by Joshua Bader
Caffeine and sugar would help on the walk back, so I took a tour of the coolers. A Dr. Pepper called out to me behind frosted glass, but I jerked my hand back upon contact with the fridge handle. The chrome was frozen to the touch, so cold that I left a good sized skin sample. I stared at it curiously for a long moment before deciding that coffee might be better suited for an October night anyway. The pot looked suspicious and I was certain this same java had been sitting here, slowly charcoaling, when I drove past on my way down to the lake several hours prior. I dumped one, and then another, Irish cream packets into a Styrofoam cup before pouring the dark brew on top. The cream told me a lot about my mood. I always take my coffee black unless I’m scared or angry. I thought I was coming out of my funk, but my drinking habits suggested my subconscious was still deep in the mire.
“Mmph mmmrr pphhmmm.”
“Stop struggling. I’m not letting you back out so you can mock me.”
I grabbed a second Snickers and headed for the register. I didn’t realize, until after I unloaded everything on to the counter, that no clerk was in attendance.
“Hello? I’m ready to check out.”
The only answer was silence. The longer I waited, the more certain I became that the attendant was lying on the other side of the counter in a pool of his own blood. Had I missed an armed robbery by mere minutes? I shook off the paranoia and called out again.
“Mmmph Grrmmt.”
Leaving my prizes by the register, I stepped back through the front door. There was a battered old truck parked off to one side. Across the street, six or seven cars were gathered around the bar. The muffled sound of Hank Junior coming out of it was a welcome relief to the cold quiet of the gas station. I glanced over the door, hoping to see a “Be Back Soon” or, in more regionally appropriate vernacular, “Getting a Beer, Hold Your Horses” note. No such sign was in evidence. I slipped back inside.
“Hello?”
I didn’t want to peek behind the counter, but as the seconds of emptiness stretched into minutes, I saw no other choice. The gray and white linoleum tile was mercifully empty. No dying store clerk, no pools of blood, no signs of struggle or violence.
“Rrmmh Mmmph Mrmm.”
So where was he? I knew this was the Bible Belt, where people were generally trusted to do the right thing. But I’d been in here for at least fifteen minutes and hadn’t seen a soul. If I had a buddy and a moving van, I could have looted the entire store. I mentally added up my purchases, pulled three twenties from my wallet and weighted them down by the beef jerky jar next to the cash box. I thought about writing a note, when I noticed the door to the back room.
I slowly walked over to it, past the row of whispering coolers. The machines glared out at me with their mechanical blue light. The air was colder here, forcing goosebumps to the surface. When I knocked on the door, the wood underneath felt like ice. On instinct, I took a deep breath and pulled my aura in, picturing it as a thin white shell-skin stretched tight around me. It was the first spell I had ever learned, a defensive magic so familiar I could use it on reflex. As spells go, it was little more than a token gesture of protection, but I felt better afterwards anyway. My confidence restored, I knocked again, noticing the cold did not bother me as much.
“Hello? Anybody back there?”
When no response came, I tried the handle. The door swung in six inches before stopping against something hard. My breath came out as a solid white fog as the chilled air rushed back from the opening. What I did next should prove how spectacularly short-lived I would be in a horror movie: I squeezed my head through the opening to see what was blocking the door. Any Hollywood ax murderer worth his grinding stone would have pounced at that point.
There was no ax murderer in evidence…just the body of the attendant wedged in the corner between door and wall. His skin and clothing were covered in a hoary white frost, his blue lips pulled apart in a soundless, frozen scream. I’m not an expert in anatomy, but I think the gaping hole in his chest was right where his heart used to be.
4
I stood behind the counter, eyes locked on that treacherous store room door. I didn’t need a mirror to know how pale my skin was. No doubt I looked like a zombie clerk extra from a Night of the Living Dead remake. I knew what I needed to do, but I couldn’t quite force myself to start moving.
