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

the morning. I tried to laugh but couldn’t.
    My black Toyota was alone in the parking lot, just a shadow behind sheets of falling static. A film of dry snow had already overtaken the slope of my windshield.
    I opened the trunk but the metal surface scalded my bare fingers. I tore my hand away, gasping gray mist. This wasn’t a normal coldness for early spring in the inland northwest. This was something else. I found myself wishing for that Soviet ghost’s ass-ugly wool coat.
    I propped the trunk open with my elbows.
    There it was.
    The infamous Head-Scratching Rifle was still in its cardboard mailing box. I opened the top flap and peered inside at the gooey, wrapped rifle. I could see the pointed barrel and front sight, and underneath, the tucked bayonet. The ancient bolt-action weapon was dormant, still slumbering in its cocoon of jellied chemicals.
    “This is all real,” I said aloud.
    I’m not dreaming.
    “It’s Friday afternoon. And I’m in the Jitters parking lot.”
    Because this is real—
    But I noticed something.
    Inside the bag, a powdery substance was caked on the Mosin Nagant, raising the plastic in gray clumps. All over it, from barrel to stock. This was new. This strange powder — whatever it was — hadn’t been on the rifle when I’d opened the bag in my house with Holden. In my dream.
    So I peeled off the skin-like plastic (again) for a closer look. Handling a firearm in a public place is Darwin Award-worthy, yes, but I was alone in the parking lot. The snowy whiteout had reduced visibility to silhouettes. Keeping the weapon in the trunk, I palmed off a clump of sludgy powder, like wet sand, and recoiled at the pungent odor — ammonia. Like cat urine.
    It was cat litter.
    The Mosin Nagant was coated in cat litter.
    Like it had been buried for two weeks in a neglected litterbox. Clumps of sand hardened to the rifle’s seams in damp globs. Something rattled inside the barrel and dropped out, bouncing off my foot — a blackened cat turd, bumpy with grains of litter. Adelaide called them Kitty Rocas.
    I suppressed a violent gag. The ammonia odor was so dense, I was almost nostalgic for the yeasty foulness from before. I dropped the Head-Scratching Rifle back in my trunk, but my fingers were already slick with acrid cat piss. Seriously, to hell with that thing. I wished it had a face so I could punch it. And I knew it was attacking me, in whatever ways it could. Big or small. Any way it could get to me — by being repulsive, by being eerie, by stabbing my thumb, by warping time — it was going to work on me, busily attacking my sanity. Bleeding out my willpower with a thousand little papercuts.
    That Kitty Roca in the barrel? Just one more mental papercut, I guess.
    I slammed the trunk.
    Another blade of freezing wind slashed at me. Plates of snow crunched under my footsteps as I returned to Jitters, one hand raised against the sudden blizzard. Scabs of cat litter stuck between my fingers, crunchy and moist.
    Cruelty is its language .
    When I got back inside Jitters, I’d wash my hands about fifty times, order another coffee, and tell Holden everything. I’d describe the twelve-hour dream, or premonition, or whatever it was. And this time, on this bizarrely reset version of Friday, I wouldn’t investigate the rifle or risk Holden’s life by stupidly permitting him to drag himself into it. I’d destroy the thing, and hurl the pieces into the White River, just like he’d suggested, and that’d be that. Right?
    What if I just wake up in Jitters again? With the rifle in my trunk?
    Hell, I’d already lost twelve hours.
    . . . Or somewhere worse?
    I shivered and pushed open Jitters’ front door with both hands, leaving a butterfly pattern of smears on the glass. Maybe this wasn’t really a Groundhog Day-esque temporal nightmare, and I was just losing my mind. Detaching from reality, like an untethered astronaut falling into the void. That’s what happened to everyone else, right? Ben Dyson