The Hell that Follows

* * *
(Formally Joe Baker Closes Up)
By Jackson Robinson

​

     At dusk, Joe Baker stepped out the front door of Bill’s Gas and Auto and lit a cigarette. It was five minutes to close and had been an exceptionally slow day. Since seven that morning, there had been a total of three customers. All of them before noon and all of them together filling up a total of about twenty minutes.

 

     That was fine by Joe though. He was scheduled to work the same shift for the next three days, and if no one showed up for those three days, he wouldn’t lose a wink of sleep.

     You see, Joe had a reputation around town as being... less than trustworthy. It stemmed from a decade-long addiction to heroin. Joe didn’t blame people for not trusting him; he barely trusted himself to look over the gas station. But he was ready for that to change. He was ready to shake that junkie reputation off his back once and for all. He just needed his opportunity. Bill Harolds gave him just that. His opportunity.

     Bill and Joe had met in an AA meeting when Joe had first started trying to get clean. Joe had been sitting in the back of the room, fighting to keep the little bit of food he’d managed to eat inside of him, when Bill had sat down in the chair next to him. They hadn’t really talked much, but Bill had given him his phone number and told him to call if he ever needed anything. Joe had called him two days later when he’d found half a Vicodin stuck in the knots of his carpet. Bill had told him to flush it. Then he had come over and taken Joe to a meeting in Bismarck. On the way back to Juliette, Bill had told him that if he was looking for work, he always had a spot for him at the shop. And thus began Joe Baker’s lustrous career in customer service and auto mechanics.

     Joe’s job was simple. He got to work around 6:45 AM and waited for Bill to show up and unlock the door. Then he would pump gas, check air pressure, change oil, wash windows, and do general upkeep around the building until 7:00 PM. At closing, Bill would count out the register and take the money home with him to put in his safe. It wasn’t a glamorous job. And Joe certainly didn’t make as much as he did when he was selling smack, but it paid him enough to keep the lights on in the bedroom he rented out behind the shop. And on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, Joe would hitch a ride with Bill into town and catch a meeting.

     It was a good life, and people were finally starting to look at Joe differently. And when Bill’s daughter down in Sioux Falls gave birth to a beautiful baby boy, Bill had just the guy to fill in for him when he was gone.

 

     He was going to be gone for three days. He told Joe that he would call and check in every night just to make sure that Joe was doing okay. And so far that day, Joe had been doing okay with everything. It wasn’t until that first night as he stepped outside to smoke a cigarette just before closing up that he started to wonder if there was any beer in the shop.

     Bill didn’t drink, but most of the other guys who worked in the shop did. Joe had even seen Steve Budapest take the occasional nip or two from a secret flask he kept in his toolbox on particularly hard Monday mornings.

 

     Joe took a long drag on his cigarette and pushed the thoughts away. He’d had opportunities to use in the last six months, and somehow or another, he’d managed not to. He told himself that tonight would be no different.

 

     He stuffed his hands in his pockets and crossed the parking lot, biting down on the filter of his cigarette as he did so. He made his way up the small, grassy slope on the other side of the lot to the road. There he was able to see the shelterbelt across the road clearly. With the sun setting behind the trees, they looked less like a cleverly placed windbreak and more like the dark woods in a child’s fairy tale.

 

     If asked, Joe wouldn’t be able to explain his fascination with those trees. But he was fascinated with them. On nights when he couldn’t sleep, he found himself wandering out to the side of the road just to look at them. He’d stand there for hours, smoking cigarettes and watching the shadows shift in between the branches. They were almost like smoke, and Joe could just about swear that he was able to see faces in them.

 

     He finished his cigarette and turned around to go back inside. There was an old wooden rocking chair on the porch. The kind that you would see in a book or a movie about farming in the South. Without really thinking about it, Joe sat down in it and watched the sun behind the tree line. He sat there as it slowly disappeared beyond the horizon and the sky started to turn the color of charcoal. Crickets began to chirp at the rising moon, and the arc-sodium light over the gas pumps clicked on, its fluorescent buzz blanketing the parking lot. Soon moths and gnats would start to congregate around its soft, yellow glare.

