Am I losing it? Am I seeing demons where there are none? Or worse, am I seeing them where there actually are?
Why now? It doesn’t make any sense why I would all of a sudden see demons where, before, Mrs. Lee was one hundred percent human. So what the fuck did Iceman and the others do to me?
I turn to head home, my whole body practically shaking, but my stomach suddenly rumbles in protest, reminding me that I have to make a grocery run.
Shit.
I fight my instincts to flee home and turn in the direction of the store instead. I’ll just get in and get out quickly, and then I can go home and have a proper freak out.
I repeat the word fuck in my head the entire drive, because I’m terrified to look at anything for too long, and that’s not a phobia one should have when they’re trying to drive. I screech into a parking spot, cursing myself for not hiding a back up pair of sunglasses somewhere on this piece of shit moped. I usually judge people for wearing sunglasses inside, but now I feel like it might be a much needed lifeline to make it through the rest of this demon-seeing day.
“I take back every ounce of judgment I aimed at some sunglasses-wearing freak inside a store,” I grumble to myself as I give up searching my moped for a pair. “I clearly had no idea what demons they might have been wrestling with...some of them quite possibly literally.”
I look around quickly, probably resembling some unhinged drug addict with the level of jumpiness I’m experiencing, but there’s fuck-all I can do about that at the moment.
I keep my eyes on the ground and waste no time making my way inside the store and down the aisles, filling up my cart with all kinds of shit. I’m only half paying attention to what I’m throwing in my basket, but I spot chips, cookies, TV dinners, mac n cheese, beef ramen, chicken ramen, something called deluxe ramen...you know, the seven major food groups. I’m on the drink aisle, trying to determine if I can drink my veggies so that I don’t have to actually taste them, when my creeper alarm starts going off.
I shove the tomato-kale-pineapple atrocity back into the cooler and whirl around, clutching a carton of eggs in my other hand. I’m not sure why my instinct was to clutch the eggs like they’re my best weapon option. It’s a bad choice all around, but I have to stick with it, because now I’m stalking down the aisle, pushing my squeaky wheeled cart so that I can peer around the corner.
I hold my breath, terrified of what I might find, but when I look there’s...nothing. Well, nothing other than a perfectly human looking mother of four who has one toddler sitting in the cart, one strapped to her front, and two others running around her feet. “Where’s the wine aisle?”
I quickly point her in the right direction, and she goes off in a hurried rush. My adrenaline is now through the roof, and I decide to cut this trip short and get the hell out of here. I have plenty of ramen to live off of for a good two weeks at least. Rushing to the register, I pay in cash, very mindful of the total racking up and how I need to count my pennies now more than ever.
Hurrying outside, I shove my groceries into the saddlebags on my moped and then peel out of the parking lot to head back home. I decide the highway is probably not my safest bet in my current panicked and quaking state, so I take the side roads that lead to my neighborhood. Ten minutes later, I’m zooming down the cracked asphalt, a gas station on my left and an empty biker bar on my right, when I’m forced to slam on the brakes.
Shit!
My front tire gets scarily close to wanting to veer off to the left, and the back of my moped fights me to fishtail, but I bring down one of my legs to help stop my momentum.
In hindsight, that was a shit idea, because it hurts like fuck when my ankle twists and my foot scrapes against the pavement, but I manage to come to a stop without crashing. I pant, wide-eyed at the line of figures thirty feet in front of me who are completely blocking the road. Even as they hide in the shadows of the building, I can see that they’re about four feet tall, green, horned, and more muscular than a nineties wrestler on steroids.
What in the Hellgate?
They stare at me while I stare at them right back. I glance around, but there’s no one else in this alleyway, and only the sound of cars driving on the road behind me reminds me that there’s perfectly normal human things going on.
When they still do nothing, I give the line of short green demons an awkward wave. “Uhh, hey?”
Sure, Delta. Let’s just greet the dozen hulked-out oompa loompas who are scowling and cracking their knuckles at me, because clearly, they’ve just stopped by to say hey.
This area is about as ghost town as it gets. I have no weapons, no help, and my moped does zero to sixty in just over three-thousand seconds. I blink several times in quick succession, my heart racing in fear, wishing for this all to be a bad dream.
But no, they’re really here, blocking the alleyway, and I’m screwed. Those things in the mansion’s kitchen weren’t as bad as this. Not even the one with the warts. I mentally scowl at the shadows, wishing that Echo would pop up, but it stays defiantly empty of the hot, pale-skinned
