Trials of Emersten

It was five o'clock by the time everything was unloaded, rooms claimed, and the essentials were unpacked, set up, and situated. The movers had left a few hours earlier. It was a nice place, Mom would have loved it, but it wasn't home. 
    
We hadn't eaten since breakfast, so by that time, I was starved. I remember seeing in movies, when the main character would move into a small town like this, they barely had a chance to set foot into their new house before all the nosy neighborhood housewives started arriving with casseroles and jello molds, but short of the movers and the realtor, we'd yet to see a single soul (Alright, I'll admit it: secretly, I was hoping that cliché'd be true—I like jello.  Preferably the red kinds). 
    
I put the finishing touches on my bed, so I'd have a decent place to sleep that night, frowned  at my growling stomach, pulled the door half closed as I exited my new room, and tromped down the stairs. 

Dad was in the kitchen. It was a nice sized room, larger than the one in our old house, with granite counter tops and dark, red wood cabinetry with frosted glass facings; the floor tiles were about medium sized, cream-colored, and ceramic. Like our old place, it had one of those counters that you could eat off of, only there it was like a round, attached table, and essential, due to lack of sufficient space. Here it was just a long counter, and there was still a place to put a table for four, at least. Dad was standing on the working side of the counter, flipping though some papers, as I slid onto a stool across from him, seemingly unnoticed. 

My growling stomach had made me rather impatient and somewhat fidgety, so I kicked lightly at the foot-bar of my stool as I waited for him to acknowledge me. Either he was very engrossed in the papers he was looking through, or he chose to ignore my immaturity (probably the latter), but we remained like that for several minutes before, sighing slightly, he began to shuffle them into a neat little stack. He spared me half a glance before turning, and rummaging through the box from which he pulled them. 

"What's up, Cass? Need help with something?" 

"No, I'm fine," I said, shaking my head. "What's for dinner?"

He twisted his mouth as if just noticing he, too, was hungry, and that we'd yet to stock this place with food. Pausing in his search, one hand holding up what he'd already flipped through in the box, he used his other hand to dig through his pocket and pull out his keys, sliding them across the counter to me, along with some money. 

"Why don't you and your brother go pick up a pizza, or something? Something easy."

I swiveled as far as the stool would let me (which wasn't very), to face the  direction of the stairs, took a deep breadth, and yelled, "DANNY!"

I turned back to Dad, who was giving me a raised-eyebrow look that said, ‘if I'd wanted you to yell, I'd have done so myself.’ I grinned cheekily up at him, pushed off the stool and pocketed the cash, as he shook his head, sighed more audibly, and returned to his box. 

I met Danny at the bottom of the stairs, which stood six-feet in front of the main entrance of the house. As he was about to head towards the kitchen, assuming correctly that I'd called him down because of Dad, I grabbed his left wrist, pressed the keys into his hand, and pulled him to the door, stating simply, "Feed me, I'm hungry."

We climbed into Dad's car, a 1997 4-door red Jeep Cherokee Sport, and I put my seatbelt on as Danny fiddled with the radio, trying to find a decent rock station. When he heard the sound of AC/DC's Back in Black pouring through the speakers, he was satisfied, turned it up, and began to pull out of the driveway. 

We drove around the neighborhood a bit, trying to find what looked like a main road. it took us a while, but we finally made it to the more business district part of town, where all the stores, etc., were located. It was as we were driving down Gardener Boulevard, which appeared to be the main street in this town, that Danny and I caught our first glimpse of what Doreen, the Waitress had mentioned earlier, though we didn't associate it at the time. 

It was just after six, the sun had just started to set, and everyone seemed to be closing down for the day. Under normal circumstances, this wouldn't have seemed strange. Six o'clock in the evening is a fairly normal closing time for many types of businesses. But restaurants? Food markets? A movie theatre? 

Was there some special town-wide event supposed to be going on this evening? Nope, no flashy banners. Not even a single flyer for a town meeting, which, to my knowledge, would be the only other reasonable explanation. 

Not only that, but the townspeople seemed frantic; rushing people out of their shops, rushing to their cars, down the sidewalks. Children were being pulled behind their panicked-looking parents, who were moving too fast for their little legs.

Danny and I exchanged confused looks, before pulling into the parking lot of what appeared to be the only business still open in the entire town: a pizza place called The Slice Shack. 

