Chapter 3

Instead of running directly to Ohio, I decided to turn sharply south through the thin wedge of Maryland and into West Virginia. The roads wound up and around the Appalachian Mountains giving me a mild sense of security because cell phones still had spotty reception throughout the area.

After a long hard push to run far and fast, we approached the outskirts of Parkersburg, WV famished and fatigued. I told Kristy to scan for a real restaurant that met our needs. She spotted an old neon sign that must have been fifty or sixty years old attached to an ancient diner-like building. The only lines into the building seemed to be electricity and telephone. No antennas were visible and the parking lot was mostly full of pickup trucks.

The meal was a welcome relief. The food was hot, full of fat, salt, and sugar. I scanned the room every few bites but no one seemed to be paying us any attention. The crowd was mixed; black, white, and even a young Asian couple, old, young, families, and two-somes.

Down the road only a mile or so was a motel and we took a room on the side. I sent Kristy to the bathroom to take a shower and settled on the bed, turning on the entertainment console.

A slight scrape outside the door caught my attention and then the door burst in. A man and woman exploded into the room and with a heavy Asian accent demanded to know where the "gull" was. I had already leapt off of the bed and held my tongue in the silence. They heard the same shower I did and the guy ordered the woman in an Asian language. She jumped past me and ran to the bathroom, kicking in that door.

The man smiled at me and shot out a round house kick that I dodged by bending backwards and falling onto the bed. My feet came up and I grabbed the short blade I keep in my boot. He shot a punch at me that I stopped with a stab of the knife in his tricep.

He swore a blue streak and whipped that knife out of my hand with another kick from nowhere. He gave me a cruel little smile and shot another foot out that I couldn't deflect which hit my sternum and threw me into the wall.

Just as he wound up for the kill, this white streak appeared out the corner of my left eye and grabbed his arm and shoulder, throwing him to the ground. Kristy followed him down and buried her face in his throat. I heard a short scream and a horrible crunching sound. The man's body went limp.

Kristy looked up at me and her face was a mask of blood, tissue and bits of bone. She spit something out of her mouth and said something to me that, for lack of a better word, didn't process.

She wiped her face on the guy's shirt and stood up and took hold of my arms. "Are you alright?"

That time I comprehended and I nodded "yes." I tossed off the shock and peeled myself off of the wall. Bending down to take a closer look at the dead man, I tried not to stare at his throat that Kristy had ripped out with her teeth. I had seen plenty of blown and shot bodies in the Venezuela campaign, but never something so intimately gruesome. I swallowed my vomit back down.

The face looked familiar but I couldn't place it. I walked into the bathroom and found the woman with her right hand flopping backwards nearly touching her forearm and her head at a funny angle. Her shirt was ripped off of her torso and dangled from the sleeves. A small tattoo on her right shoulder blade of a wickedly curved claw with Chinese glyphs balancing on the tip caught my attention. The art reminded me of the legendary Japanese Yakuza, but the characters were definitely Chinese.