The Graveyard Shift: A Horror Comedy (24/7 Demon Mart Book 1)

by D. M. Guay

  “I thought he was just really desperate, but he...curbed!” DeeDee sounded surprised or unsure, or maybe both.

  I couldn't tell, because I was still assessing my underpants situation when she said it. Holy shit. She just talked to me! I'm in! Wait. What does she mean “really desperate?”

  A teeny-tiny voice squeaked, “Isn't it obvious, kid?”

  Wha? The slushy roach was next to me, waist-deep in guts. It eyeballed me, shook its head, then started...mopping? It stood with two of its six feet in the muck, using its other four arms to push around an impossibly tiny mop. I rubbed my eyes, deep and hard. Roaches do not mop. Roaches do not speak. Big Dan must have slipped something into that weed we smoked this afternoon. I could have sworn I'd sobered up all the way.

  “Tell yourself whatever you need to to get through the day,” the tiny voice said again.

  “This boy helped me send Bisozoth back,” DeeDee said.

  I looked up at her. Who was she calling a boy? I was a bonafide man. Of course, all I said out loud was “Biso-what?”

  DeeDee stood in the muck, somehow still gorgeous despite a head-to-toe coating of green slime. She pointed at me but looked past me. Who was she talking to?

  Suddenly, a firm hand touched my shoulder, and I rose off the floor, floating like a feather on a breeze, to standing. A warm, tingly sensation trickled through me. I felt relaxed, like I was getting a hot rock massage, not emerging from a pile of slushy, vomit and monster guts. A tall, impossibly handsome man stood next to me. He had pitch black hair, eyes dark and glassy like obsidian, and wore an expensive designer suit, even nicer than the ones that social-climbing rich kid / wannabe lawyer my girlfriend dumped me for used to wear.

  “Young man. We have much to discuss.” Mr. Impossibly Handsome ushered me to a nondescript white door tucked between two pyramids of stacked two-liter pop bottles. The door opened before us. I didn't see him touch the knob but after the mopping roach and the tentacle thing, I couldn't really trust my eyes. Because, you know, tentacle monsters couldn't possibly exist, and that boss battle DeeDee and I had back there? Couldn't have been real. Big Dan was gonna get an earful about his bunk crazy weed for sure.

  The white door opened into a cramped hallway with boxes of Top Ramen and plastic-wrapped packs of toilet paper stacked floor-to-ceiling against both walls. The man led me down a narrow path through the boxes. As soon as we stepped past a pallet of microwave mac and cheese, the tiny pathway opened into a luxurious man-office worthy of Mr. Impossibly Handsome's designer suit. A fire roared in a giant stone fireplace behind a heavy dark wood desk. The floor was covered in wall-to-wall Persian rugs, and there was a huge chandelier hanging from a tall, vaulted ceiling. The room was lined with bookcases containing leather-bound sets of what looked like thousand-year-old encyclopedias and glass display boxes with fancy, weird stuff inside, like...what the hell was that? A monkey paw? And a curly weird goat horn? Holy crap. Stop looking. Too Creepy. Eyes forward.

  “First, let's get you cleaned up, shall we?” Mr. Impossibly Handsome waved his hand in front of me. I expected him to toss me a towel or at the very least a wet wipe because that's what my Mom would have done, but he didn't. I got nothing. “There now. That's better. Please, sit.”

  He slid into a red leather club chair behind the desk and motioned for me to sit in a similar chair on my side. I just stood there, blinking. I didn't know much, but I knew better than to sit on expensive furniture while covered in barf and melted slushy, and this guy's manspace was way fancier than anything in our beige, Target-chic tract house. “I, uh...”

  “You won't ruin the furniture. See?” He pointed at my clothes as if he'd read my mind.

  I looked down. I was squeaky clean. My “I'm With Stupid” T-shirt was wrinkled, but dry, and only had the stains it had on it when I'd walked in tonight. No slushy. No guts. No Cheetos barf. How the hell? Oh, wait. Big Dan's bunk weed. It was all a hallucination. For sure. Crap. That meant Mr. Impossibly Handsome was about to bust me for stealing the slushy.

  “Now sit, please,” he said.

  I did as I was told, sinking into the plush leather chair. The calm, warm sensation was gone, replaced with absolute stone-cold dread. Mom was really gonna be on my case if he called the cops. Petty theft would be the gasoline on her already raging bonfire of “Lloyd, when are you going to get your life together?”

