"Really? What would you call it?"

Deke studied her for a second, realizing she was trying to work herself up to doing this. Yet one look at her face told him it was the last thing she should be trying to do. She had been tough as hell tonight, but it had taken its toll and she wasn't ready for this.

"I call it not wanting to tromp around in your coworker's blood," he answered with a shrug. "Besides, you saved my butt tonight so you're entitled to three 'dainty princess' moments. This will be number one. Okay?"

Stacey didn't' answer right away.

"Okay?" Deke pressed.

"I guess." The girl managed to look doubtful but grateful all at the same time. "Are you sure about this?"

"Yep," the boy said over his shoulder as he started back towards the front. "Besides, it's still standing in water up there and I'm the one wearing boots. So this really counts as just being practical."

Stacey didn't reply, but Deke was gratified to see she remained behind.

Now he could focus on getting something done.

Stormbreak - Marisa.

Still reeling inside from his revelation about Masonfield, Marisa struggled to digest this latest statement. Normally, she would have probably said something disbelieving or sarcastic, but right now she just didn't have it in her.

"That bad, huh? This plan of yours must really be something."

"Well, it's elegant." He put the toothpick in his mouth and nodded towards the window. "But it has a couple of doozies for kinks. First things first, though...you wouldn't happen to know the owner of that truck out there, would you?"

Marisa looked out the window, grateful that this particular pane didn't feature a corpse staring back in at her. The diesel pumps shimmered in the distance under their awning lights. The lone Peterbilt parked beside them seemed like a relic from a bygone world...a world that ended nine distant hours ago.

"Yeah. That's Grandpa Tom's truck."

She looked over to see Harley exhale in obvious relief.

"Good," he murmured. "At least we have the keys to it. There's one less problem to deal with."

"Okay," she pressed, "but it's no different than our cars. We can't get to it. Especially now that that jackass managed to draw the rest of those putos up here before getting his stupid ass killed."

"Actually," Harley chewed the toothpick as he stared through the running glass, "that may end up working in our favor. I wonder how many are left around back."

Marisa tried to figure out where he was going with this.

"Who knows?" she shrugged. "I guess we could go up to the roof and count them. But why?"

"Because," he answered while peering up at the black sky, "I seem to remember there is a power line running from the roof of this building over to the awning over the diesel pumps. I can't see it right now due to the darkness and the storm, but I'm pretty sure it's there."

"It is," Marisa confirmed, now looking up into the blackness herself. "Every so often some trucker frets about hitting it, but it's too high."

She stopped a second, as the implication hit her.

"Harley, I know what you're thinking," she turned back from the window towards him. "But it won't work. That's a power cable. You try to climb out on it and you're just going to get electrocuted. Especially in the rain!"

He glanced back over at her, his grin now back in place, even if it did look a little tight.

"As it is now, yeah," he agreed. "That's one of the main reasons this wasn't Plan A. But if we cut the power, everything changes."

She looked out at the distant pumps, then back at the man.

"Maybe," she conceded. Personally, she thought it looked like a hell of a long climb, even for a guy in Harley's shape. "But how do we knock out the power?"

"Well, right there is where this starts to get kind of hairy. The only way to do that will be to cut it off at the breaker box. You wouldn't happen to know where those are, would you?"

"Sure," she frowned, "They're in the back hall. You've passed them a bunch of times."

"No, those are the internal breakers. Those would be for the stoves, coolers, and other stuff inside. What I'm talking about will be outside, probably on the back wall somewhere. They'll be big metal boxes, maybe with handles on the sides...and they'll have padlocks."

She stared at him wide-eyed.

"Harley, you can't be thinking of going out there."

"I'm sort of out of choices," he shrugged. "So, do you know where they are?"

"Yes, they're on the back wall near the corner on the left as you go out the door. But what are you going to do? Go out there and start going through keys till you find the right one? I don't think those evil bastards are going to stand around and let you do that."

