Chapter 12
The sign in front of the diner was thirty feet high, and declared it to be “El Mariachi’s Mexican Diner.” The gas station next door had one lot for passenger cars and another for big rigs; posters affixed to both its plate glass doors advertised that pay showers were located in the rear of the building. The neon sign on the building next door advertising LIVE NUDE GIRLS was dark. Dawn was two hours away, and Heath’s teeth began to chatter the moment he stepped out of the truck. He missed his now-ruined peacoat; it had had a warm Thinsulate liner.
He led the way inside, followed by Colin, with Clorox bringing up the rear.
“I thought you said this place was empty,” Clorox said accusingly to Colin, looking around the room. Heath followed the dwarf’s eyes as they darted from the enormous Mexican flag inexpertly painted on the far wall, to the television sets blasting Keno numbers at the early breakfast crowd, to the waitress behind the counter, a heavily made-up, heavily tattooed blonde in her late twenties who was openly staring at them with an expression of wary curiosity. There didn’t seem to be any booths not occupied by a trucker.
The Greyhound shrugged. “I drove by it at two in the morning, old son.”
The waitress shimmied out from behind the counter. “It’s gonna be at least ten minutes, fellas,” she said dismissively, gesturing at a row of chairs next to the door. “You can have a seat if you like.”
Colin turned to Heath. An impish smile played at the corners of his mouth. “Would you like me to speed up the process, guv’nor?”
Heath sat down and closed his eyes. “Keep it below a four.”
Clorox gave him a puzzled frown. “What do you mean by ‘four?’” he said.
“Colin’s field,” Heath said, yawning. “Levels one through three just make people nervous. It doesn’t definitionally cause fatalities until he cranks it up to at least seven.”
Colin cracked his neck. His smile grew wide and saintly, and somehow terrifying despite its apparent beatitude. “I don’t believe you’ve ever actually seen me do my little magic trick,” he said with a happy little sigh.
“I seen a lot of dead bodies afterwards while I was cleaning up,” Clorox said warily. He stepped behind Heath’s chair matter-of-factly, not bothering to hide his desire to keep Heath between him and the Englishman. “But no, I ain’t ever see you kill no one. I thought you was so fast nobody ever saw you.”
“They don’t call me The Greyhound because I’m particularly fast,” Colin said distantly. His eyes unfocused slightly as he swept his gaze across the room, as if he was doing arithmetic in his head. “They call me that because my knack is to make it so that everyone else is.”
The air of the room seemed to ripple slightly.
“A bit too fast for their own good,” Colin said dreamily.
The dwarf watched, fascinated, as diners at every booth picked up their pace despite themselves. One trucker’s eyes widened in horror as he shoveled forkfuls of scrambled eggs into his mouth too quickly to chew them. He yelped as he jabbed the tines into his lip, apparently unable to control the arm holding his fork. Another choked and spluttered, soaking his shirtfront as he attempted to drink an entire glass of orange juice all in one gulp. The waitress nearly tripped over her own feet rushing from the kitchen with a carafe of coffee in each hand. She swerved to avoid a patron leaping up from his table, check in hand, stumbled, and dumped half of the contents of one of the carafes on his table, overflowing his half-empty cup.
“Enough, Colin,” Heath said without opening his eyes.
Colin relaxed slightly, and the effect disappeared. There was a moment of total, confused silence, then every trucker in the restaurant stood up and reached for his wallet more or less simultaneously. The diner was empty but for Heath, Clorox, Colin, and the waitress two minutes later.
Colin strolled up to the horrified waitress, who goggled at him. He smiled politely. “Is there any way we could get a table now?” he asked in a voice of total innocence.
A fascinating turn for the narrative's ontology, and an uncannily familiar setting. I can smell fifty years' worth of cigarette smoke ground into the carpet of this diner. I feel the rumblings of indigestion nearly upon me. Great stuff.