Christmas at the Gas Station

Prologue

In case you’ve been following along with the events at the gas station on my blog, I apologize that my website was taken down so abruptly. For some reason, the city council found my public record of local events to be “troubling”–to the point that they hired a fancy Orwellian legal team to bury me in cease and desists. I tried fighting back, but as of last week, it looks like my entire site has been retroactively erased from existence. Presumably, these are the same guys who’ve been scrubbing all mentions of our town from the internet. I know that these are not the sort of people that you’re supposed to pick a fight with, but after what happened to Gregory Fitz I feel I have a responsibility to continue journaling in one form or other.

Some of you who followed my blog may remember Greg as the lawyer who volunteered to help out pro bono after I first started getting pushback from the “concerned members” of the city council. He even drove all the way out here last week just to have a talk with them.

I’m very sorry to say that they found his remains yesterday in a hotel room (locked from the inside, of course). Officially, his death was declared suicide, but before it was sealed Deputy O’Brien managed to get a look at the police report, which claims he died of blood loss while attempting to eat his own hands. Admittedly, I didn’t know Greg all that well, but that just doesn’t seem like something he would do.

Anyway, until I can figure things out with the website, I’ve decided to continue chronicling the events of my day to day here.

If you haven’t been following my blog and have absolutely no idea who I am, that’s okay too. let me just say that there are only two things you need to know that will bring you completely up to speed:

I work at the shitty twenty-four hour gas station at the edge of town.

Weird things happen there.

________________________________________

Chapter One

The owners decided to hire a third full-time clerk, and I don’t know if it’s because they’re getting tired of all the part-timers mysteriously disappearing, or if it’s because they’ve finally decided to fire Jerry, or maybe they just know that my time here is running out and they’re hoping I can train my own replacement before it’s too late.

Her name is Rosa, and despite her eager optimism, I guess she’s pretty cool. She’s a couple years younger than me, smart, very capable, and has exhibited a level of competence that I would categorize as “not at all like Jerry,” which is something I think the owners were really looking for in a new employee.

The flip side, though, is that she is always asking questions that I don’t have answers to. Why are there so many missing persons flyers on the bulletin board? What’s with all the mold on the ceiling? Who’s that guy in the trenchcoat that hangs out near the dumpster at all hours of the night? What’s in these boxes labeled “non aprire?”

The owners asked Rosa to start immediately, as my shadow for this week’s overnight shifts. You might think the owners would shut the place down for a couple hours for the holidays, but you would be wrong. It took a literal court order to make them close their doors for a weekend last month after we found a mummified corpse in the walls (but that’s a story for another time).

She came in to the gas station just as the sun was beginning to set, and we started with the basics: How to clock in, how to open a till, how to turn on pumps, then I gave her the same speech I give all the new employees.

“Look, there are a bunch of rules to working at any job. We’re no different. Show up on time, wear clothing, don’t feed the raccoons, the store telephone is for paying customers only (twenty-five cents a minute, prepaid only, no exceptions). And, just like every job, there are the unwritten rules. Here, that second list is a little longer.

“If something seems weird, you try to ignore it. In fact, the more you ignore, the better off you’ll be. Don’t keep track of time. Don’t go off investigating weird noises on your own. Don’t touch the garden gnomes with the green hats.”

“Why?” she asked, “What’s wrong with the gnomes with green hats?”

“Sometimes they bite. They’ve sent a few employees to urgent care for stitches.”

“Wow. What about the customers?”

“Most of them bite too.”

“Okay. What can you tell me about… you know,” she whispered this next part with a sly grin, “the animals?”

This was the moment I first realized that Rosa’s steadfast and defiant curiosity might become a problem.

“What about the animals?” I asked.

“Well, I heard a rumor from Jerry. That the woods way out here past the edge of town are full of strange fauna, and sometimes when night falls, the inhabitants of the forest get brave and wander closer to the gas station.” She said the whole thing in that stupid spooky Vincent Price voice you use when reading ghost stories to a group of first-graders.

Jerry, you idiot.

“Look, Jerry says and smokes a lot of things. I wouldn’t pay him much attention.”

“He also told me something else,” she confessed. “Is it true that you can’t fall asleep?”

“Yeah, it’s true.”

“That’s pretty cool.”

“No, not really.”

Right on cue, Jerry walked into the gas station wearing nothing but a wife-beater, jeans, and a camo trucker-hat covered in fresh snow. Some people like to go home once their shift ends. Some people even manage to stay away from their place of employment all the way until their next shift begins. But as he reminds me time and time again, Jerry is not “some people.”

“You guys, it’s colder than a stepmother’s kiss out there.”

As usual, he didn’t wait for any response. He just grabbed a bottle of whiskey off the shelf, then walked up to Rosa and pointed at a pack of Marlboros.

“What are you doing?” she asked, “Aren’t you freezing?”

“Well yeah. Didn’t you hear what I just said? I’m as cold as a witch’s dick.”

Rosa handed over the pack of cigarettes and rang him up, saying “I don’t think that’s how the expression goes.”

“You ever felt a witch’s dick? It’s pretty freakin’ cold.”

She chuckled. “Does that pickup line ever work?”

“You’d be surprised.”

She gave Jerry his total, but he just winked at her and said, “Put it on my employee tab,” before turning around and walking back out into the falling snow.

Rosa looked at me with a confused expression. “How do I ring something up under an employee tab?”

“We don’t have employee tabs.”

“So… ?”

“Yeah, Jerry just robbed us.”

________________________________________

The night passed like most, boring and slow. The snowstorm had kicked into high gear, dropping the customer count to a trickle, maybe one or two per hour. It didn’t take long to show the new girl everything there was to the job, and before too long my brain was back on autopilot and I was relaxing in a chair with an open book about a hard boiled big-city detective.

Rosa took the utterly pointless initiative to clean the place up a little. I think the dullness of the job was really starting to test her limits. The grind of long hours and the space between those events that form memories is where I like to hide, where I can relax and wait and forget about all the things knocking at the door of my mind. How many days have passed since the last time you slept? I wonder what she-who-shall-not-be-named is doing right now. She promised you would see each other again. Will your mind still be intact when the disease takes you? Do you think she’ll come to your funeral?Yep, take those thoughts and push them back into the vault and focus on the shitty book you bought from the library clearance sale.

Around midnight Rosa ran up to the counter with a cardboard box and slammed it down in front of me. I looked up to see an enormous smile on her face.

“Yo. Check out what I found in the storage closet.”

Before I could say, “No thanks,” she flipped the box upside down and dumped the contents onto the counter. It was a giant tangled ball of Christmas lights, plastic garland, holiday decorations, and freshly dead mice.

“Oh,” she said, her smile instantly evaporating, “I didn’t know about the mice.”

I put my book down and started refilling the box while she went and found some napkins to wrap up the rodents. About an hour later, the decorations were back in the storage room, the mice were all stuffed together in an old shoebox, and I was leaning against my crutches in the pouring snow while Rosa dug a tiny grave.

There was something particularly cathartic about watching somebody else dig a hole next to the gas station, thinking to myself that if she only knew all the things that had happened with that shovel, I highly doubt she would be so gung-ho about putting her fingerprints all over it. I selected one of the few spots where we hadn’t already buried something horrific and once the mice were in the ground, Rosa gave a short eulogy.

“Christmas mice, oh, Christmas mice, how we never knew ye. I’m sorry you all died in a box in the supply closet, but I’m grateful that at least you didn’t have to die alone. We pray that you don’t haunt this gas station. Instead may you find your peace in Heaven or whatever your mouse-religion equivalent is.”

“Probably Valhalla.” I muttered.

“When they say ‘not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse,’ we will know that it wasn’t for lack of trying.” She looked at me and asked, “Anything to add?”

My mind jumped to a shortlist of mouse-based puns, but instead I decided to go with this: “Yeah, somebody once came into the gas station trying to be a dick. He told me that I was nothing but a little mouse. I think he meant it as an insult, but I didn’t take offense.”

She nodded. “That was really nice.”

As we started making our way back to the gas station, I heard a voice from just beyond the treeline whisper, “Hey!”

Rosa stopped and looked back. “Did you hear that?”

The freezing wind carried with it a noise that almost sounded like children giggling as it blew against the back of my neck.

“Nope,” I said, “Let’s go back inside.”

***

It was some time later when the store phone rang. I had gone to the supply closet to grab a bucket of salt for the front steps so Rosa was the one to pick up. I could hear her side of the conversation, and didn’t think too much about it until I heard the very last word.

“It’s not bad, I think. This is my first day here.”

pause

“Oh, I like it. I think it’s going to be a lot of fun.”

pause

“Rosa.”

pause

“Yeah, actually, he’s right here. Did you want to talk to him?”

pause

“Sure thing. I’ll let him know.”

pause

“You too, Spencer.”

Then she hung up the phone.

Oh shit.

She smiled at me and said, “That was a friend of yours.”

“Spencer Middleton,” I said with a sigh.

“Yeah.” Once again, I watched her happy smile disappear. I guess she could tell from the look on my face that this was not good news.

“I need to make a phone call, then I think it’s probably about time that I told you something.”

