The Gate 2: 13 Tales of Isolation and Despair

PLASTIC by J.L. Bryan

Jeremy stood at the front doors of the Hazelpointe Meadows shopping mall in Hazelpointe, Ohio. The security mesh was down, blocking the row of still-fully-intact sliding glass doors. This was a good sign. All signs pointed to “yes,” as the Magic Eight-ball would say.

Hazelpointe itself had looked like a good prospect to him, a Rust Belt boom town with a dwindling population, small enough to stay off the radar of roving marauders, large enough that people would have fled from it when The Cough hit it big and everyone was desperate to avoid population centers.

Jeremy found the name of the mall amusing, too. Hazelpointe Meadows—a boxy, ugly concrete and glass shell, in the center of a sea of blacktop, fronted by an archipelago of restaurants like Red Lobster and Hooters facing the six-lane road. There wasn’t a meadow in sight. Nor any hazel.

He shrugged the hiking pack off his shoulders and set it on the wide concrete step beside him, on top of yellowed cigarette butts and fossilized blobs of chewing gum. He opened a side pocket and lifted out a soft purple bag stitched with the Crown Royal logo, and then he opened the drawstring. The Magic Eight-ball was inside, cushioned by thick wads of tissue paper.

Jeremy lifted it out.

“What do you think, Eight-ball?” he asked. “Should we camp here tonight?”

He gave it a shake.

Ghostly letters floated up from the dark blue fluid inside: “Reply hazy, try again.”

“Feeling cranky today?” Jeremy shook it again. The Magic Eight-ball was his priest, attorney, and grief counselor. In the months he’d been wandering the American hellscape alone, Jeremy had felt overwhelmed by all the decisions he faced at every moment, the endless uncertainty. There was no one to help him make any choices. Eight-ball kept him moving, and kept him mostly sane.

“Ask again later,” Eight-ball now advised.

“Come on!” Jeremy shook it harder now. “Should we stay here or not?”

“My reply is no,” Eight-ball finally answered.

“You’re crazy, Eight-ball.” Jeremy glanced around. The place looked secure, untouched since the Cough. From the mammoth marquee sign out front, he knew there was a Freddy Fisherman’s, a megastore supplying hikers, campers, and hunters as well as fishermen. All the things he needed would be there.

Jeremy carefully returned Eight-ball to the pouch, then opened the main pocket of his backpack and took out a few tools. Within twenty minutes, he’d cut through the security mesh and smashed one of the doors. He stepped inside the mall.

Though it was June, and thick afternoon sun flooded in from the skylights overhead, the cavernous indoor mall felt chilly. That meant a working thermostat and HVAC system…and that meant electricity. With electrical lines falling and unmanned power plants breaking down everywhere, most places no longer had any power. He relished the rare kiss of cold air on his skin.

He strolled through the central corridor. The mall was still decorated for Christmas. Stockings and wreaths hung on the storefronts and the second-story banister overhead. He passed Santa’s elevated red throne, surrounded by heaps of cotton-puff snow.

He checked the mall directory, then headed for Freddy Fisherman’s.

It looked like the mall had been locked down before being abandoned, and that was a good thing. When raiding houses, he usually had to start by dragging the rotten corpses of the former inhabitants out to the back yard, then opening a few windows to wash out the stench of disease and death while he picked through their belongings.

The Cough had taken nearly everyone. Jeremy himself had sat with his mother while the infection consumed her over the course of two weeks. She’d coughed up dark phlegm, and then blood, and finally her frothy, liquified stomach lining. Jeremy’s immunity to the Cough must have come from his father, who had died of a heart attack twelve years ago.

At thirty-four, Jeremy had still lived in his childhood bedroom at his mother’s house. He’d been an assistant manager at Game Stop before the Cough wiped out civilization, taking the video-game market along with it.

He’d left his small hometown in California to look for other survivors, but so far he’d only spotted one rough-looking band of raiders, mostly male, and he’d hidden from them. He took cars and trucks as he needed, and lived mostly on canned food, chocolate bars and bottled soda, whatever he could forage.

Jeremy broke into Freddy Fisherman’s and found the camping department. He stuffed his backpack full of protein bars and canned juices before moving on to the gear. The store had tents, camping stoves, generators, and even fuel for the generators.

“Look at all this, Eight-ball,” Jeremy said. He lifted Eight-ball from his backpack and held it up as if it were a giant eyeball, like the dripping eye shared by the blind witches from Clash of the Titans. “You were wrong, weren’t you? When you told me not to stop here?”

