Supernatural Travel Agency 1, page 1
Supernatural Travel Agency 1
Dante King
Copyright © 2024 by Dante King
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
v001
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Contents
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Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
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Immortal Swordslinger
Bone Lord
Chapter 1
This cannot possibly be the place, I thought, pulling my car into the parking lot. They want me to interview here?
I certainly had my choice of parking spaces. The lot was completely deserted, despite the fact that it was mid-afternoon on a Saturday—what was normally prime shopping time. This mall should have been bustling with customers, but there was nothing to be seen here besides weeds.
“Turn left,” my GPS curtly informed me. Like me, it seemed to be confused—and expecting something other than what I was looking at. “Then, turn right. Then, your destination will be on the left.”
I sighed and switched off my phone, pocketing it as my old rust-bucket sedan cut across three lines of empty parking spaces. I knew what my destination was—the old Azalea Mall, where my grandparents used to take me as a kid to buy comic books and visit the baked goods outlet. I hadn’t been here in years. When I got the notice that my interview would be carried out at this place, my first thought was that it must have been a mistake—that it had closed years ago.
The Azalea Mall hadn’t closed, but it looked to be on its last legs. The large department stores that had once served as the complex’s anchor were all shut down. The painted over remains of a Sears sign stared balefully down at me as I drove beneath the building’s shadow. None of the doors leading inside seemed to be unlocked.
The steering wheel shuddered beneath my fingers. I didn’t like that tremor, and I especially didn’t like how my car had been making it more and more over the last couple of weeks. Like the mall whose parking lot I was currently traversing, it too had seen better days.
My car needed repairs, but repairs were expensive. Everything was expensive, as I’d learned in the last year, and it was even more so when you weren’t gainfully employed. Rent, bills, utilities… they had a way of piling up, of growing bigger and bigger until everything collapsed beneath the weight of them, all at once.
I shook my head, clearing it. I couldn’t think about that right now. I needed to stay positive. Stay focused. Eyes on the prize.
This would be my fourth interview in two weeks, and the first three had all been busts. The last one I’d only just made in time, but today I was here early—enough time to get something to eat, calm my nerves, and prepare for a successful interview.
Eventually I found the entrance I was looking for. In better times it would have been the main entrance to the mall itself: a pair of massive twin columns flanked a set of glass doors, opening onto the remains of an expansive food court. An empty building whose faded front proclaimed to have been a national bookstore chain sat to its immediate left, vacant and forgotten.
I pulled out my phone and scrolled through my email, wanting to double-check the information about the interview.
Ah, there it is, I thought. Mystic Getaways, located in the Azalea Mall. The logo was totally 90’s, but the pay was definitely 2030’s—shockingly good, in fact. Enough to put me back on my feet.
Another rumble nearly pulled me from my seat. Something slipped inside the crankcase of the sedan’s engine, and the motor gave a whine like an angry dog struggling against its leash. I froze, torn between trying to take it for a quick circle around the parking lot to verify it could still run and not wanting to know whether it could.
“Well, I’d better get this one,” I said, putting it in park. “Otherwise, I might be hitchhiking home.”
The sun hit me like an open oven door as I stepped out of the sedan. Even in November, Florida was a freaking oven. At the rate it was going, we were going to have a warm Christmas.
As I made my way up the parking lot and headed in the direction of the food court, I wondered if the alternate-Floridas were as hot for the Alex Kaines in the other universes.
It was crazy, really—both how much and how little my world had been changed by the discovery of the multiverse. How long had it been? Six years? Seven?
Seven, I thought. I was twelve.
Some scientist working with the Large Hadron Collider—a guy named Enoch something-or-other—discovered a particle that was both very dense and very, very tiny. By building a lot of those particles, you could make a kind of really, really heavy knife—one capable of cutting through the fabric of the universe into another universe on the other side.
The discovery led to massive societal upheaval. For, like, six months. Then everybody calmed down and went back to normal.
As it turned out, all the feverish science fiction fantasies were wrong. Humanity had made contact with six different parallel universes since Enoch’s technology came about: six that they admit, anyway. And all of them were basically just our universe. Sure, a few things were different: a sports game here, a Speaker of the House there. A new music group that was super popular in the universe next door, and some group that was super popular here didn’t exist. Or the Berenstain Bears were the Berenstein Bears, and everyone who’d ever suffered from the Mandela Effect felt simultaneously vindicated and frustrated.