________________________________________

Chapter Two

Back in high school, we all pretty much knew that Spencer was a certifiable psychopath, but growing up in a small, boring, podunk town, we didn’t have the societal framework to process this sort of thing. Finding him the help he needed was simply not a feasible option, and most people just said a prayer for him and called it done. At one point, the principal delegated the responsibility to the school counselor slash gym coach, who tried talking to Spencer about his feelings. But all of that was just the equivalent of putting a band-aid on a grease fire.

There was a rumor around that time that Spencer was the one who had killed all those dogs, but when I told my mother about this, she just looked at me and said, “Well then don’t go near him with any dogs.”

After dropping out, he joined the army and worked his way up through the ranks until somebody recognized his… let’s say “talents,” and gave him a special assignment in a black budget program specializing in enhanced interrogation techniques (which is just a flashy way of saying “torture”). There’s no official record of any of this, and the only reason I know is because he told me all about it one night to pass the time while I dug my own grave at gunpoint.

Deputy O’Brien managed to intervene and arrest him before he could follow through, but Spencer escaped captivity after only a few days and for the last couple months has been a wanted but elusive fugitive.

Sometimes he calls me at work to remind me of the “good times we had together” and to assure me that he’ll be seeing me again soon. I don’t know if it’s luck that has kept him from killing me, or if the sadist in him is prolonging this intentionally.

Tonight he told Rosa to let me know that he was in the area.

As for why Spencer wants to kill me, let me simply say that maybe I deserve it and maybe I don’t and we should leave it at that.

The first thing I did was call O’Brien, but it went straight to voicemail. The second thing I did was tell all of this to Rosa, who listened patiently until I finished to ask the obvious question. “So do you have a gun or anything? In case he comes back?”

“No, I’m not really a gun guy.”

“Ninja stars? Bazooka? Flame thrower? Chainsaw? Any sort of weapon at all?”

“No.”

“Well, shit, maybe you deserve to be killed. Should we lock the doors or something?”

“Yeah, that’s another thing. Spencer knows how to get inside the gas station even when the doors are locked. He’s done it a couple times before and we haven’t been able to figure out how.”

“Crap, man! Is there anything else terrifying about him that you want to tell me?”

I once saw Spencer get his head cut halfway off and bleed out on the gas station floor, and he still somehow came back without any lasting damage.

“No. Not really.”

The gas station door swung open, causing Rosa to squeak and jump.

“Hey guys,” said the inebriated man in the oversized fur coat as he staggered into the store.

“Hi, Jerry.” I said back. “Where ya been?”

“Y’all know the roads are all shut down?” he said, avoiding the question. (It didn’t matter. I already knew the answer.)

Rosa asked, “What about the roads?”

Jerry braced himself against the frozen drink machine and answered, “Yeah, it’s been all over the radio.”

If he were a little closer, I probably would have smacked him. God knows he deserved it.

Really, Jerry? The Radio?

We’re not supposed to talk about it, but some time ago Jerry started a pet project building a POW-style shortwave radio just to see if he could. He uncoiled an old brillo pad and wrapped it around a toilet paper roll for the inductor, went vulture on a bunch of electronics in storage, and eventually ended up with something that actually picked up a few low-quality AM country stations.

It also picked up something else.

The signal is always weak, but if we put the radio in just the right spot, we can hear a man with a Slavic accent reading or discussing news relevant to our town in short, simple, choppy sentences. The weird thing is, he’s always talking, no matter what, twenty-four hours a day without taking any breaks and never repeating himself.

“The temperature is 84 degrees… there are three more people in town than yesterday… the ratio of pig to human in the town is approximately two point zero seven eight to one… The mayor is asleep… the mayor’s wife is asleep… the time is twenty hours and sixteen minutes… the butcher shop is closed… the light is on at the high school gym…”

He talks about the people in town, what they’re eating for dinner, how many pairs of shoes they own, their favorite colors and numbers. Random facts. Sometimes connected, sometimes not.

We did a couple experiments and learned that the radio signal gets a little stronger the further we go into the woods, and once we get past the gas station heading into town the signal drops to nothing.

We listened to him off-and-on for a few days as a way to stave off boredom during slow shifts. But eventually we started to get a little concerned. The things he reported on were always so specific and bizarre, and some of what the voice reported nobody should have been able to know. Who didn’t love who anymore, what high school student was about to find out she was pregnant, which local business was about to receive a random health inspector visit, how many days the milk at the grocery store had left before it turned bad, and who was going to buy it and when. We had theorized that it was just an elaborate work of fiction until one day the voice announced Sean Buckley’s death in a car accident eight hours before it happened. Then the voice started talking about us. Talking to us, even.

“There’s a man at gas station… he uses name “Jack”… he still has one baby tooth… he has been diagnosed with fatal familial insomnia… he is threat level eight… he is aware of transmission… There is another man at gas station… His name is Jeremy… He is threat level echo… He is aware of transmission… He is thirty years old… He is looking at Jack… The men at gas station have built transmission receiver… Jeremy at gas station is moving towards transmission receiver… He is disassembling transmi-”

After that night we made a pact to never listen to that radio again, and to add the transmission to that long list of “try and forget stories.” I think when most people swear on their lives not to do something again, they don’t do it.

Did I mention that Jerry isn’t most people?

“There’s a freak snow storm. The worst one in a decade. All the roads leading into town are completely impassable. You know the drill. Mandatory curfew. State of emergency. Cats and dogs living together.” Jerry waved his arms in the air dramatically, “Two dead, one missing.”

He grabbed a cup, filled it with a cherry-cola flavored frozen drink, and started to down it.

“If all the roads are impassable then where the hell did you just come from?” asked Rosa.

I whispered to her “Remember that thing I told you about ignoring the weird stuff?”

Jerry screamed.

“What is it?!” yelled Rosa.

“Brainfreeze!”

“Well,” I said, “At least we still have-”

Right then the power went out, leaving the gas station in complete pitch blackness.

________________________________________

I used my phone’s flashlight until I could find our box of emergency supplies, then somehow managed to drag it from the storage room with one hand while holding both crutches in the other. I’m sure Jerry was just being kind by allowing me to do it on my own so I could retain my independence and sense of worth, but seriously dude, you see me dragging this heavy-ass thing. You really not gonna offer to help?

Once I had made it to the front of the store, Jerry sat down cross-legged and started going through the box, handing supplies out to the four of us.

I had packed plenty of extra batteries, half a dozen flashlights, some bottled waters and emergency rations, matches, flares, and more than enough- Wait a second. FOUR of us?

“Holy shit!” I yelled, fumbling with the flashlight Jerry had just handed me. After a painfully awkward few seconds, I managed to get the damn thing to turn on and I pointed it at all the other shadows standing in the room.

Jerry, Rosa, and Deputy O’Brien.

“You mind not pointing that thing right in my eyes?” she asked.

Deputy Amelia O’Brien was the latest in an ever growing list of deputy baby-sitters assigned to the gas station dating all the way back to as long as I can remember. Some of them died, one of them went crazy, and then there’s her, a tough-as-a-brick Brooklyn transplant with an itchy trigger-finger and a long history of giving as many fucks as there are planets named Pluto. She was a very welcome sight.

“Sorry,” I said, pointing it back down. “When did you get here?”

“Just now while you were off bumblefucking around in the closet. I called to check on you thirty minutes ago but nobody answered, and I nearly killed myself ten times driving through this blizzard to get here. What the hell happened?”

Rosa perked up, “Oh, we were probably outside doing the funeral when you called.”

She unsnapped the gun on her holster and said, “What?”

I explained quickly, “It was for a bunch of mice.”

Jerry bristled, “And you didn’t invite me?!”

O’Brien shook her head and said, “That actually does not clear anything up.”

I took a deep breath and broke the bad news, “It’s a good thing you’re here though. Spencer called again. Said he’s in the area.”

Jerry opened one of the emergency packs of jerky, took a bite, then said, “That kid is so in love with you.”

The deputy raised an eyebrow at the new girl and asked “Who are you?”

“Hi, I’m Rosa. It’s my first day.”

“Amelia O’Brien.”

“Really? You don’t look like an O’Brien.”

“What does an O’Brien look like?”

An awkward silence followed, and then Jerry broke it by exclaiming “Yay! We finally passed the Bechdel test! This is a nice change of pace. Usually when we end up trapped at the gas station, it’s a total sausage fest.”

“Usually?” asked Rosa. “This has happened before?”

“Once or twice,” I answered.

O’Brien spoke into her walkie-mic, “Dispatch, this is O’Brien, do you read me? Over.”

Silence.

“Dispatch, are you hearing me? Over.”

More silence.

She sighed and dug a dollar out of her pocket, handing it over to me as she said, “I need to use the store phone.”

But before I could even take the money, the phone started ringing. She shot me a look and said, “Hey Crutches, pick it up and put it on speaker.”

Without thinking, I tucked the flashlight into my mouth and crossed to the counter. When I got there, I reached out to answer, then immediately spat the flashlight out and yelled, “Oh my God!”

“What?!” O’Brien shot back.

“I put that in my mouth and mice could have done weird stuff to it and I put that in my mouth!”

The phone rang a couple more times before O’Brien said, “Just answer the damn phone.”