He gave Eight-ball a shake.

“Signs point to yes,” Eight-ball replied.

“Heck yeah they do,” Jeremy said. “You should listen to me more often.”

Jeremy filled a shopping cart with generators, lanterns, a couple of stoves, and fuel, then wheeled all of it out to his camper-top truck in the parking lot. By the time he left the mall, he thought the truck would be groaning under the weight of his booty.

After loading his supplies, Jeremy took a break on a bench inside the mall. He was tired, but not yet sleepy. The mall seemed like a safe, well-provisioned place to spend the night—in fact, after the barns and attics he’d slept in lately, it was practically a five-star hotel.

He stood up, stretched, and started exploring. At Radio Shack, he blasted the Rolling Stones over multiple stereos. Then he switched over to Dean Martin, one of his mother’s favorites. Later, he could come back and watch a Blu-ray on a plasma screen or three. Plenty of entertainment here.

He reached the Macy’s at one end of the mall. The multi-level department store struck him as a kind of vast communal mansion. The bedding department had a number of complete bedroom set-ups, with matching furniture. After that there were rows of living rooms, dining rooms, offices. A large number of people could have eaten at the tables, retired to the sofas, and slept in the beds. Jeremy thought about Goldilocks and the Three Bears.

That night he slept in a California King bed at Macy’s.

Over the next few weeks Jeremy kept planning to leave and kept failing to do it. He had every material comfort at hand. He knew he would never make contact with any other people if he stayed cocooned inside the mall—but then, there was no guarantee that any people he found out in the world would treat him well. The mall was a safe place to be.

On the last day of his usual routine, Jeremy woke, stretched, and made up his bed. He greeted the mannequins as he passed them. He had names for those he saw regularly. The man with the fishing hat and matching pole was Gramps; the guy with the sunglasses perched on top of his head and the sweater arms draped around his neck was Skipster; the snooty women in tennis outfits were Marla and Ivana.

Jeremy brewed himself some stale coffee at Seattle’s Best and read a magazine. Every day he read the final issue of a different newspaper or magazine. Today it was the final issue of Time, and the cover story was, naturally, about The Cough. “Who will cure The Cough?” the headline asked.

“Nobody,” Jeremy said. He read the story anyway, about universities, hospitals, and the CDC working day and night to fight the disease. The tone of the article was cautiously optimistic. The article’s writer, and every person interviewed in the article, were now dead. Jeremy was pretty certain of that.

After coffee, he took a walk through the mall. He picked a few stores each day to thoroughly inventory, jotting down their merchandise on a yellow legal pad. Partly, this was so he wouldn’t leave without missing something he could use, but mostly it just felt productive and cut the boredom.

As he passed the Hot Topic, he slowed his walk and glanced sheepishly at the mannequins in the window. Three women, all dressed in a kind of punk Goth fashion. The one in front had long blond hair and an exceptionally beautiful face, in his opinion, with dark shadowed eyes and dark purple lipstick. She wore a spiked leather dog collar, skimpy mesh shirt, lacy black miniskirt. Jeremy had already memorized her appearance, down to the purple toenails in her spiked black shoes.

“Hi, Melissa,” Jeremy said. Was he actually blushing? “Hi, Kristen, Catelyn,” he said to her two friends. The girls didn’t respond to him at all, as if he didn’t even exist—which was to say, they treated him exactly the way real women always had.

He continued on, all the way to the Sears at the opposite end of the mall from the Macy’s. He was looking at the assortment of power tools when it happened.

The overhead lights blacked out all at once, and the department store fell into darkness. The only illumination was dust-filled sunlight from the row of exterior doors, where metal security mesh sliced the light like prison bars.

Not even the EXIT signs glowed.

Jeremy cursed. This was going to make life less pleasant.

He walked away from the chainsaws, found a shopping cart, and began gathering flashlights and batteries.

Over the next several days—he had long since lost track of time, and didn’t know a Friday from a Sunday—Jeremy became gradually convinced that the mannequins watched him from the shadows, maybe even whispered about him behind his back. With the loss of power, it could sometimes be hard to read the mannequins’ faces or discern where their eyes were looking. Something weird was definitely happening at the mall.

One night, sitting in his easy chair and reading a paperback by candlelight, he thought he heard laughter. He stood up and searched the Macy’s, but he couldn’t find anyone. The mannequins watched him with smug, plastic smiles.