 

     The night was bordering on peaceful when another sound came. It was far off, buried beneath the buzz of the light over the pumps at first, but it was growing. It was pushing its way up through the dull of the night. It was a motor. A sick and neglected motor that at first made Joe think of a lawn mower. But as it grew closer, he could tell that it belonged to a car. He could hear the transmission shifting as the engine whined. It came in loud clicks that were preceded by painful spurts of gears grinding on gears. He saw the headlights on the road next.

 

     The vehicle was coming from the south. Joe weirdly enough found himself picturing an old coupe de ville rattling down the road, almost like something you would see the devil driving in a cartoon. But that’s not what showed up.

 

     The car that pulled into the gas station parking lot was an old and beat-up Rolls Royce. The paint was faded and chipped away in places. Rust coated the door, the hood, the trunk, and bits of the bumper. All four hubcaps were gone, and the windshield was a spiderweb of cracks and chips. If that wasn’t enough, the engine sounded like a man dying of emphysema. It coughed and sputtered and shot big, black clouds of exhaust from its tailpipe.

 

     The car wheezed to a stop in between Joe and the two gas pumps in the center of the lot. The driver switched off the engine, and Joe felt the inside of his stomach tighten. It was too dark for him to see in the windows of the car, and that only made his uneasiness grow. He could just about imagine one of those windows rolling down and the barrel of a gun emerging from the other side. The owner of said gun being someone he’d burned in the past. Someone whose bag he’d shorted or someone he’d stolen from and not paid back yet. That’s just how it always seemed to go for him too. Things would just start to get better, just a little bit here and there, and then boom—life happens. He’d catch his girl messing around, or a hookup would fall through, or maybe somebody close to him would OD or get cancer, and then what? Why, off to the dope house of course.

 

     But the window didn’t roll down. Instead the driver’s door opened, and from where Joe sat on the porch, he saw a little plume of smoke exit the car. Its hinges squealed as the driver swung the door, and then a man’s head popped up on the other side of the car. Joe recognized the man immediately. His name was Trevor Holiday, and he’d been—up until about five years ago when he got busted selling to an undercover cop—Joe’s main supplier of heroin.

 

     Trevor beamed across the old, rusted-out Rolls at Joe. His eyes were little more than slits in his skull. Joe knew the look plenty well. Trevor was stoned. Off what, Joe couldn’t be sure, but he knew the look nonetheless. Just like how he knew that Trevor would have something else to pick him back up if he got too low.

 

     His passenger—a large man with a lumpy, bald head—opened his door, leaned out, and vomited. As he did so, stray beer cans spilled out of the car and onto the ground. Joe counted three, but he was certain that the whole floor of the Rolls was littered with crushed empties.

 

     “Hey, watch it, Doyle,” Trevor slurred.

 

     He started to laugh then, doubling over and disappearing behind the Rolls. Joe could hear him slapping his knee. His laugh was a wheezing and high-pitched chortle akin to the sound a pig makes. The laugh died off, and Joe heard the sniffing sound of Trevor doing a line off the fleshy part of his hand between his index finger and thumb.

 

     Joe felt his insides give themselves a turn. He’d been clean for almost six months, and in that time, to the best of his knowledge, he’d only been alone with dope once. That was the day he called Bill after finding a painkiller in his carpet. He supposed he could call him again, but part of him didn’t want to. Part of him—the junkie deep down in his guts, to be specific—didn’t want to call Bill ever again. That part of him wanted Trevor to walk across the parking lot and ask him to do a line.

 

     Joe wouldn’t ask for one. Not now. Not yet at least.

 

     Trevor stood back up, brushed the hair out of his now-wide eyes, and slapped his palm down on the roof of the Rolls.

 

     “Joey Baker!” he screamed across the parking lot. “Is that you?”

