Carrion (The Bren Watts Diaries #1)

Chapter 20

Logan shivered next to me. We were practically hiding shoulder to shoulder, and as I locked eyes with him, I've never seen him this terrified. But here he was, shaking beside me. His macho-alpha persona was seeping away.

I nudged him, whispered, "You okay?"

This seemed to knock him out of his trance. He turned to look at me for a second, as if he didn't know where he was, and regarded his attention back at the bloody feast in front.

"We should get out of here," I added.

Miguel was even worse. He had his eyes closed. "Miguel?" I called out to him. "I said we should go."

Miguel nodded. Dazed. "Huh? Right. Okay."

We sneaked off slowly from car to car until we could no longer see the vectors feasting on the poor woman in the middle of the pedestrian crossing. We turned to our left as Miguel instructed, and there, clear as day, was the sign ROBERTSON PHARMACY & WELLNESS. 

The street was mostly empty, saved for a single male vector standing in the middle between us and the building. I stopped midway and shuffled behind a car. The others followed.

"Okay, Here's what we're going to do--" I began to say.

Suddenly, Miguel came charging out on the street with a snarling face, clutching his cleaver with one hand, and brought it down on the vector's head in one blow. The vector didn't even know what hit him.

I gaped. Logan did the same. Panting, Miguel looked around to make sure no one heard anything before he gave us a shrug.

"I thought it was going to turn around and alert the others," Miguel said. "And the kid..."

"Oh, um...there's no problem," I said, not knowing what to say. Given the state of his cleaver, he had probably used it on a dozen of them trying to wade through the streets to get to the bookstore.

Not wanting to stay on the streets any longer, we crept to the front. A locked gate blocked the door. I peered in; the store remained intact. I didn't see anything unusual inside.

"Jim owns this place," said Miguel. "We can try the back alley and get in there."

"What if the door's locked there, too?" Logan asked.

"His apartment is just above the store. We can try the broken window. I remember Jim asking me if I could fix it for him a couple of days ago since the latch didn't work. Gerta, his wife, is a bit sickly. He didn't want the cold seeping into their room," Miguel explained.

"I guess we can try that."

"Follow me."

We scurried to the back alley in haste when we heard a slight commotion from the street behind us, fearing that the other vectors were finishing up their kill and returning to where they originally began. I followed Miguel to the back. He pointed at the supposed broken window twelve feet to the emergency stairs' right. The problem was, Miguel was talking about the third-floor window.

"How do you know he didn't fix it yet?" I asked.

"Jim's an occasional patron to the diner. He'd complain about it all the time," Miguel said.

I looked up again. It's a twelve feet jump to the window, and the windowsill was not big enough to stick a landing with both feet. One mistake or slip-up, we might get a broken leg or a broken neck.

There was a fire exit door for the apartment on the emergency stairwell, but it's probably locked from the inside. One of us had to get to the window, crawl inside, and open the door. Mounting upon a dumpster nearby, we grabbed the last rungs of the emergency ladder and climbed up toward the staircase. Fortunately, I was not voted to jump the distance between the window and the stairs because I am shorter than the others. That burden went to Logan, who was the tallest. He almost lost a couple of inches from the news, trembling as he gripped the bars from the edge.