I did.

“Hello?”

“Hey there, Jack. It’s been too long.”

I pressed the button to switch on speakerphone.

“Hi, Spencer.”

“Who’s your new friend?”

I looked at O’Brien, who made a weird hand gesture that could have meant “keep him talking,” or “yeehaw, let’s rob this bank.” Given the current context, I assumed it was the former.

“Oh, her. That girl you talked to earlier is my new Jiu-Jitsu instructor. I had to fire the last one because he said he’d already taught me everything he knew. I’ve been getting pretty rad since the last time I saw you. Also, I’m taller now.”

“She doesn’t look like a Jiu-Jitsu instructor to me. And neither does the lady deputy next to her. And… is that Jerry? He looks drunk.”

O’Brien pulled out her service pistol, criss-crossed it with her flashlight in the opposite hand, and started pointing it at each of the windows and doors.

“Jerry always looks drunk,” I said.

“Hey!” yelled Jerry with a hiccup.

O’Brien took the phone from me and slammed it into the cradle before yelling, “Everybody get away from the windows right now! Jack, take the others and lock yourselves in the storage closet. Go!”

I sighed and said, “Fine.”

The next few hours were pretty damned boring.

***

Chapter Three

O’Brien had checked our perimeter, called for backup, and declared the situation tentatively safe in the time it took Jerry and Rosa to fall asleep in the closet. I covered them in packing blankets, then put one around my shoulders and tried to read my book by candlelight, but the situation was just too distracting to let myself get into it.

O’Brien eventually joined us in the small room, reporting that there were no signs of Spencer anywhere, and if it weren’t for the fact that somebody had slashed all the tires on her cruiser and Rosa’s Volkswagen Beetle, she might have been tempted to believe he was just yanking our cranks.

“So what’s the deal with backup?” I whispered to her as she came and sat down on a milk crate next to me. The others were knocked out, and I was just fine letting them sleep off as much of this as they could.

O’Brien looked at them while she searched for the words. “I don’t know what’s going on with you, Crutches, but ever since I was assigned to this job my life has gotten exponentially weirder with every passing day.”

“Yeah.” I said, picking up the edge of my blanket and putting it over her shoulders.

She moved in a little closer and whispered “I talked to the sheriff. He’s sending a snow truck out here first thing in the morning. I tried to tell him that this needs to be a priority, but evidently this is snowmageddon and he can’t afford to stretch his precious resources any further tonight.”

“That sounds about right.”

“What about her? I thought you and Jerry pretty much ran this place.”

I laughed. “We don’t run anything.”

She put a warm arm around my shoulder and said, “I’m really gonna miss you when you die.”

“Thanks. But that’s pretty presumptuous of you. So far I have outlived almost every deputy they sent.”

Rosa shot up, eyes wide open in a look of sheer terror.

“Hey.” I said. “Did we wake you up?”

“Did you hear that?!” she said in a voice that did not sound anything like Rosa’s voice.

A cold shiver ran down my spine. “Hear what?”

“He’s coming, almost here, when he gets it we’re all over, we can’t let him have it.”

“Girl,” said O’Brien, “You are freaking us out. Who’s coming? Spencer?”

“She’s dreaming,” I said. “One of my foster brothers used to do the same thing. Her eyes are open, but she’s talking in her sleep.”

Right then, her eyes rolled way back into their sockets, revealing nothing but veiny white bulges.

“Did your foster brother do that, too?”

“Okay,” I admitted, “That is different.”

She slowly began to stand up, clutching the blanket to her chest, and then continued speaking in that same weird voice, “Every living being will be transformed into a conduit for agony and suffering if he finds what he is looking for. You will all beg for death, but it will never come. An unfathomable horror from worlds inconceivable is at your gate. Do not open the door.”

Well that doesn’t make any sense. Is it a gate or a door? Fix your metaphors, creepy nightmare Rosa.

O’Brien stood up and looked at me, “Should I wake her?”

Right then, Rosa dropped her blanket, revealing that she was actually floating about eight or nine inches off the ground.

“Oh.” we both said at the same time.

It might have been a little bit of an overreaction to shoot Rosa with a Taser gun, but then again it might not have been and there’s no changing what already happened.

Rosa fell onto Jerry, waking them both up in a screaming fit of expletives and confusion. It took a good twenty minutes before Rosa was calmed down enough for us to pull the prongs out of her skin and get her patched up.

We were all in the front of the store, Rosa sitting on the counter while O’Brien put the finishing touches on her bandages.

“Why the hell would you shoot me with a taser?”

Always with the questions, Rosa.

“You were sleep floating.” I explained.

“Oh,” she said, “Sorry about that. I didn’t mean to.”

“Hey guys?” said Jerry, “What do you suppose that is?”

He pointed at something just on the other side of the glass doors that looked at first glance like a body slumped against it. Upon closer inspection, I became certain that it was, in fact, a body slumped against it.

O’Brien drew her gun and carefully walked over, undid the lock, and opened the door just enough for the body to fall halfway into the gas station along with a freezing blast of wet air.

“Crap on a cracker,” said Jerry, “Is that Spencer?”

It was.

He had a busted lip, swollen black eye, and scrapes and bruises covering his face like he had gone ten rounds with a dump truck, but O’Brien was smart enough not to let up her guard. She kept one finger on the trigger while she checked for signs of breathing which, sadly, she found.

She put the unconscious Spencer in handcuffs, dragged him into the store, then handed me another dollar before calling it in to the sheriff’s office.

“Do you think that’s going to be enough?” I asked, “One pair of handcuffs?”

“He’s unconscious and unarmed. What exactly did you have in mind?”

I said, “Maybe we can tie him up” at the same time that Jerry blurted out “wooden stake through the heart.”

We compromised and found a roll of duct tape to secure him to a rolling chair, then pushed the chair into the supply closet, then nailed the closet door shut.
________________________________________

Thirty minutes later, we heard the pounding on the roof.

SLAM The first one jolted us all into high-attention. We didn’t have but maybe two seconds before the next. SLAM Maybe a tree branch had fallen over in the storm? SLAM SLAM SLAM They started coming more frequently, like a muffled machine gun. SLAMSLAMSLAMSLAM

“What the hell is that?!” O’Brien bellowed.

SLAMSLAMSLAMSLAM They came together, five to ten each second. And then, just as suddenly as it started, the pounding on the roof came to an end.

“Maybe it was hail?” I suggested.

“Or maybe,” offered Jerry, “It was him, escaping.” He pointed at the room Spencer was in.

“How does that make any sense?” asked O’Brien.

“Lady, we are way past the point of making any sense,” he answered, then added, “I think you know that.”

That was all it took to convince O’Brien to pry the nails back out of the door to Spencer’s makeshift prison, but once we got it open we saw that he was still there, duct taped to the chair. We breathed a collective sigh of relief before-

“Well hey there everybody,” Spencer said with a sly smile. “Merry Christmas. Now which one of you wants to let me out of this chair?”

“Spencer Middleton,” said O’Brien, “You are under arrest. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say-”

“Christ, O’Brien, are we really going to do this again? Just set me free and give me a weapon. You clearly have no idea what’s out there right now. You think I did this to myself? Trust me. You’re going to need my help.”

We probably should have gone with the stake.

Spencer was still yelling at us as O’Brien closed the closet door again.

“Ok,” she said, “We need to check out what that noise was.”

“No, we really don’t,” I responded.

Rosa grabbed me by the arm for some reason, then said to the deputy “You can’t leave us alone with that guy!”

Jerry announced, “I’ll go check out the noise. If I’m not back in five minutes, assume the worst.”

“You’re not going by yourself,” snapped O’Brien.

“Fine,” he said. “Then let’s all go together.”

Rosa squeezed my arm tighter, “I’d rather take my chances in here.”

“Ok,” said O’Brien near her wit’s end. “Then we split up.”

“Are you freakin’ kidding me?!” I said, “Are we really going to Scooby do this?”

Apparently we Scooby were. And after a few more rounds of discussion we Scooby did. It was decided that Jerry and I would go check out the noise while O’Brien and Rosa stayed and watched the prisoner.

“Hey,” O’Brien told me just before we left on our wholly unnecessary suicide mission, “I can handle Floaty girl and Duct tape boy on my own, but you need to take this. Just in case.”

I don’t know why people are always trying to give me guns.

“I’m not a gun guy. The last time I had a gun… you know what? Don’t even worry about the last time I had a gun. Plus I need both hands just to move around.”

“I’ll take it,” said Jerry.

“Have you ever fired a gun before?” she asked.

“That depends,” he answered, “Are you a cop?”

She let out a defeated sigh and handed him her pistol. “Just try not to die, guys? Ok?”

Rosa looked at us nervously and tried to offer some words of support. “Be careful. I’d hate for this night to turn into a… what’s the opposite of a sausage fest?”

Jerry answered, “A clamboree.”

“Right. I’d hate for this to turn into a clamboree.”

________________________________________

Jerry led the way with his two perfectly functioning legs, pointing the gun and flashlight in front of him while he kicked a trail through the thick pile of snow that had settled knee-deep outside the gas station.

