Morganville (Justin Bieber)

Chapter 121

Hours passed. We cruised around for a while, and passed bulletins back to Oliver on the groups we saw. The largest one was almost a hundred people, forming up in the park. Some guy I didn't know had a loudspeaker.

"Sal Manetti," Hannah said. "Always was a troublemaker. I think he was one of Captain Obvious's guys for a while, but they had a fallingout. Sal wanted a lot more killing and a lot less talking."

That wasn't good. It really wasn't good how many people were out there listening to him.

Eve went back to Common Grounds to report in, and that was just when things started to go wrong.

Hannah was driving me back home, after dropping off a trunk full of blood bags from the university storage vaults, when the radio I had in my pocket began to chime for attention. I logged in with the code. As soon as I did, a blast of noise tumbled out of the speaker.

I thought I heard something about Oliver, but I wasn't sure. My shouted questions weren't answered. It was as if someone had pressed the button by accident, in the middle of a fight, and everybody was too busy to answer.

Then the broadcast went dead.

I exchanged a look with Hannah. "Better--"

"Go to Common Grounds? Yeah. Copy that."

When we arrived, the first thing I saw was the broken glass. The shutters were up, and two front windows had been shattered out, not in; there were sprays of broken pieces all the way to the curb.

It seemed very, very quiet.

"Eve?" I blurted, and bailed before Hannah could tell me to stay put. I hit the front door of the coffee shop at a run, but it didn't open, and I banged into it hard enough to bruise.

Locked.

"Will you wait?" Hannah snapped, and grabbed my arm as she tried to duck in through one of the broken windows. "You're going to get yourself cut. Hang on."

She used the paintball gun she carried to break out some of the hanging sharp edges, and before I could dart ahead, she blocked the path and stepped over the low wooden sill. I followed. Hannah didn't try to stop me, probably because she knew better.

"Oh man," Hannah said. As I climbed in after her, I saw that most of the tables and chairs were overturned or shoved out of place. Broken crockery littered the floor.

And people were down, lying motionless among the wreckage. Hannah went from one to the other, quickly assessing their conditions. There were five down that I could see. Two of them made Hannah shake her head in regret; the other three were still alive, though wounded.

There were no vampires in the coffee bar, and there was no sign of Eve.

I ducked behind the curtain. More signs of a struggle. Nobody left behind, alive or dead. I sucked in a deep breath and opened up the giant commercial refrigerator.

It was full of blood bags, but no bodies.

"Anything?" Hannah asked at the curtain.

"Nobody here," I said. "They left the blood, though."

"Huh. Weird. You'd think they'd need that more than anything. Why attack the place if you're not taking the good stuff?" Hannah stared out into the coffee shop, her expression blank and distant. "Glass is broken out, not in. No sign anybody got in the doors, either front or back. I don't think anybody attacked from the outside, Ana."

With a black, heavy feeling gathering in my stomach, I swung the refrigerator door shut. "You think the vampires fought to get out."

"Yeah. Yeah, I do."