But there were no crazy universes. No Nazi worlds, no planet where William the Conqueror fell off his horse and left all of England to the Swedes back in 1066. No universe where the Roman Empire never fell, or anything like that. Instead, they were… ordinary.
And so, people just started to accept it as part of life.
The Azalea Mall might have been on the verge of shutting down, but its air-conditioning bills must have been paid. Frosty air washed over me as I stepped through the set of double doors leading in through the vestibule, and the sweat on my button-down shirt froze as I entered the mall.
Walking through the Azalea Mall was like walking through a low-rent haunted house. At any moment, I expected some guy in a Ghostface mask to come out, waving a plastic butcher’s knife. I was surprised not to see broken glass littering the floor.
The janitor must have been the first position to get laid off when traffic started to slow. No one had cleaned out the garbage cans in a long time, and the white tiled floor could have used a good scrubbing. The disorder extended to the shops themselves, most of which were closed down with those heavy metal gates pulled shut over the entrances. They looked like they’d been shut down a long time ago.
When this place was open there’d been over a dozen different places to get a bite to eat at the food court, now there was only one. Most of the other stalls were shut down, with the same steel shutters slammed down over their fronts. A few looked like the people who’d worked there had just walked out in the middle of a shift: they still had their signs up but switched off, along with dusty looking soda fountains and blank cash registers.
I looked around in all directions. Where the hell was this Mystic Getaways place? Where was my interview? Was there even anyone here?
I was surprised to see a bored looking young woman lounging behind the counter of the only food stall with its lights on. A tacky sign above her head proclaimed it the Lucky Chef, with a little cartoon cook on the side holding a pair of chopsticks with noodles wrapped around them. The smell coming from the stall was delicious.
“Excuse me,” I said, getting the girl’s attention. “Can you help me?”
She blinked. Only now did I realize she had her phone beneath the level of the counter, hiding it from view. A YouTube video from a channel I didn’t recognize was playing on the screen. She’d been watching it rather than working, for which I didn’t blame her. Why bother looking busy when there was no one else in the mall?
The girl looked up at me and did a double take, like someone starting out of a trance. “Shit!” she said, putting a hand to her chest. “You scared me!”
“I’m sorry to bother you,” I said, thinking as I said it that I was probably the only other person in this entire building. “I’m looking for Mystic Getaways. Do you have any idea where it is?”
From the look on her face, I wasn’t the first person to ask her that question. Her eyes narrowed, as if I’d just admitted some harmless but personally embarrassing secret. “Why? You looking to book a trip?”
“No, I’ve got an interview for a job there. I feel like I’ve walked through the whole mall twice now and missed it.”
The girl’s eyes widened. A lock of dyed hair fell over her face, and she brushed it away from her eyes. “Oh! Yeah, they’re right over there.”
She pointed. In the direction of her finger was a small side hallway I hadn’t noticed before. It wound around the outside of the abandoned bookstore, traveling in a direction I hadn’t realized was anything other than a wall. Without her help, I probably never would have found it.
I stared at the side hallway where the travel agency apparently was. That was a weird place to have a storefront, to say the least. Ordinary foot traffic would never find it, especially without a sign to let potential customers know where it was. You wouldn’t set up shop there unless you didn’t want to be disturbed.
The girl already had her thumb on the screen of her cell phone. She was about to load the video back up. Now that I was a little closer, I could see that on the screen was a cute blonde in tight athletic clothes. She looked like she was modeling outfits. If it had been a guy watching a video like that instead of a girl, I might have been a little skeeved out.
“Yeah, you can’t miss it,” the young woman said. “It’s the only open store.” She glanced up at the sign over her head, as if she’d only just remembered she was supposed to be selling food. “Did you want something to eat before you go?”
My stomach gave an undignified rumble at the question. It was loud enough that the girl heard it and giggled.
“That sounds like a yes.”
I patted my pocket, realizing that I’d left my wallet in the car.
“Uh, actually, I’m okay,” I said, glancing over at the hallway she’d indicated. “I don’t have any cash on me.”
She gave me a strange look. For the first time, I got the impression that the girl behind the counter was actually seeing me. Until that moment, I’d been just a nuisance—another customer, in a place that had far too few of those to see a profit.
A smile tugged at the corner of her mouth. “I won’t tell anyone if you don’t,” she said, taking out a pair of tongs. “And there’s actually something you can do for me to make it up, anyway. Deal?”
My stomach growled again. Whether or not my brain was going to accept the offer, I knew what my gut wanted. Food.
