The C-Store Round Two
On the last day of my annual North Dakota trip, I was riding in the car with my three other travel buddies. We'd spent the week wandering around the prairie, and on our final night my male friend realized, we were out of tonic water.
"Did you bring more tonic water?" my friend asked.
My husband and I told him no, and our friend pulled into the C-Store parking lot. They hadn't had yeast, but they did have a liquor license. They probably had tonic water.
It was dark at this point, and there were two other trucks in the parking lot. The truck doors opened and a horde of men in high-vis jackets erupted from the trucks. Roughnecks or construction workers, it didn't matter. They piled into the C-Store.
"Great," my other friend said, the woman who I'd ended up in the C-Store with at the beginning of the week. "This should be fun."
We walked to the front door, the animatronic Halloween-colored Christmas tree entangling my male friend.
"What is this supposed to be?" he asked, stepping back from the tree. "Is this a Halloween Christmas tree? What even is that?"
I ignored him and went inside.
The same imperious clerk was there, high on her register dais. Another voluptuous woman was with her, and the two of them watched the roughnecks roll toward the beer cooler on a wave of incandescent yellow.
Then the screaming started.
The ghoul by the baking-ish aisle, which was on the way to the beer case, got a few of them, then the disembodied flying skeleton head let out a mechanical cackle and a shriek. The roughnecks yelled back, jumping into each other and causing a pile up in front of the chips. My friend, who had her mind set on chips, realized she was pinned between the gaggle of roughnecks and an animatronic little girl covered in blood and holding a kitchen knife. My friend stepped back. The little girl began a high keening and dragged herself at my friend, her arm slowly slashing the knife before her.
The two clerks were laughing their asses off, and a cacophony of Spanish curses sounded, and one of the guys, a short portly dude, only made more portly by his padded construction jacket, dove to the feet of the ghoul and ripped out the cord. My friend got away from the little girl, and the rough necks watched the ghoul expectantly.
One of them, a taller, wily looking guy jumped at the ghoul and plugged it back in. It began to shriek, but it also started making that dangerous clicking noise that tells you electricity is flowing, but not in the right way. I realized I was stuck between the roughnecks and a half a floor skeleton which was made to look like it was pulling itself out of the grave.
The rough necks were yelling while the clicking seemed to only grow more urgent, and the white-as-white-can-be head clerk, the one who'd told us to essentially go fuck ourselves when we asked for yeast yelled, "AYE VENGA! You're breaking our stuff!"
To which the roughnecks broke into a fit of giggles and the tall one snaked forward and again ripped out the ghoul's cord, causing it and the ominous clicking to go silent. The clerks were now laughing as well, and I looked up impressed the lights were still on. Then the little girl with the knife started to keen again, and like a stiff prairie wind, the roughnecks blew out of the store, leaving us in the relative silence of the unpredictable shrieks and cackles of motion activated Halloween decorations.
My friend stood at the counter looking at us all.
"I bought the tonic water a while ago. Are you all ready or what?"
My other friend, clasping a bag of salt and vinegar chips to her chest, barreled out of the chip aisle and to the clerks. The clerk sneered at her, but rang her up. We pushed into the North Dakota night, and the wailing tree tickled us on our way to the car.
"Man, that was a lot," my male friend said. "Good thing I got a lot of tonic water. We're going to need a drink after that."
And with that, we pulled away from the C-Store, the glowing Halloween orange tree disappearing into the moonless North Dakota night.