“Great. I’ll see you then.”
I hung up the phone and turned to Jerry, who looked like he hadn’t moved at all. He was still staring hard, smiling, with one cigarette hanging out of his mouth and another tucked behind each ear. He kept his eyes locked on me while he lit the cigarette, took a drag, and said, “The owners have a daughter?”
“Yeah,” I responded. “She used to work here a long time ago.”
“And why am I just now hearing about her?”
“Because,” I said. “She’s not important.”
“What’s her name?” he asked.
I looked at him. He returned my stare, turned up his chin, and blew a smoke ring into the air.
“Sabine.”
“Is she pretty?”
WHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE—
A strange sound from somewhere outside immediately ended any further discussion. A high-pitched, mechanical whirring, like a chainsaw on helium, loud enough to pierce the walls and fill the room with noise for the next thirty seconds. All we could do was look at one another and wait for it to end.
When it was done, Jerry took another puff, blew it out his nostrils, then asked, “What the hell was that?”
“Oh good,” I said, “you heard it, too.”
He tapped the cigarette out on the heel of his shoe, flicked it onto the top of the cold drink case, and announced, “I’m gonna go see what’s up. Stay here and guard the Calvin stew.” He darted his eyes towards the space behind the counter and whispered, “I don’t trust it.”
Before I had a chance to say, “Hey, wait, don’t go out there! It’s probably not safe,” he was gone. (I only made it to “Hey, wait—” before he was already out the doors.) Without thinking, I grabbed my crutches and hurried out behind him.
There was nobody outside when I stepped into the sub-freezing morning air. The noise had come from somewhere around the corner of the building. I took a step in that direction.
“Hey, dude?” I called out. “Everything okay over there?”
To my annoyance, he didn’t respond. A large part of me wanted to turn and go back into the store and lock myself away until help came. But a larger part of me knew that I couldn’t just leave my friend like that. Plus, there was another factor—that annoying voice in the very back of my mind, the one saying, Come on! Let’s go check out that mysterious noise and get to the bottom of things.
Before I knew it, I was circling the corner, unarmed and half-legged. If there had been any kind of threat waiting for me, I would have been screwed. But there was no one there. The only things out of the ordinary were a blue five-gallon bucket and a red kitchen blender sitting on the ground next to it.
I scanned the area for Jerry, stopping long enough to look at the forest and wonder.
Maybe Pops was on to something. Maybe Jerry forgot what he came out here for and went for a little walk. It was a valid possibility. There were other possibilities, too, but none I wanted to consider. Possibilities involving unnatural predators in the woods…
The wind kicked up, sending a shiver down my spine and freeing me of my temporary trance. The woods and I had an understanding. Their inhabitants were none of my business. Whatever was out there could stay in its lane, and I would do the same. For now, I needed to focus on what was in front of me—those two objects sitting next to the store.
As I approached, I noticed several concerning details. First, the blender was not actually red. It was clear, and filled almost to the top with a thick slurry of dark red pulp. Second, the bucket was half-filled with that same chunky red liquid covering the floor behind the cash register. Third, the blender was plugged into an extension cord, one that ran all the way behind the gas station.
“Hey, Jerry?” I called. There was still no response. I couldn’t hear him, but I also couldn’t hear a monster chewing on his bones, so I hoped for the best and followed the extension cord.
I turned the corner and saw that the cord ran up to an outlet on the wall just a few feet away from the back door. There was still no sign of my coworker, and my worry was spilling over into annoyance. Why would he just run outside like that, with no plan, no backup, and no clue what was waiting for him?
“Jerry?”
Still no response.
Dammit, I thought to myself. Is this how O’Brien feels all the time?
I took a step towards the back door, then heard the sound of something moving through the trees nearby. With no other defensive strategy, I held perfectly still and tried to turn invisible (desperate times, right?).
“Hey man,” Jerry said as he emerged from the woods. He had a large tree branch resting over his shoulder like a battle-club. “What are you doing out here?”