"No, you're right," he conceded, "I won't have time for that. My only chance will be to sneak down there real fast, clip the wire on the meter collar, and pull the electric meter out. That'll cut the power to everything, but if Doc's right then we can't stay here anyway."

"Harley, this is loco. You can't go out there! You'll get killed and that won't help us. Besides, even if you do make it, then what? Can you really make a climb like that? Can you? That's a hell of a long way, and it's raining." She reached over and gently tapped the bandages on his forearm. "I know you're tough, Harley, but those have to hurt."

"They won't be an issue," he replied.

She studied him for a second, understanding what he said wasn't braggadocio, but just a simple assertion. At the same time, she understood this had been "Plan B" for a reason. Harley had his doubts, even if he wasn't voicing them.

"Fine, but even if they don't bother you...and even if you do make the climb...then what? None of the rest of us could make it, or would have any other way of getting out there to join you."

"That's the easy part," he grinned. "I'll just pull the truck over by the store, and everybody can use a table or something to climb over to the top of the trailer from the roof. Then I'll take a nice leisurely cruise down to the rest area a couple of miles down the road and ya'll can get off there. Everybody gets wet, but nobody else gets eaten. What do you think?"

Marisa stared across the dim table at Harley as she turned this new scenario over in her mind.

The simplicity of the solution stunned her.

And it was a solution. It would work...it would actually work. After all the blood, death, terror, and tears over the past nine hours, the whole lot of them could be saved by something as simple as hopping onto the back of a parked truck from the roof.

Assuming Harley could reach that truck...

She fought down the surge of excitement and refocused on the problem of the power cable. She didn't really share Harley's confidence in this plan. Hell, she didn't even share his pretended confidence in this plan. The idea of any one of them stepping back outside filled her with dread.

"I don't know," Marisa muttered as she struggled between the hope of them riding off to safety on the roof of the truck...and the mental image of Harley being caught and torn to pieces at the breaker boxes out back. "I don't like this. There has to be another way."

"Well if there is," Harley sighed as he scooted his way back out of the booth and stood up, "you're gonna have to come up with it in the next ten minutes. We're running out of time, and I need to get moving."

"Where to?" Marisa stood up to follow him.

"First the roof," he answered as they started for the door. "I'll need to get a count and position on every zombie out back of the truck stop. When I go out there, I don't feel like running into any nasty surprises."

"I'm right behind you."

Harley stopped a second and looked at her.

"You know it's going to be wet out there, right?"

"No kidding." She folded her arms and lifted an eyebrow at him. "I hear it gets like that when it rains."

He looked up at the ceiling with a grin and shook his head.

"Well, yeah," Harley chuckled. "If you put it that way. But I always thought Stacey was the comedian of you two."

"She is," Marisa replied without missing a beat. "I'm the smart one who listens to weather reports and brings her raincoat and umbrella."

That brought a bark of laughter and the man held up his hands in mock surrender.

"Okay, you win," he conceded good-naturedly. "I just thought you might prefer to try and think of other options down here where it's dry while I'm up top scouting things out in the storm. It's not like there's any zombies on the roof, you know."

"We'll see," she indicated the direction of the kitchen door with the bat. "But I'm not taking any chances, 'partner.' Bien?"

"Good enough, partner. Let's go get wet."

The two turned towards the end of the counter that marked the path to the kitchen door, but they barely made it two steps.

The loud bang of the restaurant door being slammed open sounded behind them. It was done with enough force to rattle the glass in the rest of the room.

They whirled to see Deke fly into the diner, his eyes wide with fear...

...and that was when disaster struck.

Stormbreak Deke.

Turning his attention forward again, Deke moved in what he hoped was catlike silence down the aisle. He sized up the situation in front of him as he went. Several wasted silhouettes had returned to their stations outside the windows, but with the lights out they really didn't concern him. Besides, he was going to be squatting on the floor below their level of sight.

But it also meant he was going to be operating below the level of what little light came in through the windows. And the visibility was poor enough as it was.

