Fiction: Events at the Wigwam Rock Diner, Nevada by Cate Gardner

 

A symbol of defiance, the wigwam-shaped rock jutted up from the Nevada landscape. To Cora, it was the world sticking its middle finger up at her. She remembered the ancient Paiute tales of the things that hunted her kind and prayed they were a myth.

 There was no denying though, wigwams were appearing in both expected and unexpected places, and at a rate too plentiful for coincidence. She’d seen them on the t-shirts of slaughtered gang members in Harlem; in the form of a ceramic tepee that had toppled from a windowsill and cracked the skull of a passing pensioner in Chicago; and then there was the account of the couple camping in the Appalachians who’d had an unfortunate encounter with a bear outside one. Now, a waiter in a fur coat juggled salt and pepper shakers in the shape of wigwams behind the counter of the Wigwam Rock Diner.

Cora stuck out her tongue at the man. In response, he laid a plate of eyeballs on the counter. Congealed blood pooled as a macabre sauce.

 “I don’t eat off paper plates,” she said.

 She was supposed to get down to business, not socialize. If nothing else, she had promised herself she would stay on the move so that anyone or anything stalking her did not catch up. However, this man, and his seeming expectance of Death’s arrival, intrigued her.

 Broken crockery from his previous attempt to feed her covered her lap and fanned out beneath her stool. She tapped her knee against the counter top and watched as the eyeballs rolled around to look at him. To hide his shaking hands, he ran his fingers through his lank, greasy hair.

 She smiled.

 As he fussed and tried to turn the irises away from him, Cora glanced out the window. The sun glinted off something in the distance. A something out by the wigwam rock, and it was moving fast and in their direction. The diner’s metal sign creaked in the dry air. Her bicycle rested against the window and her dog, Bacteria, yapped in the basket as tumbleweeds brushed by. Lingering here was foolish.

 The waiter pressed a tarnished spoon into her hand and urged her gaze away from the oncoming vehicle. As his hands curled around hers, blood pumping fast through his veins, he seemed reluctant to let go.

 Outside, the vehicle roared into view––a yellow convertible––and then screeched away, leaving the diner behind. Had she breath to hold in, it would exhale now. Dust whorled along the empty road like a metaphor for the ghost the driver would become.

 Cora sighed. All she saw––whether in graveyard, desert or mall––were ghosts. Transient things occupying space. On bad days, their skeletons shone through their skin.

 “No one ever stops here,” he said, letting go of her hand. “Except you did.”

 She couldn’t see his skeleton. The fact disturbed. “And you’ve gone all Norman Bates on me.”

 Cora picked up a fork and stabbed at an eye. It proved difficult to puncture. The collection of eyes––green, blue and brown––rolled around the plate. Did he think she would put one in her mouth? A shiver coursed down her back. If he did, then he’d read some bad literature. Cora rolled up her sleeves, bent forward and went in for the hunt. Several attempts later, she skewered the eye.

 The waiter did a mini tap-dance and clapped his hands. She still wasn’t eating it. Instead, he bent forward and wrapped his lips around the eyeball. His lips brushed her fingers, causing her to drop the fork. It clattered to the table. She wiped his spit off her hand and tried not to retch when the eyeball popped in his mouth.

 “Spit it out,” she said.

 The eye hit the stainless steel sink with a plop and rolled around it. A flick of his finger and the waste disposal whirred into action. As he swigged a glass of water, Cora emptied the rest of the eyeballs into the bin. She crumpled up the plate and threw it at him. Outside, Bacteria yapped as a second vehicle approached.

 A beat up blue Lincoln with bald tyres pulled into the empty car park. Cora sat down at the counter. The car had been tailing her for days, and, to her knowledge, no one ever got out of it. Maybe today she would step outside and tap on the driver-side window. Then again, maybe she wouldn’t.

 The fluorescent strip light flickered. The waiter developed a twitch in his right hand, and it wriggled ferret-like up the sleeve of his fur coat.

 “What kind of turd wears a fur coat to work in a diner?” Cora sneered, not taking her eyes off the Lincoln. “How about I skin you and fashion myself a new cloak?”

 As though it approved of her remark, the Lincoln’s engine gasped and the hood popped up, betraying its vital organs.

 “Why don’t you get out of here?” she spat. “Run, run, run, as fast as your leopard print jeans and flower power sneakers will let you and don’t stop until your breath gives out.”

 He didn’t move of course. No one ever ran from Death. They were rabbits caught in her headlights.

 “Are there two of you?” he asked, nodding toward the car park.

 “Only if you’ve been drinking bourbon by the bucket load.”

 Bacteria jumped down from her basket and scratched at the car door. There was something dead inside the car. Cora stood.

 “So what happened, did Betty the waitress refuse to serve you or did Derek, the short order cook, not flip your burger fast enough?” Ridiculous that her heart, which had long ago shriveled and died, should beat so hard in her chest.

 “I scooped out their eyes and put their bodies in the freezer. I knew you would come,” he said.

 The car door opened. Bacteria appeared to be snapping at the heels of someone or something, and yet Cora could see no one. Her fingers drummed a discordant rhythm against the countertop.

 Remove their souls and go, she urged.

 The door opened. The bell above it released a faint tinkle as though uncertain someone had entered. Bacteria whined.

 “Who are you waiting for?” The phony waiter asked.

 “I’m not waiting for anyone,” she replied. “I believe they are already here.”

 Perhaps her unseen stalker was partial to eyeballs, or a freezer full of rotting souls. She decided to do the thing her father had always advised––if someone is bothering you, pretend they’re not there. Good advice in both life and death.

 She brushed the creases out of her cloak and said, “Take me to your dead.”

 Her vocation sucked. Within the dim light of the walk-in freezer, grey souls shivered and curled together in the fetal position, each one trying not to look at their corpses. She wanted to rip the fur coat off their murderer’s back. Though the cold did not touch her, Cora shivered. The waitress hung from a meat hook, and the short order cook and two checked-shirt customers lay at her feet. As Cora gathered the souls beneath her cloak and contemplated hanging the waiter and his fur coat on a vacant hook, the freezer door slammed shut. The waiter grinned.

 “I can walk through the door you know,” she said.

 Beside her, the waiter huddled into his coat. “Well, do it.” Then he began to laugh.

 Or through the walls, ceiling or floor. The question was, would the thing that waited outside be waiting?

 The waitress’s cracked heels tapped against Cora’s shoulder. The man’s continued hyena-laugh chipped ice from the waitress’s nose. His breath plumed in smoke rings. What kind of turd wears a fur coat to work in a diner? Simple answer––a man who expects a locked freezer containing a collection of corpses. A trapper––and today he’d caught the ultimate prize: Death. Or so he believed. A swipe of her scythe and his soul lay shivering beside his fur-covered corpse. She wondered what the thing that stalked her had offered him to lure her here. In the end, it didn’t matter.

 The air about her shifted. Something circled her with grace and cunning while outside the freezer, Bacteria whined. With the opening of its cloak, Cora discovered the truth of her pursuer. Glorious multi-coloured plumes formed its cloak and blanketed the collection of scalped reapers whose mouths yearned open in scream. She stepped into the death-stealers cloak and wondered who would take the dead when he had collected them all.