 

     Joe wanted to scream. He’d known Trevor before he’d gotten locked up, and he’d been scared of him then. He couldn’t imagine that five years in Bismarck State Penitentiary did any favors for his psychiatric state. Instead of screaming though, he smiled and looked down at the ground for a second while his hand found its way to the back of his head. There it scratched. He thought about lying. Saying something like, Joe Baker? Never heard of him. I’m So-and-so. But he doubted that he’d be able to sell it. Trevor had known Joe would be there. He could tell from the way he shouted his name.

 

     He looked back up at Trevor and the man he had called Doyle. Both of them looked as if they’d seen better days. Like they’d been on the road for too long—or, more likely, like they’d been on the run for too long. Trevor’s hair was long and unkempt, and the beginnings of a thin, scraggly beard had taken off across his chin. His large friend didn’t look any better. His skin looked pale and sickly, and he was breathing heavily through his mouth like he’d just run a marathon.

 

     “Yup, it’s me,” Joe said nodding his head. “Is that you, Trev?”

 

     “You bet your fur it is,” Trevor replied, brushing at his nose with the back of his hand. He wasn’t shouting anymore, but he was making no effort to be quiet. He slapped the roof of the car again and said, “This is the guy I was telling you about, Doyle. Joey Baker. The one guy who always had my back. Ain’t that right, Joey?”

 

     Joe nodded and smiled. He didn’t know what else to do.

 

     The big man in the passenger seat, Doyle, looked up at Joe, nodded his head, and then reached into the back seat of the Rolls and came out with another beer. Joe didn’t like the look of him. He looked like the kind of guy that didn’t have anything behind his eyes. No soul. No kindness. No humanity. Joe might have been nothing more than your common smackhead, but at least he possessed a modicum of conscience.

 

     “Don’t take it personally if he don’t wanna introduce himself, Joey,” Trevor said and started to make his way around the Rolls.

 

     Joe noticed that he was walking with a pretty serious limp. It was on par with Kevin Spacey’s character in that old movie The Usual Suspects.

 

     “He don’t like to talk to nobody but me. Ain’t that right, Doyle?”

 

     Doyle grunted, opened his beer, and took a pull. Beer and foam spilled out the sides of his mouth, but it didn’t slow him down one bit. He downed the beer, crushed the can in one giant fist, and chucked it into the back seat before belching loudly.

 

     “Hey, Doyle,” Trevor said. He was chuckling, but Joe got the feeling that it wasn’t because of anything particularly funny. He’d made it around to the front of the Rolls by this point and was leaning on the hood to keep his balance. “Why don’t you give one of those to our friend here?” He looked up at Joe. “You don’t mind that they’re a little warm, do ya, buddy?” Trevor smiled.

 

     It was a smile that Joe had seen him practice day in and day out for years. The smile that he used when he talked to women and cops. It was a smile that said, Hey, don’t mind me. I’m just your run-of-the-mill, ruggedly handsome, fun-loving guy. Only it didn’t look the way it used to. His skin looked dry and stretched like leather. It was hard to see underneath the glow of the arc-sodium, but Joe got the feeling that in normal lighting, you could follow the pick marks and meth rot across his face like tracing highways across a map.

 

     Doyle reached into the back seat and came out with another beer. He tossed it across the parking lot, and Joe caught it in the air. The can was warm, like it’d been sitting under a radiator all day. That hopeful feeling that Trevor would offer him a line had faded, if only for a moment, and Joe set the can down on the porch next to him.

 

     “Listen, Trev...” he started. He was about to say, Listen, Trev, I appreciate the offer, but I don’t drink anymore, when Trevor’s head snapped around so that he was looking over his shoulder. He was looking at the tree line across the road. Doyle stood up, and the Rolls shifted with the sudden release of weight from its shocks and turned to look that way as well.

 

     “Did you hear that?” Trevor hissed at his friend.

