“FUCK!”
Rosa collapsed into Jerry’s arms, and he dropped her right onto the ground like she was a sack of dog food with cooties. We were transfixed at the horrendous beast crawling off the ledge of the awning. It unfurled an arm to the ground, the appendage as thick as a tree branch. From there, it lowered the rest of its form quickly but silently. Its head was the size of a beach ball. The eyes were sunken charcoal pockets like plumes of smoke that didn’t move in time or relation with the rest of its body. It had two nostril slits above a half open mouth filled with disorganized rows of serrated chalk-white teeth the size of steak knives. It had two spiraling horns, both at least a yard in length and shiny black marble in appearance. The thing’s clawed hands were tipped in jagged talons, blacker than black, and its skin looked like a third-degree burn, pinkish deposits of scar tissue glued upon layers of giant, ropy muscles.
Even more interesting was that we could see the beast in all of its monstrous glory outlined against the black sky, with no light other than the ones on the snowplow. Our eyes were picking up a new wavelength beyond the visible spectrum, and it was all coming from this thing.
Jerry called out, “Three-way jinx!” His voice snapped O’Brien and me back to reality, in all likelihood saving us from losing what was left of our minds. The deputy fell to the ground, loudly and gracelessly barfing.
“Hey!” yelled Saul from inside his truck. “Y’all got any gas left or what?”
He still hadn’t seen the thing. His attention was on us inside the building, not on the enormous beast standing a few yards behind him. As much as I didn’t want to look back out those doors, I had to. Saul was about to do something he had no idea would be the single worst mistake of his life, and this was a man whose life could best be described as a series of mistakes.
As a bus driver, he never hit the same pickup time twice. At least once a month he’d completely forget to stop and pick me up. If any of the kids dared complain, he’d accuse us all of lying and conspiring to get him fired. He drank and smoked on the bus, and he made it crystal clear that he knew all of our addresses. At the start of each school year (or whenever he felt moved by the spirits), he would stop the bus on the side of the road and swear to God that if anyone ratted, he’d take a tire iron to their parents’ faces.
That threat wasn’t reserved only for tattle-tales. He’d threaten our parents if we were too noisy, if he felt like we were talking about him behind his back, or if he just felt like scaring some kids.
He was an intolerable drunk, but after his wife left him, he became much more intolerable, and much more drunk. His own children would show up to school with bruises and broken teeth, but there wasn’t much anyone could do, so like most problems, we all ignored it and hoped for the best.
He would spend hours at the gas station sometimes, refilling the same cup of coffee over and over and waxing poetically to anybody who would listen to him about which new group of people he had decided was ruining his country. “That’s the problem with America today,” he would say before playing fill-in-the-blank.
I guess my point (if I even have one) is that Saul was a shitty bus driver, a shitty husband and father, a shitty customer, and an all-around shitty person. He was a lot like most people in this town, actually. But even after all of that, I was pretty sure he didn’t deserve to have his skin stripped away.
I got to the front door and pushed it open at the same time Saul took his first step out of the snow truck. I screamed, “Stay inside your vehicle!”
Either Saul hadn’t heard me or he decided to ignore it, choosing instead to down the rest of his forty-ounce Natty Light before tossing it into the snow.
I tried again, “Saul! Go back to your truck! There’s a gas leak or something!”
He didn’t stop or even slow down. He just looked at me and yelled back, “Fuck you, I need to take a piss.”
The creature lurched forward, reached its arm underneath the truck with a speed that was one frame rate above instantaneous. I could hear bones crunching as it wrapped its clawed fingers around Saul’s legs. He barely managed to let out a scream before the thing yanked his feet out from under him and he went down face-first against the pavement. It pulled him to itself, under the truck, scraping against the ground and leaving a trail of bloody fingernails and teeth, then it stood erect, dangling Saul upside down, screaming and flailing, close to its mouth.
Saul was extremely lucky that he always kept a loaded pistol tucked into his pants. Not because that helped him survive this situation. No, don’t get your hopes up. He died. He definitely died. But at least the pistol saved him from what could have been a feast of agony for the thing, which I had deduced by now was probably the real Sagoth.
Saul pulled out his revolver and popped off a couple rounds into the demon’s face, but the mortal weapon was as effective as a bee-sting. All it did to the demon was piss it off. Enough to warrant immediate execution. The demon raised the tiny man over its head and slammed him against the concrete pavement below. As far as last words go, “Fuck you, I need to take a piss” are probably not the ones you want carved into your tombstone.
I heard the gun skitter across the lot, but I couldn’t see where it went. I couldn’t see anything, other than the beast in all its horrid glory and the broken body of the man it was now raising into the air. Everything else disappeared, overpowered by the unholy light that had overtaken my world. There was no snow truck. No pumps. No gas station. There was only Sagoth, a being of immeasurable power. From any distance, I could see every cell making up the black and pink integument of skin. I could feel its body heat. I could hear each of its hearts beating.
Sagoth held the man in one hand and inspected him. I sensed the surprise and disappointment with how easily Saul had died. With its other hand, it poked at the body, attempting to revive it, to squeeze out just a second or two more of delicious pain. When the man didn’t rouse, it extended a talon and opened him up and spilled his blood and organs into the snow.
