Cooper's Door

      Cooper walked into the gas station, whose air conditioning was a pleasant reprieve from the scalding Arizona sun. As he stood on the placemat on the inside of the glass door, he took this moment to simply lean his head back and take in the cool air as he closed his eyes. A smile crossed his lips, and he inhaled deeply before letting out a contented sigh.

           He leveled his head and looked around the small convenience store; he needed road trip snacks as he was not even a third of the way done with his cross-country drive, and he just needed to see this through before summer break was over.

           The counter appeared unmanned, and not a single other person was in the store there with him. “Hello?” He casually said out loud.

           Silence.

           “Hello-ooo?” Louder now. Still nothing. It was probably just his imagination, given the volume of everything else, but he could have sworn his voice was echoing faintly through the person-free store.

           He sighed and smiled to himself. “Oh well,” he said blithely to no one. “I’ll just leave some cash on the counter when I’m ready to check out of here. He looked back to see what snacks he could find for the road.

           Moving past the weird off-brand bags of chips that conveniently lacked expiration dates, Cooper grabbed a large bag of teriyaki beef jerky and a bag of lifesaver gummy rings. He then moved over to the cold drinks section to select a sweet assortment of beverages for the ride – at least one of them needed to be a plastic bottle with a twist-on cap, for emergencies.

           As Cooper opened the suctioned glass door of the refrigerated section, he heard the slightest faint something of a sound. He couldn’t be sure if he actually heard something as it happened just as the door made its popping sound as it opened, so he stilled his hand, keeping the door open in place where he stood motionless trying to hear this strange sound again.

           Cooper was practically perching his ears as he listened intently to the background. After approximately thirty seconds had passed, he decided it was nothing. He towards the cooled shelf to grab a plastic bottle of Coca-Cola with a twisting lid. As his fingers wrapped around the rim of the bottle, condensation instantly formed around his fingers – he heard it again, this time more clearly.

           It was a loud banging sound as if something was being kicked around in another room.

           He stood up abruptly, the handle to the glass door being squeezed tightly in anticipation in his hand. As Cooper’s back stood erect as a Roman pillar, his wide eyes darted to and fro around the gas station’s convenience store.

           Slowly closing the cool drink’s door, he walked towards the counter which stood in front of the revolving door leading to the store’s back room. As Cooper grew closer to the door, he could hear the banging sound again from behind the door. He couldn’t rationalize why, but he felt a powerful sense of unease as he approached. It’s most likely just an employee moving stock around, he thought to himself – but the feeling that something was terribly wrong did not leave him.

           Cooper reached his hand up to push on the door and saw that he was trembling violently; in fact, not only was his whole body egregiously shaking but he was perspiring profusely.

           What the fuck am I doing? He practically yelled in his head. I should just take my stuff, leave the money on the counter, and GO - not snoop around in this freaky shit! Try as he might, however, his body would comply with the demands of his conscience. He placed his hand against the revolving door and, remembering to breathe as he exhaled the intake of air he was holding onto, he pushed it open.

           What he saw made him want to scream – to scream so violently that it would rip his vocal cords apart. But he couldn’t scream. He could only stare in blank shock as his mind tried to register what his retinas were capturing.

           There pinned against a shelf of supplies was the gas station employee on shift today. What was pinning the young man was something far more difficult to register. In the area of what could be pointed out as the torso, it resembled that of a woman wearing a stained and molded old white dress. But what came out from underneath the skirt of the dress were six large, carapaces of black mandibles which jutted upwards and downwards across their multiple joints until they came to their ends in different directions of the concrete floor. Protruding out from the once-puffy sleeves of this dress were human-like shoulders that stretched out into long, hairy black pincers which were clamped around the waist and neck of the gas station employee. Lastly, there was the greasy curtain of onyx hair that stood like a carpeted wall above the neckline of the dress, which obscured the vision of this nightmarish creature’s face.

           Though Cooper could not see this thing’s face, he could tell it was biting into the upper abdomen of the gas station employee as his blood pooled thickly beneath the spindly legs of the creature.

           Cooper’s synapses were on fire as they scrambled to comprehend this scene before him, this scene in which no human brain was ever meant to bear witness. As madness swept over Cooper’s psyche like a dark rug, he managed to find a piece of himself that still produced rational thought. Get out of there, it told him, as quick and quietly as you can.

           Every bit of him was trembling as he slid on sneakered foot behind him. The monster did not stir. His other foot was sliding back now. Closer. One more step. He was back on the other side of the revolving door’s threshold now, and he let it fall back into position as he moved his hand painfully slow backward, every molecule of his flesh vibrating. The door had closed with barely a sound.

           He stood there as perfectly still as he could for several seconds, and when he felt he had waited long enough to see whether or not he had disturbed the nightmarish thing during its meal, he rotated on his left heel and made to sprint at the exit.

           As he ran, he stumbled over his own feet and crashed into a display of off-brand deserts that looked too much like Hostess for the company to not get sued. The display crashed onto the floor, and Cooper heard the most horrific sound come from the back room. It was how one could imagine a cat might sound if forced into a blender, and the sound itself had an oscillation to it that made his ears throb. He did not think he would ever be able to properly sleep again after hearing such a sound.

           He darted out the front door of the convenience store, not daring to look back; for if he did, he knew that if he saw this creature’s face he would’ve died of shock – then the thing would feast on his corpse. Cooper got in his car and turned on the ignition, and his tires squealed as turned out of the space by the pump and away from the gas station. The gas station was getting smaller in the rearview mirror, and Cooper saw the outline of the monster break through the glass doors and turn in his direction. Then it started to run.

           Cooper drove as fast as his car would go down the highway. Two hours had gone by since he left the gas station, yet he did not see a single vehicle in either direction. To that matter, he didn’t see anything to hint there was anyone else in the world besides him, the dead gas station employee, and the monster; there were so street signs, no buildings on the side of the road. All he saw was this stretch of empty asphalt. Whenever he stopped the car to take a breather and try to come to terms with what he saw, he would look in the rearview mirror and see the silhouette of the monster coming into view. He would get off the shoulder of the road and speed away. Again and again, he would speed away, but the mirror showed him the monster was never far behind.

            His tank was now close to empty. Still not a sign of human life around, no other vehicles on the road, and nowhere to run to for shelter.

His car came to a rolling stop as the gas gauge indicated he was empty.

“Fuck! Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck!” Cooper yelled as he slammed his fast against the steering wheel. He took a deep breath and looked in the rearview mirror. Nothing.

He exhaled and leaned back against his headrest as he tried to reassert himself. He had finally shaken the thing off and now was time to just sit and rest while he calmed himself down.

He felt himself dozing off - he tried to fight it off at first, but he was just so very, very tired now. As he circled nearer to the escape of sleep that he most desperately needed, he heard a sharp hissing sound just on the other side of the driver’s side door.