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JDatE
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Two hours later I was behind a counter, trying to peel the magnetic anti-theft tag off a DVD with my fingernail. I had a swollen lip, a bandage on my shoulder, a Band-Aid on my eye and my ribs gave me a jolt of pain every time I took a breath. I stank of turkey. I would have called in, but I had used up all of my sick days for the year and couldn't take off again until January. I take a lot of sick days, most of them self-declared Mental Health days. Meaning I wake up in a mood that I know will lead me to assault the very first person who asks me if the Two Day Rentals have to be back on Wednesday or Thursday. I had worked at Wally's Videe-Oh! for five years, been a manager for two. I started right after I dropped out of college. I remember hearing that Quentin Tarantino got discovered working at a video store, and I think I had it in my head to try work here and write a screenplay. It was going to be about a cop in the future with a flamethrower for an arm. At age 19, that seemed like a pretty sound plan. The thing about not having parents is you don't have anyone to tell you you're heading down a path paved with retardedness. The people who raised me, and I'll leave their names out of this, they did what they could. Nice people, real religious. Kind of treated me like I was a little African refugee kid they had rescued. They knew my story, knew that I had never known my Dad. When I got in trouble at school and got kicked out, because of that kid that died, they were real supportive. Took my side all the way through, then shortly after moved to Florida and hinted that maybe things would be better if I stayed behind. My birth mom is living in Arizona, I think, staying with a dozen other people in an arrangement that could be called a "compound." Some kind of commune, I don't know. She sent me a letter two years ago, thirty pages scribbled on lined notebook paper. I couldn't make it past the first paragraph. I scraped the plastic theft sticker off the DVD, put it back in its case, then picked another case off the stack. Pulled out the disc, started scraping off the tag. I looked around, saw there was only one customer it the store. A guy wearing a cowboy hat. His jeans looked like they were painted on. The TV we had mounted in the far corner of the store was turned to the news, the sound down and the Closed Captioning turned on. They had been going back to the "death" of the "hospital shooting" "suspect" every 20 minutes or so. It was hard to tell from the bits and pieces I picked up between customers, but it looked like the story Falconer fed to them was similar to the one John suggested. Franky apparently had an accomplice, meaning the construction worker. The construction worker sawed off Franky's head, then brought it to my house for some reason. We confronted him and he led us on a chase to the turkey warehouse where he was shot dead by an agent from a "federal task force." It never occurred to me that Falconer hadn't told us what agency he worked for and the news didn't mention it. Hmmm. Falconer had apparently omitted one part of John's story, which was the part where the turkeys ate Franky's body. The news said the body was still missing and a few people would look for it over the next few days, but otherwise the manhunt was called off. Everything could go back to normal since Franky's severed head was pretty much confirmation he was no longer a danger. I pictured Franky's corpse swelling to eruption with hundreds of baby mouth bugs and begged to differ. The cowboy came up to the counter with a copy of Basic Instinct 2 and 2001: A Space Odyssey. How could he walk in those jeans? I could make out the exact hang of his penis in those things. Did they inflate when he farted? I glanced up at the TV, saw a reporter standing in front of the turkey building as a tow truck hauled my Bronco out, front end smashed and windshield clouded white with cracks. I still drove it home, though. Give credit to the people at Ford. The cowboy gave me his membership card and I punched in the number. His account came up as: NAME: James DuPree Many memos had circulated at Wally's about abusing the Customer Comment box on the computer. We have John to thank for that. He worked here a few years ago, after I begged the manager to let him on. John was fired a few months later, but not before he managed to add something to the "Comment" field for pretty much every single customer he served. NAME: Carl Gass I gave the cowboy his change, glancing over his shoulder at the TV every chance I could get. They were back at the hospital, the camera showing close-ups of bullet holes in walls and shell casings on the floor. The cowboy turned to follow my gaze, saw the TV. "That's some scary shit, ain't it?" I said, "Yeah." "Whole world's comin' to an end, that's what I think." "Yeah, probably. Have a nice day." The cowboy left. He stuffed his wallet into his back pocket and I imagined it shooting back out again, squeezed by the sheer pressure of the fabric. These days John was working at a warehouse that stored government documents. Apparently most agencies have gone to a paperless system, all the records on computer, and they have to destroy all their old paper forms after a couple of years because there's no money in the budget to store them. John got a job on the document destruction team. It seemed like a perfect job for him. I mean, how can you screw up destroying papers? John told me they pile up all the papers and shoot them with flamethrowers, but I suspect they just have a big shredder or something. I met John when I was 14, in an Intro to Computers class in high school. Mr. Gertz. Huge guy with a mustache who used to interrupt lessons on Windows 95 to give speeches about atheism. Everybody liked John. He could play guitar and do card tricks and stand on his head. On