When Darlene left us to our meal, I said, “Screamers, huh?”
“It isn’t just the open maw,” Bridget said. “First time I saw one, I thought of that painting, The Scream. These creatures terrify me, but I also think there’s something despairing about them. If a scream ever came out of one, it would be a howl of hatred but also of blackest insanity, like an entire asylum full of mad voices all shrieking at once.”
In the spirit of a man slated for execution immediately after dessert, I found myself licking the sauce off my fingers, craving every iota of pleasure available to me, assuming that pleasure can be measured in iotas. “What do they want? What’re they doing?”
“We don’t know,” Sparky said. “Maybe we’d rather not know, but we think it’s inevitable that we’ll find out. Unless one of them realizes Bridget and you can see the truth of them.”
I stopped licking my fingers. “Is that possible?”
“Why couldn’t it be?”
“And then?”
“Nothing good. Which is why we have to play ignorant.”
I thought about that. I didn’t like thinking about it. I almost lost my appetite, after all.
“By the way,” I said, “you two were great with all that wedding reception patter. I wish I could be that smooth. I’m sorry I said ‘knocked out’ three times. Once would have been better.”
Bridget said, “You did fine, Quinn. But just never again call me ‘sweetums.’”
“I couldn’t believe I heard myself say it.” We ate in silence for a minute or two, and then I remembered. “You said there was an incident with one of them. What incident?”
Bridget put down what remained of her second slider and wiped her fingers on her napkin, like an adult. Evidently, she’d seen enough Screamers that the sight of two more didn’t reduce her to the morbid conviction that she’d soon be torn apart and swallowed by a large walking worm with wicked hands. I expected her to reveal the details of the aforementioned incident. Instead, the napkin fell out of her hands, and she went as still as if she’d been flash frozen, and her gaze fixed on something as distant as a moon of Saturn.
Although Sparky didn’t put down his slider, he lowered it from his mouth without taking another bite. He said, “Uh-oh.”
I didn’t ask, Uh-oh what? My brain had already downloaded too many weird and scary events for one day. Yeah, I had more storage capacity, but I wasn’t going to solicit additional freaky data.
After maybe twenty seconds, Bridget unfroze. Her expression remained grim, but her stare shifted several million miles to her grandfather. “They’re going to kill a lot of people.”
I didn’t ask, but Sparky seemed to think I had, so he said, “She means the Screamers.”
“They’re heavily armed,” she said. “They’re waiting. As the dinner hour peaks and the restaurant gets full, they’re going to open fire. It’ll be a massacre.”
We lived in a strange, dark time. Massacres were growing more common, and not all of them involved guns. Sometimes the weapon of choice was a bomb, sometimes Molotov cocktails thrown into a crowded church or synagogue. Now and then an airplane was flown into a building or a train of tanker cars was intentionally derailed and several square blocks of a town were set afire by the spilled petroleum. More often than not the perpetrators claimed a just and noble cause. Throughout history, whole societies that seemed stable have imploded when self-righteous narcissists, enflamed by insane ideologies, so threatened the larger population of the sane that soon everyone feared to stand against the violence, whereupon madness accelerated. No one seemed to remember the lessons of history—or cared to learn them. Perhaps we would persevere through this current darkness. But the very fact of it argued for a second order of pulled-pork sliders—which Darlene now brought to table—and, if time permitted, the richest dessert on the menu, just in case it would be our last.
Bridget picked up her second slider, which she had left half-finished, and she polished it off.
I said, “What—you had a vision?”
“I don’t have visions. It was a presentiment. A feeling, an impression. But pretty specific.” She pushed the empty plate aside and slid one of the fresh orders in front of herself. “We’ve got time to enjoy these, but we’ll have to split before we can tackle the banana cream pie.”
As Sparky tucked into his food again, I said, “But.”