A few days after that, he tried carrying on with his morning routine—Gramps told him that the fish were biting well, Skipster was worried about how the extinction of humanity might impact bond futures, Ivana and Marla gossiped about their wild night at the T.G.I. Friday’s bar on the mall’s first floor.

Strolling through the mall, Jeremy realized he had no excuse to pass by Hot Topic today. He’d already mentally inventoried everything on that end of the mall.

He walked past it anyway, and said good morning to Kristen, Catelyn, and especially Melissa, who just looked back at him with cool, blank eyes. He didn’t hear any of them say good morning back, but then again they never did. He wondered whether they talked about him after he passed by each morning.

He walked down the frozen escalator, and then doubled back on the second floor. This meant he had to pass the Abercrombie & Fitch, and he didn’t trust the gang of suspiciously cheerful adolescents hanging out in their window. Jeremy hurried past them and on down to King’s Jewelry to continue the inventory.

That night, he had a special question for Eight-ball. He didn’t want anyone to overhear, so he took Eight-ball to the art gallery, where nobody was around except for a couple of stone lions and a ceramic Dalmatian.

“Eight-ball,” Jeremy whispered, “Should I ask Melissa on a date?”

“Concentrate and ask again,” Eight-ball answered.

“What’s there to concentrate on?” he asked. “She’s the hottest girl in the whole mall, and I think I’ve seen her looking at me a couple of times. I know she never speaks to me. But maybe she’s shy? Is that it, Eight-ball? Melissa’s just shy like me, isn’t she?”

“Very doubtful,” Eight-ball replied.

“You’re right, of course she isn’t,” Jeremy said. “She’s too pretty for that. Do you think…Eight-ball, do you think she likes me?”

“Don’t count on it,” Eight-ball said.

“You’re right, I shouldn’t count on it. I have to win her over. What if I ask her out to T.G.I. Friday’s? We could have a couple of drinks, some peanut butter granola bars…Do you think she’ll go along with that, Eight-ball?”

“Without a doubt,” Eight-ball assured him.

Jeremy made his move the next day, after dressing in the best clothes he could find—black shirt and black pants, since he knew she liked black, plus some expensive shoes that might impress her. He spritzed on some cologne as he passed through the fragrance department.

He was nervous as he stepped inside Hot Topic and approached the three tough-but-sexy girls in the window. None of them greeted him, or acknowledged him in any way, which made him even more nervous.

“Hi, Melissa,” he said to the beautiful blond girl. She didn’t respond. He wished her two friends would go away, but they didn’t show any sign of budging. “Listen…I know this is unexpected…and I’m just a…but…well, anyway, do you want to go on a dinner with me? A date, I mean? Like, tonight?”

Melissa just looked at him. Jeremy thought he heard her two friends snickering behind him, but when he looked they were completely quiet again, their faces blank.

“Are you turning me down?” Jeremy asked. She didn’t answer. “So, can I pick you up at eight, then?”

Jeremy thought he saw the shadow of a smile about to form on her lips. Her friends giggled again, and when he turned to face them the two goth girls seemed to be giving him a friendlier look.

His heart skipped. He had a date.

They had drinks in a booth at T.G.I. Friday’s. Melissa didn’t touch her protein bar, but he’d heard that women often didn’t eat on first dates. She didn’t have much to say, either, but she watched him attentively while he told her about his life before The Cough and the girl he’d had a crush on in high school (Misty Townsend, who ended up marrying Jason Pilcher, the jerk, and together they’d bought the biggest house in Jeremy’s mom’s neighborhood).

After dinner, they went for a stroll through the forest of artificial ferns at the food court, and on down to the big central water fountain. Jeremy pushed her in a shopping cart so she didn’t have to walk. She seemed to want him to handle most of the conversation, and Jeremy struggled for more things to talk about. Fortunately she never yawned, or said anything about ending their date.

When they reached the Macy’s, Jeremy took a chance and invited her in. While she didn’t exactly say “yes” or “no,” he thought she had a sly, seductive look on her face.

He showed her around the Macy’s, and eventually took her to his bed. She didn’t resist as he kissed her, laid her down, and slowly undressed her. Then Jeremy took off his clothes and climbed into bed beside her.

“I’ve never done this before,” he whispered.

She didn’t seem to mind.

He felt sure everyone was talking about it the next day. Ivana and Marla wanted all the details, of course, so they could gossip with their friends in Ladies’ Professional Wear. Gramps just winked when Jeremy walked by.

