OUR LAST NIGHT: an edge of your seat ghost story thriller
Page 1
OUR LAST NIGHT
Taylor Adams
First published 2015
Joffe Books, London
www.joffebooks.com
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental. The spelling used is American English except where fidelity to the author’s rendering of accent or dialect supersedes this.
©Taylor Adams
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EYESHOT: The most gripping suspense thriller you will ever read
James and Elle Eversman are a young couple travelling through the Mojave desert on their way to a new life. When their car mysteriously breaks down they are stranded in the middle of nowhere without much water and no cell-phone reception.
A mile away a deadly sniper has them in his cross-hairs. They are pinned down behind their broken-down car, surrounded by open ground in all directions. There’s nowhere to run and no one to help them. How can they possibly survive? And if they do, can they save their marriage too?
CONTENTS
FOREWORD
Part I
READY TO FIRE
23 Hours, 11 Minutes
21 Hours, 48 Minutes
18 Hours, 55 Minutes
14 Hours, 15 Minutes
11 Hours, 59 Minutes
Part II
A TRAIN OF THOUGHTS
11 Hours, 53 Minutes
10 Hours, 31 Minutes
10 Hours, 2 Minutes
8 Hours, 4 Minutes
5 Hours, 9 Minutes
4 Hours, 59 Minutes
4 Hours, 21 Minutes
3 Hours, 29 Minutes
3 Hours, 20 Minutes
2 Hours, 40 Minutes
1 Hour, 55 Minutes
59 Minutes
36 Minutes
27 Minutes
19 Minutes
11 Minutes
Part III
THE BLOOD GUN
5 Minutes, 38 Seconds
3 Minutes, 49 Seconds
2 Minutes, 5 Seconds
51 Seconds
30 Seconds
(?) Minutes, (?) Seconds
(?) Minutes, (?) Seconds
FOREWORD
I’m only including this foreword because the lawyer says I have to. I’m required to state that the bizarre and horrific events described herein are complete fiction, and that they definitely did not occur in Farwell, Idaho, over a twenty-four hour period between March 19 and March 20 of 2015.
Part I
READY TO FIRE
. . . As the winter of 1941 descended, the under-equipped and desperate German Wehrmacht often resorted to scavenging Soviet Red Army coats and weapons. In one skirmish near Demyansk, a squad-strength German force mysteriously abandoned a superior position — allowing the surprised Reds to take the hill without resistance. At the summit they found three Wehrmacht soldiers slain by self-inflicted gunshot wounds and a stolen Soviet rifle. The others had scrawled a message and tied it around the barrel: Bitte, nehmen Sie es zuruck. (Please, take it back)
Excerpt from “Cursed Objects of the New Century” (W. Louis), published by Haunted Inn Press in 2002.
Northern Idaho
March 19, 2015
The rifle was wrapped in plastic when he handed it to me. A rumpled, sock-like sleeve, opaque with smeared oil — the firearm equivalent of a body bag.
The old man looked at me. “You know what this is, right?”
I played dumb. “An M44?”
It was an M91/30 Mosin Nagant, over eighty years old and still ready to fire. These vintage battle rifles were once mass-produced in the millions, until the Soviet Union decommissioned them decades ago. A spike bayonet folds along the barrel, like a black coffin nail. The stock is birch wood. It’s a bolt-action weapon, which means that after every shot, the user cranks a hand-powered mechanism to eject the spent cartridge and feed another. Even if the technology is antiquated, something about the Russian design is visually striking — even to non-gun enthusiasts like myself. It’s clunky and stiff, but also strangely sleek. Strangely predatory.
“It’s a blood gun,” he said with knobby hands on the counter.
“What?”
“A blood gun.”
“What’s that?”
His eyes hardened. “It killed someone.”
More than one, actually.
But I feigned surprise and set the rifle back on the counter, where it clanked uncomfortably on brittle glass. Joe’s Guns was curiously empty this Friday morning, so nobody turned and looked. Talk radio murmured about Obamacare in the back office. This place catered to the Call of Duty crowd more than the traditional sportsman; the aisles were stocked with tactical (i.e. black) versions of everything, from range bags to socks, and the wall of rifles bristled with expensive optics, lasers, and a Vietnam-era grenade launcher that I suspected wasn’t a replica.
The old clerk squinted at me. “Do I know you?”
“Nope.”
“You look familiar.”
I nodded at the Mosin. “Do you take debit?”
He laughed. I wasn’t joking.
Resting between us, the antique rifle was looking more and more like a bagged corpse. Brown and earwax-yellow clotted the plastic in gooey bunches. I could smell the preserving agent Russian armory workers had bathed the parts in decades ago; a sweet petroleum odor, like hard candy soaked in motor oil. Cosmoline, I think it’s called.
He looked at it, then at me. “Seriously?”
“Seriously.”
“Why this one? Stock is carved up. Bore is pitted. Mosin Nagants are already the prawns of the gun world, but this one’s uglier than a daytime hooker—”
“I’m not taking it to a beauty pageant.”
“Yeah? If you’re taking it out for whitetail, you’d be better off extending the bayonet and throwing it like a javelin—”
“I don’t hunt.”
