I watched both of their faces and instantly knew. One Rosa looked up at O’Brien with wide eyes and asked in a soft voice, “Somebody died?”
The other waited about a second too late to mimic the look of fear and concern on the real Rosa’s face.
I found my crutch, stood up, and walked right over to the shapeshifter. “You’re busted.”
Jerry walked into the cooler rubbing his chest and said, “Whoa, there are two Rosas now? Nice.”
“No,” I said, “One Rosa. And one shapeshifter.”
She looked at me with that sweet little “What did I do?” look, but it didn’t take long for her to realize she wasn’t fooling me. Soon, the look changed into a wry smile. She chuckled and threw up her hands. “Hey, what can I say? You got me.”
I heard O’Brien mutter behind me, “Jesus.”
“Alright,” I started, “you seem to have a finger on the pulse here. Who, or what, is ‘Sagoth’?”
The doppelganger got to her feet as she answered, “Oh, I don’t doubt you’ve got a ton of questions, but I have neither the time nor desire to answer them. See, this has been a nice diversion. Thanks for that. But if what you say is true, then that means I need to get to work.”
“You could have escaped any time you wanted, huh?”
“Of course. It’s adorable how you thought a tiny wall was going to stop me. You humans are such curious creatures. But I needed something to do to pass the time until Sagoth showed up, and this sure was fun while it lasted. I’ll be off now, and when you wake up you won’t remember any of this.”
The double waved her hand, and O’Brien, Jerry, and Rosa-Prime all fell to the floor unconscious. I looked at each of them long enough to make sure they were still breathing, then back at the faux-Rosa in front of me.
“Well, that certainly is strange.” She chuckled nervously. “But when you wake up, this entire night will be nothing but a dream. Now, it’s time for you to go to sleep.”
She waved her hand again.
I blinked a couple times.
“What,” she said.
“I don’t sleep,” I said back. “I thought I told you that.”
“You may have told Rosa, but I can’t copy memories, Jack. Only voices and faces. And certain emotions, when they’re strong enough. Take you. I see what you’re trying to forget. The harder you try to bury your feelings, the louder they become. I could feel your guilt a mile away.”
“Who are you?”
“I don’t have time for—”
I pointed the revolver at her and squeezed the trigger.
Now, I know that sounds bad, and I’m sure you moral absolutists out there are probably thinking to yourselves, “I would not have done that if I were in this situation.” Well, you know what? You weren’t. I was. And if the shapeshifter really could feel emotions when they were strong enough, she should have seen this coming because I was pretty pissed off. Not just because this asshole had been screwing with us, using us as bait to lure out the real demon, letting us all go paranoid on one another this whole time, but also because after all of the challenges I’d been through that night, all the hard talks and close calls, I was going to be the only one to remember any of it.
Besides, I had already worked out that a bullet to the chest wasn’t going to kill her.
“OUCH!” she screamed angrily, immediately transforming into O’Brien before my eyes. “Why would you do that?! All I wanted was to help you! But if I have to kill you to get to Sagoth, I will! And you’re not—”
I shot her again, aiming for center mass like Benjamin always said. The creature immediately transformed into Jerry. He smiled, and I shot again. That’s when he turned into someone else. Someone I wasn’t prepared to face again.
He turned into Sabine. The creature looked at me with her green eyes and asked with her soft voice, “Well? Are you going to shoot me again?”
I sighed and lowered the gun. “What’s the point?”
She changed one last time. Now I was standing in my own presence. And I must confess, it was quite the wake-up call. I didn’t realize how rough I was starting to look until I was forced to see it in person. I desperately needed a haircut. The circles under my eyes were big enough to have their own zip codes. My cheekbones weren’t just pronounced; they were articulated. And I was even skinnier than the mirror had led me to believe.
“Jack, I’m going to tell you something I’ve never told a human before. To me, your kind are a lot like hamsters. I don’t feel compelled to explain my actions or motivations to people because you’re all so primitive and unevolved that you simply couldn’t wrap your tiny minds around it anyway.”