 

     Doyle didn’t say anything. He just rested both his colossal hands on the roof of the Rolls. Joe was finally able to see just how big this fella was. He towered over the Rolls, and Joe was genuinely impressed that he even managed to fit inside it. But it wasn’t just his size that baffled Joe. The man’s body was misshapen. His muscles bulged dramatically in odd and random places, making him look like some obscene caricature of a bodybuilder.

 

     “We should get inside,” Trevor said. He turned around and limped a few steps toward Joe. “Joey, how do you feel about helping out an old friend?”

 

     Joe felt his heart skip a beat. He’d known that something like this was coming. He tried to strain his ear and see if he could hear sirens coming from far off, but there was nothing.

 

     “Look, man,” he started, “I just closed up. I guess I could give you some gas real quick, but that’s about all.”

 

     Trevor smiled. He laced his fingers behind his back and looked at the ground. “Yeah, I’m gonna need a little more than gas, buddy.”

 

     Joe didn’t say anything. Instead he looked at Doyle, who’d moved to behind Trevor. Next to Trevor’s scrawny frame, Doyle looked even bigger. He must’ve been six feet seven and probably 250 pounds. In other words, Joe got the feeling that if Doyle wanted to come inside, Joe wasn’t going to be able to stop him with anything less than a hand grenade.

 

     Trevor swished saliva in his mouth for a second before spitting it out on the ground. “We were kinda hoping that maybe we could crash here for a day or two, you know? Pull the Rolls into the garage. Hang out back while things cool off a little, if you’re picking up what I’m laying down?”

 

     “Look, Trev, I just got this job—”

 

     “We weren’t really asking, Joey,” Trevor said. “If you don’t want us here, that’s fine. Doyle can deal with you. It’s just a matter of if this is going to be a pleasant experience or not. That’s your call.”

 

     Joe looked at Doyle, and a sick feeling filled his stomach. It was dread. He’d never been much of a fighter, but even if he had, there was no universe in which he was going to take down this mountain of a person. He supposed that he could let them in and sneak off to call the cops. That was probably what Bill would have wanted him to do. But that old junkie mentality about snitching was still strong in his mind. It was almost as strong as the bond that he still felt with Trevor, a man who was actively threatening him. As crazy as he was, Trevor was a friend. They’d used together for years. They’d shared needles, drugs, experiences, and all. That wasn’t something that you could just throw away. It was life. Joe didn’t have any siblings. His family had quit talking to him years ago. But Trevor always would’ve been  there for him.
 

     How bad could it actually be? he thought. 

 

     “I guess I’ll go open the garage,” Joe said, getting up.
     

     “That’s more like it,” Trevor said.

​

* * *

 

     It took Trevor two tries, but he got the Rolls started again and pulled it into the garage. He parked it near the back exit, with the idea that if they had to, he and Doyle would be able to make a quick getaway from there. But from the looks of the car, Joe didn’t think they would be making it very far. Under the hard fluorescents of the garage, Joe could see the car was even worse for wear than he originally thought. The tires were bald to the point where he could see wire starting to shine through. The shocks squealed when Doyle got in and out of the car. And the motor coughed out so much exhaust from Trevor starting it that Joe wouldn’t have been surprised if someone two towns over thought they were sending smoke signals.

 

     Trevor threw the car in park and switched the engine off. He got out and flashed a rotted-out smile at Joe.

 

     “Thanks again, bud,” he said and slammed the door of the Rolls.

 

     There was a large red smear from where his hand had touched the door. Joe couldn’t help but stare at it.

 

     “You’re really doing us a solid here,” Trevor said and leaned back against the trunk of the car.

 

     Joe probably would’ve said something back to him, but the Rolls wasn’t the only thing that looked worse under the fluorescents. Trevor looked... sick to say the least. His skin had taken on a translucent sort of quality, and Joe could see the blue of his veins underneath it. He’d heard of people’s skin turning yellow with jaundice, but never anything like this. It looked sort of like blood poisoning, and had it not been all over Trevor’s face, he would’ve thought it was just that. There was something wrong with his eyes too. They looked cloudy. The way that coffee looks when you pour the first bit of creamer into it.

