OUR LAST NIGHT: an edge of your seat ghost story thriller (7 page)

10 Hours, 2 Minutes

I’d entered a coffee shop and ended up in a gun store six miles away. So, yes, this was definitely getting worse.

“I have it,” Not Joe said.

I jolted.

“I have it, I have it,” he echoed, ducking into the back room to get something. I knew what it was. I knew exactly what he was talking about, because we’d had this conversation before. All of it. Even his annoyed grunt as I entered the store — “Well, shit” — because that was exactly what he’d said the first time. He knew I was here to pick up the Mosin Nagant that killed Mr. Dyson last year in Georgia. The creepy blood gun. Déjà vu didn’t even begin to describe it.

The jail-barred front door whooshed shut behind me, with JOE’S GUNS stenciled backwards on the glass. Under it, accompanied by a silhouette of a ghillied sniper shouldering his rifle: REACH OUT AND TOUCH SOMEONE. Outside, the blizzard was gone. No pelting waves of snow, no arctic winds. Just the same watery sky I remembered from Friday morning, dumping sporadic handfuls of slush. And my black Toyota Celica, now with no snow on the windshield, parked beside a blue Ford pickup.

This is time travel
, I thought numbly.

Like wristwatches running backwards in the Kalash. I’m falling back in time
—

Something clanked harshly on glass and I whirled, my throat tightening. Not Joe was back at the counter, setting the rifle on the surface. The Head-Scratching Rifle was once again bundled in its slimy, skin-like cocoon, because Not Joe couldn’t bring himself to touch it with his bare skin. Because, as he would shortly explain to me, it had just felt
wrong, radioactive somehow.

At least there was no cat piss on it this time.

He looked up at me again. “You know what this is?”

Last time, I’d played dumb and said:
An M44?
This time I just hesitated dumbly on the spot, words lumping on my tongue. My brain was a squirming coil of loose thoughts.

Free-falling backwards in time . . .

Time travel is always so clean in movies — our heroes punch a precise time and date into their magic device and away they go. Like selecting floors on an elevator. It was never like this; sporadic, uncontrolled, like plunging down a dark shaft to an unknown dark floor. I tasted slippery terror. I’d already barfed in the bathroom sink at Jitters two hours in the future, but who knows how this worked? Maybe my stomach was full again.

“I asked you a question.” Not Joe pointed at the rifle with two fingers, hooked in an arthritic claw. “Do you know what this is?”

Oh, God, I sure don’t.

I’d thought I did. But I’d been wrong.

The rifle lay between us like a bagged corpse. Smeared with those gummy clots of yellow-brown sludge I knew all too well. I could smell it again, that familiar stew of yeast and insect musk, and under it — yes, maybe Holden had been right — the sharp stench of decay? Putrid flesh, souring and bulging with trapped bacterial gases. Had it been hiding from me before? How did I miss it the first time? More importantly, when
was
the first time? Like a snake eating its tail, time was a dizzying loop.

“It’s a blood gun,” Not Joe answered his own question.

“Yeah. I know. It’s killed someone.” This was a deviation from Friday’s first timeline; I’d jumped the dialogue forward a few beats and stolen his line.

He didn’t seem to mind. “Do I know you?”

I didn’t have time to recite the script. “What time is it?”

“Twelve thirty.”

I checked my cell phone: 4:01 a.m.

Yep. Time and space is still broken.

“I . . . I don’t want to buy the gun,” I blurted out. “I changed my mind.”

The air thickened between us.

Not Joe eyed me crookedly, like I was an alien wrapped in human skin. He was right to be suspicious; I was an imposter in this world of Friday, March 19. I looked the part, I sounded the part, I literally
was
the part, but I felt stranded on the moon. Wearing my body as a spacesuit. In the corner of the store, a fluorescent light buzzed like a hornet, then flickered and died.

“Just now?” he asked. “You changed your mind?”

I shrugged aimlessly and leaned on the counter, as chilly as lake ice. “Like you said. It just feels . . . wrong, somehow.”

