Authors: Christopher Golden
Waking Nightmares (11 page)
The smell snapped his head back.
“Jesus!” he said, wrinkling his nose at the stench.
The egg had gone bad. Working quickly, he scraped it off the grill into the trash, put a dash of water on the surface and scoured it for a second or two, then cracked another egg, with the same disgusting result.
“What the hell?” he said, turning to glare at the fridge under the counter as though it had offended him. Which it had. The thing had to be broken if all of these eggs were rotten.
“Boss!” Bonita snapped.
As Little Joe turned to look at her, the door to the kitchen banged open. Felicia stood there, propping the door open with her curvaceous behind, blond hair tied back in an unruly ponytail. She looked skittish, trapped halfway between pissed off and worried.
“Joe, we’ve got a problem,” Felicia said.
From the serving window, Anthony gave a humorless laugh. “More than one.”
Little Joe looked over and saw two of the waitresses bent over and peering into the kitchen through the serving window, looking confused and nervous.
“The milk’s gone sour,” Felicia said. “Cream, too. Ginny made frappés and they’re awful. And the sandwiches . . . the mayo in the tuna and the chicken salad has gone bad. It’s all spoiled.”
“Get some more from the fridge,” Anthony said.
“We tried that. It’s all bad. All the dairy we’ve got inhouse is spoiled. All of it,” Felicia explained.
Little Joe frowned, then turned to look at the rotten egg burning on the grill. The smell made him want to gag, and he hurried to scrape it into the trash. He couldn’t imagine how something like this was possible. Sabotage? That made no sense. There weren’t a lot of diners competing for his trade in Hawthorne. And how could they have worked it, anyway? Twenty minutes ago, all that milk and mayo had been just fine. And he’d used eggs from that same dozen to make pancakes.
“What do we do, boss?” Bonita asked, coming up behind Anthony.
Little Joe glanced around at his employees, all of them looking to him for an answer.
“Tell them,” he said. “Tell the customers. Anything dairy, we can’t serve right now. If people walk out, there’s nothing we can do about that. Anthony, I want to check every container in the place—milk, cream cheese, mayo, anything dairy—”
“But mayonnaise isn’t dairy,” Anthony said.
“The base is eggs, dimwit,” Bonita snapped.
“That ain’t helping, Bonnie,” Little Joe chided her. He looked around at the others. “We’ll check all the food, and we’ll check the fridges and freezers. I’ll handle it, okay? Just get back to work. And for God’s sake, when you’re telling the customers about it,
smile
.”
smile
.”
His team went into action. Crisis mode. Some nights, when they were short-staffed or there’d been a big ball game or something, the place could get pretty chaotic. Every one of them had worked in crisis mode before. They would do all right. But that didn’t solve the mystery of how an entire restaurant full of dairy products could be perfectly fine one moment and spoiled the next. Something like that didn’t just happen. There had to be a cause. Scientists might come up with some bullshit explanation, like a change in atmospheric pressure. But he couldn’t help thinking of old folk tales he’d read about meat or milk spoiling when the devil passed by.
Stupid,
he thought.
Get that crap out of your head.
he thought.
Get that crap out of your head.
Little Joe got back to work. But he shuddered a little, just the same.
AMBER
fiddled with the car radio, but every time she thought she had found a station, it would start to buzz with static, the voices or the music crackling in and out.
fiddled with the car radio, but every time she thought she had found a station, it would start to buzz with static, the voices or the music crackling in and out.
“Your radio’s crap,” she told Ben.
“Or something’s causing interference,” he said. “They’re putting a new cell tower on Admiral’s Hill. If this keeps up, people are going to be pissed.”
Amber stared at the radio for a second but knew it was useless to keep running up and down the dial. She had wanted local news more than music, but they were almost at Starbucks now, and then Ben would be dropping her off near where she’d left her car parked on campus, and then she’d be going home. If there was something to report, she’d find the news on TV or online.
“Here’s another one,” he said, tapping the brake.
“Damn,” Amber said. “What the hell is wrong with people today?”
She hit the button for her window, and it whirred downward. Tucking her hair behind her ears, she poked her head out and stared at a Ford F-150 pickup and a rusty old Audi sedan that had collided. The testosterone-boosted pickup had a dented front end and a shattered headlight, while the gray Audi had been mangled by the impact. The crash had smashed its windshield and accordioned its hood. A huge smear of the Ford’s red paint scarred the Audi’s crumpled front end.
“Check out the PT Cruiser,” Ben said, pointing out the window on his side.
Amber glanced past him and saw a ruined purple PT Cruiser being hauled up onto a flatbed tow truck. The whole side of the car had been caved in. Apparently there had been at least three cars involved in this accident, but it was the fourth time in the three miles since they’d left the hospital that they had seen recent wreckage. The police were at some of the accident scenes, but not all of them. Amber had been searching the radio for some news, something that would suggest a reason for the accidents.
“So weird,” Ben said.
Amber nodded. “It’s like there’s just bad luck in the air or something.”
“Had to be some kind of malfunction with the stoplights or something,” Ben muttered, mostly to himself. It wasn’t the first time he had said it, and Amber had the strange feeling he was mostly trying to persuade himself.
“All of them at once?” Amber asked.
Ben scratched at the stubble on his chin. “I guess,” he said. And then he smiled mischievously. “Wouldn’t want to be the guy in charge of this stuff. His ass is fired, as of right now.”
