Tales From the Gas Station: Volume Four, page 38
part #4 of Tales From the Gas Station Series
I woke up on Armageddon Eve to the arrhythmic mechanical sound of chuchock, chuchock, chuchock! My eyes adjusted to the morning sun, as I slowly put the world back together in my head. I sat up and looked around. I’d been sleeping on the top floor of a hard plastic children’s playset. A yellow slide to my left, a covered tube to my right leading to the monkey bars. Inside the tube, Rosa was sound asleep using my balled-up jacket as a pillow. Gaston was curled into a ball on her chest, snoozing away and kicking his feet to the tune of unknown puppy dreams. I stared at the animal. There’s something very wrong with your dog. What horrors may lie in such unassuming places?
Chuchook!
I stood up to try and see where that noise was coming from. Travis was asleep nearby on the rusty merry-go-round. We’d come out of the woods near the elementary school playground the night before. The others were exhausted. I promised I’d stay up and keep watch while they got some rest. Something about all the trauma, starvation, and getting blown up must have really tired me out because I fell asleep without even trying.
Chuchook!
I turned my head and saw the blonde twenty-something guy at the other edge of the playground. He had a stack of colorful posters and a heavy-duty deluxe staple gun. A trail of posters adorned the trees to his left, leading to a Prius parked by a dirt trail from the forest. He continued on his merry way to the next tree, stuck a poster against the trunk, and- Chuchook!
I adjusted my wool sweater vest and wiped the dried blood off my face as I walked up to the gentleman with the stapler. “Excuse me.” He turned to face me with an alarmingly friendly smile on his face. “What are you doing?”
He gleefully explained, “We’re spreading the word about our glorious master, the great and merciless Karen, annihilator of eternity.”
I read the poster: “The end is Nigh! Are You ready to be Flayed down to the Nerves? Come Find Out! The Universal Fellowship of Mathmetists.” Next, I read his custom tee shirt: “Karen is bae!”
“You’re one of the cultists?”
“It’s not a cult, bro.”
Another voice unexpectedly entered the chat. “Brother, have you found a nonbeliever?”
I turned around to see the blonde twenty-something woman wearing a custom tee that read, “Be purified in Karen’s pain gravy!”
“This is what you guys are doing now?”
She smiled as she said, “His agony will make an excellent meal for our precious lord Karen.”
“Indeed, Sister. This heifer’s suffering will be utterly sublime.”
She giggled, “I see what you did there, Brother.”
An all-too-familiar sound pulled my attention away from the doomsdayers—the rumbling V-10 engine of a moving van. I turned and spotted the clowns’ vehicle as it pulled into the elementary school parking lot and disappeared around the side of the building. They must not have seen us yet. How did they find us again?! It was time for me to make a bold move.
“Well, you know what? Count me in! The idea of dying horrifically sounds swell to me.”
“Praise Karen!” they said in eerie unison.
“Sure, sure. Praise Karen. I’d love to check out your whole operation, but unfortunately my car ran away. Is there any chance you could let me bum a ride out to the compound? Like, right now?”
“It’s not a compound,” he said.
“But you may absolutely join us,” she said. “In fact, new Brother, soon you won’t have any choice. The end of days is nigh!”
“Nigh!” he echoed.
“Is it cool if my friends and dog come along, too?”
After a very brief explanation of the very brief plan, we loaded up in the very tiny Prius and started our journey to the Mathmetist camp. She drove. He took shotgun. “So this is like a hunting camp?” Travis asked from his spot in the middle seat.
“It’s more like an emotional evacuation point for the human soul, a place to discard individuality and give yourself over to something greater than mortal minds can conceive.”
“Oh, okay,” Travis responded. “Are y’all gonna kill us?”
She answered gleefully, “We wouldn’t dare steal that from Karen!”
Her compatriot asked wistfully, “Do you think our pain will drive us mad before death takes us?”
“Not likely! Karen will maximize our torture to extremes heretofore undreamt of. It won’t be any fun if we can escape into insanity.”
They both laughed in unison. Travis turned to me and whispered, “You sure about this?”
