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

by D. M. Guay

  Uh, I don't know. Obviously. Duh! But I was too chicken to say that out loud, so I shrugged.

  “I'm pretty sure dad-khakis and pastel polo shirts aren't it,” she said.

  The eight ball shook violently in my hand. I looked at it. “She's right. Lose the outfit. You're dressed like a pedophile. Oh, and remember that whole 'the answers you seek are right in front of you' thing?”

  The triangle turned, and this time two arrows pointed right at DeeDee.

  Geesh. I get the hint! DeeDee must be the answer, well, have the answers. To a question that isn't quite coming to mind.

  “I feel a gate check coming,” DeeDee said. “Why don't you come with me. See how it's done. You can't hide behind the counter forever.”

  Oh yes, I can. I glanced, terrified, at the beer cave.

  “Kevin's obviously got it covered back here,” she said.

  We both looked at Kevin, who was balanced on the magazine rack with his head poking into a small hole in the plastic modesty wrap of a Hustler magazine.

  “Come on. Don't be scared. I'll protect you.” She squeezed my hand and smiled at me. I melted, putty in her skeleton-ring-clad fingers.

  I followed her to the beer cave door. A moment later, the guy from the other night stepped out. The one that had emerged from the swirling blue cloud wearing the leisure suit? Yeah, him. This time he was in full country singer gear like he'd just stepped off a rodeo bull. He had stiff, dark blue Wranglers, cowboy boots, a black shirt with embroidered roses across the shoulders, and a black Stetson hat.

  “All dressed up, Morty?” DeeDee asked him.

  “You know it.” He stood a little taller and adjusted his bolo tie. “Meeting a hot-to-trot married heifer with a very strong desire to ride a cowboy, if you get my drift. You showing the young buck how it's done?”

  “I sure am, cowboy,” DeeDee said. “You know the drill. Papers please.”

  He took out a small black book that looked like a passport. She opened it. There was elaborate writing on the page, similar in style to the illuminated book behind the counter. DeeDee used a tiny device to scan it. A yellow light flashed on the passport, a green light on the scanner lit up. “See?” she said. “Green means go, approved for entry. Red means stop. It's that simple.”

  “Go get 'em, tiger,” she said to Morty.

  “Sure thing, honey pie. You let me know when you're ready to ride.” He winked at DeeDee, and for a hot minute, his eyes glowed bright red.

  I froze in sheer terror. He strutted out the door, tipping his hat and flashing a shit-eating grin at us both through the window. Woah, Boy. Red eyes. Swirling vortex. Nope. In over my head. “I can't do it,” I said.

  “Can't do what?”

  “Work here.”

  “Yeah, right.” She laughed at me. Laughed!

  “I'm serious. This isn't funny. Dude made of snakes. Cowboy with laser eyeballs. Green tentacle guy. Demon Caroline?”

  “Okay, technically Caroline wasn't a demon, just a jerk with a half-ass online cult. That's why the taser and holy water didn't work. Besides, problem solved. It's over. What's the big deal?”

  Gah! This chick! “How can you be so cazh about burning in hell?”

  “Who's burning in hell?”

  “We are! Faust...He's...we work for the devil!”

  She laughed, a deep loud belly laugh.

  “This isn't funny.” My gut was squeezed tight with frustration knots.

  “Faust isn't the devil,” she said. “He's a devil, not the devil. Big difference.”

  My brain was about to explode. “Big difference?” I squealed. “Hello? Burning in hell?”

  “We're not burning in hell. Well, I'm not. You're probably not either, unless there's something you want to confess there, tiger. Hold that thought.” DeeDee turned back to the beer cave.

  The Magic 8-Ball shook in my hand. “You're like defcon dweeb right now,” it said. “Chillax. She's right. Remember, you aren't damned. Not yet.”

  Why do you keep saying not yet?

  “Because you're kind of a fuckup. Never say never.”

  I shook the ball so hard the cube rattled against the plastic. Shut up. You shut up. You don't know anything.

  “Dude. Hot chicks, twelve o'clock,” eight ball guardian angel said.

