From Chapter 2
“Olivia, check this out,” Taggart said, his voice tensing with worry.
If he’d found a dead body in the popcorn machine, Olivia didn’t want to know. She’d had enough tonight.
From the register, her gaze followed Taggart’s pointing arm toward the vehicle rows. He aimed at the vagrant woman, still harmless. Olivia opened her mouth to tell Taggart off, let the poor woman be, but he wasn’t pointing only at the woman. Shadows surrounded her where several people had left their vehicles.
The letter jacket crew had finished smoking their cigarettes, but few had returned to where they’d parked along the drive-in’s vehicle rows. Instead, their shoes and boots crunched over gravel, forming a loose circle around the tarp-covered woman.
She hunkered low to the ground now. Her knees had to be bending far up her torso, and if she leaned any lower, she could easily crawl on all fours. Maybe her back was aching, but none of the letter jacket crew reached out to help her. They didn’t even raise friendly arms to wave at her like they’d done for Sunflower. A humid stillness closed over them. The boys eyed each other with predatory sureness that they had found easy game.
Easy prey.
Olivia shoved up the counter’s staff partition and marched onto the gravel. The counter creaked and then crashed shut behind her.
Taggart dogged her heels. “Should I come?”
“Stay,” Olivia said.
“Am I still the concessions deputy?” Taggart asked.
“Just stay!”
Olivia hurried deeper into the drive-in. The movie ran on above her, Booth Bill oblivious to the trouble brewing between the rows. Technicolor men in gray military-style uniforms spoke against a background of red earth and black cosmos. Their cinematic universe seemed to stretch beyond the screen, where sudden clouds now blotted a section of the sky above Chapel Hill. A storm seemed to be coming after all. Above and below. Olivia could feel it aching in her head.
The graduated football boys weren’t alone in circling the tarp-covered woman. Their girlfriends joined them now, along with some of last semester’s juniors, and onlookers who hadn’t really been watching the movie.
A bright red can of Coca Cola sailed from Devin Shipley’s hand and crashed into the woman’s hump.
Her arms jerked toward the tarp’s underside like a turtle bucking into its shell. Hissing breath crinkled the tarp’s front edge, but the letter jackets’ cruel snickering drowned her out. Another hand raised a soda can, held by a boy with a blond goatee.
Olivia darted into the circle, arms outstretched. “Knock it off.”
The goateed letter jacket—face familiar, name forgotten—might not have expected a big voice from a woman her size. He looked around with a sheepish oops smirk.
“Lighten up, Olivia,” Devin said. His fingers twitched.
Olivia stepped between Devin and the crawling woman. Dark brown hair cropped to his scalp as tight as Christmas’s. Shoulders tensed as he cracked his neck. He didn’t seem out for blood tonight, just bored. Somehow, that was worse.
“No fighting,” Olivia said, lowering her arms. “Drive-in policy. We’ll stop the movie and send everyone home.”
Warm breath wafted up her calves. The vagrant dragged her hands at the gravel to rise. Olivia twitched to glance back, bend down, and help the woman. But if she dropped her guarded stance, Devin or one of the others might rush in, and the rest would start snickering again, juicing them up to keep going.
Just go, lady, Olivia wanted to say. Run while you can.
“This is how we keep the wrong kind out of town.” Devin thumbed at the concessions counter down the vehicle rows. “Don’t you have snacks to sell?”
“She don’t have a choice,” another letter jacket said, younger than Devin. “Ladies of the road stick together.”
One of the girlfriends whispered too loud, “Maybe she’s Olivia’s mom.”
That set Olivia’s teeth. “I’m on shift,” she snapped. “Which means I’m in charge, or I get Booth Bill to kick you all out.”
Another can hit the gray-haired woman with a sloshing metallic thud and then ricocheted against Olivia’s leg. Laughter barked from every direction. Taggart lingered with the crowd, dwarfed by broader shoulders and thicker arms. He should have stayed at concessions. His eyes wandered the gathered teenagers and then the sky, as if watchful for thickening clouds.
Olivia strafed around the circle, arms spread. “Stop.”
Devin chortled. “Look at that face, too. What a dog.”
“Not a dog,” another letter jacket said. “See her crawling? That’s a lizard.”
A raspy whisper sighed across the ground. “Yes,” the woman hissed. “That’s why she calls me Lizzie.”
Olivia turned to kneel and help the woman up, but Lizzie was already rising, her gray head with its scraggly hair aimed at Devin. Maybe she’d confronted people like him before. She was hunched and bulky, a shapeless mystery beneath her tarp, nothing of a fighter in her thin limbs and bony hands. How long had she been living rough?
This mini-mob bullshit couldn’t go on. Olivia would let Taggart cover the concession stand for two more minutes while she guided the drifter to Starry Wood Lane, a few more dollars in her pocket than she’d come with. No one deserved to be pelted by jackals.
“Ma’am,” Olivia started. “Lizzie? Let me help you.”
Lizzie didn’t look at Olivia. Her unkempt gray hair parted in places, offering glimpses of leathery flesh and pursed lips stretching far back along her jaw. The tarp rippled off her back as she grew taller than Olivia, than Devin, than everyone standing at the center of the Starry Wood Drive-In.
There was no hump swelling from beneath her shoulders. Bent arms jutted from her upper body where long hands dangled, fingers tensing. A serpentine torso uncoiled from her bending legs, where vertebrae peeked through clinging blankets like a row of lumpy teeth prodding beneath Lizzie’s skin.
Not like a lizard. Like a snake.
Lizzie’s mouth opened wide as Devin’s shoulders, and her unhinged jaw freed a flood of drool as white as Devin’s blood-drained face. Her bulbous head stretched high over his, and sharp, narrow teeth peeked beneath thin lips.
A collective jolt sobered the crowd. The letter jacket crew, their girlfriends, and unrelated onlookers flinched back, or let their jaws go slack into black-holed mouths. Each of them stood frozen in shock, their cruelty broken a moment too late. Olivia held rigid beside them, paralyzed as if by a venomous snakebite.
None of them could stop the horror show at their circle’s center, where Lizzie’s mouth snapped down over Devin’s head, shoulders, and chest in a sinewy crunch.
*
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