HERE FOR THE SLUSHIE - Short Story

Author's Note: This one was written three years ago, and is mostly just a weird, fun romp that doesn't have much substance to it. But I hope it's fun, at least.

            Tanner socked his forty-four ounce Styrofoam cup up against the slushie machine and flipped up the lever. He picked a dome lid free while his slushie, frothy and brown and looking totally fricking great, filled the rest of the way, and then flipped the lever down, fit the lid on top, and headed for the front counter to pay. A few steps in, and he realized he’d forgotten a straw.

            He turned back around, and that was when everything went to hell.

            The floor shook and he stumbled, and when he tried to turn back around, something hit him low in the back and sent him to the floor. His slushie hit the tiles and exploded, and if Tanner hadn’t been trying to frantically catch his breath and figure out what the hell had just happened, he would’ve been pissed about it. But instead of getting pissed, he tried to push himself to his hands and knees.

            “Stay down,” a voice hissed, and Tanner twisted his neck to try and see who it was. It was someone he recognized—a kid from his school, one of those ones that you couldn’t help but recognize even if you didn’t know them. The guy’s name was something biblical, something like Isaiah or Zechariah or Elijah or something, and he was biracial, black mixed with something else, Tanner’d heard. He also liked to wear colorful scarves and put beads and colored rubber bands in his dreadlocks.

            “What’s going on?”

            “I messed up,” the kid said. “Like, big time. What’re you doing here?”

            “Getting a slushie.”

            The kid snorted, and slapped him on the back of the head. Not hard, but hard enough to be annoying. “Okay. Just stay down.”        

            The kid disappeared from on top of him and Tanner pushed himself up onto his elbows and turned around to see the action.

            The entire front half of the store was gone. The cash registers, the cigarettes—the pumps, God, the pumps outside were gone. The only thing left was a crater, a huge crater, still smoking and charred and blackened. Candy was scattered everywhere, in varying states of melted or otherwise ruined, and the kid was walking for the hole.

            “Dude!” Tanner yelled after him. “What’re you doing?”

            The kid glanced back. “If you wanna be able to leave with your face,” he said. “You’ve gotta kinda just let me do my thing, dude.”

            Tanner pushed himself back until his feet hit the counter underneath the slushie machine, and then pulled himself up. His back hurt, and so did his chin where he’d hit the ground, but he felt okay, especially considering how big that explosion looked. Hell, it had torn out most of the gas station, he was probably lucky to get out of that without having to see his guts pooling at his feet.

            The kid was still walking for the crater. As Tanner watched, he snapped his fingers and a little ball of light bounced to life, bouncing between his fingers, illuminating the dark nail polish he’d adorned them with. Tanner frowned. He was willing to accept a gas explosion or something. That was a perfectly reasonable reason for a gas station-slash-convenience store to randomly blow up. But he wasn’t so sure about the little ball of light.

            Also, where was everyone else?

            When he’d gotten there to get his slushie, eighty-eight cents jingling in his pocket, there had definitely been at least three or four other people browsing—that was three or four people not counting the clerks. They weren’t there anymore, not even in pieces. Tanner didn’t even see any blood. It was like he was alone in the universe with this kid whose name he couldn’t even remember.

            A couple of minutes later, the kid came back. “It’s worse than I thought.”

            “What is going on?” Tanner asked. “Who are you? I don’t even know your name, dude, and all I wanted was a slushie. And now everyone’s gone, there’s not even any cars going past outside, and—“

            “I messed up,” the kid said again. “But uh. Elijah. That’s my name. But I messed up.”

            “Messed up what, dude?”

            “Okay, so,” Elijah said. “The thing is, I’m practicing teleporting. And I’ve gotten pretty good, so when I saw you getting a slushie, I figured that maybe I’d try and take you somewhere, ‘cause I recognize you from school and you’re pretty cute, so I figured, hey! Guy could use a meal in Paris, no better way to impress on a first date than to take someone to Paris. But instead of taking us to Paris I took us too an alternate dimension where I blew up the gas station and also there’s nobody else here.”

            “You’ve got to be shitting me.”

            “No,” Elijah said. “I, uh—I’m sorry. Also I guess I ruined your slushie, huh?”

            “A little,” Tanner said. “Also my life. Can you get us back?”

            “That is a great question,” Elijah said. He bit down hard on his lower lip and glanced around the gas station. Tanner followed his gaze, hoping that there was something in this stupid alternate dimension that could help them not be stuck here forever. But all he could see was the usual gas station fare. Some of the back aisles weren’t so damaged from the gas explosion, and Elijah’s gaze must have caught on this, too, because he grabbed Tanner’s hand and pulled him to the back. “C’mon. No use trying anything on an empty stomach, and there is a wall of jerky calling my name.”

            “Dude—“

            “I actually don’t think I can even try to get us back on an empty stomach, so please don’t complain,” Elijah said. They reached the back wall, and Elijah nabbed a bag of Originals and tore it open with his teeth. “And protein’s good for energy. You’d think sugar or caffeine, right? But no way I could jump across dimensions on a Three Musketeers, dude. I’d fizz out and we’d probably die between worlds. Which would probably suck.”

            He offered the bag to Tanner, and Tanner shook his head. Elijah just shrugged and tore through half the bag without even breaking to breathe, barely, and Tanner wondered how in the hell he’d gotten caught up in this, seriously. But he didn’t want to ask, because if he did, he was pretty sure that Elijah would go off again into some weird spiel about teleportation and honestly, at this point, he just wanted to go home.