“Okay,” I said. “That’s a fair assessment.”
“There’s no such thing as demons. That’s just a word you invented to refer to certain things outside your boundaries of comprehension. Sagoth is no demon, but he is my responsibility. He sleeps inside one of the wrinkles of your universe, but something has awakened him. Something even I don’t know. Someone in your town is conjuring and collecting gods, but if he thinks he can contain the power of Sagoth, then he is a fool. I alone can control the beast. I’ve been doing it for millennia. Every century or so, I have to put him back to sleep before he has a chance to start armageddon. That is why I’m here. Not to hurt you, but to help. The legends started a long time ago of a demon. People saw a shapeshifter every time Sagoth awoke and feasted, and before long humans conflated us.”
“Hang on,” I said. “This is all very fascinating, but can you maybe stop being me for one second? Maybe go back to Jerry or Rosa. I’m listening, I promise, but I can’t get over the fact that my voice sounds like that. It’s really annoying.”
He sighed. “I’m going to go stop Sagoth from destroying your world now, Jack. But before I do, there’s one last piece of information I want to leave you with. I can see things you humans cannot. I see emotions that you don’t even know you have.”
“Okay, so we’re just gonna pretend I didn’t ask you to stop being me. Got it.”
“You and your friends are all kinds of messed up. It would take an army of psychiatrists to untangle the mental slinkies inside your minds. Rosa, Jerry, Amelia, you…” he shuddered.
“Thanks.”
“That wasn’t what I wanted to say.”
“Oh. Okay.”
“At the end of the day, your fucked-up brains aren’t all that special. But the other one? Spencer? I looked inside of him and all I saw was… nothing. Absolutely nothing. The same as I see when I look at a chair or a rock or a knife. He’s empty. He’s just a black void.”
“Yeah,” I responded, “we actually already knew that about him.”
I took a step back and let my doppelganger walk out of the cooler on his own two legs.
The rest of the night passed without incident.
***
The others slept in the cooler, right where they fell. I tried for almost an hour to wake them, but nothing worked. All I could do was make them comfortable with blankets and pillows made from bags of stale bread and hope that the effects would wear off on their own.
While the sun came up, I cleaned. There was enough garbage and debris to fill four contractor bags. After that, I started on the paperwork, writing up inventory loss slips for everything that had been damaged in the fights, broken or commandeered in the weapons search, or stolen by Jerry. It’s amazing how productive one can be when sleep isn’t a factor. I’d need to be careful not to do too good of a job, lest the owners start to expect it.
After everything was back in order, I took my usual spot in my chair behind the register and enjoyed the silence. Another night in the bag. Now all there was left to do was finish my book and wait for the others to sleep off whatever the shapeshifter had done to them.
When our first customer walked into the store about an hour later, I didn’t even bother looking up from my book. I had already posted a sign on the door that said we didn’t have electricity and couldn’t sell gas or run cards
or accept cash and nothing worked. The customer walked up to the counter and cleared his throat, interrupting me just when the story was finally starting to get interesting.
“Excuse me, do you have any band aids?”
I didn’t have to look up to know. His voice was enough to tell me I was fucked. I took a deep breath, dog-eared my page, slowly placed the book on the counter next to me, and then, very carefully, raised my eyes to see him standing there, smiling, with a shoulder coated in dark blood from where he had been stabbed by a pencil hours earlier.
Spencer Fucking Middleton.
I quickly reached for the spot on the counter where I had left the gun, but my hand hit empty space. Spencer lifted the revolver and asked, “Was this what you were looking for?”
“Nooo,” I said. I was aiming for innocent, but I think he knew better.
“Feels a little light. Did you really think you were going to take me out with the first shot?”
I leaned back in my chair, stretched, and said in a hopeful voice, “Is there any way you’re actually just the shapeshifter?”
Spencer shook his head.