“I came to make sure you were okay.”
“That was stupid.”
“I know! What were you doing?”
“I needed a good weapon in case we had to fight a grizzly, and somebody threw away my collection of whomping sticks. I think it was Calvin.”
“I threw your sticks away. Remember? People kept tripping over them.”
He pulled the branch forward and tested it out, making a slow-motion swing through the air in front of him and imitating lightsaber noises. “This should work. I guess you saw that thing on the side of the building?”
“Yeah, what the hell is that?”
Before Jerry could offer any guesses, we both heard another strange noise. We turned to face the trees as the sound grew closer.
If you’ve never heard a distressed squirrel’s bark before, you’re not missing out. It’s a pretty annoying sound, like a high-pitched “Kukukukukuk,” somewhere between a squeak-toy and a pterodactyl. This was approximately what we were hearing, only much louder. Much more desperate. The wild animal was screaming for its life and being carried straight towards the gas station. Straight towards us.
Jerry pointed his whomping stick at the back door and said, “You wanna maybe—”
I didn’t need him to finish. We hurried to the door as quickly as we could. Jerry got there first, pulled it open, turned to hold it for me, then spotted something over my shoulder that made his eyes grow wide and his jaw drop open. The look on his face should have told me to keep on trucking, right inside to safety, but that part of my brain where curiosity resided was being especially articulate.
What is he looking at? WHAT is he looking at?! Come on! It will only take a second to turn your head and look back and see-
I gave in to the urge and looked...
***
The man—it took me a moment to decide that yes, this was a man—was down on all fours the hard way, hands and feet on the ground with his ass straight up in the air. He tarantula-crawled out of the forest with a distraught squirrel dangling from his mouth, trapped by the nape of its neck, bloodied, barking, and thrashing in a hopeless attempt to escape. The man’s face was covered in a thick bushy gray and white beard that grew in every direction with no regard for gravity. His hair was long and dirty, poking out from beneath a black fisherman cap, with some parts forming natural dreadlocks. He wore at least four layers of mismatched coats, a couple layers of pants, and no shoes, and his skin was darkened like he’d been sunburned on top of a severe heat rash.
“Sweet baby Jeebus,” muttered Jerry, “I don’t believe it. He’s real!”
I hurried inside the building with Jerry close behind, and waited for him to shut the door before I spoke.
“I guess there really is a hobo.”
Jerry looked at the door, then at me, then back at the door.
“Hey, what do you suppose he was doing carrying that poor squirrel over towards the blender?”
The loud, horrific sound of a mechanical whirring coincided perfectly with the end of the animal’s calls for help. For the next thirty seconds, we stood still and stared at one another with horrified eyes until the mechanical grinding had finished.
With the room once again deafeningly quiet, I looked at Jerry and said, “I think I just became a vegetarian.”
The silence was short-lived, though, as the telephone immediately started to ring. Jerry got to it first and picked up with a friendly, “Thank you for calling the artisan dildo emporium. This is your sommelier, Calvin Ambrose. How may I direct your call?” He watched as I walked up next to him, then handed me the phone. “It’s for you.”
“Hello?” I answered.
“I don’t want to tell you how to do your job, but maybe you shouldn’t let Stoner-boy answer the phones.” It was O’Brien. Finally.
“Did you get my message?”
“I got a message, but I’m not sure what to do with it. Care to fill me in?”
“Well, to be honest, I don’t know exactly what’s happened. Calvin is missing. And now the hobo is here and killing squirrels.”
“Hobo? Where?”
“He’s locked outside right now.”
“Is he armed?”
“He has a blender.”
“Why is it that you can never give me a normal answer?”
Slam!
I looked up to see the hobo’s black eyes staring at me from the other side of the glass door. In his right hand, he held the bucket. With his left hand, he pointed at me, then pointed at the lock on the door.