 

     “You okay, Joey?” Trevor asked. “You look like you done seen a ghost.” He laughed and took a pack of cigarettes out of the breast pocket of his flannel shirt. He plugged one into the corner of his mouth, leaving bloody fingerprints all across the white cigarette paper. Then he tore a match free from the book he kept tucked in the cellophane of the package. He ran it across the strike pad, and it flared to life before he bent forward and lit up.

 

     “Trevor,” Joe struggled to find the words, “man... you’re bleeding.”
Trevor inhaled deeply and took his cigarette out of his mouth. Most of the smoke he exhaled came out of his nose. The rest looked to come out from just below his jawline. He smiled, and Joe saw that there was blood running in between his teeth.

 

     Trevor turned his hands over, looked at them, and began to chuckle. “Yeah, it looks like I sprang a leak.” His laugh started to grow. He bent over and put both hands on his knees. The occasional “oh shit”—as in, Oh shit, I can’t believe how funny this is—managed to work its way in between Trevor’s sobs.

 

     Joe turned to Doyle, who was standing by the front entrance of the garage. He didn’t seem to care about Trevor’s hysterics. He was more interested in the road passing by the station. Most likely he was listening for sirens.
Joe turned back to Trevor. “Trev, you need to get to the hospital.”

     “Hospital?” Trevor shouted and erupted into laughter again, the idea clearly ludicrous to him. “You hear that, Doyle? Joey thinks a doctor is gonna fix me!”

 

     Trevor leaned back against the Rolls and half sat down, half collapsed onto his ass. He was calming down. In his hysterics, he’d dropped his cigarette. He picked it up off the garage floor and took a drag. The end was more red than white at this point, but he didn’t seem to mind.

 

     “Trevor, what’s going on, man?” Joe asked.

 

     “What’s going on, Joey, is you got yourself mixed up in something that you’d never, in a million years, be able to understand.”

 

     There was no humor in Trevor’s voice this time. Instead it was flat and dry. The voice of a cancer patient. He took a long drag on his cigarette, and Joe saw a small cloud of smoke form behind Trevor’s head. He exhaled.

 

     “What do you think, Doyle? Should I tell him?”

 

     Joe turned and looked at Doyle. He was standing on his tiptoes, reaching up for the garage door. He grabbed hold of it and pulled it down. The door slammed shut, and Doyle lifted his boot and smashed the track that the door ran on.

 

     “What the hell?” Joe said, getting up.

 

     “It’s no use, Joey,” Trevor said. “If you knew what was out there, you’d be locking the doors too. Doubt it’ll do any good though.”

 

     Trevor dug a baggie filled with white powder out of his pocket. He looked at his hands and wiped what blood he could away on his jeans before dumping a small pile of the powder into the fleshy part of his hand between his thumb and index finger.

 

     “You want a rail, Joey?” he asked without looking up. “It’s good stuff. We got it from Ned Hemmingsworth when we were coming through Juliette.” Trevor stopped what he was doing and laughed. Just a chuckle this time. “What are the odds that we came out near Juliette? Of all the places. What do you think, Doyle?”

 

     Doyle didn’t say anything. He’d bent the track on the other garage door and was now digging in the back seat, presumably for another beer.

 

     “I almost wonder if they let us out on purpose. Just to mess with us. Just to watch us stumble around in a familiar place long enough for us to have a little fun”—he looked down at the pile of dope on his hand—“before they cart us off back to that hellhole.”

 

     Trevor bent forward, plugged his left nostril with his free hand, and made the small pile of powder disappear with his nose. Joe felt his heart start to kick in his chest a little bit more, and damn it if he didn’t think there was a little extra saliva in his mouth all of a sudden. He pushed the urge to ask for a hit back down inside him. It was still there, a little closer to the surface than it had been when Trevor first pulled into the station, but for now it was quiet.

 

     “Trev,” Joe started, “what are you talking about?”

