“You’re an art major?” he asked, breaking the silence and using the question as an excuse to turn to Dana.
“Art and political science,” she said.
Those eyes...
“Oooh, triple threat,” he muttered.
A frown, a smile. He liked both.
“That’s only two things,” she said quizzically.
“Yes, a double... threat. That sounds weird. Let’s just say I find you threatening.”
“I thought you were dropping art?” Curt asked.
“Uh, no, never mind...” Jules said, slapping Curt’s thigh and glaring at him.
“I’m switching a few courses,” Dana said coolly.
“How come?” Holden asked, and then he twigged it.
Oh, so slimy bastard shithead had been a lecturer?
“For no reason!” Curt blurted. “For very good reasons that don’t exist.” Then he pointed. “Hey look, trees!”
“We have patterns,” Marty said, and Holden felt the pressure lift. He’d only known him for a couple of hours, but he liked Marty already. A chilled dude. “Societally. The beautimous Dana fell into one of the oldest patterns and we are here to burn it away and
pour ash into the grooves it has etched in her brain. Cover the tracks and set her feet on new ground.” Holden leaned sideways in his seat until his and Dana’s shoulders were touching, and he felt her hair on his cheek and neck. “Is it okay if I don’t follow that?” And she actually
leaned back into
him before saying, “I’d take it as a favor.”
“Gas!” Curt shouted. Through the windscreen, Holden caught sight of a ramshackle building beside the road. “Gas,” Curt repeated, quieter, “and maybe someone who knows where we actually are.”
The five friends fell silent as he brought them to a standstill beside two ancient fuel pumps. The red, rusting hulks stood on a crumbling concrete pedestal, a bucket of sand sitting between them, a rickety-looking tin sheet canopy above supported by weathered timber posts. It looked as if the slightest breeze would knock the whole thing over, and Holden thought vibrations from the Rambler might just do the job.
“Does anyone have a banjo I can borrow?” Marty asked. “In fact, I see one bald kid, and I’m outta here.” “It’s just a bit run down,” Holden said, but his observation was so far off the mark that no one even challenged him. “A bit run down” might mean something that needed a lick of paint, or a bit of reorganizing, or the attention of someone used to calmness and order. This place—the pumps, the building beyond them, and the surrounding area— looked as if it had been blown up and put back together again by a blind man. With no tools. Or hands.
“Shit,” he whispered to himself.
Beyond the pumps, the main building appeared to have been assembled from the tumbled remains of several others. Timber boarding didn’t quite meet flush, no corner was quite ninety degrees, and the patterns of fading the sun had left on the wall were uneven and haphazard. Many of the boards had nail holes where there were no longer nails, and in some places the bent, rusted remains of a nail still protruded, as if someone had tried to fix the boards from within. The corrugated roof covering was uneven and rusting, holes punched in two places for small chimneys.
Windows were out of true, dusty glass hiding any view of the inside. Even in several panes where the glass had been smashed out there was nothing to be seen. Holden thought perhaps the building had been plucked from the ground by a tornado and dumped here from several miles away, and ever since it had been preparing for collapse.
Scattered around the building, like the detritus of that same tornado strike, were all manner of objects, whole and in parts. Oil or gasoline barrels, rubber pipes twisted like long snakes in the grass, a chopping block with piles of splintered timber and a rusted axe buried in its top surface, an old cement mixer, and the carcasses of furniture now devoid of upholstery, their springs and metal bracing joining the rest of the surroundings in rot.
“Well,” Curt said, stretching in his driver’s seat. “We still need gas. And directions.”
“And I need to take a leak,” Jules said. She opened the door and stepped out, glancing back nervously as she did so.
Holden looked at Dana and smiled, pleased to see that her nervousness lifted as she smiled back.
“Maybe they’ll sell home-made jerky,” Holden said, and propelled by groans of disgust he followed Jules outside.
They stood close to the fuel pumps. The smell of fuel was almost reassuring, because it meant that they were still working even though they looked like they hadn’t been used in years. Holden scraped the dusty ground and shifted aside sand that had been scattered on places where fuel had spilled. Despite all appearances to the contrary, he thought perhaps this was actually a working fuel stop.
