I chuckled and lowered my shoulders, picking up speed. Street signs, small trees, and fire hydrants all whipped past me. A small dog barked at me from an open car window, but its yipping receded behind me almost instantly.
I came to the first intersection, and I was in luck. A green light. I debated slowing. The debate didn’t last long when I spied the van hang a left far ahead.
I hit another gear entirely. A gear I didn’t know I had.
Lights blurred past me so fast that I shouldn’t have been able to control my body. I should have been completely out of control, slamming into whatever crossed paths in front of me. But it was the opposite. I had complete control of my body—and I saw everything with clarity. Perhaps even supernatural clarity, nearly predicting where cars and people would be.
Wind thundered over me, plastering my clothing to my skin, whipping my hair into a crazed frenzy.
My legs felt so damn strong. My energy endless.
I could do this all night. All the way to the rising sun.
I’m not sure what people saw, or what they think they saw, or even if they actually did see me. I was through the intersection so fast that if someone looked down, or looked away, or even blinked, they would have missed me.
I felt movement to my right and veered away just as a car pulled rapidly away from the curb and hung a U-turn. The driver never saw me, I’m sure of it.
The light at the next intersection was red. I slowed down gradually, reluctantly, coming up behind a row of cars. I side-stepped smoothly onto the sidewalk and wove quickly through a group of women who were much too loud and drunk. I suspected I was in the midst of one of those “girls’ nights out” that I’m always hearing about. Does drinking with my sister count?
By the time I reached the sidewalk, the light had turned green. I crossed with the others, except, unlike the others, I was already on the far side of the street before they had taken a few steps. I heard gasps behind me, and saw many heads turn, but they were now so far behind me that I didn’t care and I’m sure they were doubting their own sanity.
And now I was running so fast that I wasn’t entirely certain that my feet were touching the ground. Wind blasted me. Lights streaked. Bugs were obliterated.
The next light was green and I was just a blur. I felt like a blur, too. I felt inhuman. I felt elemental. Like the wind. Something from the sky, the earth.
Cars came and went. People came and went. I swerved, I dodged, I hauled ass, and finally I hung a left and was nearly upon the van, which was just turning into a warehouse.
I swerved to the other side of the street and spent a few seconds coming to a full stop. I might be immortal, but I still had to contend with physics. Well, sort of. Cars are manufactured with brakes. Bi-peds? Not so much.
From behind an old-school station wagon, I watched the van come to a complete stop along the side of the building. The baker emerged from the van, and as he did so, a car door opened from another vehicle parked near the warehouse.
His pretty young assistant stepped out and met him with a warm hug. Bingo!
Together they slipped inside the dark building through a side door. My mind raced. What was this place? What the hell was going on? I didn’t know the answers to either question, but one thing I did know: Men were fucking pigs.
Chapter Seven
I stepped up to the building and scanned it.
So what kind of building was this? Why were they here after hours? Was this some kind of underground sex club? Were unspeakable sexual acts being performed just behind these doors? I pictured a sea of naked bodies, all undulating rhythmically to hypnotic music, drugs everywhere, naked limbs everywhere, penises and breasts and sex toys galore.
But I knew this wasn’t right. This was just my imagination running wild. Far different than a psychic hit.
Still, I listened for music, for the thumping of bass, for anything, but heard nothing other than a faint, echoing hammering sound which could have come from anywhere.
No. Wait. Laughter. Yes, I just heard laughter coming from within the building.
The bastard. He had no business laughing with another woman, not with a dying wife waiting for him at home.
The bastard.
I stepped back and scanned the facade. Nothing to indicate what the building was. I had a thought and removed my iPhone. I Google-mapped the area and a moment later the same city street popped up on my screen. This time in bright daylight.
Ah, there we go. According to Google Maps, the area was known as Al’s Auto. I pocketed the phone and did some frowning.
Al’s Auto? What the hell?
I didn’t know what was going on, but I knew one thing: a married man had met his cute assistant in an apparent abandoned building late at night, leaving his sick wife to die alone.
Yeah, men are fucking pigs.
Of course, I was a little biased these days.
Keeping to the shadows of a pathetic tree rising up from a trash-strewn sidewalk planter, I closed my eyes and utilized some of my newfound skills, clearing my mind and doing my best to remove some of the burning hate that I was feeling for the cheating bastard. With eyes closed, I expanded my awareness. I imagined this as a glowing arc, widening around me like ripples in a pond. The glowing arc was my feelers, my tentacles, my supernatural eyes and ears and hands and feet. It kept widening. I sensed a nearby mailbox. There was a rat watching me from a drain grate. Correction, three rats, all with glowing eyes, attracted to me for reasons I couldn’t quite understand. There was also an orange tabby that had made its way from the alley to sit under the baker’s van. The tabby was watching the rats, its tail swooshing spasmodically. I could almost—almost—hear the growling of its stomach. Maybe I sensed its hunger. Anyway, the arc continued out, widening, now reaching its curious supernatural feelers deep into the Al’s Auto. I saw a simple front office. Two simple front offices, actually. Computers. Desks. Filing cabinets. Pictures of sports cars on the walls. The building wasn’t abandoned. It was perfectly functioning. I sensed a hallway that led into the back of the shop. I pushed through a doorway into a brightly lit room. Lots of images here. Murky images. Clear images. Cars lined up. Cars on lifts. Another bigger image under what appeared to be a tarp. But I was reaching the end of my range. The images were getting murkier, fuzzier, more scattered. I was certain there was a man lying on the ground. Correction: two men lying on the ground. Or perhaps kneeling; it was hard to tell. Were they dead? Again, impossible to tell. And now I saw something else. Or someone else. A woman was squatting over one of them. The images were distorted at best. What they were doing exactly was impossible to tell. What I inferred they were doing was another story.