“Hallucination?”
He shook his head again.
“Ghost?” I said hopefully.
“Get up, Jack. I need your help.”
A minute later, we were back outside in the knee-deep snow behind the gas station. Spencer dug the barrel of the gun into my back and walked me towards the woods. No matter how often it happens, being death-marched at gunpoint is something I’ll never get used to. I prayed that this would be the last time it ever happened. Then I realized why that was wrong and prayed that this wouldn’t be the last time it happened. Then I realized why that was wrong and prayed that—
“Stop!” We were right at the edge of the tree line, and for a brief moment, I considered making a run for it, but then I looked back at the man with the gun and realized why it wouldn’t work. I couldn’t leave if I wanted to. The others were still here, locked in the cooler, and if I ran, he’d make short work of them. Spencer looked around, smelled the air, smiled, and pulled a long knife out of its sheath on his belt. “Yeah, this will work. Are you left-handed or right-handed?”
“Why?” I asked.
“Never mind.” He grabbed my left hand and, in one quick movement, sliced my pinky finger clean off, then he grabbed my crutch and yanked it away from me. I hit the thick blanket of snow hugging my rapidly-bleeding hand wound tightly against my stomach.
As the pain and panic surged through my body, Spencer crouched down next to me and said, “Nothing personal, I just needed some bait. I got a new boss now, and he wants me to bag and tag something special for him, and you’re gonna help. Do me a favor and keep on bleeding. It won’t take long for the thing to catch your scent. For what it’s worth, if he doesn’t kill you, I’ll let you live.”
He turned and began to walk away.
“Hey Spencer!” I yelled after him.
He stopped. “Yeah?”
“You’re a dick.”
He laughed and walked back into the gas station with my crutch under his arm. I rolled onto my back, and looked up at the sky. Snowflakes fell into my eyes, and I heard the familiar sound of the gas station door closing, followed by the scraping noise of the deadbolt going into place. The hot, wet liquid pouring uninterrupted out of my hand felt strangely comforting, warming my torso. The snow on my clothes had already melted from the body heat, and underneath it all, I was soaking wet. The parts of me that weren’t stinging cold were already numb, and if I was going to give survival the old college try, it would have to be now or never.
I pushed myself along with my good hand and leg, leaving a sloppy trail of bloody snow behind me. Maneuvering in my condition was going to be difficult, to say the least, and I could sense that my vision was beginning to tunnel, a particularly bad sign. If I were to lose consciousness, it would be because I was dead.
I managed to drag myself all the way to the back wall of the gas station before I surrendered to the reality that this was all a waste of time. I wasn’t getting inside, and even if I did, Spencer would just drag me back out. There was nothing left to do but hope for one more miracle.
“Hey Jack. What are you doing out here?”
I looked up to see my old friend Tom, dressed in his deputy uniform with his white hair perfectly matching the snowy landscape. I squeezed my bloody nub under my armpit to try and slow the bleeding as I worked out whether I was looking at a ghost, hallucination, or the shapeshifter and realized that I genuinely couldn’t tell.
“Spencer’s using me for bait.”
Tom instantly morphed into a seven-foot tall, four-hundred-pound Samoan man covered in scars and tattoos. That limited the options down to hallucination or shapeshifter.
“Spencer?! That punk is back?” he barked.
“Yeah.”
He punched a fist into the opposite hand. “Well, I guess I need to teach him a lesson about—”
He stopped and turned back to the woods. Something out there was crunching loudly through the forest, snapping through branches and causing a hell of a lot of noise as it approached. The Samoan figure crouched next to me and whispered, “Sorry. It looks like we don’t have time to get you out of here. Sagoth has smelled your blood and now he comes for you.”
“Well that sucks.”
“Listen to me very closely. There’s one thing you need to know about Sagoth. He has one weakness, and that is this: He cannot hurt you if you don’t look at him. Do you understand?”
“No.”
