The High Place

[yarri]

Chapter 2 Part 2
“If you don’t hunt it down and kill it, it will hunt you down and kill you.� Flannery O’connor

We parted ways at the lobby, Bekka heading toward the parking garage and her jeep. Me, three blocks up and over one to a convenience store I’d never been to. The streets were congested with EMS and local law enforcement all racing back and forth from the pier. People lined the sidewalks rubber necking to try and see what was happening. It has slow going to get through them I had to shoulder my way through at one point. Bekka wasn’t kidding we were running out of time and if what happened in California happened here the streets would run red with blood. A speeding ambulance missed me by inches as I was hit from behind by the crowd and shoved into the street, scrambling to my feet I opted to run with the traffic trusting my speed and agility to avoid being hit by EMS and other cars. The sidewalks were too crowded.

It took me longer than I’d anticipated too locate the store Bekka had described to me. I must have walked past it three times before I saw the half lit neon open sign and the high placed gated window and gated door. Entering I saw the girl behind the counter was barely twenty and half asleep with a small portable black and white TV blaring at her the day’s events going on outside of her window. I didn’t waste time and started pulling what Bekka had told me to get off the shelves the pile woke her up. She looked at me almost fearful. The gated window and door told me this little shop was subject to repeated hold ups.

“Do you take credit cards?� I asked going for my wallet extracting a card watching the girl’s face go from terrified to relaxed as she took my MasterCard to pay for it.
I was in and out of the shop in less than fifteen minutes but it had taken me thirty minutes to reach it. Bekka was going to be worried I thought as I stepped outside slinging the duffle bag to my back. A scream caught my attention a woman was down on the ground fighting with some man I moved to help her when the spray of dark arterial blood from her torn out throat hit me in the chest. The man looked up at me but he wasn’t a man any longer. I couldn’t see anything but her blood dripping for his mouth and his wild yellow eyes. I turned and everything was a blur from that moment till Bekka found me.

I still don’t have much memory of that run until the report of Bekka’s 9mm firing at the creature that was on my ass as I made it to the Moore Hotel brought me back. Bekka had called my reaction high alert. I still don’t know what that means but whatever it was it got me back to the Moore and her.