felt her hands which were warm and not ice cold as they would have been had she been in shock. “No shock I ever saw. She acts…empty�
�just empty.” Coral shook his head as he stepped back to speak to Pax quietly. “Marla is a screamer and hyper; this is not like her. It doesn’t look like shock to me.”

  For some reason, Coral thought about the spaghetti in the cake and the bugles in the frog that Ed had talked about and had a sinking feeling that Marla, a woman he had known for years, might clearly understand that gibberish.

  “Is she okay?”

  The woman was wearing a white blouse with blue jeans, but the shirt had gone pink with rain-soaked blood. “It’s isn’t her blood.” He raised Marla’s arms, and she held them there. She was like a giant doll he could pose. Although he asked her questions and spoke to her, she didn’t say anything clear, only mumbled a few times.

  “She’s like Ed and Myke after they had finished,” Pax said quietly.

  “Why are they like zombies?” Dana asked. “That guy, Ed, was all angry; now he’s like a zombie, no reactions, Myke, too. They don’t care that they’re tied up. And Marla, look at her. Why are they acting as if they’re empty?”

  Had she been upset when she had asked that question, Coral would have ushered her to the back before she started a panic, but Dana was calm. People nodded with every question she asked. It was what they were all wondering.

  They turned to the window as Coral stared at the action outside; the car had finally stopped pushing into the building and was stopped in the parking lot. Coral realized it was Marybeth’s car, and as he heard gasps from other people, he knew they had noticed the same thing.

  The bundle of rags, the body, was still lodged into the windshield, but at least the car had stopped. All sighed as if they had been holding a collective breath. The blinded man still lay on the grass, letting the rain continue to fall into his face, but he didn’t seem to be in pain or upset. No one could tell if he were breathing or not.