We trudged through the frozen landscape until we were safely under the vehicle overhang next to the fuel pumps, then he scanned the area with the light, revealing dozens of small holes in the fresh snow, like tiny baseball-sized craters. From here, we could see the roof of the gas station, as well as the piles of tiny, winged creatures caught up in the gutters and slowly being swallowed by snow.

I dug my own flashlight out of my coat pocket and scanned the area under the overhang, finding six or seven dead birds around the edges.

It wasn’t the first time I had seen this, but it was the first time I know of where it happened right on top of the store. We get strange weather patterns out here, and every once in a blue moon birds get confused and forget which way is up and fly straight into the ground en masse. Local scientists blame everything from fireworks to pesticides, but officially the cause is unknown. All I know is that it’s freakin weird.

“Hey, check this out.”

I turned to see that Jerry had plucked one of the creatures out of the snow and was holding it in his hands.

“Dude, don’t touch that, it might have herpes.”

“Check it out,” he said as he pulled a long coil of thin copper wire out of the bird’s corpse, then held it up for inspection. Unwound, the metal string was about a foot and a half long. “You think he ate this?”

I shrugged. “Times are tough.”

He threw the bird back into the snow and wiped his hands on his pants. “Should we go back inside?”

“Yeah, in just a minute. But first, we need to talk.” I really hate this part. Honestly, I’d rather face one of the creatures from the forest than have a serious chat with Jerry. But sometimes we don’t get a choice.

“Fine. I’ll come clean,” he said. “The mice were mine. But they were dead when I bought them! I was using them for snake food, and I didn’t know-”

“The radio. You put it back together?”

He blinked a couple times, slowly pulled out his pack of Marlboros, slowly put one in his mouth, slowly lit it and took a drag, then said, “Yeah, so?”

I didn’t really have anything planned for this part. So I let his question hang there in the air for a while.

“Did it say anything else?”

“Not much. Mostly about the snow storm. And…” He trailed off.

“And?” I asked.

“And it said that Sagoth has risen.”

He took another drag.

“Are you sure he didn’t say ‘a savior has risen’? Like some kind of Christmas thing?”

“He said it like ten times in a row. Sagoth has risen… Sagoth has risen… You get the point. Sagoth has risen… et cetera. I thought it was kinda weird because I’d never heard him repeat anything before.”

We stood there in silence until he had finished his cigarette, then he looked back up at me. “So, ready to go back inside now?”

We both heard the sneeze at the same time. It came from somewhere down the road leading into the forest, and if I could have jumped I probably would have.

“The hell was that?!” Jerry said in a frantic whisper.

“It was a sneeze! Where’s the gun?”

Jerry looked at the ground. I followed his eyes and pointed the flashlight at the blank spot in the snow next to the set of racoon-feet shaped prints leading off into the forest.

I repeated the question slowly. “Jerry. Where. Is. The. Gun?”

“I set it down to pick up the dead bird. You don’t think Rocco made off with it, do you?”

Rocco. Our resident mutant trash-panda.

“I highly, highly doubt that Rocco didn’t steal it.”

We both looked at one another with that what do we do now look, and then Jerry yelled out “Bless you!”

Of all the stupid ways I’ve imagined dying at the gas station, this was not one of them.

A voice called back from somewhere deep in the blizzard.

“Hello? Is somebody there?”

“No!” I yelled back.

“It sure sounds like somebody to me.”

The voice was getting closer. I tried to do some quick math. Could I crutch-run back to the gas station before the source of that voice reached us? Probably not.

A figure started to emerge in the snow storm. A man-shaped figure. As it got closer, the details came into focus, and before long the man was underneath the awning with us, casually walking towards me. Hands in his pockets, snow covering his hooded blue jacket coat. He walked right up to the two of us and asked if he could bum a smoke.

I watched the guy light it up and take a drag, and noticed that there was something strangely familiar about him. He was about 5’10’’, early thirties, with dark brown eyes and a short and well-maintained beard, thin but in good shape, and wearing a coat that was way too big on him.

After a few moments he asked “You guys know if the gas station is open?” His voice was so tip-of-my-tongue familiar.

“There’s no power,” I answered, “but the phone still works if you pay in advance.”

“Who are you guys? You part of the emergency services crew or something?”

“No,” I said, “We work here and got snowed in.”

“No shit? I was driving through and got stuck. Been waiting in my car down the road for the last couple hours, but the engine just died. Thought I was going to freeze to death out here. I’m Donald.”

He shook our hands and we introduced ourselves, before Jerry finally asked the question that was on my mind since we first saw this guy.

“Hey, aren’t you Donald Glover?”

He laughed, “Yeah, I am.”

I knew it! We were standing outside talking to famous actor slash director Donald Glover! At my gas station!

“Holy shit!” I said, “What are you doing here?”

“I was just driving through,” answered Grammy-award winning musical performer Donald Glover.

“You were just driving through? On Christmas Eve?” I asked.

He shrugged, “I got lost.”

I looked at Jerry, then I looked back at Primetime-Emmy awardee Donald Glover, who asked, “So is it cool if I come inside and warm up?”

“Of course!” yelled Jerry before handing a spare flashlight to multiple Golden-Globe winning writer slash comedian Donald Glover and leading the way back to the store.

Once we were back inside, we introduced O’Brien and Rosa to five-time WGA Award recipient Donald Glover. I thought it was pretty cool. This was the second most famous person to ever step foot into the store (if that really was Elvis that one time), but the girls were not impressed. In fact, they seemed more concerned about why we were returning without O’Brien’s pistol.

Jerry explained that we were attacked by a herd of ninjas, but O’Brien wasn’t buying it. Before I could tell them about the birds, the store phone started ringing again.

I was the closest, so I picked up while O’Brien gave Hollywood superstar Donald Glover a packing blanket to wrap up in.

“Hello?” I said.

The owner of the voice on the other end let out an annoyed growl, then said, “Jack, it’s me.”

“Benjamin?”

“How many times have I asked you not to use my name on the phone?”

“Sorry.”

It was Benjamin, the crotchety bearded man that occasionally shows up at the gas station to shoot and blow things up. I would say more, but that’s literally almost everything I know about him.

“What’s going on over there? I’m looking at weather reports right now and the gas station looks like someone opened up a portal to the center of the ninth circle of hell.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Thanks for checking.”

“By the way, I found your blog online.”

“Oh? What do you think?”

“I think you don’t know the difference between a clip and a magazine. From here on out I would appreciate it if you left me out of your little stories.”

“Ok, I will. Are you going to be showing up this time?”

“Negatory. I’m in Greece right now, just looking for a status report.”

“Something beat the shit out of Spencer and we lost power again. By the way, does ‘Sagoth has risen’ mean anything to you?”

“Sagoth?! Yeah, that’s the name of a shapeshifting demon. If he’s anywhere near the gas station, you boys need to hunker down and pray, because that son of a bitch can look like anyone. He feeds off of pain and leaves his victims stripped of all their skin.”

“Oh damn,” I said, “It’s a good thing we found Donald Glover when we did.”

What followed was an agonizingly long pause.

“Hello?” I said, “Did I lose you?”

“Who the hell is Donald Glover?”

“You know, the critically-acclaimed musical genius? He performs under the pseudonym Childish Gambino. He’s a rapper. He raps.”

“Yeah, and I bet he’s a great kisser, too. Jack did you somehow become dumber since the last time I saw you?”

“What do you mean?”

“Motherfucker, I just Googled him! Donald Glover is at home with his family in Atlanta right now. You’re in the presence of a shapeshifting demon.”

“Or maybe the one in Atlanta is the double, and the real one is in the gas station.”

He made that growling noise again and said, “The only way to kill a demon like this is to take off his head. Goodbye dumbass.”

Then the line went dead.

Jerry came and sat on the counter and said, “Alright, I’m not making any offers or anything. I just want to know your opinion. Do you think we’re more likely or less likely to have an orgy now that Donald Glover is here?”

“Jerry, listen closely,” I said in a low voice, “We have to kill Donald Glover.”

“Okay!” he said, hopping back to his feet. “Let’s do this. How?”

Jesus, he didn’t even need an explanation or anything.

“We need to cut off his head.”

“Nice.”

Well, I had one ally on board, but I knew that convincing two more people to help us cover up yet another brutal murder at the gas station might be more difficult, assuming we could even figure out a way to kill not-Donald-Glover, and also assuming that he really was a demon, and also assuming demons were even real, Benjamin was feeding me true information, and none of this was just a vivid hallucination caused by my rapidly-deteriorating mental state.

Man, when I lay it all out like that, it’s a lot to take on faith before commiting decapitation.

Chapter Four

I’m not sure how differently the night would have gone if Spencer’s phone hadn’t started ringing right then, and I’m also not sure how I keep forgetting that he has the only private cellular network on the planet that reliably gets service out at the gas station.

We forgot to take his phone?!

The last couple times Spencer and I crossed paths, it didn’t go so well for me. I never learned how to fight or take a punch, but one thing I’m surprisingly good at is picking Spencer’s pockets, especially whenever he’s got a case of the blood-lust blinders. Somewhere in a box in storage, I have about a dozen phones I’ve stolen off of Spencer and Kieffer, his deceased former employer. But this go-round, in my hurry to get him taped to a chair before he woke up, the idea of stealing his phone again had completely escaped me.