  “We must discuss what transpired tonight,” he said. His voice was deep, calm, with an accent I couldn't quite place but part posh, part aristocrat, part old European.

  My palms began to sweat. Here we go. Going down for grand theft slushy. I sunk my hands into my. Hey. I still had my eighty-four cents. Stupid pothole. Maybe I could give him what I had, and we could call it a deal.

  “Now, be a good lad and hand me your file.” Mr. Impossibly Handsome's eyes flickered bright red in the firelight. He extended his hand across the desk as if he expected me to put something in it. “Your file, please?”

  “My...I don't...” File? What? Did I look organized enough to keep a file on anything?

  He pointed at my shirt, and I suddenly felt something stiff and decidedly cardboard under the cotton. I reached under the hem and pulled out a green file folder packed with papers. I handed it to him on autopilot, because, uh, what the hell was it and how did it get there? I didn't even own a file folder, and if I did, I'd probably never get around to actually putting papers in it. I wasn't that organized.

  “Yes. Perfect.” He took it out of my hand. “Now, let's get started.”

  He put the green folder on his desk, opened it, and turned through the neat stack of papers, skimming each page, saying “hmm,” and “I see,” to himself. “Lloyd Lamb Wallace. Aged twenty-one. Your current domicile is your childhood bedroom on Hummingbird Court. How sweet. Oh. I see. You moved home because your former lover, Simone, changed the locks on your shared apartment one hundred eighty-seven days ago. Current romantic relationship: None.”

  “That's not true,” I blurted out, horrified by the completely accurate stream of intimate truths he'd spouted about my life. “I'm dating a girl. I mean, online. I haven't met her in person yet, but...”

  “I'm sorry. You aren't. Your file indicates that your online girlfriend, Caroline, is a catfish. Her real name is Bruce Hardin, and he's a sixty-year-old recently paroled felon who plans to scam you but hasn't yet realized you're broke,” he said.

  Crap. Seriously, Caroline. How could you do me wrong, girl?

  “Which brings me to current employment: None. Savings, assets, and investments: eighty-four cents, only seventy-four in U.S. currency, all of it in your left pocket,” he said. “Financial status. Oh my. More than ten thousand dollars in debt. Student loans, exterminators, late cable bills? Well, then.”

  His eyebrows rose. I squirmed. This had to be an epic joke. Or a hallucination. No human could know all of this about me. Yeah. That's it. It was a hallucination. Just like the tentacle monster and the mopping roach. Oh, Jesus. When was this high gonna wear off?

  Mr. Impossibly Handsome flipped another page. “Let's see here. Completed education: High school. C student. Community college: Dropped out in the middle of your fourth semester. Time use: My, my.” His perfectly tweezed eyebrows arched. “You average forty-seven hours each week of Xbox. And, thirteen hours each week masturbating, primarily in less than ten-minute intervals.”

  He shook his head and casually pointed at my crotch. “Be gentle down there, son. Don't hurt yourself.”

  My cheeks burned. Holy shit, this guy wasn't lying. He knew. And, hearing it all out loud, all summed up? On paper, my life was a dumpster fire.

  “It seems you have a lot of time on your...hands.” Mr. Impossibly Handsome smirked, and my face flushed. He dug back into my file. “Now let's see here. Sins. Sins. Sins. Where are the sins?”

  He flipped through a few more pages, which presumably highlighted more embarrassing factoids of dubious, yet eerily accurate origin. He looked through all the papers again, then put h
is hands up in defeat. “It appears your sins are missing. I'm going to have to talk to Mr. Beale once again about the need for thorough accounting.”

  Sins? Mr. Beale? My stomach churned, and my heart beat hard against my chest. Yeah, I was pretty freaked out but too terrified to get up and leave.

  Mr. Impossibly Handsome either didn't notice or didn't care. He leaned back in his red leather chair, crossed his legs, and tapped his long, manicured fingers on his knee. His face glowed orange in the firelight. He had a thick silver ring on his finger, with a weird design on it. A flat circle with one straight line down the middle, and some sort of snake-like thing crawling up and around it. I swear the snake thing was moving. “Well then, Lloyd Lamb Wallace. Since your file is incomplete, we'll have to do this the old-fashioned way.” He locked eyes with me. His face flashed red for a split second in the firelight. “Tell me your sins.”

