I don't open it.
* * *
Farkas
The girl at the Orange Julius takes out the trash at nine-ten.
I've watched her do it for three nights now. The same routine. She bundles the bags, props the back door open with her foot, and drags the trash to the dumpster in two short trips. The whole thing takes her four minutes. She's slight, no more than nineteen, and she walks like her feet hurt.
Tonight she doesn't see me until my hand is already on her throat.
I pull her into the shadow beside the dumpster. Something muffled breaks against my palm. Her eyes find mine in the dark and the panic in them is immediate. She struggles. They always struggle.
I need little from her. I open my jaw and her eyes go wide and white. The bite is shallow. I drink only what I need to open the door.
Her memories spill into me. I sift through her recent days. The bright lights of the food court. The sticky counter at the Orange Julius. Her manager's red face. The smell of orange concentrate. The other workers.
I find her.
The woman from the parking lot is there in this girl's memories. Behind the Mr. Burger counter, her dark hair tied back, her face tired in the bright light. The girl saw her tonight. They passed each other in the back corridor. The woman lifted a hand in a brief, automatic wave. The girl waved back. There was no conversation, and never has been. But the girl has seen the woman every night for eight months, and so I see her too. Eight months of brief glimpses. The woman scraping the grill. The woman taking out trash. The woman behind the register laughing at something an older red-haired coworker said.
There's a name on the woman's chest. A white plastic tag pinned to her polo.Jenny.
I hold the name in my mind. Jenny. I shape it without speaking it. Jenny.
The girl's body sags against me. I've taken less than half a pint from her. I lower her to the concrete and set her against the wall beside the dumpster. Her chest rises and falls. She'll be unconscious for an hour. She'll wake with a headache and a strange wound and a gap in her memory of the last twenty minutes that she'll fill with stories she half-believes.
I wipe my mouth and step back into the deeper shadow.
The metal door of the food court service corridor stands forty feet away. The corridor runs the full length of the rear of the building and connects to every restaurant through narrow back hallways. I've moved through this corridor many times and never used it for anything that mattered.
It matters tonight.
I cross the lot and slip through the door. The corridor is empty, lit by failing fluorescent tubes that buzz and flicker. I move along the wall until I reach the back hallway of Mr. Burger.
The hallway opens onto the kitchen and the prep area. From the dark of the hallway, I can see through into the bright box of the restaurant. The fluorescent lights are punishing. The whole space is too clean and too lit, every surface reflecting back in white and chrome.
She's at the grill.
Jenny.
Her back is to me. Her hair is pulled into a low ponytail and a few dark strands have escaped and stick to the side of her neck where she's been sweating. She's scraping the flattop with the long-handled spatula, the same way she scraped it the night I first saw her. The motion is mechanical. Her shoulders move with each stroke, the muscle and bone of her shifting beneath the thin polo. There's a grease stain on the back of her shirt that she doesn't know about.
The red-haired woman from the girl's memories is at the registers. She says something I can't hear. Jenny doesn't look up but her head tilts slightly, listening. The red-haired woman keeps talking, her hands moving in expressive gestures. Jenny says something back. The red-haired woman laughs.
Jenny smiles.
It's a small smile. It doesn't last. But it transforms her face for the second it's there, and the air goes out of me as if her shoulder were pressed against my chest again.
I've been alive for over a thousand years. I've stood in the courts of kings. I've watched armies march and cities burn andwomen laugh in the firelight after long nights of celebration. None of it touched me. None of it ever touched me.
She smiles, and something in me goes still and stays still.
I watch her until she finishes the grill and begins to mop. I watch her until she and the red-haired woman walk out of view toward the back of the restaurant. I watch the empty kitchen for a long time after that, the fluorescent lights buzzing above the abandoned counter, the grease in the trap cooling, the smell of it drifting through the hallway and into the corridor where I stand.
Then I leave.
The girl by the dumpster has begun to stir when I pass her. I don't look down. I cross the lot and disappear into the trees that border the access road, and from there I move north and west on foot. The snow has begun to fall in earnest. By the time I reach the farmhouse, my coat and my hair are dusted with it.