I yelled to him, “Sorry, we’re closed!” then said into the phone, “The, uh, hobo is here now.”
“Don’t let him inside. Just keep your distance. I’m already on my way.”
“There’s something weird about him. Something I think you should know.” She didn’t respond. “Hello? You still there?” Silence. Hopefully, that meant she was already close enough to the edge of town to lose cell reception.
Jerry walked up to the door, clapping his hands and saying, “Okay, old man, you heard the guy. It’s closing time. You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here.”
The feral man slammed a fist against the glass door.
Jerry responded by slamming his own fist against our side of the door.
“Dude,” I said, “I don’t think that’s helping.”
The hobo dropped his bucket onto the ground, then dashed off to the side where we couldn’t see him anymore.
Jerry looked at me and remarked, “That was easy.”
“Yeah,” I answered, “A little too easy.” Together, we both looked at the back door. I pointed and asked, “You locked that behind us, right?”
“Yeah, of course.”
“Okay.”
“I mean, I’m pretty sure.”
“‘Pretty’ sure?”
“Why don’t I go double check?”
I watched him head towards the back, and then heard another man’s voice.
“Jack.”
It sounded like it was right next to me, but that wasn’t quite it. It was above me, only lower, almost as if it was coming from inside my head. I looked up, then down, then snapped my fingers next to my ears to make sure they were still working correctly.
“Jack.”
The voice again.
I whispered, “Yes?”
“Let me inside.”
I turned around and saw him standing there again, on the other side of the front door, with his face pressed against it, staring at me while his breath fogged up the glass. I moved a step closer.
“No.”
He spoke to me without moving his lips. The words, or rather, the meaning, was going straight into my brain, bypassing language and voice and flowing unfettered from mind to mind.
“You need to let me in.”
“How are you doing this?” I whispered.
“You’re already connected to it.”
“To what?”
“You need to let me in, or else I will break in.”
“You can try, but Jerry’s got a mean whomping stick, and the police are already on their way. Why do you want in so badly? It sucks in here.”
“It’s hungry.” He bent down and picked up the bucket of squirrel chum. “It needs to feed, and you must open the door.”
“Why would I do that?”
“Because you fools are standing inside its mouth! Now open the door before it swallows you whole!”
Jerry walked up next to me and screamed, “Hey! Gramps! We’re not interested. Go away!”
The man clenched his jaw at Jerry.
“This fool does not understand. He does not know what is at stake. His insolence will bring about the-what- wait-what the fuck-is he really… Why is he taking off his pants?”
I looked over at Jerry, and sure enough, he was unzipping.
“Dude!” I said, averting my eyes. “What are you doing?!”
He turned his back to the door and dropped trou, explaining, “I learned this technique in survival class. It’s called ‘Bravehearting.’ You gotta show the wild animal who’s boss.” He pressed his bare ass against the glass and yelled over his shoulder, “What the fuck are you gonna do about it? Huh?” The man looked genuinely bewildered (that made two of us). He put the bucket on the ground and took a few steps away.
Jerry spun around and started rubbing his scrotum on the glass next, laughing and teasing, “Yeah, take a look, punk. This is happening, and there’s nothing you can do about it!”
The man turned around and took a few steps in the opposite direction. As we watched him go, I confessed, “I honestly did not expect that to work. Good job.”
Jerry pulled up and fastened his pants and said, “Thanks.”
The old man kept walking, all the way to the gas pumps. That’s when I knew I had spoken too soon.
He pressed a button to select the fuel grade, removed the hose from its cradle, put the nozzle into his open mouth, looked back at me, and pulled the trigger. Suddenly, a stream poured out, erupting from his mouth and pouring down his body like a gasoline fountain.
“JERRY!” I screamed, “HIT THE EMERGENCY SHUT OFF SWITCH!”
At least, that’s what I meant to scream. But everything was going so fast, my words were stumbling over one another and by the time they left my mouth, it sounded more like “JERITTHESHMORFOFF!”