The youngster crouched as he reached the end of the aisle and moved slowly forward towards the dark mounds of rubble. Water sloshed around his boots, as he carefully made his way into the puddle. He moved in a three point stance, one hand on the floor for extra balance. Moving like this made his shoulder hurt, so he slipped his injured arm back into the sling. He wasn't going to need two hands to do this job anyway.

As expected, he could see almost nothing.

He felt his way around in the mess, trying to find anything that might feel like a purse. It wasn't easy because the puddle was full of objects. A few he could make out by feel...lighters, cigarette packs, cans of snuff. Others were more mysterious. And everything was soaked. He fumbled through the debris, trying to put mental pictures to everything he handled.

He kept finding long, plastic wrapped objects that confused him. They seemed out of place in an area mainly featuring tobacco products. After the fifth or sixth one, he stopped and tried to imagine what they could be. If they weren't cigarettes or snuff, they had to be something that had been on display on top of the counter. The problem was, the counter displays changed regularly.

But that was the clue that gave Deke the mystery object's identity. Halloween was right around the corner, and the store display had been featuring stuff for trick or treaters. Things like Halloween stickers, reflective tape...

...and glow sticks.

"Yes!" Deke fished the next one he found out of the puddle. "Perfect!"

It took a little effort in the dark, but he managed to tear the foil wrapper open and snap the plastic tube. Instantly, a soft green glow illuminated the floor around him.

"Now we're cooking with gas," the boy muttered as he started scanning the debris. "Now where are you?"

"Deke?" Stacey's voice came from the darkness at the back of the store. "What are you doing?"

"Hunting the purse," he called back softly. "What color is it?"

"Umm...it's tan, I think. Or maybe beige."

Deke chuckled to himself as he searched, realizing that was the type of distinction only a girl would make. In the past few hours he had started seeing Stacey as the human being she was, instead of the fantasy he imagined. Yet somehow that was making him fall for her all the harder.

"Wait a minute," he murmured as he spied the very edge of something in the blackness under the rear counter. It was a pale blotch, barely visible in the light of the glow stick.

Excitement built as he leaned down to get a better look at the thing. It was definitely a purse or handbag of some sort. Harley would have never noticed it when moving the bodies, especially since he wasn't looking for it in the first place. One of the creatures must have kicked it under the counter when it attacked Gladys. Deke had only spotted it because he was crouched so low to begin with.

Being essentially one handed, Deke reached under the counter with the hand holding the glow stick and fished the object out.

It was what he thought it was.

"Got it!" he yelled and stood up, holding the purse aloft in triumph.

And then everything went to hell.

"Cool..." Stacey began, but then her voice rose to a shriek. "DEKE! LOOK OUT! BEHIND YOU!"

As soon as she screamed, Deke understood his mistake.

The hand holding the purse also held the glow stick. And he was waving it right in front of the window. Sick with realization, he pulled down his hand and turned to face the inevitable...and in the process turned a serious mistake into a catastrophic one.

Now he was held the glow stick in front of him, and between him and the window...fully illuminating him for the benefit of the two horrors on the other side of the glass. There would be no going back now. Both had already spread their talons and crouched for the attack, their deathly black sockets fixed firmly on his face.

Reality slowed to a series of split seconds, and Deke thought faster than he ever had in his entire life.

It was too late to stop the attack. If he stayed where he was they would be coming through the glass after him. If he backed away, the result would be the same. Even if he dropped the glowstick, the light coming in from the front gas pumps was enough for them to keep a fix on him and attack. Which meant he was screwed. He couldn't hope to fight even one of these things in his current shape, and there were two of them.

And Stacey was somewhere behind him, trapped against a door that only opened from the other side.

In the tiny fraction of time he had left, it was the last realization that dictated his course of action. He knew he was probably dead, but perhaps he could see to it she didn't die with him.

"Stacey! Get in the men's bathroom and block the door!"

Remembering the Doc and her performance with her little flashlight, Deke slapped the end of the glow stick against the glass and ran for the restaurant. He hadn't really formulated a plan, other than to get away from Stacey before the monsters crashed through the glass upon him. It was just the first thing that came to mind.