Melissa, happily, seemed content to stick around over the following days and weeks (Jeremy had lost track of time altogether, except for the steady pulse of day and night, which he only noticed because he had to use electric lanterns or light candles). Melissa never said a word about going back to Hot Topic. Jeremy found her lovemaking a little stiff and unresponsive, but he didn’t have much experience with which to compare it.

They went on little trips around the mall. He used a generator to fuel a projector in the multiplex theater, and they made out together in the darkened back row. Melissa wasn’t a big walker. She liked for Jeremy to carry her in his arms or roll her around in the cart. As a gift to her, he spray painted her cart black and decorated it with skulls and spikes from the Hot Topic. He thought she liked that, though she never really mentioned it.

When some more time had passed, he took Eight-ball back to the art gallery, and he asked The Question.

“Eight-ball.” Jeremy paused to take a deep breath. “Do you think I should ask Melissa to marry me?”

He gave Eight-ball a shake.

“Concentrate and ask again.”

“Why do you always say that about her?” Jeremy snapped. “We love each other, Eight-ball. We should get married, shouldn’t we?”

“Ask again later,” Eight answered.

Jeremy shook his Eight-ball as hard as he could. “What is wrong with you? Are you jealous of her?”

“Don’t count on it,” Eight-ball replied.

“That’s it, isn’t it?” Jeremy held Eight-ball in front of his face and stared into the circular window, the iris of Eight-ball’s eye. “I’m going to marry her whether you like it or not. I’m only asking one more time: do you think I should marry Melissa? And if you say ‘no’ I’ll smash you against that stupid stone lion over there.”

“Better not tell you now,” Eight-ball said.

“Should I propose or not?” Jeremy gave Eight-ball a furious shake.

“My sources say no.”

“Go to hell!” Jeremy shouted. Following through on his promise, he bashed Eight-ball against the ear of a snarling stone lion. Eight-ball’s shell cracked, and blue liquid gushed like blood between Jeremy’s fingers. It smelled like alcohol.

He swung Eight-ball again. Half the shell broke away and thumped to the floor at Jeremy’s feet, and blue alcohol splashed his t-shirt, soaking him. A twenty-sided die, Eight-ball’s brain, skipped out of the art gallery and rolled across the second-floor walkway. He watched it spin away under the banister and out of sight, and heard it bounce across the food court below.

“I’m making my own choices from now on,” Jeremy said, and he flung aside the remaining broken plastic chunk of Eight-ball.

He started to leave, but then he noticed the blue alcohol soaking his hands and shirt. Eight-ball’s blood. He couldn’t let anyone see him like this, or they’d know he was guilty of murder.

He gathered the broken pieces of Eight-ball and stuffed them back into the Crown Royal bag. Then he stripped off his t-shirt, wiped his hands on it, and tossed it in into one of the large trash bins out on the main walkway, next to a bench.

There was one missing piece: Eight-ball’s brain. If somebody found that, there could be questions.

He walked down the escalator to the food court, where he checked everywhere, under chairs and tables, but couldn’t find the twenty-sided die. Then he noticed someone was watching him—a clown, standing just outside McDonald’s. The clown was smiling and waving at him.

“Oh, hi, Ronald,” Jeremy said. “I’m just, um, looking for something.”

The clown just smiled at him. Jeremy wondered if he’d seen Eight-ball’s brain skip through here, but he certainly wasn’t going to ask. Jeremy looked suspicious enough, searching frantically around the food court while shirtless.

“Well, guess I better get going,” Jeremy said. The clown watched him depart, still smiling, and didn’t say a word. Jeremy didn’t trust him.

They had a small service at the Family Bible Christian Bookstore, decorated with artificial flowers from the Hallmark shop, officiated by a priest whose plastic vestments and hollow crucifix came from the costume aisle at the party store. It was a quiet affair, with a lot of silent reflection and hardly any guests, since Eight-ball had so few friends.

Melissa came, which was very nice of her, considering Eight-ball had such a low opinion of Jeremy and Melissa’s relationship. It made Jeremy love her all the more.

“I guess I should say a few things,” Jeremy said. “Eight-ball was my friend. What he really enjoyed was answering questions. Sometimes his answers were very clear, and sometimes they were kind of vague, but he always had an answer for you.” Jeremy’s throat clenched up. He felt like a horrible hypocrite, knowing he was the one who’d killed Eight-ball. He didn’t know how to handle his guilt and genuine sorrow over the loss of his friend, and of course he could no longer go to Eight-ball for advice.

Jeremy was also the pallbearer. He carried the Eight-ball to one of the fake ferns, lifted it up in its pot, and stuffed Eight-ball into the plastic peat underneath. Eight-ball was buried in the Crown Royal bag he loved so well.