“You guys hear that?” asked not-Donald.

We all stood in a weird semicircle around him, and there was no possible way we didn’t all hear the ringing noise coming from just behind the supply closet door.

O’Brien and Rosa were between not-Donald and the supply closet, with Jerry and me on the opposite side. We had him surrounded, and if only I could somehow telepathically convey to the others that we needed to jump him now while his guard was down, we might have a shot at incapacitating him while our skin was still intact.

“I don’t hear anything,” blurted Rosa between rings. She was probably the worst liar I had ever witnessed, but now that she had set the narrative the others decided to commit.

“Yeah, me neither.” said Jerry, “Probs just the wind.”

Donald-the-demon pointed at the supply closet and gave Jerry a raised eyebrow, “You don’t hear that? The ringing coming from right behind that door?”

“No?” said Jerry.

“Ok, what about you?” he said to the deputy. “Are you going to gaslight, too?”

For some reason, O’Brien looked at me. I tried to make a hand gesture to say “He is a demon! We need to cut off his head!” but I think it just confused the hell out of her. She and I should never play charades together.

“Yeah, it’s nothing.” She said.

“It’s nothing? Why are you people being so weird right now?”

Rosa scoffed and said, “We’re not being weird. You’re the one acting weird.”

“Ok.” He said.

A silent moment passed.

Then, Demon-Donald pointed his flashlight right at O’Brien’s eyes. She flinched for just a second, enough time for Demonald to dart past her to the supply closet door.

“Wait!” I yelled.

But it was too late. Demonald had opened the door.

“What the hell is going on?” he asked, pointing the flashlight at Spencer.

O’Brien put up her hands and said, “It’s okay. I can explain.”

Spencer started shouting, “Oh my god, please! Please help me! You’ve got to save me! These people are maniacs! They beat me and killed my wife! You have to get help!”

Rosa–bad liar. Spencer–freakin’ amazing liar.

O’Brien yelled “Close the door!” and took a step forward.

“Hey!” yelled Demonald, “You stay back! Stay away from me! ALL OF YOU!”

“Please! Untie me! She’s not really a cop! They’ve killed people, so many people…”

Spencer started crying. Like, real, actual tears.

I couldn’t help it. I started slow clapping.

Everyone turned their flashlights to me except for Jerry, who was clapping along.

“You got something to say?” asked the shapeshifter-formerly-known-as-Donald.

“Yeah, how about we don’t turn this into a huge farce? How about we all come clean in the spirit of Christmas? You’re not really musical icon and famed television and movie star Donald Glover. You’re really Sagoth, the shapeshifting demon.”

“Do you have any idea how ridiculous you sound right now?” asked (hopefully) Sagoth.

“Yeah, I do. Because I just said it.”

“These people,” sobbed Spencer, “They’re crazy! They’re talking about demons and angels and they’re killing people. There’s something wrong with them. Please run! Get help!”

Wait… why was Spencer staying in character? I just told him that this was Sagoth. Why didn’t he drop the act…

Unless…

Sagoth wasn’t the one that had beaten him senseless and left him propped up against our door?

I felt a sudden pang of dread. This situation was spiralling out of control way faster than I could keep up with it.

O’Brien attempted damage control. “Everybody calm down. Donald, my name is Deputy Amelia O’Brien.”

“You’re a deputy?”

“Yes.”

“And you think I’m a demon?”

“No. Of course not.”

“But that guy does.” he waved the flashlight at me, then pointed it at Spencer. “And this guy right here?”

“He’s a wanted criminal.”

“Ok, so that’s why you beat him up and duct taped him to a chair and hid him in a dark closet? Is that something deputies do?”

“No… not exactly.”

“Fuck this. I’m out.”

Before she could say anything else, Donald(?) turned and ran out the back door, letting another cold blast of freezing snow rush into the store before O’Brien raced out after him.

The only sound in the room for the next minute was Spencer laughing. No, not laughing. Cackling.

When he had finished, he said with a shit-eating grin, “This is getting fun.”

________________________________________

I wanted to run out after them. As stupid as it sounds, if I had been able to run, I would have. But they were gone, and O’Brien was an adult who made her own decision. All I could do was wait. The time crept by slowly, waiting for her to return. Intrusive mental images of a demon flaying my friend did not help. Neither did Spencer’s comments.

“Hey, Rosa, isn’t it?”

She looked up.

“Shut up.” I said.

“Let me just ask you one question. What exactly did Jack tell you about me? Huh? Did he try to sell you that horseshit about me being some kind of sociopath?”

Rosa answered, “The exact word he used was ‘psychopath.’”

Spencer laughed again.

“No, I’ve never hurt anyone before in my entire life. I came out here for Jack. I’m worried about him. You know what he has right? You know what FFI does to your brain? He shouldn’t be out here near other people, he needs to be in a hospital where he can’t hurt anybody else.”

“What do you mean ‘anybody else’?”

I crutch walked over to Spencer and considered hitting him, but decided against it for two reasons. First, that would have been embarrassingly ineffective. And second, it was obvious that that’s what he wanted. He was trying to flip Rosa and prove that I was the bad guy.

I don’t know why I thought it was a good idea to engage in conversation.

“Do you have any idea how annoying it is to live with what you did to my leg?”

“I’d bet it’s not half as bad as what you did to any of the folks you killed. Why don’t we ask Kieffer? Or how about my old boss?”

“Hey! I didn’t kill your old boss.”

A second passed before he cracked a smile and I realized what I had done.

“What about Kieffer?” asked the soft, nervous voice from behind me.

“Oh,” I said turning to Rosa, “yeah, him either. I didn’t kill anybody.”

“Now let me ask you a question, Jack. You know, ‘cause you’re in such an honest mood right now. What ever happened to Diego? Huh? I’ve been sitting here in the dark all night, and I can’t shake this weird thought. Am I the only one that wants to know why Diego isn’t here?”

I looked at Jerry and said, “Put him in the cooler.”

We wheeled the psychopath into the walk-in, double checked that the duct tape was secure, then closed the door and propped a chair up against the handle. He could scream to his tiny black heart’s content in there and it wouldn’t bother us.

________________________________________

Ten more minutes passed before O’Brien returned to the store.

“He got away,” she said as she dusted the snow off of her jacket.

Jerry shattered a glass beer bottle against the wall and pointed the jagged fragment at her, yelling “Nice try, demon!”

She glared at him and said, “If you come near me with that thing, you better be ready to use it, because either I’m going down or you are.”

“He’s right,” I said.

“What?!” asked Rosa and O’Brien at the same time.

“O’Brien was alone out there with Sagoth for how long? We have no idea if you’re really you anymore.”

“Jack, I think you’re confused.”

Rosa raised her hand and said, “Why don’t we just ask her something that only the real O’Brien would know?”

“Good idea,” said Jerry, “Is Jack circumsized?”

Dude!

“How the hell would I know that?” she answered.

Jerry looked at me, then back at her, then back at me.

“Oh, were you two not… ? Oh. I’m sorry, I think I totally misread that whole situation.”

“Remind me to kick your ass later,” she said, taking the words right out of my mouth before pointing her flashlight at the empty supply closet. “Where’s Spencer?”

I explained that he was trying to get into our heads, and we had no choice but to put him in there. It was self defense. Amazingly, she didn’t disagree. It took a minute for the situation to calm down, but eventually Jerry lowered his bottle-knife and agree that we would all just keep an eye on one another until daylight and backup came.

I lit the last of our candles and placed them all around the store, then got O’Brien alone in a corner. Jerry was still eye-balling us pretty hard, so I whispered quietly, “There’s something I think you need to see.”

“What is it?” she whispered back.

“I can’t say exactly. I need to show you.”

“Okay. Where is it?”

“I need Spencer’s phone.”

“Let me guess. It’s still on him?”

I nodded. In the midst of Spencer’s mind games, I had once again forgotten to steal his cell phone.

“I’ll be right back” she said.

I followed as close behind as possible as she crossed to the cooler and pulled back the chair. I definitely didn’t love the idea of opening that cooler door. Every time I think of Spencer, I convince myself that he’s already figured out a way to escape and he’s just a few seconds from falling down on me from the ceiling like evil Spider-man.

“What’s she doing?” asked Jerry in an atypical voice that I would call “concerned” if it were coming from anyone else.

We didn’t answer. Instead, O’Brien opened the door, pointed her flashlight at the still smiling Spencer, and walked up to him. I waited until she had put her flashlight on a shelf and reached her hand into Spencer’s pocket before I sprung into action, slamming the cooler door shut and pushing the chair back into place.

I could hear her muffled scream and slams against the other side of the metal door.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered.

“Dude. What the hell?”

I leaned my back against the cooler and looked at the shocked faces of Jerry and Rosa.

Had I made a mistake?

“If that really is O’Brien, then we’ll know in a few hours when help arrives. If it isn’t, then we’ve got the demon exactly where we need it.”

“What demon!” screamed the ever-inquisitive Rosa, “When did you start talking angels and demons?! I’m willing to give the benefit of the doubt, but a person has their limits! All I know is that you’ve been acting strange all night, and then your friend shot me with a taser in my sleep, and then you come in with this guy that your all fanboying over so hard I expect you start drinking his bathwater, and then out of nowhere you start saying he’s a demon?!”