 

     “You ain’t seen ’em yet?” Trevor asked, arching one of his eyebrows and tilting his head to the side. There was a bit of powder still on the very tip of his nose, but he didn’t seem to care. “I gotta say, I’m surprised. I think Ned was seeing them before we even got there. That being said...” Trevor took a drag on his cigarette, and a cloud of smoke simply seemed to materialize around his head. “He was pretty high. He might’ve already been looking for them, if you catch my drift.”

     “Seeing who, Trev? You’re not making any sense,” Joe said. But he found himself thinking about the tree line again. The image stood out clear enough in his mind that he might’ve just as well been holding a picture of it. He thought of the way that the darkness sometimes looked to be shifting inside it, almost like smoke. And then, of course, there were the faces he sometimes saw in it.
 

     Thought I saw, he tried to correct himself in his mind. But he did see faces in the shadows. The problem was that he didn’t think that they were human faces. He didn’t even think that they were earthly faces. They were something else. Something twisted and distorted, like a face in a house of mirrors.

 

     Trevor smiled, took one final drag on his cigarette, and crushed it out on the floor next to him.

 

     “You know, Joey,” he said, “I get tired easier than I used to. That’s why I gotta do so much dope. I’m not like Doyle. He can just go on forever. I gotta rest.” He laughed. “I gotta eat. Of course, you wouldn’t understand that.”

 

     “What wouldn’t I understand?”

 

     Trevor sighed and looked at Joe. He gave a little shrug that seemed to say, Ah, what the hell, and leaned back.

 

     “You want to know what’s going on? Well, can’t say I didn’t warn ya. The truth of it is this, Joey. I’m dead.”

 

     Joe sat there for a moment, staring at his old using buddy. Trevor certainly looked dead. His eyes were cloudy, his hair was dry and stringy, and his skin... well, his skin just didn’t look right.

 

     “Trevor,” the word seemed to fall out of Joe’s mouth. “You can’t be dead. We’re talking right now. Dead people can’t talk. Unless you’re a ghost.” Joe laughed, trying to lighten the situation.

 

     “Well, I’m not a ghost,” Trevor started. “And I guess that dead isn’t exactly the right word for what I am either. Reborn might actually be better. You see, I died a couple of years ago. Took a shiv in the stomach and bled out in the showers while I was locked up. It’s hard to know when exactly because time is so different in hell. But that’s not really what’s important. What’s important is, I realized right quick that I was just moving from one prison to another. Only the one down there”—his eyes shifted from Joe to the ground and then back—“the one down there ain’t right.”

     “You don’t know it’s hell at first,” Trevor continued. “You think that it’s just another day, only this day is gonna be the mother of all bad days because Satan himself is planning it out for you. But somehow or another, you manage to get through it, and then you wake up the next day, and it’s exactly the same. That was my biggest problem. The repetition. Sure, there would always be something new spliced into the day, like maybe I’d see my mom strung up in the shower asking why I was off smoking crack with you the day she fell down those stairs. Or maybe I’d be putting my shoes on and find a pair of baby blue Nike sneakers. The kind that I saw poking out from that bush when I had my accident a few years ago. I ever tell you about that?”

 

     Joe shook his head.

 

     “I didn’t think so. Anyway, that’s what your cell is. You just keep on living this day over and over again with little things changed until your mind starts to go. But I showed them, Joey.” Trevor tapped his temple with one scrawny finger. “I got out. And once I did, I started looking for a way back here. And that’s how I met Frank Hopkins, who taught me about building bodies. You see, people cross back and forth all the time, but it’s like stepping outside of a spaceship without your space suit. You just can’t last that long without a body. There’s always possession, of course, but that’s not great either. One, because you’ve got to fight with the person you’re possessing constantly to keep hold of the body, and two, because a priest can always just bounce you back to hell with a couple of prayers. It isn’t exactly a long-term solution.” Trevor was smiling madly now.

 

     “Trev—” Joe started before he was interrupted.

