The young man looked unsure, but nodded and headed over to where Stacey sat huddled next to the grill. The doctor watched him go while wiping her hands on a hot rag. He bent over and said something to the girl softly, and whatever it was must have been the right thing for she gave him a wan smile and offered the spot on the floor next to her. Rachel had a feeling he was going to have a girlfriend on his hands long before their scheduled first date took place.

Assuming any of them lived that long.

"Okay," Rachel surveyed the grim faces around the kitchen, sighed, and tossed the rag into the sink. "Is that everybody? Are there any other injuries I need to know about?"

Nobody answered.

"Anybody?" she repeated. "Bueller?"

"Well," Marisa spoke up from her place beside Benny, "I remember that Harley's hand was bleeding, but I think it was just a barked knuckle from punching the one out in the store."

"Okay," Rachel pondered for a second, "That's not critical enough for immediate attention, but I'll remember it if I get a chance at him later. Anybody else?

For a moment nobody answered, then Gerald's girlfriend raised her hand.

"You're injured?" Rachel frowned "No," the girl blushed and shook her head in obvious embarrassment, "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to imply that. I just have a question. It's completely unrelated to injuries."

"No problem," the veterinarian shrugged...at least the girl was polite, no matter how bad her taste in boyfriends. "It looks like everybody is patched up for the moment, so what's your question?"

"Where do they come from?"

"Huh?" Rachel gave the girl a puzzled look. "What are you talking about?"

"The dead things...the zombies," Holly swallowed. "They've got to come from somewhere, right? I'm not from around here, but we passed this place on the highway before turning around and coming back, and I don't remember seeing a graveyard."

A graveyard?

Rachel gaped at the girl as her mind violently twisted away from being preoccupied with treating people and focused on the question.

A graveyard?

She had been so busy trying to help people, it had never occurred to her to question the origin of these monsters. Up until now, she hadn't had the time. She had simply considered them a hideous threat and not put much more thought into them than that. But now...

...now they were something worse.

"Oh...no..." she moaned as the only possible source for these "zombies" rose in her mind. She vaguely saw Marisa coming to her feet with a similar look of horror on her face, apparently realizing at the same time where these things must be coming from.

Only they weren't "things".

They used to be people...their people.

People who had lived, loved, and had families. People who had died and were buried at the Mazon County Memorial Cemetery a mile up the side road beside the truck stop.

And one of those people had been Matt.

"Doc? Marisa? What's going on?"

Rachel saw Harley turn in his bar stool towards them as they crowded to a stop in the kitchen door. The door opened from behind the counter, and she had expected to have to slip past him to get into the room proper. So it came as a bit of a surprise to see him sitting out in the open on a stool in front of the counter, instead of the station he had assumed behind it when everybody first retreated to the kitchen.

The young man had tilted the scruffy hat back on his head and was lounging on the stool next to the back wall, drinking coffee that he had been serving himself from the nearby pot. For a hopeful moment Rachel wondered if things had changed out here and the big lout simply hadn't gotten around to telling them.

A quick glance at the windows revealed that not to be the case. As a matter of fact, things were worse than before.

They were surrounded.

Water sheeted down the big panes of glass, distorting the figures in the unending row grinning back in at them. The motionless forms stood side by side in a line stretching from the window closest the kitchen wall, to the glass fire door, then the windows all the way to and around the front corner...stretching across the front windows as well. The light from inside the diner shimmered out through the streaming sheets of glass, almost glowing off the bone and bare teeth of the watcher's mutilated faces. At the same time, it made their sockets look black and utterly empty of both eyes and humanity alike.

They wore dark suits and pale dresses, all drenched and hanging off their frames like overdressed scarecrows at a dinner party for the damned.

There was no sign the storm howling around the building discomfited them, or if they even noticed it.

They simply stood out there.

Waiting.

Rachel hesitated at the sight of them, causing Marisa to bump into her from behind before allowing herself to be slowly edged into the room. She tore her eyes from the motionless wall of dead people and fixed them back on the man at the counter.

"Harley," she whispered urgently, "We need to see something. We've got to know if something is true about these...things. It's important. Is it safe to come out here?"

The young man gave a speculative glance over his shoulder at the windows, then looked back at the two women with a fatalistic shrug. He picked up a bottle of sugar and started pouring it into his coffee as he answered.

