By the time the end of her shift rolled around, everything was almost back to normal. The broken glass, blood stains and gross black smears were gone. The only evidence of Travis’s crawling hand were the scratch marks on the counter, the dents in the door, and the gauze bandage that covered Roy’s right cheek.
There were about ten dents now and Gracie didn’t know how the hell they were going to explain that to the owner. Or what they were going to do about the hand on the other side of the door. It had been quiet for hours, so finally, knowing that they couldn’t leave it in there for the next shift to find, they stood in front of the cooler. This time Gracie had a broom and Roy had a crowbar.
“Ready?” Roy asked, his eyes gleaming as though he were relishing the potential rematch.
“On three,” Gracie replied. She took a deep breath, counted the numbers, and jerked the metal door open.
Cold air whooshed out of the freezer and Gracie blinked at what she saw. There, in the middle of the floor, was Travis’s hand poised in his death touch. The ninja ring gleamed under a layer of frost.
She and Roy crept up to it slowly and she held her breath as she poked it with the broom handle. It twitched a bit, but otherwise nothing.
“Well I’ll be damned. It’s frozen,” Roy said as he straightened up and laughed.
“Good. Let’s figure out how to get rid of it.”
“To hell with that. This is the greatest thing I’ve ever seen.” Roy picked the hand by its thumb and put it in a box of frozen burger patties. He carried the box out to the ice bin, sprinkled a couple of scoops inside, and taped up the top.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m gonna take it home and put it in the freezer. My brothers will love this.”
Gracie shook her head, struck dumb for a moment by the sheer stupidity of this plan. She could picture Roy and his three brothers drinking beer and taking turns brawling with the hand in the dirt yard in front of their trailer. “If it thaws out, it’ll try to kill you again.”
“I know! It’ll be fun,” Roy declared as he pulled his leather biker jacket off of the hook in the back. “Don’t worry. I got it all under control.”
The morning shift’s waitress and cooks shuffled through the kitchen doors, yawning. Roy gave them all a jaunty wave before saying, “’Night, Gracie.”
Gracie pulled out one of the smokes left by the college students and watched him go, figuring this might be the last time she’d ever see Roy, but doubting this was the last she’d see of Travis’s crawling hand.
Other Tales of Truck Stop Terror:
Invasion of the Slime People
State Trooper Darnell Cooper is a man who can handle belligerent rednecks, rowdy drunks, and most anything else he comes across on his late night back country patrols. But tonight, when he visits his favorite waitress at the Pink Panther Truck Stop, he's about to find out firsthand what kind of weirdness lurks in the fog that creeps along the side of the road...
I Married a Leech Man!
Carol the line cook spends her days preparing for the imminent collapse of society, but underneath her survivalist exterior is a wounded woman whose husband ran off with a stripper two years earlier. Just when she thinks she'll never see Frank again, he shows up in her barnyard, on the run, with a wild story and some strange new abilities...
Curse of the Ninja Ring
Travis Johnson is a ninja who can't get any respect. His co-workers hate him, the hottie waitress at the local truck stop barely notices him, and even his best friend Jimmy thinks he's a loser. But everything is about to change because the ring he bought off of e-Bay can turn Travis into the badass he desperately wants to be. It even has a mind of its own...
About the Author:
Because of her mother and grandmother, Nicole Prestin grew up watching far too many b-movie creature features at two in the morning. She continued down this dark path by becoming a MST3K junkie in college and ever since then she has been a connoisseur of any kind of "so bad it's hilarious" movie she can get her grubby paws on. This has obviously warped her muse beyond repair and resulted in the "Tales of Truck Stop Terror," a series of short interconnected stories inhabited by rowdy rednecks, plucky waitresses, kickass cops, and silly supernatural menaces.
A short fiction writer at heart, she writes across many different speculative fiction genres (horror, science fiction, fantasy, urban fantasy) and occasionally even dabbles in trying to finish one of her half written novels. When she is not swearing at the blinking curser on her screen, she spends time with her incredibly patient and indulgent husband and her pair of extremely cute, yet terribly clever, spawn. She can be found at her website: https://nicoleprestin.blogspot.com/
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