“Well, when you put it like that, sure, I guess this does look bad.”

“Where’s the gun? Huh? You two go outside and then Jerry just ‘loses’ the gun? How do we know you didn’t take it?”

“Yeah!” yelled Jerry. “How do we know you didn’t take it?”

I gave him my coldest stare.

“I want you to let O’Brien out of the cooler. Right now, please.”

She crossed her arms and started tapping her foot.

“I can’t do that.”

“Why not?!”

“She called me ‘Jack.’”

“So?!”

“Yeah!” echoed Jerry, “So what?!”

“So, she never calls me Jack. She calls me Crutches, or weirdo-boy, or some other slightly insensitive pet name. I’ve never heard her call me Jack before.”

“Hmm…” said Jerry, “He does make a compelling point.”

Rosa screamed “Shut up!”

It was too late. Spencer had put the roots of doubt into Rosa’s mind and there was nothing I could say that would get her back on board. Fortunately for me, I didn’t have to say anything, because right then the front doors opened and O’Brien walked in.

“He got away,” she said as she dusted the snow off of her jacket.

Jerry shattered another glass beer bottle against the wall and pointed the jagged fragment at her, yelling “Nice try, demon!”

She glared at him and said, “If you come near me with that thing, you better be ready to use it, because either I’m going down or you are.”

Fuuuuuuck!

“How… how did you get out?” Rosa stammered.

“Get out of what?” she asked.

“Oh check it out,” Jerry said to the room, “It’s Rosa’s first time witnessing something paranormal! Let’s see how she reacts.”

O’Brien put up her hands and said, “What the hell are you talking about? And why is there a chair next to the cooler? And where’s duct tape boy?”

Rosa fainted. And as strange as this sounds, it’s probably a good thing she wasn’t conscious for this next part.

Chapter Five

Did you ever hear the one about the guy who thought the fireman was an arsonist? Admittedly, it’s not a very good joke, and even if it were, I’m awful at delivery. People usually think I’m trying to be funny when I’m not and same for the other way around. At any rate, the punchline is something to the effect of “Every time there’s a fire, he’s there.” Feel free to forget that joke if you want to. It’s not important, just something I was thinking about.

________________________________________

Jerry covered Rosa with a blanket and made every attempt to keep her comfortable while I tried to explain the situation to O’Brien.

“So you’re telling me there’s an evil doppelganger inside that cooler?”

“Yeah.”

“And how do you know that’s what it is?”

A magic radio and a monster-hunter told us.

“I just do.”

“I need more than that to go on.”

“Please, just don’t go into the cooler until after help has arrived. You can wait a few more hours, right?”

I could see the gears turning in her head and had to wonder if she thought I was crazy, or if she were about to rip off our flesh and feed on our suffering. Surely, if this actually were the shapeshifter, there wouldn’t be any better opportunity to start picking us off. Two of us were locked in the cooler, one of us was unconscious, I’ve never been much of a fighter even with all of my limbs, and Jerry was… well, Jerry.

Obviously, she did not kill and eat me. So I was forced to assume that this really was the original O’Brien and the one in the cooler was the double, but my confidence level–in anything, reality included–had hit zero and started digging a long time ago.

A pair of headlights lit up the room and we both looked outside at the snow truck pulling into the parking lot. I couldn’t believe it. The calvary was early. In my experience, anything can happen at the gas station, but seriously that never happens!

The “cavalry” was Saul Berthelot, the retired school-bus driver and owner/operator of the only snow plow in town. He must have had plans for Christmas, because people around here aren’t exactly known for finishing ahead of schedule, especially Saul, and especially on the taxpayer dime. But I’ll take my miracles where I can get them these days.

Saul pulled up next to pump two, honked a couple times, and waved at me.

O’Brien stated the obvious, “I think the jagoff wants you to turn on the pump.”

“He knows the pumps don’t work without electricity, doesn’t he?”

“I’m guessing he does not.”

None of us wanted to open the door and go back into the freezing cold, but when the pumps hadn’t magically switched on after a few seconds, Saul decided it would be a good idea to lean on the horn until somebody came out to help him.

O’Brien pulled out her car keys and started for the door.

“Where are you going?” I asked, stumbling after her and trying my best not to make it sound like I suspected she might be on her way to kill him and strip his flesh.

“I have a can of gas in my trunk. I was going to help him on his way, if that’s alright with you, Jack.”

I suddenly felt very small. It’s bad enough not being able to trust my own eyes, or memories, or mind. It’s so much worse not being able to trust my friends.

“Hang on a second,” Jerry said just before O’Brien pushed the door open. “You just called Jack ‘Jack.’”

“So?” she asked.

Jerry looked at me and waved his hands in the air. “Your entire basis for locking the other O’Brien in the cooler was that she called you ‘Jack’!”

O’Brien shook her head at me. “I call you ‘Jack’ all the time. It’s your name, dumbass.”

”Don’t open that door!”

Behind Jerry, Rosa was floating with her eyes rolled back into pupiless white bulges. He looked back at her and casually said, “Oh snap. She’s floating again.”

”It is not safe. Something has found you. It is waiting, hungry, outside.”

She slowly started to rise into the air by a few more inches until Jerry grabbed her around the waist. “I’m gonna have to tie her to a chair or a doorknob or something. Do you remember where Benjamin left all that paracord?”

”There is something on the roof!”

I looked her in the… eye area… and asked, “Now, is this like a metaphorical something on the roof?”

”You fools! There is SOMETHING on the roof!”

With that, Rosa pointed out the glass doors, up at the covered awning over the gas pumps, at the thing leaning over the edge, staring down at the snowplow.

What followed is actually pretty difficult to describe. When we saw it, the three of us had a shared moment, a visceral animal reaction like a nut-punch to the soul.

Before that instant, I had seen some things–truly bizarre thing–that many people might have considered “horrific”: my own exposed bones, a clan of nudist zombies, a snake and spider hybrid, I could keep on listing these things all day, but my point is, after this, I’m going to have to completely reexamine my concept of “horrific.” The very image of that creature(which is not even the right word for it, if human language is even capable of one) was something that eyes were never meant to see. It forced our minds way past fight-or-flight into some third option, like my brain simply gave up and shat its pants. We all said it at the same time:

“FUCK!”

Rosa fell into Jerry’s arms with her eyes closed, and he dropped her onto the ground like a sack of dog food. We were all transfixed at the horrendous beast on the ledge of the pump awning. Its head was the size of a beach ball, shaped more or less like an enormous skull. The eyes were sunken charcoal pockets that didn’t appear to move in time or relation with the rest of its body, sort of like balls of smoke. Two nostril slits above a half open mouth filled with disorganized rows of serrated chalk-white teeth like those of a shark, each one about the size of my thumb. 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 resembled that of 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 sky, even though there was no light out there other than the ones on the snowplow. Our eyes were picking up a whole new wavelength outside of the normal visible spectrum, and it was all coming from this thing.

“Three way jinx!” yelled out Jerry, temporarily snapping the rest of us back to reality and in all likelihood saving us from losing what was left of our minds.

O’Brien fell to the ground and started violently barfing.

“Hey!” yelled Saul from inside his truck, “You guys got any gas left or what?”

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.

I feel like maybe I should tell you just a little bit more about Saul. When I was still too young to drive, I would have to walk half a mile every morning to my area’s school bus pick-up spot at 5:30 AM. My house was close to Saul’s hunting camp where he parked the schoolbus, so that meant I was always first on the bus route, and if I were ever late, he would leave without me. But depending on how hungover he was, he might not start driving until 6:30 or 7:00, which meant I would have to stand in the middle of a dirt field next to the road for up to an hour and a half at the point of each day when mosquitoes were waking up.

After his wife left him, he became a much more intolerable drunk, and his kids would show up to school with bruises and broken teeth.

He would spend hours at the gas station sometimes, refilling the same cup of coffee over and over and droning on to anybody that would listen to him about which new group of people he had decided was ruining his country.

One time, his name came up on the transmission.

“There is a man… Saul Berthelot… he cries alone in deer stand… his blood alcohol content is zero point three one one zero… he owns forty-two firearms… his favorite color is purple…”

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, a shitty person, and probably a shitty hunter, too. He was a lot like most people in this town, actually, but even still I did not want to watch him get his skin ripped off!

I got to the front doors and pushed them open at the same time Saul was stepping out of his 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.

“Saul! Go back to your truck! There’s a gas leak or something!”

He was a couple yards from his truck when he looked at me and yelled back, “Fuck you, I need to take a piss.”

The creature lurched forward from the edge of the awning, reached its left arm down with the speed of a mousetrap, and snatched Saul into the air by his feet. The beast pulled Saul, dangling upside down, screaming and cursing, 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, he died. Like, so much dead. But at least the pistol saved him from what could have been a feast of agony for the thing on the awning, which I had deduced by now was actually the real demon Sagoth.

He popped off a couple rounds into the demon’s face, but the mortal weapon was as ineffective as a bee-sting, and all it did was piss off the demon enough to slam Saul full-forced against the concrete pavement below.