I’m pretty much never sure of anything, but the plan was neat and simple: Go hide out among the cultists. Needles in a stupid haystack. There’s strength in numbers, after all.
The car jerked to one side. Tires screeched against the road. “Damn!” the driver said. “I missed him!”
“Missed who?” asked Rosa.
“There was a baby woodchuck in the road,” she explained. “Do you mind if we go back and try again?”
“Leave it be, Sister. More souls for Karen’s harvest. The lucky sacrifices have already been accepted.”
I was totally prepared to let that go, but Rosa couldn’t help herself. “Sacrifices?”
She answered, halfway singing, “Last night, three farms were chosen to receive the omen of unholy slaughter. Cows torn in half and exsanguinated. A beautiful miracle, heralding the approach of sacred Karen.”
Travis blurted out, “Y’all are fucking weird.”
The car pulled into the winding forest path leading to the compound. I stayed silent, but my mind wasn’t in the mood to follow.
What killed the cows? I closed my eyes and grit my teeth as the answer hit me. I did. I killed those cows. I killed them when I forgot to go back to the gas station to feed the dog. The last time I forgot to feed, the dog killed six goats in one night. And now… Sabine was right. There’s something very wrong with your dog. I had to get back there before things got any worse.
“Hello, Brother. Hello, Sister. What have you brought us?”
“These are our new recruits.”
“Welcome to Mathmetism. Hail Karen!”
“Hi, my name is Rosa, and this is Gaston.”
“Not anymore. Henceforth, you shall be Sister and Dog. We are so glad to have you with us at this most pivotal time, Sister. There is much work to be done before the great harvest of agony. We can use your assistance in the abattoir tent. Do any of you have experience with butchering animals?”
Travis snorted, hocked a loogie into the grass, and said, “Sure, I can give it a try.”
Rosa rocked Gaston nervously and asked, “Do you have anything less… horrible?”
“We need help making the team breakfast.”
“Yeah, that’s much more my speed.” She lifted the drooling animal in her hands and said in a puppy voice, “Gaston, would you like to help us scramble some eggs?”
“Oh, terribly sorry, but you’ll need to leave Dog outside. It’s, you know, a health and sanitation issue. We wouldn’t want anyone to get sick before Karen’s arrival, now would we?”
Rosa gave them a look of pity and confusion and asked, “What?”
“Don’t worry, I got him,” Travis said, taking the pup out of her arms. “We’ll see you at brekkie. And remember, I like my bacon medium rare.”
One cultist showed Rosa into the building, another walked Travis to the giant tent erected on the other side of the lot. Despite appearances, I knew they’d be safe here. And with that knowledge, I could focus on the current emergency. I looked at the remaining cultists standing watch outside the compound and said, “I need to borrow a car for a little while.”
“Okay.”
“That’s it?” I asked. “I don’t have to sign it out or anything? No questions? No follow-up? Just, ‘Okay’?”
“Just pick out a car from the lot. They all have keys in the ignition and full tanks of gas. If you try to leave, you won’t make it far. Never forget, we all burn the same under the watchful eyes of Karen.”
“Hail Karen!”
Under the watchful eyes of Karen, I walked over to where the Mathmetists’ fleet of vehicles were parked at the ready. I picked out a modest-looking Toyota and found the door to be open, just as advertised. I was just beginning to marvel at how things were going a little too easily until I heard, “Arp! Arp!”
I turned around to see Travis holding Gaston and giving me a you’re-busted look. “Where ya going?” he asked.
“It’s not a big deal. But there’s something I need to take care of back at the gas station. It’ll only take a second. I’ll be back before breakfast is ready.”
“Only take a second, huh?” He walked up to me and plopped the dog into my arms. Gaston started licking my face while Travis slipped past me into the driver’s seat. “Well, what are you waiting for? Get in.”
The parking lot was empty when we arrived. I instructed Travis to stay in the car and keep the engine running. I told him to keep an eye on Gaston, then told Gaston to keep an eye on him, then I left and hurried into the building, noting the vibrant orange sign taped to the front door that read, “WARNING! By Order Of the County Board of Health, This Property is CONDEMNED.”
