“You’re going to get yourself killed before we get to the party,” Jenny said.
“Whose party is this anyway?” asked a short girl with straw-colored hair and glasses that seemed more like a pair of windows perched upon her nose. It was a chilly day, so she wrapped her zip-up sweatshirt so tightly around herself that it almost completely hid the picture of Ted Nugent during his Damn Yankees days that was plastered across the front of her T-shirt.
Another one of the girls came up behind her. “You know
Wes.”
“The one with all the tattoos?”
“Oh yeah.”
“Tara’s still in the bad boy phase,” Paige explained while strolling across the street during a lull in traffic.
“Like you’re so much better?” the Damn Yankees fan scolded.
“At least I can keep my mouth shut when screwing someone at three in the morning.”
Taking that as their cue, all of the girls except for Tara chanted, “Wes, Wes, oh God!
Tara winced and pulled the collar of her navy blue sweater up high enough to cover most of her face. “I accidentally rhyme in the middle of a late night quickie and never hear the end of it.”
“You’re in the room right next door to us,” Paige said. “We’d like to hear the end of it so we can get some studying done.”
Rushing up to bump Paige with her shoulder, Tara said sarcastically, “Right. All Margarita Girl here wants to do is study.”
“Finals are coming up soon,” Jenny offered.
“You guys need to lighten up.” Pivoting around to walk backward across a small field of grass on the perimeter of a set of residence halls, Tara added, “Especially Karen. I bet you could be the one screaming by the end of tonight.”
Although the face behind her wide glasses was made to smile, the one she showed the other girls was forced at best. “Sure. Maybe.” That got the others off her back long enough for the rest of the pack to get distracted.
Now that they were close enough to hear music rolling out of one of the smaller halls, they set their eyes on the prize and fell into a strut that made them look like a small girl gang taking over a bar in a campy fifties sexploitation flick. Playing the role to the hilt, Paige swatted the face of the second-string football player guarding the door as she announced, “You can stop wishing for it, boy. The party’s here.”
“About damn time,” the jock said. “Bar’s right down that hall and the food’s upstairs. Just follow the music.”
It wound up being just another loud night in a string of similarly loud college nights. Even though she was taking part in festivities that so many of her peers found enthralling, Paige soon got bored. She drank a few of the margaritas for which she’d become famous, joked around with some guys, deftly avoided their clumsy advances and promised to call the number that had been given to her on a scrap of paper that became a receptacle for her gum.
Wes made an appearance every so often. He was a tall guy who stood out from the rest thanks to a series of intricate tribal tattoos on his neck and forearms. Every so often Paige thought she could see those tattoos shift, but chalked that up to the light in the room or the alcohol in her system.
Finding the rest of her pack was more of a chore than she’d expected. The second floor of the dorm was jammed to capacity with students and townies alike who’d clustered around the free booze and boiled hot dogs like a school of piranha. Jenny was in the upstairs common area on a ripped plastic couch while getting three bottles of Michelob poured down her throat via a length of plastic tubing. Amy was one of the pack’s tagalongs, having been added a few weeks after the start of spring semester. The bright red Huskers jersey given to her by her boyfriend at the University of Nebraska was impossible to miss, but Paige still couldn’t spot her. Amy wasn’t the type to leave a party before being given permission by her friends, so that meant she must have been holed up somewhere out of sight, ditched the sweatshirt, or both. Good for her, Paige thought. Amy’s boyfriend was a self-centered jackass. The rest of the group had been swallowed up by a crowd that became one sweaty, rattling mass. Time for a breather.
Even though the bar downstairs had been stripped of its goods by a bunch of lower classmen, it seemed the best place to go to clear her head. The door to the room at the end of the hall swung open so Tara could stagger outside. Her clothes had been hastily pulled on after what looked to be one hell of a tumbling session, and her hair was a telltale mess. Before Paige could be spotted, she bolted down the stairs.
Tara was a smoker. She was the kind of smoker who rolled her eyes at any talk of cancer, coughed up phlegm because she was an adult, and had every right to do what she pleased. Anyone who approached her with concerns about secondhand smoke were quickly made to wish they’d just shut their mouth and taken their chances with the carcinogens. Tara was also a screamer. Not in the way that Wes had surely just experienced, but in the way that almost shattered glass if she looked up to find someone standing there when she hadn’t been expecting them. It was all Paige could do to keep from giggling as she circled around the bar to the perfect hiding spot and hunkered down in the darkness to wait for the ideal time to jump out and scare the living shit out of a good friend.
She could hear Tara’s uneven footsteps coming down the stairs and could picture the bleary, dazed expression on her face. Once she got down the stairs to step outside for her smoke, she would be focused on the door and not expecting to get jumped from someone lurking behind the bar.
This was going to be great.
Something rustled in another part of the room. That was either Tara approaching the bottom step or someone else trying to find a quiet corner in the noisy building. Paige wasn’t familiar with all the little noises in the structure, so for all she knew, some of the abundant noise from above was just filtering down.
Then again, Tara might have found a window to puff her smoke through. She might have even broken her routine and lit her cigarette upstairs. The creaking could be anything, and the feet coming down the stairs might belong to anyone. Suddenly, the joy Paige felt at the prospect of scaring Tara out of her mind was dimmed by the possibility of being discovered crouched behind the bar like an idiot. Holding her breath, she placed her hands on the edge of the bar and eased herself up past a row of dusty empty bottles that had probably been sitting there since the last Super Bowl.
Her eyes drew level with the warped top of the bar, making all the broken peanut shells and dried chunks of pizza crust seem like boulders on a miniature alien landscape. A shadow wobbled within the enclosed stairwell, followed by a long sigh and, “Wes, aren’t you coming out here with me?”
Paige ducked under the bar, feeling every bit of dumb giddiness returning. The mood was heightened by the drinks she’d had in her, but was completely obliterated by the sight of the man chewing on Amy’s face.
He was a skinny collection of bones and saggy skin wrapped up in paint-spattered jeans and a sleeveless T- shirt. The only reason she hadn’t seen him before was because he and Amy were completely under the bar where it formed a corner that pointed toward the front door of the building. Nestled in there, they might have gone undiscovered for hours. His arms were covered in thick tribal tattoos, and for a moment Paige thought he was Amy’s impromptu date for the evening. His mouth was wide open and pressed against the lower section of Amy’s jaw. Wide dark eyes glared out from the shadows, waiting to see if he’d truly been discovered.
Nervous fear flooded through her, starting off as something she might feel when walking in on someone else’s intimate moment and gradually turning into the mild dread of discovering a deranged homeless person following her down the block.
Then she saw the blood trickle from the man’s mouth.
Amy twitched, snapped her eyes open and tried to look over at Paige. When she reached out for her, Paige immediately grabbed her hand. The instant Amy’s leg scraped against the floor, she was pulled back by a bony arm that wrapped around her waist. Amy’s cry didn’t make it past her lips before the man tightened his grip on her.
For a moment Paige thought she’d gotten a hold on the other girl. Amy struggled to get away from the man under the bar, squirming in his grasp to expose the three sets of fangs buried in the side of her neck. Blood sprayed from the openings in her flesh, dimming the last bit of light in her eyes. The man holding her took it in with a wet sucking sound before adjusting his bite so the blood sprayed into his mouth.
Although it seemed she was forced to watch that for hours, only a few seconds had passed. Footsteps crossed in front of the bar, so Paige jumped up to catch Tara’s attention. She found herself looking into the face of yet another man with thick tribal tattoos.