When he picked the man back up, his broken body dangled lifelessly in the monster’s hand. With its other hand, it poked at Saul a few times, then with one of its talons opened the man up and spilled his blood out onto the snow.

As far as last words go, “Fuck you, I need to take a piss,” are probably not the ones you want on your tombstone.

I felt myself being yanked backwards by my shirt collar and tossed onto the floor of the gas station before O’Brien closed and locked the door.

Yeah, nice, lock the door. That deadbolt will be sure to stop the twenty-foot tall demon creature from coming inside.

She pulled me to my feet and said one word. “Weapons.”

We stayed as far away from the doors as possible while we turned the place inside out looking for whatever we could use to defend ourselves, but it was seriously slim pickings. Broken glass shards, chair legs, a pair of spare crutches, three pocket knives. We didn’t have what it took to kill that thing outside if it wanted us to.

“I can’t believe he’s dead,” lamented O’Brien as she collected a few bottles of our more flammable liquor. “Just like that.”

“Whelp,” Jerry answered as he duct-taped a pocket knife to the edge of a chair leg, “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 because it’s Christmas and all, but read the room. A man just died.”

“So what?” Jerry said defensively, “Somebody dies every 600 milliseconds. We can’t function if we have to grieve every single one of them. Are we really going to pretend that any of us are broken up over that redshirt? If we can be perfectly honest for a second, the value of human life out here at the gas station is grossly over-exaggerated, and out of the six people inside this building, Rosa is probably the only one of us that hasn’t killed anybody.”

He stared at me and O’Brien, daring us to call him on that. We all just stood still, trying 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, and it’s easy for me to forget that when I first met him he was trying to get me to join a murder cult.

“Well,” I finally said, “It’s only her first day.”

We allowed ourselves a short awkward laugh before going back to hunting for weapons. I can’t say exactly how much time had passed, but the three of us were ripping open every box in the supply closet when we heard Rosa say, “Hey guys? What happened?”

We looked back and saw her standing in the doorway pointing Saul’s revolver at the floor.

“Where did you get that?” asked O’Brien.

“I saw this thing just sitting there on the ground outside. Did you guys know there’s a snow truck out there?”

“How did you get it?” O’Brien asked, even though I think we all knew the answer already.

“I just walked outside and picked it up. Why?” The annoyance in her voice had ticked up a notch.

“Don’t do that again.”

“Why not?” The annoyance in her 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 said, “No. Why? Did you lose one?”

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 that should have a gun right now.”

That’s fair. I wasn’t even mad.

I was, however, mad at the plan that she laid out next. Desperate times call for desperate measures, and there was one resource we had purposely neglected to tap before now. Whatever was left inside of the cooler, we were going to need help fighting the thing outside, and whether I liked it or not, Spencer was a survivor.

O’Brien checked the revolver to see that we had four bullets left. That would almost certainly not be enough if we needed it.
________________________________________

The deputy opened the door, gun in hand while the rest of us stood close behind holding flashlights. Our job was to collectively point them into the eyes of anybody or anything that might try to jump out at us, if it came to that.

We didn’t know what to expect when we opened the door, but the first thing we saw was the empty chair that Spencer had been duct taped to.

“Hello?” O’Brien called into the room, “Is anybody alive in there?”

After a few seconds with no response, she stepped into the cooler, and I immediately regretted going along with this plan. Spencer flew in from next to the cooler door, hooked an arm around O’brien’s gunhand and spun her into the wall. The gun clacked to the ground and we all tried pointing our flashlights at him, but he was just way too freakin’ fast. He planted a solid boot into Jerry’s solar plexus, sending him crashing into the wall across from the cooler door, and snatched a handful of Rosa’s hair, yanking her into the cooler with him. Before O’Brien could even stand up, Spencer had Rosa in a chokehold with the pencil that we use for inventory counts pressed tightly against her neck.

“You guys get bored without me or something?” he taunted. I kept my flashlight trained on him as he slowly backed into the cooler. The deputy’s handcuffs were still around his wrists, but the chain had been snapped and now it was nothing more than a pair of fancy bracelets.

“Dude, 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 into the cooler and, I was just starting to realize, the same exact flashlight that I had given to the Donald Glover double earlier that night.

“Damn,” said Spencer (the conscious one), “Is that what I look like? I am one sexy motherfucker.”

The expression on his face changed once he spotted something on the cooler floor. I followed his eyes to where he was looking and saw it. Saul’s revolver.

O’Brien leapt for it at the same time as Spencer, and they both collided before reaching it. They went flying into the shelves, O’Brien catching most of the impact, and I dove into the cooler, finding the disgusting sticky ground and feeling around in the dark until my hands felt the cold, 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.

Spencer threw O’Brien into the rolling chair, and she flipped over it onto the floor. 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 right at them both, completely not sure what to do. I looked at O’Brien and said, “I don’t know which one’s the real Spencer.”

“Who fucking cares?!” she yelled back. “Shoot them both!”

Flashlight-Spencer stopped punching. He and Pencil-Spencer both looked at me and said, “Huh?”

I hesitated.

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 lit molotov cocktail, but not for long. Before I had time to scream “Bad idea!” he had pitched the damned thing at flashlight-Spencer…

…who fucking caught it in his fucking hand!

Just when I think 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 just a moment before burning out and leaving us all in the dark trying to catch our breaths.

Rosa pointed her flashlight at the figure running out of the cooler. The Spencer ran right through Jerry like he were made out of balloons, then disappeared out the back door. After a couple seconds, we collectively remembered that there was still a Spencer in the room with us and pointed our flashlights around to find him. First I looked at where he just was, finding nothing but specks of blood and broken shelves. Then I pointed it at O’Brien, then Rosa who was sitting on the ground pointing a flashlight at me, then the other Rosa, who was sitting right next to her holding an identical flashlight.

________________________________________

The Rosas both crawled quickly to opposite sides of the cooler and then stared at one another with the exact same look of frozen shock while O’Brien stood between them and spoke.

“Okay, so here’s the deal. One of you is the shapeshifter. That’s the one 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 that just killed a man.”

I watched both of their faces and instantly knew. One Rosa looked up at O’Brien 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 walked right up to the shapeshifter and said, “You’re busted.”

She looked at me with that sweet little “What did I do?” look, but it wasn’t fooling me.

And then, the look changed into a wry smile, and then she chuckled. “Hey, what can I do? You got me.”

“So,” I started, “Who is ‘Sagoth’?”

She got to her feet as she answered, “Oh, I don’t doubt you’ve got a ton of questions, but I don’t have the time or desire to answer them. This has been a nice distraction. But if what you say is true, then I need to get to work.”

“You could have escaped any time you wanted?” I surmised.

“Yeah, but you humans are such curious creatures. And I needed something to do to pass the time until Sagoth showed up. Well, I’ll be off, and when you wake up you won’t remember any of this.”

The double waved its hand and O’Brien, Jerry, and Rosa prime all fell to the floor unconscious. I looked at each of them just to make sure they were still breathing, then back at the mimic Rosa in front of me.

“Well, that certainly is strange. But 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. Just voices and faces.”

“Who are you?”

“I really 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 I was actually pretty pissed off. Not just because this asshole had been screwing with us, using us as bait to lure out the real demon, and letting us all go super-paranoid on one another this whole time, but also because after all of this, after everything I’d been through that night, he just announced that 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 it.

“OUCH!” It screamed, immediately transforming into O’Brien before my eyes. “Why would you do that?! All I wanted to do was help you! But if I have to kill you to get to Sagoth, I will! And you’re not-”

I shot it again, aiming for center mass like Benjamin always said.

The creature immediately transformed into Jerry. It smiled, and I shot again. That’s when it turned into someone else. It turned into her. She who shall not be named. The girl that would haunt my dreams if I were capable of having any. The creature looked at me with her green eyes and asked, “Well? Are you going to shoot me again?”

I sighed and lowered the gun. “What’s the point?”

It changed one last time, and then I was standing in my own presence, and I gotta say, I didn’t realize how rough I was starting to look. I desperately needed a haircut. The circles under my eyes had their own shadows. My cheekbones were getting more pronounced, and I was even skinnier than I looked in the mirror.

“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 are so primitive and unevolved that you simply couldn’t wrap your tiny mind around it anyway.”

“Ok,” I said, “that’s fair.”

“There is no such thing as demons. Sagoth is my responsibility. He sleeps inside one of the wrinkles of your universe, but something has woken him up. Something even I don’t know. Every century or so, I have to put him back to sleep, which is why I’m here. Not to hurt you, but to help.”

Benjamin, in case you’re reading this right now, you were wrong. Again. Also, fuck you.

“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.”

“Oh.” I said.

Firefighter.

“I’m going to 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. When I take somebody’s form, I don’t see memories, but I can feel what’s inside them. In lack of a better term, I’m what your kind calls an empath.”

“Ok.”

“You and your friends here are all kinds of messed up. You would need an army of psychiatrists to untangle the mental slinkies inside your minds.”

“Thanks.”

“That’s not what I wanted to say. 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 table or a rock. He’s just a black void.”

“Yeah,” I responded, “I actually already knew that.”