  I looked up. Four of the most smoking-hot women I had ever seen in my life walked out of the beer cave. One fiery redhead, two sorority-sister blondes, and a kinda witchy in a hot “The Craft” kind of way brunette. All had flawless smooth skin and perky, toned everything. They looked like nudie mag pin-ups who'd come to life, torn right off the centerfold page. And...they had no beer. Which could only mean one thing. Great. Hot demons. Straight from hell.

  DeeDee started scanning passports. “You ladies out for fun or are you working tonight?”

  “Working. You should try it sometime. You'd make a killing,” the redhead said. She then turned to me, running her hand around the collar of my polo shirt. “Who is this tasty little morsel? Aw. His shirt's orange like candy. He's like a pudgy, sexy circus peanut. I could just eat him up.”

  I started tingling all over, but particularly in my downtown area, if you get my drift. Gulp. Stop it, Mr. Penis. These are demons. Don't even think about it. But her body was so close. Like so so close and radiating heat all over me. Hell heat. Too late. Full-on wood.

  “Go easy on him,” DeeDee said as she scanned the brunette's passport. “He's the new guy.”

  “Tell me, new guy,” the redhead said, curling a bit of my hair around her blood-red fingernail. “What's your secret fantasy?”

  She looked me in the eyes, and I watched as her red hair turned royal blue. The curves of her body morphed, and in less than a minute, she'd turned into a dead ringer for DeeDee. “Oooh la la!” The new demon DeeDee said. “Looks like you have a secret admirer, D.”

  “Cut it out,” real DeeDee said to her.

  In an instant, the curvy redhead had returned. She blew me a kiss, then all four of the flawless vixens sashayed right out the front door, across the parking lot, and into the Sinbad's strip club. Oh shit. They're hot demon strippers. Welp, that boner's gonna hang around a while.

  “Well, now I know how you really feel about me,” DeeDee said, once again too cazh and completely unruffled.

  My cheeks went hot. Okay, so she saw that. Play it cool. “They're not people, are they?”

  “Of course not. Duh.”

  “What are they?” I braced myself.

  “Succubus,” she said. “You know, sexy demons. They, like, shrivel up if they don't have sex or something. It's like food for them. They eat sex like you eat Monster Burgers.”

  Gulp. “And Morty? What's he?”

  “Same thing,” DeeDee said. “But I think the boy ones are called incubus? I'd have to look it up. It doesn't really matter.”

  Oh yes, it does matter. Demons! “That's it. I can't. I quit.”

  I started toward the door, and DeeDee ninja-rolled in front of me, blocking the way. “Stop right there. You said you'd stick around. You promised.”

  I stood there, totally blank. Shit. Had I done it again? Promised a woman something when I wasn't paying attention?

  “Why are you so scared? They're harmless,” she said.

  “Harmless? Harmless!! How can you say a demon from hell is harmless?”

  “You haven't read your employee manual yet, have you?” She put her fists on her hips.

  “It's like a hundred pages. Who has the attention span to read that?”

  “Um, most normal people?”

  Great. Now she's calling me stupid.

  “And it's actually only about ten pages,” she said. “There's room in the back to take notes about your experiences, you know, for posterity and to help those who come after you, blah blah blah.”

  “Don't care.” I took another step and DeeDee pressed her body, arms out, across the front door.

  “Wait five more minutes.” She looked out through the glass. So did I. The par
king lot was dark and empty.

  “What? Why?”

  “Because I don't see your replacement,” she said. “Which makes me think you're not a hundred percent sure you want to quit.”

  My replacement? “I just quit, like, five seconds ago. How could there be a replacement?”

  “If you were serious, there'd be a replacement.” She looked out again. “Nope. No one's coming, so more of you wants to stay than wants to go.”

  “What are you talking about?” This place made me feel like I was going nuts. All. The. Time.

  “When Carl decided to quit, you were here,” she said. “When Junebug decided to move to day shift? I was here. Junebug was here the night Kevin, well...poor Kevin.”

  “So what? People come here. It's a convenience store for God's sake. People come here to buy beer and Slim Jims and Combos. I came in for a slushy.”

  “Yeah. Sure. You just happened to come for a slushy at the exact moment Bizosoth made an escape and Carl quit? Come on. You don't get it, do you? People don't come here for no reason, not when the Go Away charm is on. They have to either be drawn here, part of the otherworldly community, or super desperate. We were drawn here for the job, at the precise moment we were needed.”