“Close your eyes. No matter what happens, no matter what you hear, keep your eyes shut until you hear me say the word ‘Salutem.’ Until then, he will do everything he can to trick you into opening your eyes. If you do that, all bets are off. He’ll start with your eyelids. Do you understand?”
“Still no.”
The shapeshifter sighed and said, “Close your stupid eyes!”
Right then, I saw it. Sagoth. Pushing his way through the forest. He stood as tall as the trees, horrendous and vaguely humanoid, with an aura of inconceivable terrors and a face that screamed all things dark and hateful. I squeezed my eyes shut and instantly felt blessed relief.
After that, it was nothing. My head pounded. My hand burned. There was a ringing in my ears and the world spun. I felt sick to my stomach. And then, the pain began to slip away.
The door scraped open and someone stepped outside.
O’Brien called my name.
“Yeah?”
“Oh my God!” she screamed. “What happened? Are you okay?”
“Spencer’s around here somewhere.”
The ground shook. O’Brien screamed. “What the hell is that thing?!”
“Close your eyes!” I screamed.
“What?”
“It can’t hurt you if you close your—”
She let out a blood-curdling scream that climbed into the air.
“Amy!”
“Jack! The gun! Grab it!”
I tried to move despite the pain. “Where?! Where is it?”
“It’s right there by your feet!” She screamed again.
“I can’t find it!”
“Right there! Look!” I grabbed handfuls of the snow, but there was nothing there. “Open your eyes and look!”
Wait… O’Brien’s gun was stolen by a raccoon.
I fell against the wall and screamed, “Nice try, but you’re going to have to do better than that!”
Sagoth responded like it was a challenge. All at once, I felt them crawling all over me. Insects. They chirped and squeaked as they flooded up my pant leg and under my clothes and even into my nose, ears, and mouth. I gagged and swatted at them but still pressed my eyes shut as hard as I could.
A vicious heat blasted across my face as I heard the giant being scream at me from inches away, “MAGGOT. OPEN YOUR EYES AND BEHOLD YOUR DAMNATION!”
“No thanks!” I yelled back.
And then he brought out the big guns. The
next thing I knew, I was falling. There was no earth beneath me, only air, whipping against my skin as I plummeted down, down, down. (It’s a good thing I’m such a coward, because I think squeezing my eyes shut in a situation like that was actually my natural reaction.) After falling for what felt like ages, I finally landed in a warm ocean. This was about to get really tough.
I kicked and screamed at the water around me with no idea which way was up or down. I was certain that I was about to drown but still, I kept my eyes shut.
Eventually, I could feel myself rising. Was the air left in my lungs maybe possibly enough to pull me to the surface? I held off for as long as I could, until my insides ached with a pain almost as bad as death, but still I had not broken the surface. This was it. The moment I would finally die. But if I had to go, I wasn’t going to give that douchebag demon the satisfaction of knowing he had beaten me. I kept my eyes shut, put up two middle fingers, and took a deep breath of water...
...Which of course turned out to be nothing but cold air. As soon as I inhaled, I was transported back to the snow-covered patch of dirt next to the gas station, alive for now, but still freezing to death.
I felt somebody grabbing me and pulling my body into the gas station. I could hear Jerry’s voice right above me.
“Dude, are you okay?” He dropped me onto my back in the hallway.
“I’m fine.”
“Why are your eyes closed?”
“There’s a demon trying to trick me into opening them.”
“I think he’s gone now. You can open your eyes. If you want.”
“Nah, I don’t think I’m gonna do that.”
Rosa and O’Brien came rushing to my side. O’Brien ordered Jerry to call an ambulance and for Rosa to bring the medical kit and blanket. As my body temperature slowly came back to normal, so did the sensation in my extremities. My remaining toes and fingers stung as blood flow returned to normal. This was an interesting new trick, but I wasn’t going to fall for it. I would keep my eyes closed for as long as it took.
Tales From the Gas Station 2 Page 30