“Or at least in time for the next newscast, so the mayor has a scapegoat.”
They turned onto Eastwind Avenue, a tree-lined street that had once been home to fish markets and dive bars but—over the course of the past twenty years—had been the locus for Hawthorne’s twenty-first-century gentrification. The façades of the shops and restaurants were pristine and relatively uniform. Victorian-style lampposts had been installed up and down the street. There were a couple of other expensive restaurants in Hawthorne, near the marina, but the rest of the town’s fine-dining establishments were on this particular three-block stretch of Eastwind Avenue. Most of them were places where Amber could rarely afford to eat, but she had been to the Sea Glass twice during high school and loved it. Of course, it wasn’t all fine dining on Eastwind Avenue. College students and twenty-somethings packed Pedro Diego’s pretty much every night for authentic Mexican cuisine and a long list of specialty margaritas. Neo-hippie high schoolers frequented the Troubadour, a café where members of the staff performed four or five songs an hour.
Not every storefront window was a restaurant, of course. Eastwind Avenue boasted a florist shop, an especially snooty bookstore, a handful of clothing boutiques, and a jeweler’s. But for Amber, the best reason to drive down Eastwind was the green-and-white sign that hung at the intersection with Church Street, the beacon of the Starbucks logo. As weird as this day had been, a good cup of coffee would make everything better. She could practically taste mocha latte on her tongue.
“Remember,” Ben said as he pulled up to the curb across the street from Starbucks. “No caffeine.”
“Really?” She gave him sad eyes.
“You promised.”
“It’s been a crisis kind of day,” she said. “A girl can’t be held responsible—”
“No caffeine,” he repeated.
“Cruel, cruel man.” She popped the door and climbed out. “Thank God for chocolate.”
Ben followed her across the street, but Amber’s focus was on the cars moving up and down Eastwind Avenue. All the accidents they’d seen on the drive over had made her wary. If people were driving crazy today, she didn’t want to end up as a bloody hood ornament.
As she approached the door to Starbucks, a pair of fortyish women—fit and fashionably dressed—were exiting. One, an athletic blonde, held the door for her and Ben.
“I’m hearing at least thirty accidents, maybe more,” the blonde said to her friend. “Someone’s going to get sued.”
Amber paused, taking the weight of the door from her. “Are you talking about the car accidents today?”
The woman nodded, eyes lighting up with interest. “Yes. It’s crazy, isn’t it? How does something like that happen?”
“What
did
happen?” Ben asked. “We saw a few of them on our way here, but do you know what caused them all?”
did
happen?” Ben asked. “We saw a few of them on our way here, but do you know what caused them all?”
The blonde gestured inside. “There was a policeman here a few minutes ago who said something went wrong with the system that controls the traffic lights. They all went green simultaneously. None of the drivers are to blame, but I’m sure their insurance companies are going to come after the city. The mayor’s lucky no one was killed.”
Her friend started talking to her again, and then the women were drifting away.
“Thanks,” Amber said, but they were barely paying attention to her and Ben now.
“Told you. Malfunction,” Ben said.
But Amber still felt uneasy. Malfunction or not, it was a strange day. And it only became stranger as they walked into Starbucks. Her gaze had taken in the short line and started to turn toward the menu board when she heard someone make a gagging noise at the table to her right. She turned just in time to see a paunchy businessman—his laptop open in front of him—make a pinched, disgusted face and spit a mouthful of coffee back into his cup.
“What the hell?” the man said, staring sourly at his drink.
Before Amber could comment to Ben, the man’s behavior rippled through the place. Others made similar faces, some swallowing a gulp of something awful and some spitting it into their cups or into napkins. One teenage girl, standing in front of the pickup counter, turned and spurted some kind of frozen coffee drink into the trash can.
“This is disgusting,” the man next to Amber and Ben said, rising from his chair.
They stood back as the complaints began, people marching up to the counter to explain that the milk or cream in their drinks had gone sour. A man who had just received his coffee from the pickup counter called over the noise of grumbling customers to say that the cream in the dispenser there had become completely curdled.
“Looks like cottage cheese over here,” he said.
The girl who’d been taking orders and was now taking the brunt of most of the complaints looked like a deer in the headlights. She was rescued by another barista, a huge bear of a man with his reddish hair tied back into a ponytail. He lifted his big hands in a calming gesture.
“All right, folks. Please settle down. We’ll get fresh cream and milk out there in just a minute, and we’ll be more than happy to set you all up with replacements for your drinks.”
A beautiful girl with caramel skin came over with an open container of milk and whispered something in the burly man’s ear. Amber knew from his expression that it wasn’t good news.
“You’re shitting me,” he said, frowning as he took the milk container from the girl.
He took a whiff of the open container and made a face, holding it away from him. With all of the customers looking on, he turned and dumped the milk into the sink. It came out in sludgy chunks and he let the container fall into the sink.
“Change of plans,” he said, looking back at his customers. “People who don’t like black coffee may need to get refunds.”
Amber turned to Ben and fixed him with a glare. “Are you still going to try to tell me this isn’t a weird day?”
Before he could reply, a loud thump echoed through Starbucks, silencing the complaining masses. Something had hit the plate glass window at the front of the store. Everyone in the place seemed to be on pause, looking expectantly at that window, but there was no one outside and no indication of the source of the noise—just gray skies and a light sprinkle of rain. People started to turn away, but Amber took a step nearer the front door.
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