  “You're nuts.” Hot, but nuts. I made for the door again.

  “You are not leaving.” DeeDee spread her arms wider across the glass and dug in her heels.

  “Oh, yes. I am.”

  Eight ball angel shook in my hands. What? What now?

  “She's not lying,” it said.

  No way. This was all bullshit.

  “Don't make me come down there,” it said. “You have a job to do. Just do it.”

  Jesus. I can't believe I'm having this conversation with a floating triangle.

  “Technically it's an icosahedron, and you're not talking to it, you're talking to me, your guardian angel. I just move this shit around in the fluid.”

  Gah! Dick!

  “Watch your mouth. I do have feelings, you know.”

  I threw the Magic 8-Ball on the floor and grabbed the door handle. DeeDee held tight.

  “Listen. When you asked me about the big blue hole in the beer cave, you said you wanted the short, easy answer, so I told you it was the gate to hell. And that's technically true. But it's not what you think.”

  “If demons come out of it, then it's hell. Hell is hell!”

  “Yes, but no. We let the harmless things out and keep the bad ones in.”

  “Hello. Demons? They're all bad.”

  “Nothing is black and white. There are degrees, rules. We only let out the creatures that can take human form, respect free will, don't plan to kill people or start plagues. Any being that wants to take over or destroy the world, or bring the old gods back. They're shit out of luck. They can't come out.”

  “And that magically makes it okay?” I asked.

  “Look. Before the gate system, anything that wanted to could cross over to earth anytime, anywhere and do as it pleased. Famines. Plagues. Whole cities and cultures destroyed. Have you heard of Pompeii? The Titanic? Krakatoa? The San Francisco earthquake? The London and Chicago fires? Monsters used to run slipshod over the world, and there wasn't a damned thing we could do to stop them. Now we have gates to contain the worst of them. And those gates need people to enforce the rules. Good people like us. Faust hired you because you were pure of heart, didn't he?”

  How did she know?

  “Yeah. That's what I thought,” she said. “Me, too.”

  Angel eight ball rolled around on the floor and landed window side up. “She's totes right. You'd know this if you'd read your employee manual. Wait. Do you know how to read?”

  “I'm talking to you, aren't I?” I screamed. Man, Angels are dicks.

  “Good point,” angel eight ball said. “And who are you calling a dick?”

  “You are talking to me, aren't you?” DeeDee glanced at the eight ball.

  “Yeah. Uh, sorry,” I said. “None of this is making me feel any better.”

  “It should,” she said. “What other job will you ever have that matters as much as this one? Face it. You're a loser, Lloyd. A reject. And so was I when I started here. But now? We protect the world. We keep bad guys from wrecking the place. You heard Faust. You saved a dozen people's lives when you fed Demon Caroline that burger bun. How could you say no?”

  “Because Faust is the devil!”

  “A devil, not the devil. Big difference,” she said.

  “I disagree,” I said.

  “Okay, then chew on this: Devils are angels. Devils just do God's important, but dirty work. Like, oh, keeping the biblical plagues and the hungry gods in check. They're an essential gear in the grand machine of the universe. But they need humans. Good, pure of heart humans, to help them keep the balance. You have been given a rare gift: The chance to do something that actually matters in this giant, messed-up world. So what do you want to be, Lloyd? Do you want to be a zero or do you want to be a hero?”

  Chapter 11

  Of course, I picked hero. Duh. Had any man in the history of the whole world ever once chosen zero when there was a smoking hot chick on the line? Yeah, no. I didn't think so. And, so far, to my surprise, I didn't regret it.

  DeeDee had stirred something in me. A resolve, a new perspective. Feeling like my life mattered? Like I was important? Honestly, that was a new feeling for me. I had never once in my entire life felt that. It helped a lot that my next two shifts were relatively quiet. No tentacle guys. No subreddit cult-possessed Caroline Ford Vanderbilts.