Took them long enough.
Once inside, I gave the place a quick scan to make sure there weren’t any active fires, then made a beeline for the storage room where we kept the remaining bags of dog food. I opened the door, then screamed.
Jerry screamed back. I screamed again. So did he.
“What are you doing here?!” I shouted.
“I was trying to take a nap! Do you have any idea how hard it is to fall asleep on one of those jail cell cots? Oh, wait, never mind. Pretend I didn’t ask that. What’s up, dude? Did you kill Karen yet?”
“No, I didn’t kill-” I took a second to catch my breath and center myself. “I thought you were still in prison.”
“Technically, I was never in prison. I was in ‘jail.’”
“How is this helping?”
“Never mind,” he said, climbing out of his hammock. “Here’s what happened: This morning, Sheriff O’Brien released me from holding. She told me to keep my nose clean and not to leave town.”
“Why would she do that?”
“If I had to guess—which I did because I’m not a mind reader—it was because she’s still trying to find you and ran out of leads, so she decided to use me to get to you. She put a tracking device on the Nissan and a couple of plain-clothes deputies on my tail, just in case.”
“But doesn’t that mean we’re about to get caught?”
He laughed and said, “C’mon, dude. I know how to lose a tail. All you need is a baby car seat, ninety-nine cents worth of crazy glue, and a bit of good timing.”
“I’ll try to remember that. What about the tracker?”
“Oh, I gave your car to a homeless gentleman and walked the rest of the way here. Hope you don’t mind.”
“Why would I mind? Did you by any chance feed the dog since you got back?”
A look of serious understanding washed over his face. “No. I’ve been busy being incarcerated. I thought you did.”
“No, I’ve been busy running for my life from clown monsters.”
All he had to say was, “Oh.”
All I could respond was, “Yeah.”
I walked over and grabbed a fresh sack of dog food. Better late than never, right? As soon as I left the closet, I heard Gaston’s excited, “Arp! Arp!”
“Hey bro,” Travis said. “We got bored waiting in the car.”
Jerry stepped out of the closet and said, “Travis! I thought you were dead again!”
“Again?”
“Arp! Arp!”
Jerry laughed in surprise. “Seriously? You went back for Gaston? Let me guess, Rosa guilt-tripped you into it, right?”
“Arp! Arp! Arp!”
I set the back of dog food onto the floor and asked, “What do you mean?”
“Arp! Arp! Arp!”
Travis tried to calm Gaston down, but he was so excited to see Jerry, he could barely contain himself.
“I’m sorry, buddy,” Jerry said. “It wasn’t anything personal, you know.”
“What wasn’t anything personal?”
“ARP! ARP! ARP! ARP!” He was going positively crazy.
“You know, when I took him back to the pet shelter.”
“When exactly did you take him back to the pet shelter?”
He jumped out of Travis’s hands and sprinted across the floor to leap into Jerry’s waiting arms. As Jerry picked him up and gave him a thorough petting, he answered, “You know, when you were still at the can’t-get-out-of-bed part of the grieving process. Is Rosa mad at me? I knew she wouldn’t let me do it if she knew what I was doing, so I told her I was going to the pet store for supplies.”
I was starting to get that tingling feeling on the back of my neck—the one I usually get right before something horrifying and/or calamitous happens. “But,” I said. “You didn’t really go to the pet store for supplies. You actually went to return Gaston.”
“Yeah,” Jerry said as the puppy went to town licking him in the face. “What did they say when you went back to get him? Were they annoyed? Did they make you pay the adoption fee again?”
“We never went back to the shelter.”
“Do huh what now?”
“I mean, Gaston never left.”
The pup let out an annoyed whine as Jerry slowly lowered him to the ground. He spoke slowly, “Are you telling me… that this dog… this one right here… is not the same dog that I returned to the shelter two days ago?”
Travis was a few seconds behind us, but he eventually pieced together what we were already sweating about. “Oh shit!” he yelled. “It’s a trojan horse dog!”
