"Stay away from them, Kyle," the dead man said. "Their time is coming. They will be hunted and sought after. Everyone with them will suffer the same fate."
Fear gripped Kyle, holding his feet as tightly as cured concrete. The dripping horror in the shower suddenly grabbed the glass edges of the shower and stepped toward Kyle. Panicking, Kyle tried to dive backward. His foot slipped on loose debris. He twisted as he fell, flailing his arms as the dead man hovered over him.
The crowbar crashed through the glass surrounding the shower, shattering the glass into huge shards. One of the shards slid against Kyle's left arm, slicing neatly through the flesh. The cut instantly filled with blood, then overflowed and ran down his arm. A steady stream dripped to the floor as he landed on his butt beside the enclosed shower.
The dead man leaned down toward Kyle, revealing the hideous gashes left from rough contact with street pavement. Kyle now remembered who the dead man was, though he hadn't thought about him in years.
"Stay away," Kyle gasped. The burning pain of the cut reached him, as well as the initial fear of the amount of blood he was losing. "Stay away!"
The dead man leaned in more closely. His hands left bloody smears on the bathtubs edge. "They are going to die, Kyle. We are going to kill them. Just as we will kill anyone who stands with them against us."
"Kyle!" Quinlann yelled from the other room. Footsteps drummed against the floor.
"Stay away," Kyle told the dead man.
Quinlann burst into the room, taking in Kyle at a glance. "Hold on, Kyle," the man said. "Just hang on. You're going to be all right." He took his shirt off and wrapped the garment around Kyle's injured arm.
"Do you see him?" Kyle demanded, pushing back from the dead man leaning out of the shower.
"See who?" Quinlann asked. He struggled to take up slack in the shirt and tie the cloth off tightly.
"The man," Kyle said. He suddenly felt like he couldn't get air to breathe.
"Calm down," Quinlann said. "You're going to hyperventilate in that mask. Everything's going to be all right."
"No," Kyle said, fighting to back away as the gory dead man leaned in. He tried to lift his arms to protect himself. How could Quinlann not see the dead man?
"Kyle!" Quinlann said. "Kyle!"
The dead man reached for Kyle, his bloody palm turned outward to cover Kyle's face.
11
Isabel found Jesse sitting in the emergency room admittance area. He still wore his suit, but had the jacket draped over the chair beside him. Every line in his body was tense. He stared out the windows into the parking lot.
The two nurses at the admittance desk stayed busy handling the phones and processing patients.
Isabel crossed the room. Jesse must have spotted her reflection in the glass, because he turned around to look at her. His clothing and his hair still held a fine layer of desert dust. Isabel resisted taking his hand or standing too close to him. Roswell was simply too small to take such risks. Someone would see them, jump to the obvious… and right… conclusion, and word would get back to her dad.
"You doing okay?" Jesse asked.
"I'm fine," Isabel said. Not sitting beside him, not touching him, was hard, and it got more difficult every time she saw him in her dad's offices.
"How's your friend?" Jesse asked.
"She's okay," Isabel said. "Maybe a little stressed. But nobody got hurt."
Jesse pointed at the television hanging from the ceiling in the corner by the admittance desk. "Local news station is covering the story."
Isabel stared at the television screen. She watched in disbelief as footage of the front of the Crashdown played on the set.
"They're suggesting that the damage was done by a poltergeist," Jesse said. "Totally weird, don't you think?"
Isabel tried not to hesitate. "Yes," she replied. To cover her momentary lapse, she asked a tension-filled question of her own. "Did you let my dad know you were here?"
Jesse nodded. "I told him I witnessed the accident and that I felt I needed to stay here to make sure the woman was okay. He understood. Then he told me you were here. Told me to help you if you needed it. He's got a conference call that he couldn't put off."
The whispering tone reminded Isabel of how much they were hiding, of how much they had at risk. Or, at least, how much she felt they had at risk. She gazed into his dark eyes. Why hadn't she ever felt like this about someone from Roswell High? Then guilt filled her. She hadn't felt that way about anyone in high school because none of the guys she'd been around there had been Jesse Ramirez.
"How is the woman doing?" Isabel asked.
"She's going to be okay. The police contacted her husband. He's here now." Jesse paused. "Do you remember how she was crying out for her baby?"
Isabel suppressed a shiver as she remembered the child-thing that had threatened her. She folded her arms across her chest. "Yes."
"She had a baby," Jesse said. "A little girl. But she died in childbirth."
"That's horrible," Isabel said. And she thought it was even more horrible because the thing in the vehicle had known of the woman's loss and had used that pain against the woman. But that didn't explain why Jesse hadn't been able to see the child-thing.
"Yeah," Jesse said. "It is. I heard the state police interviewing her husband when he got here. They wanted to make sure there hadn't been a baby, or that nothing had happened to the child."
"Is the woman going to be okay?"
"The cut on her head isn't serious. The seat belt held her in place and the air bag protected her from most of the crash. But that doesn't explain why she freaked out and lost control of her vehicle."
Isabel was silent for a moment, knowing that she knew exactly what had caused the woman to lose control, although she didn't know where the child-thing had come from. But she couldn't tell that to Jesse. The fact was a reminder of how much distance actually separated them, and she didn't know how… or if… they could bridge the gap.
"Hey," Jesse said softly.
She looked at him.
"It's going to be okay," he said.
"I know," she said, and she wanted to believe him but she knew he didn't know everything he needed to in order to make that prediction. There were still too many things about her that he didn't know.
"… here at the scene of what is believed by some to be the result of a poltergeist manifestation."
Michael leaned against the pass-through window at the back of the Crashdown and watched the news anchor, Marty Lackley, roll through his spiel. They were on the third take, and Marty wasn't happy with the job Bob the cameraman was doing.
Marty was also not happy that Nancy Parker had forbidden the news crew to step into the cafe. The part where the news reporter had gotten indignant and insisted on the public's right to know if the Crashdown was haunted had been hilarious.
The scene had taken some of the edge off the argument that Michael and Maria seemed to be locked into. However, when Maria had seen Michael smiling at the reporter's discomfort, she'd gotten mad all over again. Apparently, they were in another one of those arguments where everything was supposed to be unhappy for everybody until they somehow fixed what was wrong.
Since Michael didn't feel that he'd done anything wrong, he didn't have a clue how to fix the situation. The only good thing was that the construction crew Nancy Parker had called in had arrived and was in the process of taking over the cleanup. They didn't want anyone else in the cafe while they repaired the broken glass and electrical damage.