The girl behind the counter didn’t wait for me to answer. She grabbed two egg rolls from one of the heated plates and dropped them in a small Styrofoam container, grinning as she did it. “One sec,” she said, turning away. “I’ll get you something to drink.”
She squatted down and opened a small refrigerated cooler, filled with Coke and Diet Coke. As she grabbed it, I saw a hint of black thong peek out from underneath her jeans.
She added a can of Coke to my order. “There,” she said, still grinning. “For good luck.”
My hunger overrode my pride. I grabbed one of the egg rolls and bit into it. I expected it to taste stale, like it had been sitting at the bottom of a warmer all day. But it was fresh and delicious—like she’d made it five minutes ago.
“Damn. That’s amazing.”
She handed me a napkin to wipe my mouth. “I’m glad. If you feel really bad about it, you can pay me back once you get the job. Mystic Getaways pretty much keeps this place open, anyhow. It’s the only source of customers we have any more.”
I could see that. The food court was deserted.
“But there’s something else I’d be happy to trade for the meal,” she said, her tone turning conspiratorial.
“And what’s that?” I said as I swallowed back the food, chasing it down with Coke.
“I want you,” she said, leaning forward and lowering her voice, “to tell me what the hell that place’s deal is.”
Deal? I dug into the second egg roll. “I don’t get it.”
She nodded like she’d expected this. “Mystic Getaways is… weird,” she said, glancing past me at the hallway. “They’ve only got the one storefront, but I’ve heard rumors that they own half this mall.”
“Really?” I found that hard to believe.
The girl nodded. “My uncle wanted to open up an acupuncture salon on the opposite side of the mall a few months back, just to try and drum up some business at the restaurant. Brand synergy, you know? But the LLC that owns the place, they wouldn’t let him. Every site he picked, they told him it was already owned.” She lowered her voice even further. “Look around this place, dude. Do these stores look like they’re in operation to you?”
They did not. I frowned, feeling the spike of unease in my stomach grow. The egg rolls and the Coke tampered it down a bit, though, so I wasn’t that freaked out.
“Sounds interesting,” I said. “It did feel a little like I was about to have my organs harvested when I first walked in here.”
The girl laughed at that. “Tell me about it. I’ve always been so curious about that place. If you could tell me anything—anything at all—about it, I’d be super grateful.”
It was kind of a weird request. But, well: the girl had been so nice to me, giving me free food and all. And it sort of made sense. If you worked in an abandoned mall all day, you’d naturally be curious about the places that were still hanging on to customers, right?
“Will do,” I said, putting the empty can of Coke back on the counter. The girl made the Styrofoam plate and the can disappeared so quickly that only the sense of fullness in my gut proved that I’d eaten anything at all. “I’ve gotta get the job first, I guess. Have they been interviewing a lot of people?”
The girl’s brows scrunched together. “Huh?”
“The interviews,” I said, a strange sensation washing over me. Surely they’d been interviewing potential employees for a while, right? “Lots of people coming and going, all dressed up like I am with hope in their eyes…”
The girl shook her head. “You’re the only person I’ve seen today,” she said, picking her phone back up. “Only person I’ve seen yesterday, too.”
That… made very little sense. Maybe I was about to have my organs harvested. If that was the case, then this girl who worked in the food court might be the last person to see me alive. At least I’d had a decent final meal.
“I’m Alex,” I said, extending a hand over the counter. “Alex Kaine. It’s nice to meet you.”
She stared at the hand for a moment, then graciously took it. “Fang,” she said, giving me a squeeze in return.
“Interesting name,” I said.
“Interesting?”
“It’s cool,” I said with a smile.
She smiled back. “Good luck with the interview. If you get the job, Alex, we’ll probably be seeing a lot of each other.”
I certainly hoped so. She seemed like a pretty cool girl, all things considered.
“Thanks for the grub,” I said, nodding. “I’ll pay you back ASAP.”
Fang batted my promise away like it was vaguely annoying. “Please. Just go! Kick ass at that interview.”
I made my way across the food court, heading for the hallway she’d indicated.
“And if they turn out to be the Illuminati, let me know!” she called out, laughing.
Grinning, I stepped into the darkened hallway. I was feeling refreshed and ready for my interview. It was time to show Mystic Getaways that I was the right man for the job.
Chapter 2
Mystic Getaways looked exactly the way I expected it to.
Just as Fang had said, the storefront was located all the way at the end of the hallway. A tiny vestibule opened up onto the other side of the building, revealing a parking lot I hadn’t noticed before. If I did get the job, I wouldn’t have to walk much to get to where I worked.