“Mmph…ptui. I tried to tell you it was too damn cold back there.”
“What’s the temperature mean? How did he freeze to death in the store’s back room?”
“First, he didn’t freeze to death. His heart was ripped from his chest AND he froze to death. From the looks of it, either one could have killed him. Second, store that formula away for later use: Cold equals bad, very bad. Right now, we’ve got more important things to worry about.”
“Yeah, I know.”
The smart money was on wiping down any surface I touched, taking the stuff I came for, and getting back to Dorothy ASAP. The cops rarely like occupations that can be summed up as aspiring vagrant. My alibi for the last day was less than stellar. I could imagine the interrogation now:
Cop: Mr. Fisher, where were you when he was killed?
Me: Sitting under a tree by the lake. Or maybe I was walking from my car to the murder scene.
Cop: Can anybody verify that?
Me: Well, there’s a nice oak tree, but…do you have anyone on staff that speaks Plant?
The best I could hope for was an insanity plea. If I was lucky, whatever it was about me that fouled up smart phones and laptops had royally screwed up the store’s surveillance system. If I hurried, I could be two states away before sunrise.
There’s a lot of words that could be used to describe me: College dropout, weirdo loner, polyglot, wizard-wannabe. Unfortunately, lucky and amoral were not among them. The security system was working. Worse, I couldn’t force myself to walk away from this. There was a chance I'd seen or heard something that might help the police catch the sicko who did this.
“If you pick up the phone to call 911, you’ll regret it,” my annoying inner voice warned.
“I don’t have a choice. If I don’t call the cops, it’ll just make me look guilty.”
“Colin, you really don’t want to touch that phone.”
I hesitated, but I lifted it from its cradle anyway. It was a land-line and as old as I was. No dial tone. I tried hitting 9 to see if that would let me call out. Still no dial tone, but the line wasn’t dead silence either.
“Hello?”
There was no answer, but the background noise got louder. It sounded like heavy breathing…no, heavy panting, like a Saint Bernard after a long sprint. My eyes returned to the back door, still slightly ajar. I was suddenly wondering whether the man’s heart was torn out or eaten out by a giant canine-esque maw.
“Whoever this is, you don’t want to screw with me.” I could only hope I didn’t sound as scared as I was. “I know magic.” I meant to say I had a gun, but the other slipped out before my brain-to-mouth editor could get a handle on it.
The panting stopped and for a moment the line was blessedly silent. A terrible voice spoke, a rumbling stone-edged tongue uttering words full of strange clicks and guttural stops. It growled its way through four or five alien sentences before falling back into silence. I slammed the phone back into its cradle.
“What the hell was that?”
“Cherokee, maybe. It was Native American, but I can’t place it. And what are you asking me for? You’re the linguistic genius.”
“So you jump ship on the whole 'I’m just your shadow-side' thing when there’s blame to be placed, but when I come up with all the good ideas...”
“You know, I can find another gag.”
“Okay, yeah. It was native. But it was OLD native.”
“You’re thinking Mayan or Incan?”
“Think older. Think whatever it was they all spoke before they came over the ice bridge.”
“Did you catch any of it?”
“No, but I don�
��t need to translate to know what it was saying. It was threatening to eat our heart out, too.”
“That’s about what I thought. Death threats have a rhythm all their own.”
My internal monologue was shattered by the ringing phone.
BRRRINGG!
I stared at it, hand trembling.
BRRRINGG!
I reached, but I couldn’t quite grab it before...
BRRRINGG!
I snatched it up, determined to deal with the monster. “Look, I don’t know who...”
“Colin?” The speaker whispered, soft, distant, and breathless.
I was scared out of my mind, contemplating sorcerous counter-measures for an unknown assailant…but I still recognized that voice. “Dad?”
“Colin, Colin…I can’t see you, Colin.”
“Dad, it’s all right, I’m here.”