Jeremy noticed an extra guest here at the burial. The clown was watching from McDonald’s, waving at Jeremy and giving a macabre smile. Jeremy was pretty sure Ronald knew something, but so far the clown was keeping mum about it.

Jeremy waited a few days to make sure nobody was talking about the murder. Then he proposed to Melissa at midnight at Yankee Candle, where he’d lit every piece of merchandise in the store to set a romantic scene. The shop smelled like rose, cinnamon, vanilla, jasmine, sandalwood, musk, licorice…Jeremy wanted to gag at the many mingled smells, but he figured women liked that kind of thing.

He dropped to one knee and presented her with the biggest diamond ring that had been on display at King’s Jewelers.

“Melissa, you make me happier than I ever thought I could be,” he said. “Will you marry me?”

She didn’t say no. He slipped the ring on her finger.

They were married by the fountain, under the skylights. The fountain pumps no longer functioned, and the water had gone stagnant, but Jeremy had covered the water with a layer of plastic flowers and floating candles.

Guests came from as far away as Sears. Melissa’s old friends wore leather bridesmaids’ dresses from Hot Topic. Gramps gave away the bride. Skipster was Jeremy’s best man. Jeremy didn’t even like Skipster that much, but he didn’t have many friends, and Skipster hadn’t expressed any problem with the idea when Jeremy asked him.

Jeremy wore a black coat with tails from Tuxedo Junction. The priest who had officiated the funeral conducted the service.

Melissa came down the aisle in a white cart festooned with white bunting and more plastic flowers. She was veiled inside her wedding dress, her long lacy train dragging the floor behind her.

When Jeremy finally lifted her veil and kissed her, he thought he heard Marla and Ivana crying in the audience.

They had their reception at T.G.I. Friday’s—not only had it been the site of their first date, it was the only place in the mall that served booze.

They honeymooned at the Sears swimwear department, where a photographic mural of a beautiful tropical beach covered the wall from floor to ceiling. Suntanned young people modeling assorted brands of beachwear played volleyball in front of it. To one side there was a tiki hut offering racks of sunglasses. Jeremy and his bride lay on a blanket that evening, watching the sunset through the glass outer doors of Sears.

On subsequent nights he took her to the Sears bedding department. Along the way they passed the menswear department, and Jeremy felt jealous when he noticed the men in their business suits blatantly ogling Melissa in her bikini.

Then the honeymoon was over, and they returned home to Macy’s.

“I love you Melissa,” he said as they lay together on their first night home. He was spooning her, with his face buried in her long blond hair. She didn’t answer him. She must have already been asleep.

For a number of days he felt like she was keeping her distance from him. He suspected there was something she wasn’t saying. An unspoken tension began to grow between them.

Then Jeremy figured it out: Melissa was pregnant, but she just didn’t know how to tell him.

Then they were happy again, shopping at Big Baby Junction for cribs and bottles. He couldn’t believe how quickly her pregnancy progressed. One day she appeared as she always had, ever since the first time he saw her in the window. The next day it looked like someone had shoved a basketball under her maternity dress, and possibly anchored it there with duct tape.

After much anticipation, the big day arrived. It was a difficult delivery—Jeremy had to break her basketball himself with a pen knife to get the air flowing out. In the end, though, it was a beautiful day. Jeremy wheeled their children in from the Gap Kids store. They’d had a boy and a girl, fraternal twins, both of them cute and smiley.

They named the twins Sammy and Suzy. Sammy got a race-car bed, while Suzy got a princess bed with a frilly canopy. They all lived happily at Macy’s.

Having children changed Melissa. She moved on from her spiked collars and leather pants to prim blouses and ankle-length skirts, just like Jeremy’s mother used to wear. She took the kids down the escalator to Sylvan Learning Center each morning. On Sundays Melissa made the whole family attend church at Family Bible, where they listened to preachers via audiobook. Jeremy’s mother would have liked that too, knowing her grandchildren were getting a good Christian education.

Jeremy sometimes took Sammy over to the sporting goods store and tried to show him how to shoot basketball, but Sammy was a shy, inactive kid. For that matter, Suzy was as much of a wallflower as her mother. Jeremy couldn’t believe that he had turned out to be the talkative, outgoing one in the family.

In the summer they packed their kids and their luggage into the family shopping cart and made the long trip to the Sears swimwear department for a beach vacation.

