Free OUR LAST NIGHT: an edge of your seat ghost story thriller by TAYLOR ADAMS

fine. Safe at home. In her enclosure. Right?
    Right.
    I twisted off the faucet.
    Just a nightmare.
    It’s jarring, trying to write off half a day of detailed memories. Your body resists it, like jet lag. I couldn’t believe it was Friday afternoon again; it felt like early Saturday morning. What if it had been a flash-forward of some sort? A premonition? Or something knottier and more complex, like time travel?
    Time travel. I recalled the urban legend Holden once told me of the young honeymooning couple driving through the New Mexico scablands, right through some sort of temporal blister. Their watches stopped working. They fell five hours out of synch with the rest of the world. So when they stopped for food at some trucker diner, they were horrified when the waitress who seated them was just empty skin. A hollow bag of dried-out skin and nothing else — no bones or tissue inside. The entire diner had been like that, a crowd of grinning human taxidermies, gaping eye sockets and mouths, seated in their booths. Moral of the story? Don’t fall out of synch with time, I guess. I don’t know what happened to the couple afterward.
    Hell, I didn’t know what was happening to me right now .
    Shadows moved under the door. Holden tapped twice. “Dan, you okay?”
    “I’m fine.”
    “What’re you doing?”
    “Heroin.”
    Muffled voices outside, and I heard Holden again: “No, no, he’s joking; he’s not actually doing heroin in there—”
    I checked my phone out of mindless habit — and promptly wished I hadn’t. Because according to my iPhone, it wasn’t Friday at all. It was Saturday, March 20. The time was 3:36 a.m. I even had an hour-old text message from Holden, sent after he took my broom home at the conclusion of our Friday night ghost hunt.
    The screen trembled in my hands.
    The twenty-four hour countdown was still ticking.
     
     
    NEW TEXT MESSAGE
    SENDER: “Holden” (509) 555-8727
    SENT: 2:01 a.m. Mar 20 2015
     
     
    Glad you’re OK. Still got the rifle in my trunk will destroy it tomorrow just to be safe. Get some sleep buddy see u tomorrow for briar mine.

10 Hours, 31 Minutes
    I returned to my seat, taking careful steps.
    Everyone in Jitters seemed to be watching me. Even the baristas fell silent, eyeing me between stacked cups on the counter. I was hyper-aware of my own heartbeat, the mechanical push and pull of my breathing, the scuff of my footsteps on hardwood. Not frightened or panicked, because those were unproductive emotions. Just . . . alert. Aware. Like a deer that may — or may not — have just heard the distant snick of a rifle’s disengaging safety.
    I sat back down with Holden, squealing my chair, and sipped my coffee with shaky hands. As cold as tap water.
    “Second thoughts?” he asked me.
    “About what?”
    “Your new gun.”
    Right. I remembered that although I’d jumped back twelve hours in time, the Head-Scratching Rifle was still in my possession. In the trunk of my Celica parked outside. I’d just detailed my intentions to Holden, and he’d invited himself along. I’d been too gentle — or maybe too lonely — to sway him. He’d show up at my house with Haunted equipment and his Ouija board. History was set to repeat itself.
    Outside, Paul Bunyan’s grinning head trucked past on an eighteen-wheeler. A chug of diesel fumes and a flash of piano-white teeth in the sunlight. Just like before.
    “Creepy,” Holden murmured this time, watching it go.
    Maybe I’d wake up again, I supposed. This would turn out to be another blistering salvia-trip of a dream. That was the only way to describe it. My cell phone said it was Saturday morning, the rest of the world said it was Friday afternoon, and I was in the throes of another mind-bending nightmare.
    But the big man who killed Baby did make some sort of sense. I recognized the greatcoat; it was trademark winter-wear for the armed forces of the Soviet Union. I’d thumbed over hundreds of black and white photos of men