“Colin, I’m sorry. I’m sorry, I didn’t tell you before…I know you didn’t hurt that girl.”
“Sarai. Her name was Sarai, Dad.”
“Sarai.” The sound was faint, as if the receiver were drifting away from his mouth. “I’m sorry I didn’t handle it better. I knew…I knew you were a good boy, Colin. I’m sorry, sorry, sorrryyyy...”
I nodded, a single tear rolling down my cheek. “I’m sorry I didn’t make it back soon enough. I would’ve liked to see you one last time. I love you, Dad.”
I stood there with the phone pressed hard against my ear, hoping for an “I love you” that never came. The line, like my father, was dead.
First Interlude
The gas station convenience store could have been a twin to the one outside Lake Thunderbird, Oklahoma: snacks, hygiene, dry goods, automotive accessories, and refrigerated items. At that other store, something very bad had recently happened. At this one, something very bad was in the process of happening.
Jacob Darien held the revolver casually, comfortably, but it was pointed at the clerk all the same. His tone of voice suggested this was old hat for him. “Two strips of beef jerky, five lottery tickets, and all your money. You want anything, Dizzy?”
The scantily clad redhead draped over his left shoulder picked up at the mention of her pet name. “Umm…bubblegum. Can I get some bubblegum, Jakey-poo?”
He looked at her and the clerk thought hard about the shotgun under the counter. “Really? My name in front of our guest?”
“You used mine first, my consort,” Dizzy replied, only half chastised.
”I doubt they have a birth certificate on you.” Jacob’s tone softened, his accent changed. “Go forth and get thy gum, my child.”
She kissed him on the cheek and went prancing off down the candy aisle. “Thank you, Reverend. Jakey was getting a little boring.”
The clerk slowly lowered his hands to the register. “All right, all right, I don’t want any trouble. You can have the money.”
The robber’s face had relaxed, gotten older, the voice more fatherly now. “Bless you, my son. It is the will of the goddess that you doeth thus. Do as thou are told and all will go well with you.” He turned his head to the girl again. “My daughter, I shall require a Dr Pepper to quencheth my thirsteth.”
He turned back just when the clerk had gathered the confidence to go for the gun. “I’m a doctor, too. My degree is in sophistry, young man. An excellent field of study for any man of the cloth, don’t you think?”
The clerk shoved the money into a plastic sack, unable to think of how he should reply to that. “There you go.”
The robber known as Jakey-poo and Reverend glanced down at the bag. “I believeth my host specifically requested beef jerky and lottery tickets as well. I do not bear false witness in this, do I?”
“Right, right,” the clerk turned to the jerky jar. “I just…I’ve never been robbed before.”
He put two sticks of dried meat on the counter, then reached underneath as if going for the scratch tickets. His right hand wrapped around the stock of the gun when the man spoke again. “Where is the rest of it?”
The man’s voice had changed again. This time it held neither the casualness of the first nor the joviality of the second. Now he sounded like a cold-hearted British movie villain. The clerk’s nerves froze at his tone.
Dizzy yelled from the coolers. “Hey, Mr. Osborne, you’re not supposed to be out during a creative acquisition. Jakey-poo said so.”
“He’ll thank me later.” The man’s eyes never left the clerk. “This young man was just thinking about trying out his boss’s gun.”
The clerk whipped it out and leveled it at Jacob-Reverend-Osborne. “Maybe I am. Get the fuck out.”
“Pull the trigger and you’re a dead man,” the robber growled.
“Ooo,” Dizzy clapped, dropping three bottles of Dr. Pepper on the floor. “A real Wild West showdown.” One of the bottles began spraying brown foam in every direction.
The voice returned to its initial bored coolness as he tilted his head down to his shoulder. “I’ve got this, Osborne.” When he turned back to the clerk, there was no threat in his voice. “Put it down, Stephen. It’s not your money, it’s the store’s. They’ll never miss it. Insurance will repay them for every dime we take and then some. The only ones getting screwed over here are the insurance companies.”