"It's alright," he cautioned softly, "As long as you move real slow and don't get too close to the window, they don't seem to react. But stay out of sight of the ones at the door if you can. They seem to see better. I think it has something to do with the water on the glass."

"Oookaayyyy," Rachel replied doubtfully.

Part of her still insisted this had to be a trick or an illusion of some kind. Maybe some form of disease that wasted an individual and drove them to self mutilation and violence. The doctor knew what she had seen at the back door, but still felt tempted to write it off as a quick but unreliable impression in the heat of a violent confrontation. She clung to a small sliver of hope that a closer look would reveal an all too mundane nature of their attackers.

All it took was one flash of lightning to shatter that hope, once and for all.

As she reached the end of the counter, the sky flared with light and cast the line of besieging horrors into stark relief. The man looking in directly across the room from her must have had his suit torn a recent altercation, for it hung half off him and revealed the desiccated chest underneath...along with the autopsy scar. The incision must have also been torn loose in the same fight, for it hung open on one side and revealed the cracked ribcage underneath.

The woman next to him might have died in a car crash or some other violent manner, for the face of her skull was half crushed in. Only one eye glared back from its lone intact socket, and the jaw didn't hang exactly straight underneath either. She was missing an arm from the elbow down, and she stood at an odd angle that suggested hip or leg damage as well.

These people were dead.

Very dead.

And the only question left was their point of origin.

Rachel moved up to the end of the counter, and barely noticed as Marisa brushed past her and started moving down the room, peering at the ghoulish figures one at a time.

It only took Rachel one look at the window to drive home the numb certainty her own intent to search for Matt...to settle once and for all if her lost husband walked out there in the storm this night...was doomed from the start. Almost all the male figures wore dark suits that appeared identical in the night time downpour, and without faces there was nothing else to go by...just a chorus line of stick figures with leering skulls and hanging suits, anonymous in their shared mutilation.

He could have been any one of them...or none o them.

It was almost a relief.

Maybe he wasn't out there. Maybe this nightmare had nothing to do with Matt at all. Just maybe these things came from some military or government vehicle that had crashed nearby, or was parked behind the truck stop right now with its back gate forced open. Seriously, who knew what cargo any eighteen wheeler out on the road might be carrying? Hell, this was already like some kind of bad movie...was there any certainty where these things really came from?

"Oh, no."

Marisa's soft gasp jarred Rachel out of her reverie and back into the room with the hellish view.

The waitress had dropped the bat and covered her mouth with both hands. A single tear started down her cheek as she stared at the window.

Rachel tracked her horrified gaze to a wraithlike figure in a white dress. It was hard to see much through the streaming window, but the older woman could tell even in the rain it had a full head of thick black hair very much like the girl staring at it, and its garment looked like some kind of formal gown...or perhaps a prom dress.

"Vicky?" Marisa choked out. "Madre de dios! Vicki?"

The girl took a halting step towards the window.

"Doc!" Harley called while coming off his stool, "Grab her! Don't let her do that!"

Rachel recovered and moved towards the girl just as she stumbled toward the window.

"Vicki!" the tears now flowed. "Soy yo, Marisa! No te recuardas de mi?"

Rachel caught her just as the thing in the window came alive.

The two women shrieked as the dead woman gaped her jaws in what was becoming a familiar prelude to attack and slammed herself against the window. The whole pane shook as the monster now focused in on them, withered hands splayed against the glass. For one heart stopping second Rachel thought the horror would come crashing through the weak barrier and land on them both. And if that window broke there would be more of those things piling through in a heartbeat.

The sound of the pane creaking in its frame sounded like imminent death in her ears.

But evidently it was made of sterner stuff than she realized. The window held...for the moment...and the veterinarian grabbed Marisa as the girl cried out at the specter.

"Vicki! So yo! Marisa! Tu hermana, Marisa! Lo siento! No hagas esto!"

Not knowing what else to do, Rachel put herself between the young woman and the window and embraced her tightly. She couldn't understand what the girl was saying, but from the sound of her voice she was bordering on hysterics. She could also hear more hands thumping and squeaking on the glass behind her and feared all their luck would soon run out. A look to her left revealed Harley had halted on his way over, obviously not wanting to add any more motion to the scene.

It was up to her.