 

     “Let me finish,” Trevor said, cutting him off. “Anyways, I met this guy, Frank, who told me about building bodies. The details are a little hard to explain, but essentially, I can take a little bit from every person I meet and add it to my own body. It’s not exactly foolproof.” Trevor held up his hands so that his palms were facing Joe. Blood was seeping through the skin like water through a paper towel. “As you can see, my body is still pretty fragile. That will change as I get more... skin.”

 

     “Now, I know what you’re thinking,” Trevor was talking faster now. The dope was starting to kick in. “If you’re crossing over to earth and you’re just a... I don’t know, let’s say a spirit, how the hell are you supposed to make your first kill? Because that’s how you get the skin, Joey. Well, that’s where Doyle comes in. You see, I made Doyle out of clay. That’s why I was down there so long. Because you have no idea how hard it is, giving life to someone that’s basically just a pile of mud.”

 

     Trevor paused long enough to exchange the air in his lungs for new air.

 

     “I did it though. I brought that big, dumb lug to life. Didn’t I, big guy?”

 

     He turned to look at Doyle, who belched and went on drinking his can of beer.

 

     Joe looked up at Doyle. His misshapen body seemed to make a little more sense now, even if Joe hadn’t completely accepted Trevor’s story yet.

 

     “Things were going all right until we managed to get topside. We came out down by the south-side bridge. You know that old bridge we used to go and smoke weed under?”

 

     Joe nodded.

 

     “Frank had told me that our crossing might attract some... unwanted attention.” Trevor’s eyes went to the door, then back to Joe. “Well, he was right. We noticed the first ones when we got the car. They were off in the distance, just waiting. The next ones were at Ned’s place, and still, they were just waiting. That’s why we came here, to try and give them the slip.”

 

     Joe stared at his friend. Seeing people hiding in bushes wasn’t exactly unheard of for the average tweaker, but Trevor had never been the paranoid type. He’d always managed to keep himself from getting too high.

 

     “You don’t believe me? Go have a look through the door. Tell me what you see.”

 

     Joe stood up and walked over to the door. He told himself that he was only humoring Trevor, but that wasn’t entirely true. As much as he didn’t want to admit it, a part of him did believe Trevor. There was something about the way he told his story that really got under Joe’s skin. Was it really so hard to believe, once you accepted the existence of the supernatural, that someone could come back from the dead? And if that was true, it only made sense that they could kill someone and use their body to rebuild their own. He thought of the way that Trevor’s hands were bleeding and how his cigarette smoke didn’t seem to go into his lungs but simply seep out of holes in his head. He thought about Doyle’s misshapen body and how the man hadn’t done anything besides drink beer and belch since they arrived. And most of all, he thought about the tree line.

 

     Each garage door had four small window slots in them. Joe bent and looked out the one closest to him. He hadn’t really expected to see anything, had he? He stared out the window at the gas pumps, his eyes straining, looking for ghosts.

 

     “There’s nothing out there,” he said.

 

     Joe turned around to see Trevor and Doyle standing behind him. They were five, maybe six feet away. Close enough that if Joe tried to make a run for the door, Doyle would catch him with one quick step.

 

     “What’s going on, guys?” Joe asked.

 

     “I think you know what’s going on, Joey,” Trevor said. 

 

     “Hey, man, whatever you guys are mixed up in, I don’t want any part of it. I let you guys come in to crash. So crash.” Joe was having trouble getting air into his lungs. It felt as if there just wasn’t enough oxygen in the room anymore. He took a step back and bumped into the garage door.

 

      “We’re not here to crash, Joey,” Trevor said. He was breathing deeply now, sucking air in through his mouth in big gulps, like a person with asthma might breathe into a paper bag. Joe noticed when Trevor opened his mouth that there were little spikes slipping out of his gums into the spaces between his teeth.

 

     “Hey, man, look, I’ve always had your back. You said it yourself,” Joe said.

 

     He didn’t like the pleading sound in his voice, but there was nothing he could do about it. He didn’t understand what was going on completely, but he knew enough to know that letting Trevor inside had been a bad idea. Colossally bad. Like selling to a cop in uniform.