He just wondered what the insides of the building contained.
“Billa bing, bing-bing, bing-bing, bing-bing,” Marty said, playing an imaginary banjo.
“I’m thinking this place won’t take credit cards,” Curt said, touching a pump delicately as if afraid it would fall apart.
“I don’t think it knows about
money,”
Marty said. “I think it’s
barter
gas.”
Curt leaned left and right, stretching up on his toes, trying to see if anyone was around.
“Well, I need to pee,” Jules said again, heading around the side of the building.
“I’ll see if anyone’s home,” Holden said, looking
across at Curt. His friend nodded, then glanced back at the Rambler.
I’ll keep watch,
his look said, and Holden nodded once. He was on edge... but not quite nervous enough to
not
watch Dana as she followed Jules around the side of the dilapidated building. She was wearing a fitted blue jacket, but it only came down just past her hips, and he could still admire the way her butt moved in her jeans.
As they disappeared around the corner he headed for the front door. It stood ajar, and looked as if it could never close all the way. The door didn’t quite seem to fit the frame.
It scraped across grit on the floor as he forced it open. He saw curved scrape-scars in the timber floor boarding.
“Anyone here?” he asked. But the building’s insides swallowed his voice, offering no echoes at all. He left the door open behind him to provide more light, and because he didn’t want to hear that pained scraping again, ventured inside.
“Hello?” Curt called outside. There was no answer from anywhere, inside or out. And as Holden’s eyes grew accustomed to the gloom, his sense of unease only increased.
“Holy shit,” he muttered. It seemed as if he’d landed in redneck heaven.
He thought that perhaps it had once been a shop, but he couldn’t imagine anyone wanting to buy anything from this place anymore. He couldn’t imagine anyone wanting to
stand
in here, for more than a couple of
minutes. The smell was rank, a spiced blend of fusty age and progressing rot, and flies buzzed here and there.
Why are the flies in here?
he wondered, and he had a sudden image of finding the proprietor dead and decaying on the floor somewhere, maggots crawling in his eye sockets and rats gnawing at—
“Hey!” he called, looking for movement, listening for acknowledgment. There was neither.
Wooden shelving and tables provided perimeter storage, and there were also two island units. Tinned goods were stacked here and there, the labels so faded by damp and age that he couldn’t make out most of them. Tomatoes, perhaps? Corn? From metal poles braced across the ceiling hung several animal pelts, and one table seemed to be taken with various experiments in taxidermy. Several boxes and glass jars held what might also be a part of the experiment; in one glass jar something floated, its shape and origins vague in the opaque fluid.
There were meat mincers and slicers fixed to another tabletop, flies dipping in and out of both, dark speckles marking the hardened remains of old meat. One shelving unit in the corner was stocked with glass jars, some containing pickled vegetables of some kind, another holding what appeared to be boiled animal bones. It was as if the shopkeeper had suddenly tired of selling food and fuel and taken to stuffing animals in his spare time.
“Gruesome,” Holden said to no one in particular. He walked to the rear, where a glass counter displayed
a selection of hunting knives. He drew his finger across the counter, leaving a clear line of glass in its wake.
Well, this is nice,
he thought.
All we need now is some old fuck warning us not to go any further.
“Thar’s danger in them thar hills,” he growled, then he laughed, but the giggle he emitted was too high and nervous for comfort.
Fuck it. Time to go.
•••
“Why here?” Dana asked.
“Because I
hate
going in the Rambler!” Jules replied. “And besides, the keg’s in there. I can’t piddle next to what we’re drinking. It’s just... euch.”
She shivered. This place was spooky and grim, but exciting too. There was something about it that had her blood flowing. It was almost... exotic.
“You think the toilet here’s gonna be any better?” Dana asked.