“A target rifle, then? It might not even work.”
I wondered if all firearm vendors were this abrasive. Then again, not all firearms had a body count. “I’d still like to buy it.”
“Maybe you didn’t hear me, son. This rifle killed someone last year. The previous owner stuck it in his mouth and blew his head off—”
“So it obviously works.”
And it was under his chin. Not in his mouth.
For a long moment, we both stared at it in stalemate silence, and I half-expected the weapon to suddenly breathe and crinkle the bag. Then the old man deflated a bit. He didn’t have a nametag, but I could discern from the trophy photos on the wall — he wasn’t the eponymous Joe of Joe’s Guns.
“The victim’s family in Georgia is technically making the sale,” Not Joe grunted. “Our store is just the middleman. The FFL-holder.”
I was only half-listening. I knew all this already.
“I didn’t know the victim,” he said. “But I knew of him. Ben Dyson. He ran a semi-popular gun blog. His thing was obtaining crappy, century-old surplus rifles from the World Wars for dirt cheap. Mosins, Enfields, Arisakas. Then he’d clean ’em up — install scopes, cozy pistol grips, fancy synthetic furniture — and then he’d s
ell ’em for twice what he paid. Kind of like flipping houses.”
I ran a hand over the bagged rifle. Wood and metal bones wrapped in a slimy, semi-transparent skin. As the legend went, this particular antique rifle didn’t take kindly to being accessorized like a Barbie doll. Not that it had taken kindly to any of its past owners.
“I followed Dyson’s blog.” Not Joe chewed his lip. “So I saw his last post, the afternoon he shot himself.”
“What did he write?”
“It was weird. Just one sentence—”
A bell dinged. Another customer entered behind me.
The old man looked up, then back at me, lowering his voice: “Look, I don’t really want to talk about it. If you just have to know, I recommend trying this exciting new invention called Google.”
Sarcasm. That was new on him.
“Are you buying the rifle or not?” he asked.
I touched the Mosin Nagant’s twelve-inch spike bayonet through the milky plastic. It was folded along the barrel but the bladed, screwdriver-like tip was still honed to a vicious needlepoint. You could pierce a beer can with one good jab. And God only knows the species of foreign bacteria wriggling on its surface.
“Yes or no?”
“Yes.”
The old man sighed. “Can I convince you not to?”
“You’re sure trying.”
“Honestly, it just gives me the creeps. Not just because it’s a blood gun. I’ve seen those before. This . . . this is something else. It turns my stomach, just standing five feet from it. The air curdles around it, like milk left out in the sun. It feels . . . I don’t know. It feels radioactive somehow, like being near it takes away a piece of you.”
He’s just trying to scare me.
I held up a palm but didn’t feel any evil radiation coming off it. Just the musty odor of gun preservative and ancient solvent.
“I kept it in the bag the Dyson widow mailed it in,” he said. “I haven’t physically touched it, with my bare skin, since it arrived. And I never will.”
“Okay.”
“I’m also not selling you any cartridges for it.”
“Understood.”
“And I swear to God, you’d better not shoot up a shopping mall with it.”
I shrugged. “If so, I’d be better off throwing it like a javelin, right?”
Not Joe didn’t laugh.
The new customer was hovering with his hands in his pockets by the wall of luxurious black rifles (the Lexus of the gun world, apparently), so Not Joe huffed and scooted a handful of yellow paperwork at me before moving on. The pens here had little Don’t Tread on Me flags. I listened to the two men talk while I initialed boxes on the carbon-paper NICS background-check forms. When I knew the old man wasn’t looking, I leaned forward and pressed the sticky plastic flat against the Mosin Nagant to read the serial numbers engraved on the barrel. I matched this to the writing on my palm, scribbled earlier that morning in black Sharpie: B5066.
This was the one. No doubts left.
I found you.
But this antiquated weapon didn’t seem haunted or cursed. Nothing felt off-kilter or wrong to me. The air wasn’t curdling around it (can air even curdle?). It was just a battered hunk of ancient wood and milled metal, surprisingly heavy but surprising in no other way. For all the gory photographs and digital campfire stories, it was still just a gun. An object. Hard to believe it made W. Louis’s book.
“Yo.” The other customer eyed the bag. “Is that a Mosin?”
I nodded. “Good eye.”
“Good gun.” He grinned wolfishly. “That’s Ruskie tech — ugly and beautiful at the same time. Helped ’em boot the Krauts back to Berlin. Did you know that during the Space Race, they shot the first dog into orbit?”
I shook my head. His breath was aggressively foul, even at ten feet, which must’ve been some kind of record. An acrid ammonia stench, like cat litter clumped with urine (so maybe air can curdle).
“Dog’s name was Laika.” He shouldered a black rifle with a holographic sight and aimed it at the wall. “She was this cute husky-terrier. The Soviets, they crammed Laika into a three-foot pressurized capsule, Sputnik II, and fired her off into space. After they made human history, you know how they brought little Laika back down to earth?”
I shook my head again.
He dry-fired with a click. “They didn’t.”
