Tales From the Gas Station 2

by Jack Townsend

  “You guys hear that?” asked not-Donald as he looked in the direction of the supply closet.

  It was a silly question—we were all in the same room. Rosa was seated a couple feet from him, with her back to the closet. O’Brien stood close behind her. There was no way we didn’t all hear the ringing noise.

  Jerry and I were only a running start away, and “Donald” was mildly distracted. This was our best chance to incapacitate him with our skin intact, but before I could yell “Get him!” and hope for the best, Rosa took the initiative to explain it away.

  “I don’t hear anything,” she blurted 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, pausing for the ringing between sentences. “Probs just the wind.”

  Donald-the-demon stood up, took a step away from the others, and pointed at the supply closet. “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 that could only have meant “He is a demon! We need to cut off his head!” but alas, the message didn’t get through.

  “Yeah,” she said, confused. “It’s nothing.”

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

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

  “Okay.” He said, then he took a step towards the closet. O’Brien cut him off immediately.

  A silent moment passed as they stared each other down. This was my chance. All I needed was an axe or something, and I could get behind him and—

  Ah, who am I kidding? I could never cut off Donald Glover’s head. Some things just aren’t worth the risk.

  Demon-Donald moved like he was going to turn around, but then he shined his flashlight into O’Brien’s eyes. She flinched long enough for Demonald to dart past her to the supply closet door.

  “Wait!” I yelled.

  But it was too late. Demonald had turned the knob and 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!”

  O’Brien yelled, “Close the door!” as she stepped forward.

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

  Spencer was crying now. Real, actual tears. “Please! God! Get me out of here! She’s not really a cop! They’ve killed people, so many people…”

  I couldn’t help it. I started slow clapping. Everyone turned their flashlights to me except for Jerry, who by now had started 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 here? No more lies. 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 Sagoth.

  “Of course I do.”

  “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 is 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 he had warned us about. Sagoth wasn’t whoever or whatever had beaten him senseless earlier.

  I felt a sudden pang of dread. Spencer and Sagoth were already too many moving pieces, if there was something else out there then… Oh shit. This situation was spiraling 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?” he asked, incredulously. “Named ‘O’Brien’?”

  “Yes.”

  “And tell me, O’Brien, 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 criminal.”

  “Oh, 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 around here?”

  “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.”

  If I had been able to run out after them, I would have. But they were gone. O’Brien was an adult who made her own decision.

  I pulled the bag curtains off the front door, but I may as well have left them up for all I could see in the darkness outside. There was no moonlight, no starlight, and—most importantly—no flashlights. All I could do now was wait for her to come back and hope it would be in one piece.

  The time crept by slowly. 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 prions do to your brain? His DNA is literally unraveling. He doesn’t know what’s real and what isn’t. 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 I 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 already had his talons in Rosa’s mind. Now his entire goal was proving to her 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? Living with what you did to my leg?”

  “At least you’re still alive!” he screamed. “How many people can’t say that? How many people have you taken everything from? You know you’re a murderer, and now you can’t wait to do to me just like you did to poor old Kieffer. Or my old boss.”

  “Hey! I wasn’t the one who killed 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 Tony? 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 Tony 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 d
uct 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. She came in through the front door, out of breath.

  “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! What the hell?!

  “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 open door of the supply closet. “Where’s Spencer?”

  I explained that he was trying to get into our heads, and we had no choice but to barricade him inside the cooler. 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. We came to a tentative peaceful resolution, with each of us agreeing to keep an eye on one another from a safe distance until daylight and backup arrived.

  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 eyeballing 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 phone. I was losing my touch.

  “I’ll be right back,” she said.

  I followed as closely as possible as she crossed to the cooler and pulled back the chair.

  “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.

  “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 want it.”

  “What demon?!” screamed the ever-inquisitive Rosa. “When did you start talking about 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 you’re fawning over so hard I expect you to start chugging 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 tapped 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 yelled, “Shut up!”

  We were 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 to my side. Fortunately, I didn’t have to say anything, because right then the front door 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.”

  Fuuuck!

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

  “Get out of what?” she asked.

  “Oh check it!” 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.

  It’s probably a good thing she wasn’t conscious for this next part.

  ***

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

  “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. I’m not expecting you to blindly trust me; I’m just asking that you 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. She was contemplating something, but she had always been hard to read. Was that the look of a woman who thought she was talking to a crazy person? Or was that the look of a demon, fantasizing about stripping off my flesh and feeding upon my suffering? Surely, if this was the shapeshifter, there wouldn’t be any better opportunity to start picking us off than right now. 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 intact, and Jerry was… well, Jerry.

  Obviously, she did not kill and eat me, so I had to assume I was talking to the original O’Brien, and the one in the cooler was the double. But my confidence level—in anything, reality included—had hit rock bottom and started digging a long time ago.

  A pair of headlights lit up the room as a snow truck pulled into the parking lot. Amazingly, the cavalry had arrived, and several hours early at that. Good news, for sure, but I wasn’t ready to cash in that optimism yet. Somehow, I knew this was just another fake-out ending to our night from hell.

  The “cavalry” was Saul Berthelot, the retired school-bus driver and owner/operator of the only snowplow in town. He pulled up next to pump two, honked twice, and waved at me in an unfriendly manner.

  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 seem 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!”

  Jerry looked back at Rosa 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 general 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 outside. Past Saul’s truck. Up, at the awning over the gas pumps. At the thing standing on top, leaning over the edge, staring down at the snowplow with hunger and curiosity.

  What followed is actually pretty difficult to describe. When we saw it, the three of us had a shared moment, a visceral reaction like we’d just been nut-punched right in the soul. Before that moment, I had seen some things that many people might have considered “horrific.” My own exposed bones, too many dead bodies, a vision of the literal end of the world, the floor of the gas station bathroom. But after seeing this thing, I had to completely reexamine the 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 behold. Its existence was an obscenity my perception couldn’t handle, and my mind catapulted past any human instinct to run away or cower in fear. All I could do was freeze up all function while in its presence, like my brain simply gave up and shat its pants. I did manage to get one word out. In fact, we all said it at the exact same time: