He needs an excuse to go to the store. Another afternoon coming off a long high, he takes a few edibles at around 8:30pm. He’s running out, but he doesn’t mind. Pay day’s less than a week away, & he has the ingredients to make more at home. Well, everything except butter. He refused to use vegetable oil, per the instructions on the box, because he swore that the fat content in the rendered butter bonds better with the THC distillate .
So, at 9:15, he decides to walk to the store. It’ll be a thirty minute round trip, nearly fifteen minutes each way. He wants snacks anyways, despite the overwhelming options in this pantry. He has his sights set on a frozen delicacy. A supreme Tombstone Pizza.
Bluey slippers on each foot, & his Smoke-Shop, Delta-9 vape in his pocket, he makes his way out into the muggy, Virginia summer night. The mosquitoes buzz as they flock to his exposed skin, so he picks up his pace.
As he makes his way under the first light pole of the trip, he thinks he sees something. The lights of the neighborhood porches & the streetlamps illuminate his immediate surroundings, but between the trees & the edges of the fences, shadows held firm like curtains.
He takes his earbuds out. He only hears the few cars on the nearby highway. As he gets closer, he can make out the faint visage of a woman, hiding in the dark.
Just like that, there it is. The faint sound he could've sworn he heard. The sounds of buzzing & chirping, like the sounds of a machine, maybe a printer. As he passes her, maybe fifteen feet away, she watches him, & he realizes something that makes his skin prickle. The mechanical noises were coming from her, & even though he couldn’t clearly see her face moving from the dark, he knew the sounds were mimicry made by a human voice, repeating perfectly on a loop. He picks up his pace slightly more. He keeps his sights ahead after he passes her, trying not to attract her attention.
“Maybe I’m just higher than I think,” he mutters. He didn’t see her head rotate to watch him, just her eyes, but even then, his mind could’ve just been playing tricks on him. He goes through the light of the immediate next street lamp & looks back at her. He was now about twenty-five feet away. She was staying still, her position unflinching. He turns away & continues. Under the next streetlamp, he repeats, looking back again. Still, nothing. At least forty-five feet away by this point, he lets out the breath he hadn’t even realized he had been holding, & pops his earbud back in.
“Huh, weird.”
Sixty feet away, under the last umbrella of light on his street, he humors a last glance back, just before he bolts. She’s strolling briskly towards him, calculated & confident. She’s not even on the road, she’s cutting through dark driveways & lawns in a direct beeline. As she gets closer, he runs faster & faster. By now, he’s closer to the store than to his mobile home.
“Holy shit! I need to get somewhere with fucking cameras & lights," he thinks.
He rounds past the small, vacant Sheriff Deputy building, & under more streetlights. He was now out of the neighborhood, on the sidewalk right next to the sparse highway, no further than two closed establishments from his destination. He looks back, momentarily grateful to see she’s not visibly behind him anymore. He begins to slow slightly, his unfit joints & atrophied muscles shrieking in pain. The cramps nip his ankles & thighs, & his pace loses steam. That is, until he sees two individuals across the road to his left.
They keep his pace & watch him predatorily. He can’t make out their faces clearly, but he can see they’re wearing something on their heads. Something silvery that went down just above their mouths that exposed their eyes. Something was… off. Uncanny about their expressions. They looked so angry, & their faces were flush. Too flush.
To the contrary of his body, he speeds up again. Some predators try to surround their prey & block off the exits. He was going to take his chance before he lost it. With one last burst of energy, his feet smacked from pavement, to grass, & back onto pavement as he crossed the threshold into the parking lot of the open Family Dollar. Nearly tripping, he threw himself into the unlocked glass doors, & with a blinding light, he’s done it. He’s inside the store.
Relief blossoms in his stomach & warms his fingertips. He wipes his mouth & looks around. The small shop is nearly empty. His heartbeat flutters rapidly, & he desperately tries to regain his breath.
“Dude?”
He snaps his neck to face the person who spoke & took his earbud out. A small employee, donning a nametag that says, “Grenda,” looks at him like they’d been trying to get his attention for several seconds.
“Dude. You good?” Grenda asks, visibly concerned.
He looks back out the glass doors. No one in the parking lot, in the road, on the sidewalk. No normal people, no one with helmets. He turns & looks at Grenda again.
“Yeah, I think. Sorry.”
He picks up a basket & wearily begins traversing the store. The shelves are like a thin maze. He grits his teeth & pushes on. He grabs a few small snacks. Some Pork Rinds, a case of kool-ade & a jar of pickled jalapenos. But he has his sights set on the refrigerator section. A pizza & some butter. Looking both ways like he’s crossing the street first, he makes his way to the brightly lit, freezing cold aisle. As he does, he bumps into an older woman, another customer.
“Oop, sorry ma’am.”
She mouths something in response, but he can’t hear her over the sound of his reactivated earbuds.
He crouches down to look at the selection of frozen pizzas, & his earbud runs out of battery. As soon as it does, he hears that sound again. The person imitating a robot. In surprise, he falls back onto his ass & looks up. There it is, fully illuminated. She looked like she used to have a thick head of blond hair. She’s bright pink, like a lobster. Flush as if she’s been exerting a great amount of effort, but she doesn't breathe, her nostrils don’t even flair. She just stands there, wide enough to block the entire aisle, & built like a bulldog. Her lips are pulled up in a sneer, & her teeth look rotten, gritted together so hard that her jaw visibly strained from the effort. The part that made him want to cry was what it was wearing. She was wearing normal houseware, a tanktop & some basket-ball shorts. She looked like a normal person, juxtaposed against something horrendous on its head.
Covering the cranium down to the tip of the nose, was a filthy wrapping of duct-tape. It partially concealed all manner of exposed wires & blinking things, motherboards & copper shavings that reflected the light's glint. The only thing that was not covered were her eyes. They were bulged out of her noggin like overfilled water balloons, squeezed through a thin pipe. Blood leaked from the edges of their duct-tape sockets, & from under the border that covered her cheeks & the tops of her ears ran streams of blood across her blushed skin as well, dripping all the way under her chin. & down her neck. He was frozen for a moment from sheer panic. What was this?
As soon as he gathered his bearings enough, he scrambled up & backed away, trying to keep sudden movements to a minimum.
“Lady, lady!” He gasps, addressing the older customer who he’d bumped into earlier.
“What?!”
“What is that?”
She glances over, her eyes trained on the same spot as his, at the end of the aisle.
“What?”
“Look!”
“Look at what?”
He momentarily turns to assess the old woman. She looks dumbfounded.
“You don’t see her?” He breathes.
“See who, young man?” She gulps, frightened & a little flabbergasted.
He looks back at the thing, & it’s moved closer. Now merely five feet away, more details become noticeable. The antenna on top of its head. The two pulsing buttons on the side of its left temple. The way that even though the eyes were on the verge of bursting, they stayed locked on him.
He didn’t even bother taking the items with him. He just dropped everything & ran out the door. He tried to call 911, but his phone ran out of battery too. Once outside, he didn’t look back, but he did hear it start to catch up. He closed his eyes & pumped his legs, pushing harder than he ever had before. He wouldn’t look back.
When he was a kid, he heard the story about the man whose family got a pass out of Sodom & Gomorrah. The wife had looked back, & got turned to salt. As he heard the sound of the thing getting closer behind him, footsteps smacking the pavement at a constant, precise speed, he tried not to think of all the things that might happen to him if he dared.
He ran, & it kept a steady pace behind him. A couple of times, he got some good distance, others, the thing was almost close enough to brush him with its fingertips. At some points, he swore he heard other footsteps, like the pack of them were coming back to finish him off, but over the sound of his heartbeat, he couldn’t have been sure. The entire time, he heard that repeating sound. The whirring, puffing, beeping & buzzing. Its vocal chords were worn out, & they strained to continue droning, but on they did.
A round trip that wound up usually being thirty minutes was done in twenty-five this time. The wood of the porch thumped under his slides & he gripped the handle, twisting & yanking with all his might. The automatron sounded like it could've been just yards behind him. He slammed the metal door shut behind him & slumped to his knees, letting out a half sob, half wheeze. He whimpered & crawled to his blinds, shutting them too. The tears were welling up almost as hard as the stomach bile in his throat. He hadn’t run like that in so long, he almost felt like he’d pulled something in his calves. Everything burned. He sat down on his couch & tried to plug his phone in. That was the last thing he did before he realized someone was under his table.
That night, his neighbor reported seeing him run into his camper, & then a few minutes later, screaming. When the police arrived, all they found was the top of his skull, scalp still intact, & a puddle of bloody spinal fluid.
“What do you think, Detective?” A policeman asked as he placed yellow caution tape over the door of the trailer.
The detective picks up a brownie from the microwave & smells it.
“It’s these damn kids & their weed, it's always these damn kids & their weed…”
Thanks to everyone who checked out my story last night! The encouragement was great, so I finished editing this one I had in the making and figured I’d share it tonight. This one was really fun. I hope it translates well into written format, this was originally intended to be a short film. Hope y’all enjoy!