The old man snatched the paperwork from under my hand, startling me. Then Joe’s Guns ran my background check through a nineties-era landline, and in ten minutes, the Mosin Nagant was mine for a total of two-hundred-and-four dollars. It was the first firearm I’d ever purchased. I had zero interest in shooting paper targets with it, or cans, or whitetail. Or myself, if that’s what you’re thinking.
I carried it out in a taped cardboard box.
“Shoot safe,” Not Joe said as I left. It was probably a standard parting phrase, but to me it sounded like a barbed joke.
The Ben Dyson suicide stuff was all true, but it was only the beginning. The real gruesome business happened on the other side of the ocean, before the Mosin even reached our American civilian market. Not Joe didn’t know about it. If he had, he wouldn’t have sold me the rifle at all.
He’d also missed a small tertiary detail — before Mr. Dyson mail-ordered this Mosin Nagant as a cheapie to be cannibalized, it spent several years sitting mothballed in a warehouse in West Virginia. A forklift driver who worked the graveyard shift there apparently walked off his shift one night and drove home. His wife awoke to find him standing in their driveway at 3 a.m., in a strange trance, chugging what she thought was a two-liter bottle of diet cola. Until she got closer and read the container — concentrated lye solution. The stuff they sanitize industrial ovens with. He was a walking DOA by the time the paramedics arrived, his lips turning bubbly red, his organs dissolving. But, you never know — that could just be unrelated, right?
I didn’t believe in ghosts. Or curses. Or poltergeists. Or demons, or possessions, or any of the pleasant fantasies we like to scare ourselves with. That’s not horror — that’s wish fulfillment. Because even the cruelest, most heinous supernatural terrors imply a higher order. You can’t fear the devil without also acknowledging God.
I’d been searching for God for a while now.
Not Joe must’ve recognized my name from the NICS check, because as I stepped outside into the parking lot, he called through the swinging door. “Wait, I knew it. Dan! You’re one of the guys from the ghost-hunting show on channel eleven, right?”
I let the door close. I hadn’t been on Haunted in over two months. This was my extended leave of absence, after what happened on New Year’s Eve.
“Asshole,” I heard him grumble.
I carried it out into the parking lot under a watery sky. I put the rifle in my trunk. As I climbed into my black Toyota Celica, I fumbled for my phone and set a countdown timer, beginning now. Twenty-four hours: BEEP.
24:00:00
23:59:59
23:59:58 . . .
I’d almost forgotten — but according to the original Russian legend, no owner of this cursed rifle had ever survived longer than a single day. So there’s that.
Thus far, this quirk had held true in America, too. Exactly twenty-four hours after Ben Dyson signed a little UPS tablet for his mail order, his wife heard a concussive bang from his workshop. She’d found him with the Mosin Nagant cradled in his lap and a 7.62 mm hole in the ceiling. Through some minor miracle of physics, he’d remained seated on his stool. The photos were all digitally scrubbed of gore, but you could see browned blood speckling the workbench, dripping down solvent bottles and Ziploc bags bulging with brass casings. A camouflage hat on the floor. His laptop was there, too, but it was pixelated by a censor. Meaning a chunk of Mr. Dyson’s scalp had likely landed on it. The cops and medics on the scene were all wearing shorts and tees darkened with sweat; it had been over a hundred-and-five degrees, mid-August under a blistering Georgia sun.
Minutes bef
ore putting the barrel under his chin, Dyson had logged into his WordPress blog and typed: SO COLD IN HERE.
As I drove home with that very same rifle in my trunk, the first flecks of snow hit my windshield. With my phone quietly counting down in my pocket, I promised myself that if in the next twenty-four hours I couldn’t find anything legitimately supernatural with this old, Russian blood gun, I’d stop searching forever.
And move on.
23 Hours, 11 Minutes
“Dan, this is the dumbest thing you’ve ever done,” Holden said.
I stopped mid-sentence. I hadn’t even told him about the lye.
Holden H. Hume was a crucial element to our Haunted investigative team: the true believer. The heart and soul. The one your mom probably likes. Holden can’t cross the street without having a paranormal encounter. You name it, he probably believes in it. He’s the only guy I know who could go out hiking to search for Bigfoot, and spot the Jersey Devil on the drive out there. He’s also my best friend, which is why I was telling him — and only him — about this.
And this was a bizarre reversal. When the DVC tapes were rolling, I was usually the one ridiculing his ideas.
“This isn’t for Haunted,” I clarified. “This is just for me.”
We’d met for coffee at Jitters, a little place in downtown Farwell known for its superb Mexican hot chocolate and godawful live poetry readings. After what happened on New Year’s Eve, this had become a weekly ritual of ours. Through Windex-streaked windows we watched eighteen-wheelers haul dismantled chunks of blue papier-mâché ox; debris from last weekend’s Winter Bunyan Days. The snow kept falling but didn’t stick, swirling on updrafts like dry cotton.
Holden stirred his pale drink. It was more creamer than coffee. “So . . . what equipment do you need to check out?”
I sipped mine — jet black. “Nothing.”
“Not even a camera?”
“Like I said. This is just for me.”