Dark Creations: The Hunted (Part 4) by Jennifer Martucci, Christopher Martucci

though she were whistling soundlessly.  “You’d think I’d have this down pat by now.  But I’m a bit of a wreck here.”
    Gabriel squeezed her hand reassuringly.  “You’re doing a great job,” he told her.  “This is the last house.  If this guys doesn’t tell us anything new then we are on vacation in sunny California for the next week with nothing to do but relax.”
    “He won’t have jack shit to tell us,” Alexandra bellowed from the back seat.
    “Ha!” Yoshi laughed.  “I get it; jack shit!  Funny!”
    “Maybe I’ll try surfing.  I’ve always wanted to learn to surf,” Alexandra shared.
    “You’re probably right, Alex,” Gabriel added.  “He probably won’t tell us anything, especially since he’s been written off by everyone else.  But you never know.”
    “Here goes nothing,” Melissa said nervously then climbed out of the passenger seat of the rental car and strode to the front door. 
    He watched as she rang the doorbell and waited.  After several seconds, no one answered.  She rang again and he joined her on the stoop.   He knocked, and still, no one answered.  As they turned to walk back to the car, a voice called out to them.
    “You kids looking for Jack?” the female voice shouted from the house next door.
    “Yeah, do you know where we can find him?” Gabriel asked.
    “Same place he is every day: Rory’s, the bar down the street,” she replied.
    “Thanks!” Gabriel called back.
    He and Melissa moved quickly to the car and shared what they’d learned with Alexandra and Yoshi before turning back on to the main road they just traveled along and heading to the only bar they’d passed.  They pulled in to the gravel filled parking lot and walked to the door.  The squat, white building had a stucco exterior and a flat roof that looked as if it would collapse under the weight of the oversized neon sign that flashed atop it.
    “Gabriel, how are we going to get in to this place?” Melissa asked.  “None of us are twenty-one.”
    “You think they’re going to card two gorgeous girls?” Alexandra asked incredulously. “Be serious, Melissa.”
    “She’s got a point,” Yoshi chimed in.
    “Yeah, if anyone is going to get carded, it’s us,” Gabriel added gesturing to himself then Yoshi.
    “All we can do is try, right?  If they tell us to get lost, then we go and wait for him,” Melissa said.
    Gabriel walked through the door followed by Melissa, Yoshi and Alexandra and was not greeted by a bouncer wishing to check his identification as he’d expected.  Instead, he was met with the smell of stale cigarette smoke mixed with a sour, liquor and sweat medley, along with the sound of dreams being quelled one glass fill at a time.  The scene, and all of its sensory offerings, was depressing.  Few people sat at the bar as they approached it.  He was able to exclude three of them immediately because of their age.  Men who appeared to be over the age of seventy-five were unlikely candidates for either recent military service or the impregnation of a twenty-six-year-old woman.  Other than them, two others remained, a woman who looked to be in her late fifties, and one man at the far corner of the bar. 
    The man, whose countenance resembled a boulder in every sense of the word, wore his hair buzzed closely to his scalp and sat, stone-faced, as he nursed a glass of brown fluid.  Everything about his posture and presence suggested discipline and honor, everything save for the glass he clutched in his hand in the middle of the afternoon.
    Melissa must have been making similar suppositions about the man as she began walking toward him.  Gabriel followed with Alexandra and Yoshi in tow.  She sat down beside him and made quick eye contact.  He returned her glance with a lingering look of disapproval, a nonverbal warning to leave him alone and move to a seat farther from him.  Gabriel was shocked to see that she did not wither under the intensity of the