  My spine went stick straight and stiff. A heat rose inside me, and I had the acute feeling I no longer had control of my body. My mouth moved and words spilled out. “When I was ten, I put a booger in Lee Smeltzer's peanut butter and jelly sandwich when he wasn't looking. I never thought he'd eat it, but he did, and I didn't stop him because I was scared I'd get in trouble. My friends found out and started calling him Booger Eater. It stuck so hard people wrote that in his senior yearbook. He got really fat and got beat up a lot, and I always wondered if that booger sandwich sent him over the edge. He didn't deserve it. He was super nice, and he was so desperate for friends that his Mom would always give us as many Popsicles as we wanted if we went to his house. When he realized we only came over for Popsicles, not to hang out with him, he cried. He lives at the end of my street with his parents, and I run inside every time I see him in the yard because I still feel bad about the booger.”

  Oh Jesus. I was like a cursed ventriloquist's dummy, spewing embarrassing secrets.

  Mr. Impossibly Handsome stared at me, waiting for more. My mouth, on autopilot, gave it to him. I tried to stop talking, but couldn't. My damn tongue kept on clucking and the words just kept on coming. And these weren't just any words. They were horribly embarrassing words from the deep, dark cavern of shame where I hid all the things that I never ever wanted another soul to know about me.

  “And then this one time, Mom asked me to clean up the basement, and I told her I did, but I didn't really. I just pushed my Monster Burger bags under the sofa instead of throwing them away. A month later, the basement filled up with ants, I mean like tons and tons of ants, and my parents had to pay six-hundred dollars for an exterminator. The guy found the burger wrappers and leftover fries. My parents were so disappointed in me. They're always so disappointed in me. Waaaaaaaaa...”

  Cue waterworks. Yes, I was crying at this point. Ugly crying, snot and all.

  “I didn't tell my parents I dropped out of school, either. I was so embarrassed that I couldn't hack community college, that I lied and told them I was still going. They had to pay all the tuition, because I missed the deadline to drop the classes. All I had to do was press two stupid buttons online, but I didn't because I'm so lazy. I slept all day and played video games instead.”

  Oh my God. Why am I telling a stranger all of this? This was worse than the file! I tried to zip my lips and run right out of there, but I couldn't. My body was frozen to the chair, and my mouth just wouldn't shut. I sniveled and watched as the last thin, gossamer thread of self respect broke free and floated away on the wind.

  “And Simone, my ex? She'd yell at me for leaving the toilet seat up, and I told her I'd put it down next time, and I remembered to do it, I just didn't because I didn't care and I thought her butt falling in the water in the middle of the night was her problem and kinda funny. And I never cleaned the bathroom, even though when I had morning wood and tried to pee, I'd miss the bowl if I yawned. I'd get piss all over the floor and the wall. When Simone would get mad, I'd tell her cleaning up was women's work because I'd rather play video games than clean. Waaaaaaaaaa!”

  Okay, full disclosure. I was epic-level blubbering here. Tears streamed down my cheeks. Snot clogged up my nostrils. Hey. Don't judge me. Real men cry when they mess their shit up really hard and are forced to fess up to a complete stranger. Remember my life was a dumpster fire, and I lit the match.

  “I owe Simone, like, two thousand dollars,” I sniffled. “I couldn't keep a job and never had any money, so she paid my half of the bills. She left me for some rich douche bag law student with a really clean apartment. Waaaaaaaaaa...”

  The tears faucet was dialed up to eleven at this point. For realsies. Mr. Impossibly Handsome even produced a box of tissues and handed it to me. I wiped my nose and took a couple of deep breaths. My spine slackened. For a hot second, my body became my own again. Sniffle. Sniffle. That's it, Lloyd. Pull yourself together. “Why am I telling you all this?” I asked.

  “I asked you to tell me your sins, so you're telling me about the choices you have made that cause you the most guilt and grief,” he said. “Tell me more.”

  I went stiff again. Shut up! Shut up! Shut up! Shut up! But no. I blabbed like a cheap hand puppet. “I smoked weed today, and I tried to steal your slushy because I hit a pothole outside the Cash4Gold and a quarter fell out of my pocket so I didn't have enough to pay for it, and I didn't want DeeDee to know how broke and pathetic I am.”