He looked puzzled. “I didn’t say that.”

“Believe me, you did.”

If this really was time travel, I supposed wishfully, perhaps I could just rewrite the past here by not purchasing that damn thing and simply leaving the store empty-handed. Maybe the Head-Scratching Rifle would retcon itself out of my life. Like entering the Cretaceous period and stomping on the right butterfly —
squish
— and then I could stand back and let Ray Bradbury’s temporal physics do the rest—

He shrugged. “Sure.”

“Sure?”

“But you still owe the transfer fee. To reimburse us for—”

“Deal.” I scooted my debit card across the glass. He punched buttons and tore a receipt. Thirty-nine dollars. I signed with a half-assed Nike swoosh and threw the pen down, glancing over at the rifle. “Done?”

“Done.”

“Transaction canceled?”

He nodded, making a sour face. “Something smells like cat pee.”

I wiped my hands on my jeans. I remembered that leering customer — the guy with cat piss on his breath who’d told me the story of Laika, the Soviet Union’s unlucky first cosmonaut — and wondered with a nervous tremor if that had been his breath after all. Time seemed to be porous; maybe odors seeped through. Was that even the first time I’d been here?

I stepped back, away from the Mosin Nagant on the counter. Technically, it wasn’t mine — not anymore — but that didn’t make me feel any better. Demonic evil probably doesn’t abide by Federal Firearms License paperwork. Somehow I knew with a grim certainty; I could flee Joe’s Guns right now and never look back, but the Head-Scratching Rifle would remain with me, its tendrils hooked inside me, its alien cells quietly multiplying in my brain like cancer.

I glanced up at a wall bristling with cutting-edge tech — P90’s, SCAR’s, F2000’s decked out with red lasers and holographic sights — and found it darkly amusing that the most dangerous thing in this room full of assault rifles was a wooden, single-shot clunker. Then again, I remembered,
assault rifle
is a misnomer. Adelaide had corrected me once, in this very same gun store:
Those are just scary-looking semi-automatics, Dan. Real military “assault weapons” have fire selectors for automatic fire, and they’ve been illegal in the US since the 1930s. So when you hear people wring their hands about how we need to ban those evil “assault rifles,” it tells you that they have no idea what they’re talking about.

Yes, she’d been a bit of a know-it-all. But her words stuck in my mind; an American gun nut with an oh-so-proper English accent. Sometimes I wondered if she ever felt like a cultural orphan, forsaken by both sides of the pond.

I shivered.

The temperature in Joe’s Guns was now plunging. I could feel the air change around us; a gathering chill that seemed to originate on the floor and rise in drafts. Cold pillows. Not as bad as the subzero heat-death of the Jitters parking lot, or the woods outside my house, but it was getting there. Fast. Like something else, something not of this world, was greedily siphoning the warmth.

I wondered:
why is it always so cold?

“You look familiar,” Not Joe said, his breath fogging the air between us. “You on TV?”

I wasn’t listening. Something else had occurred to me, something monumentally terrifying. Just one sentence. But the most terrifying sentence I’d ever read, because now I understood its meaning. The last thing Ben Dyson ever typed on that sweltering July afternoon in Macon, Georgia, via a WordPress post on his laptop, seconds before blowing his face off with the cursed Mosin Nagant I’d so willingly introduced into my life.

SO COLD IN HERE.

Not Joe paused and looked over my shoulder.

As I turned around, my mind whispered:
The ghost in the Soviet greatcoat. He’s here.

* * *

He was standing at the door.

Perfectly still, statuesque, as if he’d been out there for hours, peering eagerly into Joe’s Guns like a Black Friday shopper. Today’s milky daylight exposed every inch of him in crisp detail. I’d been right; that greatcoat was definitely Russian military-issue, worn in patches to reveal tufts of decayed yellow. So was the leather-brown utility belt encircling his belly, bulging with flapped pouches, pockets, and a dirty oilcan. All things I’d only seen before in black and white.