 

     Trevor took one quick step forward, and as he did, something shattered in his leg. Joe heard the snap from where he stood by the garage door and suddenly remembered Trevor’s limp. Whatever he was doing trying to rebuild his body, he clearly hadn’t rebuilt that knee completely yet. Doyle turned to look at his master, and as he did, Joe bolted for the door.

 

     “Get him!” Trevor barked, but Joe was already on the other side of the garage, climbing the short staircase up to the front door.

 

     He didn’t think when he got to the door. He just pushed it open and froze at what he saw standing on the other side.

* * *

     It was human in shape but covered in a long, dark robe that hid most of its features. Joe thought that he could make out the shape of a face underneath its hood, but he couldn’t be sure. Looking at it was like trying to read a book through somebody else’s glasses. It made his eyes hurt, and against all his better judgment, he swore that the thing was vibrating just slightly, as if it didn’t really belong in this world.

 

     Joe’s eyes drifted to the scene beyond the thing in front of him. Scattered amongst the parking lot, all of them just out of reach of the light over the pumps, must’ve been a hundred more creatures just like the one in front of him. Behind them, lined up along the highway, were probably a hundred more. All of them still as statues and staring past Joe.

 

     The one in front of him reached its arm out and nudged him out of its way. Joe had just enough time to see that the thing’s hand was a claw with purple-and-red scales that ran back up its arm. The sight of it made Joe want to scream, but his throat was locked up tight.

 

     The thing walked inside, and a few of the others followed it, leaving Joe on the front porch. He could hear Trevor trying to get the Rolls started. There were shouts that followed, and then a loud, high-pitched scream. The things in the robes came back out, quiet and in single file, making their way toward the tree line. The last one dragged Trevor’s limp but very much alive body behind it.

 

     “See ya soon, Joey!” he shouted as they dragged him across the porch. He snapped his jaws open and shut, like an animal trying to nip at prey that’s just out of reach. “See ya soon!”

 

     He started to laugh when they got to the bottom of the stairs. A sick, unhealthy laugh. It was the laugh of the insane. It echoed in the still parking lot, making it sound like there were a hundred crippled Trevors being dragged across the lot.

 

     They dragged him up and over the road and into the tree line, and as they did, the others joined them. They all walked slowly and with determination.

 

     Like prison guards, Joe thought.

 

     None of them paid attention to Trevor even though he didn’t stop laughing once.

 

     Joe stood where he was on the porch and listened to that laugh as it began to fade away. He thought that he was able to hear it a lot longer than he should’ve been able to. After a while he was certain that he was only remembering the sound of it and his ears were playing tricks on him. But still he listened to it until it was gone. He peeked back into the garage. The Rolls was still there, and Doyle was lying lifelessly in the middle of the room. Joe guessed that the things that had taken Trevor had killed him. That is, if you could really kill clay. He walked back outside.

 

     The beer that Trevor had given him had rolled off the porch in all the commotion. Joe picked it off the ground and sat down on the front step. He turned the can over in his hands. He wanted it. There was no denying that. If anything, he thought that he deserved it. He ran his finger along the pull tab, envisioning himself ripping it open and downing the whole thing. Then he would go inside and see if Trevor had left any dope behind. There had to be something in that old Rolls.

 

     No one would ever have to know, he thought.

 

     He could hear Trevor offering him a rail in his head. You want a rail, Joey? It’s good stuff. 

 

     He could almost taste the bitter powder in the back of his throat. His heart started kicking in his chest a little harder, and damn it, this time he knew that he was just salivating at the idea of a good fix.

 

     His phone screeched its shrill ring, and he took it out of his pocket. Bill was calling. Joe looked at the screen in his right hand and the beer in his left. Bill would want him to answer. Would want him to set the beer down and start walking to town if he had to. Joe took one last look at the beer, before setting it back down on the porch next to him.

​

* * *

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End