With gentle care, Rachel eased herself and the girl two small steps away from the glass. A glance back revealed the dead woman to be pressed up against the window...her teeth and cheekbone making an audible "scritch" as they slid across the pane's surface...but at least she wasn't slamming up against it anymore...much. The distraught waitress must have seen enough, because she felt Marisa bury her face into her shoulder and start to cry.

"Lo siento, Vicki!" she sobbed into Rachel's shoulder, "Lo siento! No sabia! Por favor, lo siento! No sabia!"

"Easy," Rachel soothed, and hugged the girl tighter. "Easy, Marisa. We're not out of this yet."

She could still hear the scratching on the glass behind her, and could see Harley staring at it with hair trigger intensity. Behind him, she spotted Deke and Stacey standing frozen behind the counter and Gerald and Holly in the kitchen door. Nobody moved, and another series of thumps from the window told her that the thing was still focused on her back. The tension hung thick in the air, and Rachel knew their luck couldn't hold out much longer.

"Marisa," she breathed into the crying girl's ear, "we need to take another couple of steps away from the window. Okay?"

For a moment she didn't know if the girl didn't hear her, or if she was simply having to much trouble catching her breath to talk. Then, just before she intended to repeat herself, Marisa nodded her head.

"Okay, good," Rachel continued, still holding the young woman for all she was worth, "We're just going to take a couple of really slow steps backwards, and then I want you to tell me who that was. Okay?"

No answer.

"Okay?"

"Okay," came the muffled reply.

"Alright then," Rachel murmured as she gently guided the waitress backwards. "Just one sloooowww step."

The two moved in unison, almost as if dancing.

"Now another."

The sounds behind her faded.

"And one more."

The two stopped, still embraced, beside a booth on the far wall from the windows. Neither moved for a moment, and Rachel maintained her tight grip on the girl. The tall waitress had not shown one ounce of fear during this whole ordeal, but the sobs escaping her now were those of a deep and reawakened grief.

She didn't know what else to do but continue to hold her until sounds behind them ceased. It took a few minutes but, as Harley had mentioned, the dead didn't seem to see through the window well, and once they lost sight of their prey it wasn't too long until they reverted back to their still vigil at the streaming glass.

Another flash of lightning cast their shadows on the diner wall, revealing them to be once again standing in their grim cordon.

The danger had passed.

"It's okay, now," she murmured and tried to get a look at the young woman's face. "They've gone quiet again. Are you alright?"

It surprised her, but Marisa actually straightened up and wiped her eyes.

"Yeah," she sniffled, seeming to struggle between embarrassment and the grief that had gripped her earlier. She sat down in the booth behind her and took a shaky breath. "Yeah...just give me a second. I'm a little messed up."

Rachel slid into the bench across the table from her. She watched quietly as the young Latina brought herself back under control, before gently asking the obvious question.

"Who was it, Marisa? Who was she?"

Marisa closed her eyes for a second, then opened them and stared at the now still wraith in the window. The pain in her face hurt for Rachel to see. She had been seeing that look in her own mirror for longer than she cared to remember.

"That," she swallowed, then continued, "is my big sister, Vicki...Victoria."

"Are you sure?" Rachel looked from the girl to the dim, death-faced figure in the window. "Can you really be certain?"

"Oh yeah," Marisa whispered and gave another wipe at her eyes. "My mom and I helped her make that dress for prom. You see, Vicki and I weren't just sisters, we were best friends. I was going to wear it for my prom too, when I was old enough. But instead, I ended up taking it to the funeral home for Vicki. She died a week before the prom, and never got to wear it...so I didn't want it anymore. At least this way she got..."

The girl swallowed and wiped her eyes again, unable to finish the thought.

"Marisa?" Rachel reached across the table and took her hand, "What happened to her? Why did she die so young?"

The waitress swallowed and took another deep, shuddering breath. She stared somewhere into the darkness past Rachel's shoulder, and the doctor knew she was looking at a scene somewhere in the past.

"School was almost over for the year," the girl continued, "and we were at a swimming pool. Everybody was laughing and cutting up, and having a good time. It was just a bunch of kids having a party, we weren't doing anything wrong. We were just having fun. But sometime during all that," Marisa closed her eyes and took a deep breath, "Vicki jumped off the high diving board...and didn't come back up."

"Oh, God..." Rachel started, then faltered. She didn't know what else to say, other than to hold the girls hand and let her finish.