Another customer enters the crowded diner.
I notice the other men give him a suspicious glance as he makes his way to a booth in the rear. They looked at me and Katarina with similar suspicion when we first entered. I took this place for a way station, filled with strangers, but apparently some strangers are worthy of suspicion and others aren’t. Katarina and I are doing our best, dressed in generic American mall clothes: T-shirts and khaki shorts. I can see why we stand out—apparently they have a different definition of “generic” here in the far reaches of West Texas.
This other stranger is harder to figure, though. He’s dressed the part, more or less: wearing one of those Texas ties, with the dangly strands of black leather. And like the rest of the men here, he’s wearing boots.
But his clothes seem somehow out-of-date, and there’s something creepy about his thin black mustache: it looks straight at first glance, but the more I consider it, something about it just seems crooked.
“It’s impolite to stare.” Katarina, chiding me again.
“I wasn’t staring,” I lie. “I was looking, with interest.”
Katarina laughs. She’s laughed more in the past twenty-four hours than she has in months. This new Katrina is going to take some getting used to.
Not that I mind.
I stretch out luxuriantly on the hotel bed while Katarina showers in the bathroom. The sheets are cheap, polyester or rayon, but I’m so tired from the road they may as well be silk.
When Katarina first pulled the sheets down we found a live earwig under the pillow, which grossed her out but didn’t bother me.
“Kill it,” she begged, covering her eyes.
I refused. “It’s just an insect.”
“Kill it!” she begged.
Instead, I swept it off the bed and hopped into the cool sheets. “Nope,” I said stubbornly.
“Fine,” she said, and went to shower. She turned the faucets on, but stepped out of the bathroom again a moment later. “I worry—” she started.
“About what?” I asked.
“I worry that I haven’t trained you well.”
I rolled my eyes. “’Cause I won’t kill a bug?!”
“Yes. No, I mean, it’s what got me thinking. You need to learn to kill without hesitation. I haven’t even taught you to hunt rodents, let alone Mogadorians . . . you’ve never killed anything—”
Katarina paused, the water still running behind her. Thinking.
I could tell she was tired, lost in a thought. She gets like that sometimes, if we’ve been training too gruelingly. “Kat,” I said. “Go shower.”
She looked up, her reverie broken. She chuckled and closed the door behind her.
Waiting for her to finish, I turned on the TV from the bed. The previous tenant had left it on CNN and I’m greeted with the site of helicopter footage of the “event” in England. I watch only long enough to learn that both the press and English authorities are confused as to what exactly happened yesterday. I’m too tired to think about this; I’ll get the details later.
I shut off the TV and lay back on the bed, eager for sleep to take me.
Katarina steps out of the bathroom moments later, wearing a robe and brushing out her hair. I watch her through half-closed eyes.
There is a knock on the door.
Katarina drops her brush on the bureau.
“Who is it?” she asks.
“Manager, miss. I brought ya some fresh towels.”
I’m so annoyed by the interruption—I want to sleep, and it’s pretty obvious we don’t need fresh towels since we only just got to the room—that I propel myself right off the bed, barely thinking.
“We don’t need any,” I say, already swinging the door open.
I just have time to hear Katarina say, “Don’t—” before I see him, standing before me. The crooked mustache man.
The scream catches in my throat as he enters the room and shuts the door behind him.
CHAPTER SEVEN