Chapter Twenty-Six

That week was the longest of my life. 

Each day dragged worse than the last. I knew that every customer that came through those doors could have been a precious sale, or one of those things in disguise. Jerry offered to take over driving duties as penance for planning a party at the gas station without my permission, but I couldn’t risk taking any more breaks. Instead, I let him run errands. He picked up laundry and food. He watched the counter whenever I needed to take a hobo bath in the bathroom sink. Otherwise, I stayed at my guard post, sitting in front of the register. 

Howard never let up the pressure. Any time I started to think I was getting a handle on the situation, he’d send another goon to the store (always when I was alone) to steal and break things.

O’Brien wasn’t much help. She wasn’t much of anything. Ever since her super-secret assignment started we barely saw one another, save for those brief moments when she’d stop by to check on me and drink a cup of free coffee. But even those visits were getting noticeably shorter. I tried asking, just once, what she was working on, but she let me know that she wasn’t able to talk about it and that I needed to leave it alone for my own good.

Once upon a time, I would have been happy to leave it alone. The old Jack wouldn’t have even needed to have been told. But not anymore. Now I was fighting old-lady-monsters and listening to the Russian radio tapes on repeat, searching for clues. The thought hit me one cold and lonely night that I was different, and maybe, just maybe… I had been replaced.

“Amelia O’Brien has been targeted. Jeremy Pascal has been targeted. Jack Townsend has been targeted. Leland Cruz has been replaced. Rosa Vasquez has been replaced...”

I listened to the tapes a thousand times, but nothing ever changed. On one particularly desperate low, I even attempted to rebuild the radio, but whatever dark magic possessed Jerry to piece together this keyhole to the other side wasn’t reproducible. Maybe that was for the best. The radio was a liar, after all. I’d already concluded as much.

Suspiciously, nothing unexplainable happened that week. No new phone calls from Beaux. No more slug-monsters. No creepy salesmen or cameos from my long-dead friends. It was terrifyingly dull, like the calm before the storm, as if every terrible thing that ever wanted to hurt me was rallying, readying to attack all at once the second I let my guard down.

I tried to occupy my mind with things other than the impending doom. I read a couple books about how to run a small business and quickly realized how much we were doing wrong (turns out, a lot!). Unfortunately, I never did figure out the whole “paying taxes” thing. As a workaround, I stopped making bank deposits and stopped recording sales. All of our money went straight into the safe.

The credit card processing companies picked that week to finally hit me with their final “final” notices. When they said “payment due immediately,” they were using the traditional definition of all three words. At midnight on Tuesday, the credit and debit card machines stopped working altogether. For a business like a gas station, that’s what you might call a “major inconvenience.”

I had to purge the payroll of all non-vital employees. Most of our part-timers were very understanding (only a couple of death threats). Even Jerry didn’t seem to mind the fact that I wasn’t able to pay him anymore. By the end of the week, I was the only one officially working there. 

Our stock and supply vendors were next in line to complain about what I was trying to pass off as a “small payment hiccup.” They put up a big fuss until I promised to pay them in cash, too.

Just like that, the gas station was a cash-only establishment, just like the speakeasies in days of yore. It would have been a fine setup, except for the fact that we had way more dollars going out than coming in, and once we ran out of the real stuff, I had to try bartering with IOU’s.

That idea might have stood some chance of working if Doctor Butthole Howard hadn’t started threatening each of my suppliers. Very soon, word got out that our business wasn’t worth the trouble. The vendors stopped vending, the suppliers stopped supplying, and the customers stopped customing. Another nail in the coffin. In no time, we were running on the ghosts of fumes.

Whenever I wasn’t on the lookout for monsters or driving the business into the ground, I was planning that birthday party for Jerry. It was actually a welcome distraction in this trying time, but I still did a piss-poor job of it. He gave me a guest list, and I did what I could to track down and invite everybody on it, but in my defense, I think most of the names were stretch goals at best, including: The Bathroom Cowboy, Old Bob, Young Bob, Gumble, Deputy Arnold, The Rat King (whoever the hell that was), Brick Roscoe (but only the blind one), “the handsome guy who threw up all that blood that one time,” Rocco, any remaining Kieffers, and Chris Pratt. In the end, I had exactly two RSVP’s not including myself: Rosa and O’Brien. All in all, I considered that a success.

 

***

 

On the morning of Jerry’s birthday party, Doctor Howard graced me with his presence once again.

I was by myself, filling out that day’s batch of predatory loan applications when Howard walked up to my counter like he already owned the place. I hated him so much. He’s such an enormous dick!

“Well, well, well,” I said. “If it isn’t Doctor ‘Huge Dick’ Howard.”

He furrowed his brow. “Excuse me?”

God! Why am I so bad at insults?!

“Nothing! Stop trying to make it sound like I’m saying stupid things.”

“What are we doing here, Jack? What’s the point of all this? You’re clearly in over your head. You’re not just hurting yourself anymore. Your friends are worried about you, you know? And to be quite frank, it’s ruining their lives. Now is the time to get over your pride and do the right thing.”

He put a contract in front of me, little yellow post-its marking the places where I should sign to legally hand the business over to him. He’d made a point to highlight and even circle the proposed sale price: more money than his first offer. More money than I had earned in my entire life. (Sure, that’s not saying much, but this was truly an absurd amount.)