“I don’t like to pee when all my friends are two feet away from me,” Jules persisted. They’d passed around the corner of the building now, and were threading their way through a scatter of old stuff lying all around. Leaning against the building’s wall to their left was a large roll of barbed wire, with some dried husk tangled in it. She tried to persuade herself it was a mass of old plant, but the tiny splayed claws testified otherwise. To their right a camper van was all but buried in a large bank of bushes. Its color was no longer discernible,
the tires were smothered beneath plant growth, and the rear window was obscured on the inside by drawn curtains. The thing that spooked Jules most about it was the open side door. If it had been shut she’d have thought no more about it, but open seemed to suggest that the thing was still in use. That there might be someone in there.
Hello?
she tried to say, but no noise came from her mouth.
“So you’re gonna pee in the Toilet From Out of Nowhere,” Dana said, a quaver in her voice.
Jules reached for a side door in the building, assuming—hoping—that it was the bathroom. She
really
needed to pee.
“I’m quirky,” she said, pulling on the handle. “At least this has gotta be—
hoah
!”
The smell hit her instantly, then the sight of the bathroom revealed behind the creaking door, and for a moment both robbed her of words. There was a toilet. and nothing else—no basin, not even a cistern. The walls were dark and coated with slime, the floor was wet with thick brown fluid... not
pure
shit, she thought, but an overflow of the stuff that filled the toilet. Thick, fluid,
shifting
, the sludge topped the toilet and dribbled slick down its surface, turning what might have once been white a uniform brown.
Behind her, Dana gagged.
Jules took a small step forward, fascinated, wondering just why the sludge in the pan was moving. And then she saw the scorpion, struggling in the fetid
muck, slowly drowning.
And unless that thing’s
full
of drowned critters, it’s weird that we open the door just in time to see this
, she thought. It was almost as if.
She turned and looked around, past Dana, past the camper van buried in the undergrowth, along the lane that led away from this place up into the wooded hills, then back toward where she could just see the nose of the Rambler.
Dana watched her with raised eyebrows. Jules opened her mouth to speak, but before she could say anything they heard a muffled, “Fuck!” from somewhere around the front of the building.
“Seems we’ve found the attendant,” Jules said softly. Walking close together, she and Dana retraced their steps. Suddenly, her need to pee had abated.
•••
I’ve got a bad feeling about this,
Holden thought, and he uttered another nervous giggle. Heading back outside, he saw Marty and Curt through the doorway, trying to work one of the pumps. Marty was holding the nozzle in the mouth of the Rambler’s fuel pipe, while Curt circled the pump, reaching out now and then to run his hands across the flaking painted surface. Looking for a switch or lever, Holden guessed, though he seemed to find neither.
“I don’t think there’s gonna be—” Holden began, voice raised to carry out as he approached the door.
Suddenly a shadowy figure filled the doorway,
blocking most of the light, and a voice said, “You come in here uninvited?”
“Fuck!” Holden gasped loudly. “Dude... ”
“Sign says closed,” the attendant said, because that must have been what this man was. Tall and broad, old and weathered until his skin looked like a leather jacket left out in the sun too long, his left eye terribly bloodshot and swollen. His lips and chin were stained and glistening with chewed tobacco and drool, and he scowled in anger and disgust.
He blocked the exit completely, and that was what worried Holden the most, more than his grotesque face and pissed attitude.
If I want to get out and he doesn’t want me to...
He was just about to start looking around for an alternative escape—jump through a window, perhaps, or maybe he’d find a door hidden behind a pile of badly stuffed animals at the back of the shop—when the attendant grunted and turned around, walking out to face the others.
Holden let out a gasp of relief. That was when he realized he’d been holding his breath.
“We were looking to buy some gas?” Curt said, taking a few steps toward the old man. Marty hung back, still holding the nozzle in the Rambler’s fuel pipe. “Does this pump work?”
“Works if you know how to work it,” The attendant said. He glanced to his left and paused, and Holden took the opportunity to slip from the building. He circled around the old man until he was standing just a few feet to Curt’s right, and past the guy he saw Dana
and Jules appear cautiously around the side of the building. Both were wide-eyed and slightly panicked.
What have they seen?
he wondered. Dana glanced at the attendant only briefly, then past him at Holden. They swapped nervous smiles.