He wore a gas mask. It encircled his head in flattened walls like a half-crushed beer can, and two round eye apertures gave it a vaguely insectoid look. The nose of the mask was protracted, snout-like, and from it dangled a flaccid air tube. About a foot and a half of corrugated black rubber, attached to nothing. It looked like the design of the apparatus — some antique trench-warfare thing designed to guard against mustard gas or blister agents — called for the breathing tube to coil around the cheek, into a goiter-like filter box on the neck. This creature was wearing the mask incorrectly, but it hardly seemed to matter. I don’t think it breathed.

And it was standing outside the door. Staring at us, through the jail-barred glass, right over the REACH OUT AND TOUCH SOMEONE sniper sticker.

I shivered.

Not Joe regarded the man in the gas mask with dull suspicion, like he’d seen much worse, and glanced at me. “You know this guy?”

My throat dried up.

“
Hey
. You know him?”

“Kinda,” I managed.

“You don’t
kinda
know someone. Yes or no?”

I hesitated — actually, this could be the literal definition of
kinda
.

“I think he’s here for you,” Not Joe said.

I remembered the poor homeless guy who’d hitchhiked three time zones just to hang himself upside-down from the Kalash ceiling with barbed wire. And his nonsensical final words to his buddies:
Well, the Gasman has summoned me.

This was the Gasman.

He still held the severed upper half of Adelaide’s savannah monitor in one fist, like a toddler clutching a favorite toy. I recognized Baby’s front legs, her toe claws hanging limp. Several inches of bloody spine dangled from her torso, making her resemble a two-foot tadpole. With his other hand, the Gasman reached for the door.

“Oh,
shit—”

I lurched backward, off-balance, bumping a rack of blue gun manuals—

THUNK. The front door clicked.

Not Joe rolled his eyes.

I looked back and the door was still shut. The apparition was still outside. It took me a moment to realize — the Gasman had pushed it with his gloved hand. It hadn’t budged. So he adjusted his hulking stance, reached, and pushed again.

THUNK.

“Pull the door,” Not Joe said. “Don’t push it.”

The Gasman pushed again, harder.

THUNK.

“
Pull
the damn door. It’s on the sign—”

THUNK. THUNK.

The old man sighed. “Jesus Christ—”

“Don’t let him in,” I whispered.

“Son, he seems to be not letting himself in.”

“If he gets inside, shoot him.”

THUNK. THUNK. THUNK.

The Gasman kept forcing the door — the same identical motion, each time a little harder. A little rougher. The frame creaked. His head didn’t move; his mask stayed focused on us, studying us. Maybe just studying me. This thing had followed me,
stalked
me — from Saturday morning to Friday afternoon, from the twentieth of March to the nineteenth, like an extra-dimensional predator.

Who was, at the moment, baffled by a door.

THUNK-THUNK.

There was a frightening stupidity to those flat eyes. Maybe it was the way the eyeholes seemed to stare out in slightly opposite directions. Maybe it was the goofy snout-like profile of the mask, like a sports mascot. Or maybe it was the simple fact that it had spent the last ninety seconds pushing a door clearly marked PULL. But morbidly, I wondered if a human face even existed underneath that shaped rubber. My arms prickled and my next breath fogged the air.

The coldness,
I realized.
The Gasman brings it.

Like rancid meat brings flies.

Not Joe bunched up his flannel shirt to reveal a holstered pistol on his hip. “Hey!”

The Gasman paused.

“Yeah, you.” The old man’s voice boomed. “Take a big step back.”

The Gasman did. Then he kicked the door.

CRUNCH. The glass spider-webbed with icy cracks and the dangling open/closed sign clattered to the linoleum.

I backed up to the counter. “
Now
can you shoot him?”

“Not unless you’re gonna help me drag a giant-ass corpse inside.” It took me a second to grasp what Not Joe meant by that. His pistol was out now, held at his side, a boxy little automatic with a checkered grip. Through the corner of his mouth he hissed: “Go out the back and call 911.”