“I’m telling you man, get the fuck out, and take your freaky girlfriend with you. I don’t want to call the cops, but I’m not...”
He lost his voice when Jacob gestured with his free hand. The clerk had been so fixated on the gun hand, he barely noticed the motion. The shotgun leapt from his hands and sailed across the front toward the magazine rack. The robber never touched it, but it had been torn from his fingers all the same.
The last thing he remembered before he passed out was the girl, giggling with ecstasy. “Eek, we’re showing off our magic. Yay, Jakey-poo…I mean, stranger I’ve never met before.” As she jumped up and down, the clerk made note not only of her firm breasts, but also of the pair of fiery wings sprouting out of her back and the tiny curved horns appearing on her forehead.
Jacob hopped the counter, took five tickets off the Lucky 7’s roll, then walked back around, stopping to pick up the shotgun. He cracked it open like a pro. “No ammo.” He tossed the gun toward Dizzy.
She caught it and moved up to kiss him. “Could come in handy anyway. Maybe goddess is telling us we need more firepower.”
“More?” Jacob cocked an eyebrow at her. “Baby, you’re already traveling with the three most powerful wizards on the planet and that’s just what I’m packing in this body. What do you think we’re here to do, start Armageddon?”
A dark voice answered Jacob from the depths of his subconscious.
“Pretty much. Shouldn’t be too much longer before we can get the party started.”
PART TWO
PROBLEM WITH AUTHORITY
“The mark of truth is that it’s so obscenely complex when you get up close with it that it would drive you mad to stare at it for longer than ten seconds. Occam’s razor isn’t for understanding the world; it’s for slitting your wrists and gouging out your eyes before such understanding turns you into a raving lunatic.”
- Jadim Cartarssi, Amateur Philosopher and Part-time Raving Lunatic
1
I hate to admit it, but that wasn’t my first time in police custody. I’d never been formally charged with anything more serious than Public Nuisance, but I have been questioned on everything from Jaywalking to Murder for Hire. It went with the territory of using my car as my address of record. It wasn’t politically correct to say it out loud, but when something really nasty happened, standard police procedure still involved rounding up all the gypsies, tramps, and thieves.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t just a shiftless vagrant. I was the shiftless vagrant who found the body. One might think that reporting a crime to the proper authorities would have granted me a small measure of trust (and/or immunity from prosecution). It hadn’t. The only good news was that they hadn’t officially arrested me
for anything yet. I think they were hoping I would be decent enough to confess and save them the trouble of investigating any further.
The first officer on the scene was off-duty at the time, a county deputy who happened to be drinking at the bar across the street. The alcohol made him friendly enough…until he saw the body. From the retching sounds, I’m guessing that his liquid courage was congealed in a puddle next to the deceased. After that, it was all sideways glances at me from a safe distance across the room.
Two uniforms from the nearest town arrived next. One of them took down my version of events, while the other spoke to the deputy, well out of earshot. I’m not sure what the townies made of it other than deciding that the whole incident was not a town matter. More calls were made and, within the hour, the gas station was host to a statewide law enforcement convention. I maintained my post by the counter the whole time, hoping the assembled criminalists might forget they had a convenient scapegoat on hand. Unfortunately for me, they remembered.
It was well after midnight before I was escorted to a holding cell. A holding cell is for “witnesses” who were going to be “questioned” and who were, in legal theory at least, not under arrest. I held no delusions about my freedom. If I tried to leave, they would arrest me for the murder just to keep me there, whether they really believed I did it or not. My best bet was to play along and hope either they figured out I didn’t do it or I ran out the clock. Most states have rules regarding how long a suspect could be held without formal arrest, usually somewhere between 24 and 72 hours. I had no idea what the shot clock was in Oklahoma, but I was fairly certain there was one and it was slowly ticking in my favor.