“Or,” I said, slowly making my way to the counter, “it’s a mimic.”
Jerry took a step back as “Gaston” sat in place, tongue out, panting and enjoying all of this sudden attention. “Are we sure mimics can even mimic dogs?”
Travis was never very good at reading the room, but I still didn’t expect him to walk right up to the dog, point a finger at him, and start interrogating. “Alright you little sumbitch, who do you work for? What are you hiding? Why are y’all tryin’ to kill me?”
“Travis,” I said urgently. “Step away from him.”
Travis didn’t listen to me. He kept escalating the situation. “He knows what’s going on! Think about it. How else did the clown bros know where to find us? You thought they were trackin’ my phone, but really, it’s been him all along. These bastards killed my friends and forced me to shit in a bucket for days. I’m done playin’ around! It’s high time we squeeze their little spy for information.”
Gaston arped innocently. Travis sneered at him and said, “I ain’t fallin’ for it. Maybe a boot to your little head’ll jog your memory.”
“TRAVIS NO!”
He pulled back his leg and leaned his entire body into a powerful kick that would have sent any normal dog soaring through the air. Travis screamed in agony. It took me a second before I saw why. A bony protuberance of interconnected joints had erupted from Gaston’s back—an elongated spinal cord, curved forward like a scorpion tail. The unguis—a solid black stinger—had pierced through Travis’s foot, staking him into the ground an inch from the dog’s face.
“Arp.” Four more pointed talons sprouted from each of the dog’s dewclaws, lifting the animal several inches, its new legs resembling shimmery wet bones. “Arp.” It leaned its head back and opened its mouth wide, wider than should have been possible. The jaw snapped and skin stretched away until there was nothing left of Gaston’s face but a meaty red skull that sizzled and crunched and morphed into a new shape. A new mandible and carapace formed together from slithering black and morphed into a wide smile. The dog eyes stretched into vertical ovals, and finally, a new layer of skin wrapped itself across the monstrous face. It looked like an artistically challenged child’s crayon drawing of a human. “Arp,” it said in a deep, guttural voice.
Travis screamed, “What the hecking fuck is that thing!?”
The inside-out scorpion dog with its bone-stilt legs and Glasgow smile craned its neck to look towards me and speak the words, “Be not afraid.”
“Oh fuck me it talks!” Travis exclaimed. “It talks human words! Holy heck y’all! Holy fucking heck!”
I snapped back into action and jumped over the counter to find the right tool to dispatch this newest nightmare creature, but the sword-bat was nowhere to be found. Driven by desperation, I opened the bottom drawer of the cabinet and pulled out the secret weapon hidden therein.
I stood up in time to see Jerry’s valiant attempt to save the day. “Hey, Uggo!” he shouted, brandishing the sword-bat. The grotesque canine twisted its neck to face its attacker. “My name is Jerry,” he said, lifting the sword bat over his head. “Knife to meet you!” The weapon came down with a thwack-crunch, severing the link between the animal and its scorpion tail. Runny black liquid sprayed forth from both points of separation. The creature squealed and skittered towards the wall, leaving a black slime trail in its wake. “Aw, come on! Don’t be a sword loser!”
The mutant dog turned around again. Its back legs grew longer, then cracked and bent into a shape that I might have noticed resembled the legs of a giant flea, if I had more time to process the situation before- Snap! The animal launched itself at missile speed and landed on Travis, planting its boney claws around his head and torso and sinking its teeth into the back of his neck. Travis screamed, loudly at first, but his volume quickly ran out as the creature siphoned out the black goo. With each heaving gulp, Travis’s face turned another shade paler, and the creature’s body swelled larger and larger, ballooning in size like an inflated tick. Jerry ran and swung, but the creature saw it coming. It smacked the weapon out of Jerry’s hand, sending it flying across the room. I’d seen more than enough. It was now or never.
I took the bear bell, flicked off the magnet, and gave it a vigorous shaking. The jingle, jingle, jingle was almost lost below the sickening sounds of Travis’s life being slurped away, but the dog heard and understood the message from where it slumbered below the building: Dinner time. Come and get it.[35]