  Mr. Impossibly Handsome perked up when I said DeeDee's name. “That's enough.”

  My mouth zipped shut.

  “Tell me, young Mr. Wallace. Have you killed any people or animals?”

  “No way! I'm not a monster,” I said. There I go again, yapping. “Wait. Except for bugs. Mostly spiders. I hate spiders. They're terrifying.”

  “Any terrorist or gang affiliations?” he asked.

  “Um, no...?” Weird question. Do terrorists steal slushies?

  “Do you want to see the world, your government or civic institutions, or the people you disagree with politically, go down in flames? Or, do you troll people online?”

  “Well, no. Not really.”

  “That'll be enough, young Mr. Wallace.” He waved his hand. My mouth slammed shut again. “You certainly aren't what I expected. You're delightfully slim on sins. You have a pure heart. You're a breath of fresh air, actually.”

  “What about the slushy? And the masturbating? That's a sin, right?” I blurted it out before thinking. I was pretty emotionally raw at this point, and when you're in that state, things tend to come out.

  “There's no sin there, young Mr. Wallace,” he said. “Indulging a perfectly natural impulse alone, safely at home, while hurting no one else hardly counts as sin does it? Besides, every man does, and if he says he doesn't, he's a liar.”

  Mr. Impossibly Handsome winked at me.

  Not a sin? Tell Pastor Woodruff over at the Holier Than Thou congregation. The devil's hands go straight down your pants. That's what he'd tell us at Vacation Bible School. Mom sent me there for a week every summer when I was a kid because it was free. Then again, you get what you pay for.

  “Now, let's get right down to it, shall we?” The smile slid off of Mr. Impossibly Handsome's face, his fingers stopped casually tapping his knee, and he leaned forward. “You were brave and noble tonight. In the face of danger, you could have run, but you didn't. You rose to the occasion. As a humble thank you, we've refurbished your current mode of transportation.”

  He snapped his fingers and a shiny, perfect Huffy, the exact same make and model as mine, materialized against the bookcase that also housed the creepy glass case of maybe monkey paw. I was pretty sure that bike wasn't there when we walked in. “That's not my bike,” I said. It couldn't possibly be. The one I rode over here was busted up, duct-taped together, and had lost a brake lever when Comb-over Carl made a run for it. This one was shiny, new, perfect. Mine was what, eight years old? I got it for my thirteenth birthday.

  “I assure you, that is your bike. The clean-up crew has given it a tune-up as a thank you, and to repair the damage Carl caused o
n his way out,” he said. “It's the least we could do to thank you for your assistance in sending Bisozoth home.”

  Biso what? It's that word DeeDee had said.

  “Now, I have also brought you here to discuss Carl's abrupt departure. Or the consequences, at least. Now that we have dispensed with formalities, I can tell you I have a job opening. I look for a very particular set of qualities in an employee, and you, young Mr. Wallace, are exactly what I'm looking for,” he said. “I'd like to offer you Carl's job. Graveyard shift, of course, but your file indicates you already keep nighttime hours. I provide generous hazard pay, some rather unusual but popular benefits and perks, as well as training in all the necessary arts. Would you like the job, young Mr. Wallace?”

  “A...job?” I stammered. “I'm not going to jail for stealing your slushy?”

  “Jail? Oh, heaven's no. The proprietors of all the fine establishments at this intersection work diligently to stay off the radar of human law enforcement and local ruling bodies,” he said. “Now, where were we? Yes. You have proven worthy. It is also clear this job could solve many of your problems.”

  Phew. No jail. Stoked! But wait. Job? I stared at him for a minute. Oh, man. A job? I'd have to think about that. It'd seriously cut into my Xbox time. Sucks. Then again, maybe Mom would ease up on the cringey adulting lectures. Bonus! But I'd have to actually show up on time and work. Every boss I'd had to this point had made it clear I absolutely sucked at that. Sucks. A job also meant leaving the house and washing my clothes more regularly. Double sucks. On the upside, I'd have an excuse to be near DeeDee. Bonus!

  “The job comes with free, all-you-can-drink slushies,” Mr. Impossibly Handsome said. “Even on your days off.”

  “I'm in.” Come on. We all have our price. Mine was free slushies. He should have led with that.