            So he’d just wait for Elijah to finish his snack and then maybe he could go home, go to the gas station across town, and get a slushie without someone taking him to an alternate dimension.

            The store shook and Elijah’s head jerked up, like a rabbit that had just caught wind of a predator. “Aw, hell,” he said, and then he shoved the jerky into his back pocket and grabbed Tanner’s hand. “We might die.”

            “I hope that’s you being overdramatic.”

            “No, I—alternate dimensions are weird, and like, sometimes there’s monsters and shit like that. So we might die.”

            “I’m going to say it again, because I don’t think you heard me the first time: I hope that’s you being overdramatic.”

            Instead of responding verbally, Elijah pointed. Tanner’s gaze followed his finger to see a large, black… something, it was a tentacle or something, he didn’t know what it was, but it had hooked itself around the single still-standing gas pump and was pulling the thing’s body up from the giant crater the explosion had caused. Tanner looked back at Elijah, who bared his teeth in an apologetic sort of smile.

            “Sorry for bringing you to an alternate dimension where you could get killed by a horrible tentacle monster.”

            “You owe me way more than a slushie after this.”

            “Hah,” Elijah said. It came out funny, like he’d lost all of his air and will to live. “Yeah. Uh. I’m like, eighty percent sure what that is, and I, uh, I don’t think you’re getting your slushie.”

            “That’s great. Any way we could get your energy up enough for you to get us the hell out of here?”

            “Nope. Any last-minute confessions for your priest?”

            “Um—no?”

            “Great,” Elijah said. Tanner looked back at the hole outside. Whatever the hell that thing was, it was pulling itself out. It was slow, at least. He could see more tentacles coming up, wrapping around structural support and pulling. Tanner watched it for a couple more seconds, and then grabbed another bag of jerky, ripped it open, and shoved it at Elijah. “What? It’s not time for a snack, it’s time to become at peace with our imminent demise—“

            “This is not a Fall Out Boy song, that thing’s slow, eat more beef.”

            Elijah laughed again, that same sort of hopeless laugh, but he started eating. “I’m gonna need a couple bags,” he said, and Tanner nodded.

            “Cool. I’ll distract it.”

            “Huh—?”

            Tanner didn’t stay to hear whatever he was going to do, his exclamation of worry or fear or whatever, he just jogged to the edge of the gas station. As close as he could get without stepping on a tentacle. The closest tentacle, one that had shot out of the hole later than the rest, one that had wrapped itself around a part of the building itself, twitched a little, and a flap of skin flicked up and an eye, large and orange and wet, fixated on him.

            This had been a mistake.

            Tanner didn’t run, though, because the only place he had to run was back to Elijah, and Elijah needed to focus on eating beef jerky, so he reached around, grabbed for whatever was nearest, and came up with a pot of coffee.

            He threw the entire pot. He’d meant to just throw the coffee, but somewhere along the line the pot went with it, and it smacked into the tentacle. In the next moment, the tentacle was around Tanner’s waist and he was in the air. He yelled and twisted and just tried to plain wiggle his way free, but it was not working out in his favor. “Elijah!” he yelled. “How’s the jerky coming?”

            From the back of the store: “What did you do?”

            “It doesn’t like coffee!” The tentacle squeezed, and he had to wriggle, breathless, for a couple of moments before he could breathe a lot. “Or being called it!”

            He managed to pull one hand free and hit uselessly at the tentacle. It shook him, and then he was just dizzy and breathless and really wishing that Elijah would just hurry up. Though he didn’t know how Elijah was supposed to reach him to save him, the idea that Elijah could save him made him feel a little bit better.

            Out of spite or just a lack of any other way to fight back, Tanner spit at the thing. He was good at spitting—he had an older brother, and that was just something that brothers did was spit at each other—and it landed directly in the center of the orange eye, which was still looking at him.

            The eye fizzled and the tentacle (with Tanner in it) thudded to the floor. Tanner wriggled, trying to free himself, but even though the tentacle had lost the will to wave him around in the air, it had not lost its grip, so his struggles were mostly in vain. He tried spitting more, but it didn’t have the same effect as the spit to the eye had, so he mostly just laid there and tried to get his breath back, figuring that it was all he could do until Elijah came back, fully fed and (hopefully) with some sort of plan.

            That was, until the tentacle started dragging him toward the crater in the ground.

            “Elijah!” Tanner yelled again. “Please hurry up and do something!”

            Elijah said something, but Tanner didn’t hear it; he was too busy wriggling and trying to not be pulled into a chasm of Hell. He felt like he was making progress, honestly, with the whole wriggling thing, but he didn’t seem to be escaping, so either this bullshit tentacle monster just didn’t care about his progress or he was delusional.

            Seeing no other option, he craned his neck and bit the thing.

            It withdrew. It screamed, first, it vibrated horror through the dead world that Elijah had brought them to, but then it let go of him, spun him into the ground and pulled its tentacle back. Tanner took about half a second to catch his breath and then lurched to his feet and ran back for Elijah.

            Elijah, who was still eating.

            “Dude, that’s got to be enough,” Tanner said. “I bit the thing, and now I feel gross, so please tell me that you can take me back to where I’m supposed to be and also buy me a slushie because you owe me one.”

            Elijah swallowed, looked around at the jerky bags scattered around his feet, and nodded. “Yeah, okay,” he said, and he grabbed Tanner’s arm and then they were standing in the jerky aisle at the convenience store. “Coke slushie, right?”

            “Yeah,” Tanner said. Elijah headed off, and Tanner trotted after him. “And I want sixty-four ounces, dude! You owe me the extra twenty ounces!”