the other end, most people found me to be unlikable in the way that most people find dogs to have fur. I grabbed a DVD and went back to peeling off stickers. I had gotten written up six weeks ago because more DVD's were stolen on my watch than either of the other two managers. Not sure what I was supposed to be doing to stop it, I guess running out and tackling the kids who tried to walk out with the goods. The problem, I decided, was the magnetic anti-theft tags that would activate the door alarm were in the DVD cases, so it only took the thieves minutes to figure out they just had to pop the disc out of the case and stuff it in their pocket, leaving the case and the theft tag behind. So I wrote up this angry e-mail, saying the anti-theft system was retarded and that if they were serious about people not stealing discs, then they should put the anti-theft tags on the discs themselves. After all, it was the disc that was valuable, not the case. They agreed, and me and two other employees spent about twelve hours sticking these stiff little stickers to all of the new releases in the store. The plan worked beautifully. That is, until last Thursday, when a customer brought in a disc that had been scratched to hell because the theft sticker came unstuck inside his DVD player. It jammed the little tray when it tried to eject the disc and he had to pry it out. Two days later, a customer brought in a broken DVD player. When his disc got stuck thanks to the sticker, he wound up breaking the disc tray on the machine trying to free it. I wasn't at the store that day, I was on one of my many sick days. But when I came back I was greeted by 27 e-mails from managers and regional managers and other people I had never heard from before, telling me that every anti-theft sticker had to be removed from every DVD by November 1st. I bring this up, again, in case you were wondering why in the holy hell I felt the need to come in to work in the middle of the apocalypse. The answer is that if I took one more sick day I would be fired, and if I didn't get these stickers off by the deadline I would be fired, and even if I could talk my way out of one firing I sure as hell couldn't talk my way out of both. And if I was fired, soon after society would decide I wasn't earning my electricity and water and my house and my food. And they'd be right. If you think that's a bad reason to come to work in the middle of this, then I'm guessing you're still living with Mom and Dad. I glanced up at the TV and saw something new. Security camera footage, from the hospital. In color, but in a frame rate that made the people appear to blink down the hallway, teleporting five feet at a time. There was a shot of a woman running in terror. They cut to a live shot of some older guy in a suit, an expert of some kind they had brought in. Then they cut back to the security video and I froze. I heard the DVD I had in my hand fall to the counter. Did I just see that? They played it again. The first frame was Franky, in the hall of the hospital, gun in hand, holding a nurse around the throat. The frames rolled forward, slowly, everybody making jerky movements. A security guard came into frame, hand out, trying to talk Franky down. Next frame, same players, limbs in different positions. Looked to be about one frame per second. The next frame was what got me. At the top of the screen appeared a man in black. Not a Shadow Man, a regular man, in black clothes, black sunglasses. Next frame - one second later - he was gone. I stared. They cut back to the anchor. The closed captioning lagged behind but I didn't think I saw any mention of the mysterious man in the hall. My cell phone rang. On the screen it said, "JOHN." I picked up. "Yeah." "Dave? Can you get to a television?" "We got one on here. I saw it." "Man in black, in the hall?" "Yeah." "So who's this asshole now?" "I don't know, John. I'm still peeling off stickers." "I'm still at your place, everything seems okay here. I've got the crossbow." "You've got the what?" "Hey, have you heard from Falconer?" "No. I figured they sent him home. His case is over, right?" "Yeah. I'm sure that was the end of it. The thing with the turkeys." "Yeah. Probably." "Yeah." ". . ." I had to close the store, so it was midnight before I turned into my driveway. John's Caddie was there, parked along the street. So he apparently really had staked out my place all night, during which time I'm guessing he ate most of my food. He must have heard me pull up because he appeared at the front door before I could even get out of my truck. I asked, "Any monsters in there?" "I wasn't paying attention. I got wrapped up in a movie. I'm going home. I left the crossbow." "Well, thanks for watching the place." "Sure. Hey, I think something got into your fridge because all of that leftover pizza is gone now." I pushed through the front door, threw my keys on the table, glanced at the answering machine and saw I had no messages. A little surprised Amy hadn't called. I surveyed the room, the lamp inside the front door raising an island of light in the dim little house. Nothing stirred. I went toward the kitchen, casting sideways glances along the way. Something flew across the big window in the living room and I gave a start. Probably a bird, though. I see owls around here from time to time. Molly was asleep on my couch. I flipped on the kitchen light, opened all the cabinets, saw nothing hiding in there. Not much food, either. I tried the freezer, found no monster hiding in there, either. I did find a box of Hot Pockets, little frozen pastries with meat and cheese inside them. It's the kind of food they feed to prisoners of war to keep them alive. I took one step toward the microwave, and stopped. A shadow had moved on the floor. Not my own, either. The dark shape grew, up over the drawers to my left, spilling onto the counter top.  
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