That was good enough. Jerry immediately sprinted towards the counter and dove over to a triumphant battle cry of “Sproing!” He managed to smack the emergency shut-off button on the wall before landing in the center of the thousand island meat gravy.
I messed up. I should have checked the pumps as soon as I got here. It was part of my responsibilities as a gas station clerk. It wasn’t even an unwritten rule. It was a regular, day-one-of-training rule. The pumps must always be turned off unless a customer has already paid or swiped.
Someone must have manually turned the pumps on before I got here.
Jerry got to the shut off button way faster than I could have hoped to, but it was still a few seconds too late. The man was drenched from head to toe, out of his ever-loving mind, and standing in a puddle of highly flammable liquid.
He shook himself like a wet dog and turned back to me with a grin like a Cheshire cat in heat. When he started for the doors, I tried to tell myself everything was going to be okay. Help was on the way, and this guy had just guzzled enough poison to kill an elephant. He probably wouldn’t be much of a threat for very long. All I had to do was wait him out. But when he started smashing his face against the glass door, I realized all bets were off.
SLAM!
His head bounced right off. The noise shook me, but it didn’t seem to bother him at all, certainly not enough to stop him from trying again.
SLAM!
The second time, it left significant cracks in the glass.
SLAM!
The third time, the network of jagged cracks spread from edge to edge, leaving a dense lattice of fractures around the center that was, more or less, face-sized, and laced with hobo blood.
I turned to see if Jerry was seeing this too, but he was still behind the counter. He stood up, covered in squirrel butter and whined, “Aw, gross! It’s everywhere! Aww, man, it’s still warm!”
I turned my attention back to the front door and
flinched hard at what was waiting for me. The man on the other side of this thin, shattered barrier was holding a handgun and pointing it at my face.
Lines of blood poured down his forehead and nose, around the curves of his wild smile and clotted together in his thick beard.
When my ability to speak returned, I tried my best to talk him down. “Whoa, dude, it’s okay. I’ll do whatever you want. I’ll let you inside. Just put the gun away.”
The man began to cackle, then he extended the weapon and pulled the trigger.
“Whoa!” I screamed. My poorly tuned fight-or-flight mechanism had never been more useless than it was now, where neither option was a possibility. I flinched hard from the surge of wasted energy that coursed through my veins with nowhere to go.
Then I realized that I was okay. And for one beautiful moment in time, I felt the calming presence of sweet, innocent relief. That gun wasn’t real! In fact, it was nothing more than a gimmicky butane-lighter. And when he pulled the trigger, instead of firing a bullet, he conjured a tiny flame, which he then turned upon himself.
The whole scene went in slow motion, or at least that’s the way my memory decided to immortalize it. His face was plastered with a huge smile as he pulled his arm back towards his body, bending the elbow, turning the lighter upwards to his mouth. His eyes locked forward, looking past the flame, right at me, and just before the fire touched his wet face, a blinding light took over.
With a loud fwoom, the man became a living fireball, flames reaching into the sky past where I could see. And then, I heard him again. Using his Shining voice. In my head, he spoke calmly to me. “I have escaped what is coming. You will not be as lucky. This is your problem now, asshole.”
He stayed there, standing, staring as the flames ate his clothes and skin. His beard hair singed off instantly, followed by the cheeks and lips that blistered and peeled away until nothing was left of his mouth but the skeleton grin. His eyes blackened and blistered away until they were hollow sockets of charred black, yet still, he stared at me.
“Goodness gracious,” said Jerry, who at some point had walked up next to me and was now standing by my side, watching the man burn.
I tried to peel my gaze away, but I couldn’t. I knew this moment was going to haunt me. Probably for the rest of my life. But there was no way I could get myself to look anywhere but straight ahead. At long last, I managed to form the words, “How the hell is he still standing?”
Tales From the Gas Station 2 Page 13