“I’m doing just fine. In fact, business is booming.”

The doctor raised his eyebrows and slowly turned in a complete circle, looking the entire place over again with a smile before saying, “Is that why all the shelves are empty?”

“Yep,” I answered. “We just had a huge rush of college kids. They’re our biggest new demographic. I sold a million fidget spinners this week. We’re swimming in financial liquidity here.”

He shook his head like a disappointed father. “What is it with you gas station clerks and your complete inability to tell the truth? You, Jeremy, the other guy. What was his name? Antonio?”

“Hey! Leave them out of this. You can’t get in my head. I already know all about Jerry’s past.”

The doctor laughed. “No, you don’t.”

“Yes, I do! I know he’s secretly rich and ran away to join a cult and his parents are looking for him.”

“If that’s what you think his big secret is, then I’ve got news for you. You don’t know your friend nearly as well as you think you do. Use your brain for once, Jack. Why do you think Jerry—of all people—never talks about his brother?” As he laughed in my face, something about him changed. His eyes were darker. His clothes became looser. His teeth, once so perfect, now looked sharp and yellow. “Perhaps I’m being the hypocrite. After all, I haven’t always been honest with you. Maybe I didn’t think you deserved to know the truth. Or maybe it was a courtesy, to spare you the pain.”

He was standing next to me now. He hadn’t moved though. He was just there, behind me, pointing at the contract with a long, boney finger. His nail was sharpened into a point like a claw as he tapped at the paper where it said “Seller’s Signature.”

“You see,” he whispered into my ear like fire. “I am a doctor. I’ve always been a doctor. Just not the kind you think.”

I realized we weren’t in the gas station anymore. I couldn’t tell where we were. There were no lights, but I could still see the only thing that mattered. The contract in front of me.

His voice had changed. The fake southern charm drained away. The new sound was like tearing paper. His words were venom. His tone uncompromising.

“Time for one last story. When I was a young man in my first life, no older than yourself, my village gave me a most grave and solemn task. It was upon me to decide a just and decent punishment. This was the burden of the doctor. You see, a man had committed crimes so heinous, they can’t be spoken of. But no amount of torture could ever equate to justice for what he did. So I communed with the elders—the doctors who had already passed on to the other side. They explained to me that this man couldn’t feel pain appropriately because he’d never truly felt joy. And so, we hatched a plan. We started by giving him a beautiful, loving wife. Then we showered his family with riches. We made him fat with food and wine. We gave him everything he could have ever dreamed of and more. Then, when he was happy, when he truly knew what joy was, we were finally able to destroy him, piece by piece.”

I felt the heat of the room like we were inside a fire. Sweat stung my eyes as I strained to move my neck but failed. The only thing I could see was the contract. It was enormous. And I was small.

The doctor continued, “Then came time to enact the punishment. His beloved children died at the very hands of his most precious wife. She then took her own life in front of his eyes. Before he could mourn, his fortunes vanished. His closest friends soured into enemies. His home, the one he built with his own hands, stayed the same. That was the cruelest part. A mansion with empty beds and no visitors. A table with no food. And when he inevitably tried to end his own life, I was there to stop him. Over and over. No matter how he begged, I made him live. His greatest punishment was yet to come. When he couldn’t move from the grief anchoring him into the earth, that’s when I came to his side, along with everyone he had wronged, and we told him the truth. None of that was real. He was never loved. His wife was a conjuring. His children, his home, and his happiness were phantasms of my creation, put in place to show him exactly what he never deserved to have.”

The invisible flames burned through my skin until I was nothing but a presence, same as the doctor. I tried to scream, but I had no voice. The only voice in this place was his.

“When he finally died, not one person in my village had any worry that he escaped from this life without paying the price for his sins. I tell you this story not to scare you. I simply want you to know what I am capable of. I need you to realize how far I’ve already gone. This is something I did to my own brother. Do you believe for one second I won’t do worse to you?”

And then, just like that, it was over.

I was sitting behind the counter by the cash register. The doctor stood across from me with his white suit and dapper haircut. A middle-aged, rich, white, southern gentleman. The perfect vessel for a being such as this. He smiled and gestured at the contract. He used his fake voice. His human voice. “Do we have an understanding?”

I balled up the papers and bounced them off his face.

He shook his head and said, “It didn’t have to be this way. I pity you over what comes next.”

The front door opened and Rosa rushed inside. (It was definitely Rosa, no matter what any stupid omniscient radio had to say about it. She waved at me and ran around the counter to give me a hug.)

“Hey, Jack! How are your knife wounds? I brought stuff for decorations for tonight! Oh, and there’s a cake in the car. It’s funfetti! I baked it myself!”

I looked around, confused. The doctor wasn’t there.

“What’s happening?” I asked.

“I came early! I had the whole day off and wanted to help you get everything ready for the party tonight. How are you at blowing up balloons?”

“Average, I guess.”

“Great! You’re on balloon duty. I’ll do colored streamers. But first, let’s get the music bouncing so we can get this party started right!”

She danced all the way out to her car while I tried to stifle my panic attack.