I could feel myself falling, and then the familiar world I knew crashed into focus around me. My eyes readjusted to the lights they were designed to observe, and when I caught up with my surroundings, the first thing I saw was the ceiling of the gas station. Somebody had grabbed me and pulled me back into safety, then thrown me onto my back. I sat up to see O’Brien closing and locking the door.
Yeah, nice, lock the door. That deadbolt will be sure to stop the twenty-foot tall demon creature from getting inside.
She pulled me up, put the crutch under my arm, and said one word. “Weapons.” When I looked back outside, Sagoth was nowhere to be seen.
When we couldn’t get Rosa to wake up again, we considered it a win and carried her behind the counter. She was still breathing, and we saw no reason to mess with good enough, so we bundled her up in blankets, made a pillow out of some car towels, and left her there to sleep it off.
As a pointless precaution, we stayed as far away from the doors and windows as possible while we turned the place inside out looking for whatever we could use to defend ourselves. Sadly, our selection was slim pickings. Broken glass shards, chair legs, road flares, pocket knives, and plenty of flammables, if that sort of thing could even hurt a hell-born entity like the one outside. I’d watched what that thing had done to Saul. If we had to fight, we were going to lose. But I kept my opinion to myself. This task wasn’t about making weapons. It was about giving our minds a precious distraction. Even the memory of that thing was enough to sting the walls of my mind like fingernails on a sunburn.
We were all working together in the supply closet, opening boxes, pouring out the contents into a pile in the center of the room.
Jerry asked, “You still got that box cutter?”
“What box cutter?”
“I’ll take that as a no,” he said before ripping into an unopened cardboard box with his teeth, completely overlooking the pile of pocket knives at his feet.
“I can’t believe he’s dead,” O’Brie
n said, tossing a box of toilet paper to the floor. “Just like that.”
“Whelp,” Jerry answered, turning to face her. “At least he died doing what he loved. Shooting stuff.” O’Brien shook her head in disgust. Jerry caught the gesture and asked, “Oh, I’m sorry. Were you and Rando close?”
“Dude,” I said. “I know tensions are high and all, but read the room. A man just died.”
“So what?” he asked, throwing the box in his hands onto the ground as if to emphasize his point. “Are we really going to pretend that any of us are broken up over that redshirt? If we can be perfectly honest for one second, the value of human life in this town is grossly over-exaggerated. Hell, out of the six people inside this building, Rosa is probably the only one who hasn’t killed anybody.”
He crossed his arms and stared hard, silently daring us to call him on that. I tried to think of what to say, but there really wasn’t anything to say at all. For all his faults, Jerry could be very… Jerryish. Sometimes, it’s easy to forget that when we first met, he was trying to convince me to join a murder cult.
“Well,” I said at last, “give her some time. It’s only her first day.”
The room was perfectly quiet for a second. O’Brien broke first. Soon, we were all laughing at the absurdity of our situation, but only for a moment before returning to the weapons hunt.
I can’t say exactly how much time had passed, but we all stopped once we heard Rosa’s voice coming from the doorway.
“Hey guys? What happened?”
She was standing there, looking around at the mountain of supplies and shredded boxes with the abject horror that comes from knowing you’re probably going to be the one to have to clean this mess. She looked tired, like she just woke up with a migraine and a hangover. In one hand, she held a flashlight, in the other, Saul’s revolver.
“Where did you get that gun?” asked O’Brien.
“It was sitting there on the ground right outside. Hey, did you guys know there’s a snow truck out there?”
“How did you get it?” O’Brien asked, even though I think she already knew the answer.
“The door was unlocked. I walked outside and picked it up. Why?” The annoyance in her voice had ticked up a notch.
“Don’t do that again.” She wasn’t angry. She had the same tone one might use to walk someone through defusing a bomb.
“Why not?” The annoyance in Rosa’s voice had ticked up a couple more notches.
“Don’t worry about it.”
Jerry jumped in with, “You didn’t happen to see a terrifyingly huge hell-monster while you were out there, did you?”
She squinted at him and asked, “Why? Did you lose one?”
While she was distracted, O’Brien reached out and snatched the gun from her hand.
“Hey!”
“Sorry, I didn’t feel like explaining to everybody why I’m the only one here who should have a gun right now.”
That was fair. I couldn’t even be mad.
I was, however, mad about the “plan” she laid out next. We had all but finished our weapons search and come up empty. Desperate times call for desperate measures, and there was one resource we had purposely neglected to tap before now. We were going to need help fighting the thing outside, and whether I liked it or not, Spencer was a survivor. Whatever was left inside of the cooler might be our only shot.
O’Brien checked the revolver to see that there were four bullets left. Four bullets seemed to bring her a lot more reassurance than they did for me, but that’s why she was the one volunteering to lead the way.
She moved the chair away from the cooler door with us right behind her. Our job was to provide backup in case things got hairy, which—she explained twice for Jerry—meant pointing our flashlights into the eyes of anybody or anything that might try to jumpscare us. Not diving into the middle of anything, and not going inside the cooler for any reason. She made me promise that if things got real bad, I would close the door and barricade it all over again, no matter which side of it she ended up on.