As they lay on their beach towels, Jeremy looked over his family. While he cared about them, he felt like he wasn’t really connecting with them anymore. They hardly spoke a word to him, and they never seemed to listen. More and more, they just stared right through him, blankly, whenever he tried to strike up a conversation.

He found himself looking at the tan girls playing volleyball in their bikinis. Melissa didn’t wear bikinis anymore, just a dark one-piece with a prim swimming skirt, and Jeremy could sense her disdain for the flirty young things at the beach.

Jeremy didn’t feel disdain, though. His eye kept wandering to one of the bikini girls, one with a very dark and exotic skin tone, her hair luxurious and brown. She wore a bikini with a sort of tie-dyed flower pattern.

Sometimes Jeremy could feel her watching the back of his head. Once or twice he was pretty sure he’d caught her looking at him. And maybe smiling, or just about to do so.

On the sixth day of their vacation, Jeremy found himself staring at the dark beauty again. He glanced over at his wife and kids, stretched out on their beach blankets. None of them were moving. They must have all dozed off.

This was his chance.

He stepped right into the middle of the volleyball game and approached the dark girl in her colorful bikini. Nobody said a word to stop him. He took her by the hand.

He led the girl around behind the tiki hut full of sunglasses, out of sight of his family. The dark-skinned girl must have been feeling eager, because she let him lay her down on the beach blanket and remove her bikini.

Jeremy hurried to get out of his clothes, then he spread her legs and climbed on top of her. He was feeling eager, too, so the whole thing lasted less than two minutes.

When he was done, he rolled off the girl and lay down beside her, but she wasn’t looking at him. She was staring straight up at the high ceiling overhead.

“This was a mistake,” Jeremy said. “I have to go.”

She said nothing, indifferent to him.

Jeremy returned to his family and lay down beside his wife.

“Nice day, isn’t it, Melissa?” he asked.

But she didn’t have a word to say to him, then or ever again. The kids gave him the silent treatment, too.

When they returned home, Melissa lay rigid in their bed and showed no interest in being intimate with him. After a couple of nights she moved to another bed. He cried and apologized to her again and again, but she said nothing, her face like a hard plastic mask.

Soon after that, Melissa took the kids and moved into Sears at the far end of the mall. The last time he saw her she was with one of those jerks from the menswear department.

Gramps had no sympathy. Neither did Ivana and Marla, who whispered nasty things about Jeremy when he wasn’t around, telling everyone on the north end of the mall what he’d done to Melissa and insinuating he’d done a lot more, like hooking up with various women all over Macy’s, which was just malicious gossip. Skip didn’t seem to care about Jeremy’s suffering, either, but he had never been a true friend. None of them had ever been true friends, Jeremy thought. Eight-ball had been the only one he could really trust, and now Eight-ball was gone.

Jeremy worried that word was getting out about his part in Eight-ball’s death. While nobody said anything to his face about it, he thought he could sense an air of suspicion. The clown gave him a lot of strange smiles whenever Jeremy passed the food court.

One night he went to T.G.I. Friday’s and drank Seagram’s straight from the bottle. He found himself wandering through the mall, drinking and weeping. Everyone came to their windows to watch. The college kids at Old Navy, the sexy ladies at Victoria’s Secret—all of them watched him, no doubt whispering to each other about how pathetic and worthless he was, how he’d lost his wife to some wingtipped jerkoff over at Sears.

“Go to hell!” he shouted at one placid, grinning face after another. “All of you go to hell!” The place was getting too small for him, with everybody full of gossip and judgment, everybody up in his business.

He found his way out to the parking lot. Jeremy managed to climb inside his truck with the camper top, the one he’d loaded with provisions so long ago. He fumbled the key into the ignition and cranked it up.

He would have to press on without Eight-ball to help him. Jeremy swerved his way down the interstate, steering with one hand, sipping gin with the other. He flipped on the radio and listened to the open hiss of dead air for the rest of the night.

J.L. Bryan studied English literature at the University of Georgia and at Oxford, with a focus on the English Renaissance and the Romantic period. He also studied screenwriting at UCLA. He enjoys remixing elements of paranormal, supernatural, fantasy, horror and science fiction into new kinds of stories.

He is the author of The Paranormals series (Jenny Pox, Tommy Nightmare, and Alexander Death) and other books. Fairy Metal Thunder is the first book in his new Songs of Magic series. He lives in Atlanta with his wife Christina, his baby son John, and some dogs and cats.

Website: www.jlbryanbooks.com

Twitter: @jlbryanbooks