  When there weren't any weird hell beasts to fight, 24/7 Demon Mart actually had a predictable rhythm. Kevin arrived via green swirling vortex around eleven every night. Bob the Doughnut Guy delivered a fresh batch of doughnuts every night, and the weird guy in the track suit always jogged to the store and bought one as soon as Bob's truck left the lot. Honestly, that guy looked buffer every time I saw him. I had no idea how he stayed so fit eating so many chocolate doughnuts.

  Three times a week, Pawnshop Doc came in to pick up a single large, special-order pink-frosted glazed doughnut with rainbow sprinkles packaged in its own separate box.

  Regular human customers would come in and buy beer and beef jerky. Lots of beef jerky (Dude. So. Much. Beef jerky. Why??) pretty steadily until midnight. At midnight, Kevin pressed a purple button behind the counter to flip on the “Go Away' charm. It worked, well, like a charm. The second it flipped on, people filed out of the store, paying for their lotto tickets, beer and chips as quickly as possible. All of the people brave enough to pull into the lot after midnight immediately pulled right back out, without so much as stepping a single foot out of the car.

  “It keeps 'em out of the line of fire,” Kevin said as he flipped the button. “Of course, they can still technically come in, but only if they're super motivated, super desperate, have been summoned here. Or, if they're super stupid.”

  He looked at me with his shiny black roach eyes, and made it pretty clear he thought I'd managed to get in because I was stupid.

  Every night, Kevin took over the stereo from one to two a.m., so he could play the heavy metal album of his choice over the Muzak, which literally was ancient magical chants looped over dance beats. It flipped on at the same time as the Go Away charm, and supposedly helped reduce gate breaches. Words with magical powers actually existed and bad demons hated dance beats. Who knew.

  Kevin's albums, on the other hand, only involved the magical incantations of Ronnie James Dio. Rainbow, Black Sabbath, Dio, Heaven & Hell. Jesus. Every Dio band. Why did I know this? I'd never even heard of Dio before last week. Oh yes, because Kevin presented his DJ hour as a public service to DeeDee and I, opining “so you young kids can learn what real music sounds like. None of that Auto-Tune bullshit.”

  At one a.m., he pressed play on his busted up pink Zune. (Where the hell did he even get that?) The synth guitar intro to “Rainbow in the Dark” filled the store for the third time this week. Kevin had somehow
used a set of speakers and copper wire to jerry-rig his Zune to the store intercom system, creating a slipshod surround sound system.

  “Dude,” I said. “Can we listen to something else?” This song was slowly burning into my brain.

  “No,” Kevin said. “If you can't handle the rock, go take a break.”

  I shrugged. Fine with me. I grabbed a Gehenna Grape slushy. (I swear I'd drunk half my body weight in iced sugar this week alone.) and headed for the Employee Lounge.

  Chef was in his usual spot, standing behind the grill swaying slightly, wearing super dark tinted sunglasses, that kinda reminded me of the ones the Bloods R Us techs wore. “Hey man.”

  He grunted. I ordered two medium-rare ribeyes and slid into the big round red plush booth. The eight ball was sitting on the table. God damn it!

  The eight ball rolled. “Don't bring Him into this.”

  “Fuck off already!” I shook the ball really hard and slammed it down on the table. Gah. This angel! He was the worst. I'd tried to ditch him several times, but the stupid ball just kept reappearing. No matter where I left it, it always ended up right next to me. And he wanted to chat all hours, day or night.

  “I'm your guardian angel. I can't do my job if I'm not with you,” it said.

  “Fine. But did you really need to binge-watch all of Ash Vs Evil Dead season three when I was trying to sleep today?”

  “Hey. We can't get that show up here. I had no choice. Why are you complaining? Bruce Campbell is a national treasure.”

  “He can be a national treasure when I'm awake. You're a shit roommate. You know that?”

  “Says the guy who leaves dirty, poop-streaked underpants all over the floor.”

  You shut up! I shook him. Too hard. I do not!

  “Oh yes you do.”

  Ding. Chef's bell. Yay steaks!

  I left jerk angel eight ball on the table and got up to collect my dinner. Behold, on a large plate in front of Chef were two perfectly-cooked steaks with a gigantic baked potato drowning in sour cream and a giant sweet potato covered in butter and brown sugar. I hadn't ordered them, but I totally wanted them. “How did you know?”