I took a step back and let my doppelganger walk out of the cooler, then right out the front doors.

The rest of the night passed without incident. The others slept where they fell, but I tried to make them comfortable with blankets and pillows made out of bags of stale bread. While the sun came up, I cleaned. Enough to fill four contractor bags. Then I started writing up inventory loss slips for everything that had been damaged in the fights. It’s amazing how productive you can be when you don’t sleep.

After everything was back in order, I sat in my chair behind the register and read for an hour or so while the others slept off whatever the shapeshifter had done to them.

________________________________________

Our first customer walked into the store a little while after that. I didn’t bother looking up from my book because 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. I added my own festive touch to the bottom with a drawing of a Christmas Tree.

The customer walked up to the counter and interrupted my book right when it was finally starting to get interesting.

“Excuse me, do you have any band aids?”

I looked up from my book and saw that the man standing there was Spencer fucking Middleton, complete with the pencil still sticking out of his shoulder. I quickly reached for the gun, which I had left on the counter, and realized that it wasn’t even there anymore.

Spencer lifted the revolver and asked, “Was this what you were looking for? Feels a little light. Did you think you were going to take me out with the first shot?”

I slowly dog-eared my page and placed the book on the counter before asking, “Is there any way you’re actually just the shapeshifter?”

Spencer shook his head.

________________________________________

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. Before we got there, he said “Stop!” then he 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.

“Nevermind.” He grabbed my left hand and sliced my pinky clean off, then grabbed both of my crutches and yanked them away from me. I hit the thick blanket of snow and hugged my rapidly-bleeding hand wound against my stomach. The hot, wet liquid pouring out felt strangely comforting as it warmed my torso.

“Nothing personal, I just needed some bait. I got a new boss now, and he wants me to bag and tag something special. 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 this thing 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, carrying my crutches under his arm. I laid on my back looking up at the sky and heard the familiar sound of that gas station door closing, followed by the familiar scraping noise of the deadbolt going into place. If I were 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, which for me is a particularly bad prospect. If I lose consciousness, it means I’m dead.

I managed to pull myself all the way to the side of the gas station before I finally decided that this was a waste of time. I wasn’t getting inside, and even if I did Spencer would just pull me right 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, with his white hair perfectly matching the snowy landscape. Tom was the first deputy they sent out to babysit us, and the first one to die. I squeezed my bloody nub under my armpit to try and slow the bleeding as I worked out if 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 covered in scars and tribal tattoos. That limited the options down to hallucination or shapeshifter.

“That punk is back?” he barked.

“Yeah.”

“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.”

“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. Once 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 eyes!”

Right then, I saw it. Sagoth. Pushing his way through the forest. He stood as tall as the trees, horrendous and humanoid, with an aura of inconceivable terrors and a face that screamed all things dark and hateful. I shut my eyes and instantly felt blessed relief.

“It’s ok,” said a sweet, gentle voice. “You can look now, it’s safe.”

He will do everything he can to trick you into opening your eyes.

“Um, no, that’s ok.” I said.

From behind me I heard O’Brien screaming, “Jack! Help me!”

Ha! You’ll have to do better than that.

All at once, I felt them crawling all over me. Insects. They chirped and squeaked as they flooded up my pants 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 burning heat blasted across my face as I heard the giant being scream 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, the air left in my lungs was maybe possibly enough to pull me to the surface? I held off for as long as I could, until my lungs ached with a pain that was almost as bad as death, and 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 air. As soon as I inhaled, I was transported back to the snow-covered patch of dirt next to the gas station, completely dry and still freezing to death.

The air suddenly reeked of boiled eggs, and a girl’s voice said into my ear, “Salutem. You can open your eyes Jack. Sagoth is back where he belongs.”

I cautiously opened one eyelid and looked at the amazingly beautiful woman standing beside me and asked her, “So, he’s gone?”

“For now. It’s interesting. Most people crack at the spiders and look. But you got all the way to the ocean. I don’t expect this to mean much to you, but I’m actually impressed.”

A metal pole erupted out of the center of her chest, and she fell to her knees, coughing up copious amounts of blood. She looked down at the thing with a bewildered expression, then fell over onto her side.

The pole was thin like an arrow, covered in serrated hooks, and once she hit the ground I could see that it was actually a spear. The other end of it protruded from her back with a black cord connected to it running all the way across the yard to the feet of Spencer Middleton.

He dropped the harpoon gun and whistled to himself as he walked the distance to where the shapeshifter was still gagging, still twitching, and grabbing onto the pole that had impaled her. As he came closer, she started changing, from one form to another. A giant bodybuilder, an Olympic style wrestler, a morbidly-obese man, a child, Jerry, O’Brien, Me, Spencer, and then it started switching faster and faster. Ten different people each second, all of them holding onto the spear and bleeding out into the snow. It went through a hundred of them before it finally stopped and settled on that of a frail, old asian woman. Tiny and wrinkled, with more white hair than black. Huddled in a fetal position as tears rolled down the side of her nose into the snow. Something told me that if the shapeshifter had a “true” form, I was looking at it.

“Struggle all you like,” Spencer said to her, “That spear is a tungsten silver alloy. You can’t pull it out or break it. I own you. And in a minute, dead or alive, I’m going to sell you.”

He grabbed her around the neck and dragged her away. All I could do was watch them go. She connected eyes with me until Spencer had dragged her around the side of the gas station, and then that was it. I was alone.

I couldn’t move anymore. Even breathing was beginning to become a near impossible task. I thought about how strange this was going to look. To Jerry, or O’Brien, or whoever was going to be unlucky enough to find me out here. Clutching my four-fingered hand under my armpit and staring out at the forest. The blood in the snow was already being erased under a slow flurry of snowflakes, and after an hour or less, it would look like none of this had ever even happened. People knew I had mental issues, so this wouldn’t even be front page news. The only curiosity will be “I wonder what happened to his finger?”

Oh well. There are certainly worse ways to go. Especially in a world with monsters like Sagoth and Spencer.

I watched the snowflakes fall and focused all my effort on the labor of drawing in one more breath. And then one more. And then one more after that. It might be pointless, but I’m going to get my last few seconds.

And then the back door opened, and somebody came over to my side, grabbed me by the shirt collar, and started dragging. He dragged me through the back hall and instantly I felt the blood rushing through my veins all over again. He took me all the way into the front of the store and dropped me onto my back before crouching down next to me and smiling.

“I told you I’d let you live if I caught what I wanted. And a deal is a deal, right?”

I took a deep breath of warm air and tried to find the right words to tell Spencer just how much I hated him, but I couldn’t. He didn’t seem to need me to anyway.

“You know, Jack. Maybe things aren’t meant to change. Maybe things are the way they are for a reason. I mean, it’s been up and down for both of us. We’ve both lost so many friends here at this gas station. Kieffer, Diego, Tom, that hunter asshole from this morning. But at the end of the day, only two things are constant. You and me. You’re like the shitty Batman to my awesome Joker. And don’t worry about the shapeshifter. I just handed her off to my new boss, so she won’t be bothering you anymore.”

He stared out the doors at something I couldn’t see and smiled a big, smug, self satisfied smile.

You’re right. Some things never change. Like how you never remember that I can pick your pockets.

“Hey Spencer,” I said as soon as my voice had come back to me.

“Yeah?” he asked.

“I’m right handed.”

I stuck the tip of the revolver into his stomach and pulled the trigger. The look on his face was that of “I cannot believe that shit just happened.”

He fell onto his ass and looked at the gun in my hand, then at the rapidly growing circle of blood on his shirt. “You little piece of shit.”

O’Brien final-fucking-ly woke up and ran out of the cooler into the front room, yelling “What was that noise? Jack, are you ok?”

Spencer grabbed his stomach and bolted out the front doors. I tried to yell to O’Brien to go after him, but I had lost the ability to talk again, and instead I just closed my eyes and waited.

________________________________________

I got to ride in an ambulance, which is pretty cool. I also got to take Christmas day off from work, which is the closest thing to a Christmas miracle I’m going to get, so I’ll take it.

The others all came and visited me at the hospital in shifts (somebody has to stay and watch the gas station), and I even got to eat like ten packs of chocolate pudding. There’s a nurse here that I suspect has a thing for me because she keeps sneaking me extra desserts.

Once again, the “official” report is that nothing supernatural happened. Saul’s disappearance, my beating, the damage to the gas station and all the blood were blamed on Spencer. The others have absolutely no recollection of the night, and I’m left with no proof besides my notoriously shaky memory, which is why I decided to write it all down before I forgot anything.

All in all, it wasn’t the worst Christmas I’ve ever had.

On Christmas day, the nurse brought me a neatly gift wrapped box. I asked who it was from, and she just smiled and said somebody special had dropped it off for me.

I unwrapped and opened it to find another, smaller, box. I unwrapped it to find, another box. And inside that box, another, smaller box. The last box was small enough to fit inside of the palm of my hand. Somebody had gone through a lot of trouble for this, and I was starting to get a very uneasy feeling.

I finally opened the last box and confirmed my suspicion. Inside that last box were two things: A small paper note. And my severed finger.

The note only had three words written on it in a dried brown ink:

“Merry Christmas, Jack.”