We climbed out of the car, making sure to lock the doors, and started walking towards the wonderful smell of pizza. Yep, all that driving around had made me hungrier. We approached the door just as the person inside flipped the sign and started to close it. 

"No, no, no! Please. Please. You're the only place still open!" I ran the final few steps to the door, placing both hands on it, not really stopping her from closing it. 

She looked startled, at first. Then fear flickered briefly in her eyes, and she looked at the setting sun. Then she looked to me, then to Danny, then back at the sun, then back to me. 

"No, we're not. Sorry. You better get on home." She proceeded to start closing the door again, but, again, I entreated. 

"No, please, you don't understand. We just moved in. If we can't get something here, we don't have any food to eat for the night. Please."

She looked suspiciously between my brother and I for a second before responding slowly. 

"No, sorry. Go to Mount Highmore, if you must, though you'll probably regret it, it's the next town  over, but we're closed."

Shoulders slumped, defeated, stomach growling in protest, I turned to face Danny. "Dad is going to kill us. We've already been gone so long, he's probably freaking!"

Danny sighed, and nodded his acquiescence. "Yeah, probably." He turned to start heading to the car, and I made a move to follow, when a deep, smooth-as-silk voice spoke from inside the parlor. 

"Why don't you just give them what's left of the counter pies?" I whipped my head around to find the source of the voice. A boy, who had to be about mine and Danny's age, with longish, messy, dark brown hair, was sitting at one of the tables, eating. He shrugged, took another bite of his slice, and wiped his hands as he stood up. "You were just going to throw them  out, anyway." 

He walked to the counter, reached over, pulled out a box, and folded it open. He cut off an excess slice, or two so that it was now a half-pie, and slid it into the box, along with another half-pie. He closed the box, walked it to the door, and handed it out to me. "Just make sure to heat it up a bit before you eat it."

"Will do." 

He smiled a pearly smile, which made me smile, as I took in the rest of his features. High cheekbones, a small, narrow, but strong nose. Full, but not too full lips. He was tall, about six-one. Lean, but muscular, and had a nice tan to his skin. His eyebrows weren't too thick, and his eyes…his eyes were the most amazing golden-amber color—almost like the type you'd see on an animal. 

Though I was technically older by ten minutes, Danny liked to play the role of protective older brother. He noticed the exchange between me and Pizza-boy, and decided it was time to go home. He took a stance that flexed his swimmer's muscles, as he gently tugged my arm, so as not to disturb the pizza, and narrowed hazel eyes that matched my own. 

"Hate to cut this short," he said, insincerely, though I think I'm the only one who noticed. The  other two seemed to be paying more attention to how much darker the sky had gotten since we'd arrived. "But we should probably get going before Dad puts together a search party" he chuckled lightly for effect. 

"Yeah," the pizza boy said, distracted, looking everywhere but at us. Searching, almost. "You probably should. The faster the better." He looked back at me and smiled again, tapping the box with his index finger. "Remember to heat that. See you around, then?"

I shrugged. "Yeah, I guess." And as Danny gently pulled me away, and Pizza-boy pulled, who I could only assume was his mother back inside, though they didn't look alike, I called back "Thanks, again!"

He smiled again, waved, and shut the door, as his mother shot him a dark look. 

Dad was waiting by the door when we got home. 

"There you are! Took you long enough! What did you do? Make it yourself?" He took the pizza box from my hands and began walking with it to the kitchen, pausing mid-step when he noticed the temperature. He turned to look at Danny and me, a confused expression on his face. "It's cold."

Danny walked past us both, took the pizza, and carried it the rest of the way to the kitchen. "That's because Cass took her sweet time flirting with the pizza boy." He slapped the box down on the counter, flipped it open, peeled out a slice of sausage pizza, and began eating it like that, making a face at the staleness, but not pausing between bites. 

"That's not what happened, and you know it!" I pushed past him and claimed a stool, peeking in the box to see what we had: Sausage, or pepperoni. Pepperoni it is. 

"Oh, so you weren't flirting," Danny retorted, moving on to his second slice. 

"I wa—Irrelevant!" I said, indignantly. I turned to face Dad. "The point is, we had to practically fight for this pizza." I waved my hand at it. 

"Huh," was Dad's intelligent response. 

"On the plus side, though," Danny said, smiling as he moved in on slice number three. "It was free."

Later that night, as I was falling asleep, I heard a scream in the distance, followed, not too long after, by an erie howl.