The first thing we saw when the door creaked open was the empty rolling chair in the corner.
“Hello?” O’Brien called into the room, “Is anybody alive in there? I’m not going to hurt you, but I need you to step out with your hands where I can see them.”
After a few seconds with no response, she stepped into the cooler, and I immediately regretted going along with this plan. Spencer was fast for a dead guy. He swooped in from next to the cooler door like he’d been waiting for this moment all night, hooked an arm around O’Brien’s gunhand, and spun her into the wall. The weapon clacked to the ground while the three of us tried frantically to keep our flashlights on him. But he was just too fast. He planted a boot solidly into Jerry’s solar plexus, sending him crashing into the wall on the other side of the hallway, then he snatched Rosa by the hair and yanked her into the cooler with him. Before O’Brien could even get back to her feet, Spencer had Rosa in a chokehold with the same pencil she was using earlier for inventory counts pressed tightly into her neck.
“You guys get bored without me or something?” he taunted. I kept my flashlight trained on him as he slowly backed deeper into the cooler. The deputy’s handcuffs were still around his wrists, but the chain had been snapped somehow. Now it was nothing more than a pair of fancy bracelets.
“Spencer, listen,” I started.
“Shut up!” he yelled back. “Here’s how this is going to work. First—”
CRACK!
Spencer released Rosa and fell to the ground, his head colliding with the floor and bouncing. Behind him stood… Oh shit not this again… Spencer, holding the weapon he had just bludgeoned the other Spencer with—the same flashlight that the O’Brien double had taken with her into the cooler—the same exact flashlight that I had given to Donald Glover earlier that night.
“Damn,” said Spencer (the conscious one), “Is that what I look like? I am one sexy motherfucker.”
The smile snapped off his face once he spotted something on the cooler floor. I followed his eyes and saw it sitting there, just a few feet away from him.
Saul’s revolver.
O’Brien leapt for it at the same time as Spencer. They collided inches away from the gun, wrapped together, and went crashing into the shelves. I couldn’t stand to watch anymore, so I broke my promise to O’Brien and dove into the cooler, crawling over the disgusting, sticky ground and feeling around in the dark until my hands met the warm, heavy piece of metal. I pointed it at Spencer, but there was no way I was going to get a clear shot, especially with Rosa’s wild flashlight job turning the room into an amateur disco.
Spencer threw O’Brien into the rolling chair. She flipped over it and hit the floor nearby. He wiped a bead of blood from his face and took a step towards me, but that’s as far as he made it before another body jumped out of the dark and tackled him from the side.
Here’s where things got even more confusing. Pencil-Spencer landed on top of Flashlight-Spencer and started punching him hard, but not hard enough. In no time, Flashlight-Spencer had slammed his flashlight into Pencil-Spencer’s fist, then flipped him onto his back and started wailing on him.
I had my gun aimed at the two of them while they beat each other stupid, but I couldn’t tell the difference between the monster and the shapeshifter. I looked at O’Brien and said, “I don’t know which one’s real!”
“Who fucking cares?!” she yelled back. “Shoot them both!”
Both Spencers froze mid-fight, looked at me, and said in unison, “Huh?”
I hesitated. It was long enough for one of the Spencer’s to get the upper hand.
Pencil-Spencer stabbed the pencil into Flashlight-Spencer’s shoulder and twisted. Flashlight-Spencer winced and jumped off of him. Right then, Jerry called out from the cooler doorway.
“Hey butt-brain!”
He was holding a bottle of grain alcohol with a cloth fuse burning at the end—a Molotov cocktail. Before I had time to
scream “Bad idea!” he had pitched the damned thing at Flashlight-Spencer… who caught it in his fucking hand!
Just when I thought things couldn’t get any crazier, Pencil-Spencer punched the still-burning weapon hard enough to shatter it into a blue fireball that lit up the entire room for a brilliant instant before burning out and leaving us all in the dark trying to catch our breath.
Rosa pointed her flashlight at the figure sprinting out of the cooler. Pencil-Spencer ran right through Jerry, shoving him against the wall before escaping out the back door. After a few seconds, we collectively remembered that there was still one Spencer in the room with us and frantically pointed our flashlights all around to find him. First I looked at where he just was and found nothing but specks of blood and broken shelves. Then I pointed my light at O’Brien, who was breathing heavily and bleeding from a split lip; then at Rosa who was sitting on the ground pointing a flashlight back at me; then at the other Rosa, who was sitting right next to her holding an identical flashlight.
The Rosas both squeaked and crawled to opposite sides of the cooler, staring at one another with the exact same look of frozen shock while O’Brien got to her feet, walked between them, and spoke calmly. “Okay, so here’s the deal. Spencer is gone now, which means that… Oh God I can’t believe I’m saying this… one of you is the shapeshifter. That’s who I’m talking to right now. We didn’t come in here to hurt you. We came in here because we need your help. There is something outside the gas station. We don’t know what it is, but we think maybe you do. It’s some kind of impossible creature, and it’s already killed a man.”
Tales From the Gas Station 2 Page 29