OUR LAST NIGHT: an edge of your seat ghost story thriller by TAYLOR ADAMS

and the others? Maybe right now, it was really Saturday morning and I was pressing the Head-Scratching Rifle to my chin and reaching for the trigger—
    I froze in the doorway.
    I’d entered Jitters. But I wasn’t inside Jitters.
    I saw a different room entirely. No Holden. No baristas. No paper lights. Just a squared storefront with prison-gray walls. Center aisles lined with red solvent bottles, leather holsters, and little square patches. A long glass counter packed with tagged semi-automatics and revolvers. Behind it, a back wall bristling with shotguns and rifles. And the sudden, disarming comfort of room temperature. This place ran its thermostat much hotter than Jitters.
    I was back in Joe’s Guns.
    My stomach turned to water and tugged my throat in contracting pulls. I felt ants crawling on my skin. The prickle of millions of insect feet. And a powerful wrongness somewhere deep inside me; a wrenching dislocation between time and space. I didn’t even notice the old man standing by the cash register, eyeballing me — it was Not Joe, the tired old guy who’d sold me the Mosin Nagant on behalf of Ben Dyson’s surviving family — until he exhaled and muttered something under his breath.
    It sounded like: “Well, shit .”
     

10 Hours, 2 Minutes
    I’d entered a coffee shop and ended up in a gun store six miles away. So, yes, this was definitely getting worse.
    “I have it,” Not Joe said.
    I jolted.
    “I have it, I have it,” he echoed, ducking into the back room to get something. I knew what it was. I knew exactly what he was talking about, because we’d had this conversation before. All of it. Even his annoyed grunt as I entered the store — “Well, shit” — because that was exactly what he’d said the first time. He knew I was here to pick up the Mosin Nagant that killed Mr. Dyson last year in Georgia. The creepy blood gun. Déjà vu didn’t even begin to describe it.
    The jail-barred front door whooshed shut behind me, with JOE’S GUNS stenciled backwards on the glass. Under it, accompanied by a silhouette of a ghillied sniper shouldering his rifle: REACH OUT AND TOUCH SOMEONE. Outside, the blizzard was gone. No pelting waves of snow, no arctic winds. Just the same watery sky I remembered from Friday morning, dumping sporadic handfuls of slush. And my black Toyota Celica, now with no snow on the windshield, parked beside a blue Ford pickup.
    This is time travel , I thought numbly.
    Like wristwatches running backwards in the Kalash. I’m falling back in time —
    Something clanked harshly on glass and I whirled, my throat tightening. Not Joe was back at the counter, setting the rifle on the surface. The Head-Scratching Rifle was once again bundled in its slimy, skin-like cocoon, because Not Joe couldn’t bring himself to touch it with his bare skin. Because, as he would shortly explain to me, it had just felt wrong, radioactive somehow.
    At least there was no cat piss on it this time.
    He looked up at me again. “You know what this is?”
    Last time, I’d played dumb and said: An M44? This time I just hesitated dumbly on the spot, words lumping on my tongue. My brain was a squirming coil of loose thoughts.
    Free-falling backwards in time . . .
    Time travel is always so clean in movies — our heroes punch a precise time and date into their magic device and away they go. Like selecting floors on an elevator. It was never like this; sporadic, uncontrolled, like plunging down a dark shaft to an unknown dark floor. I tasted slippery terror. I’d already barfed in the bathroom sink at Jitters two hours in the future, but who knows how this worked? Maybe my stomach was full again.
    “I asked you a question.” Not Joe pointed at the rifle with two fingers, hooked in an arthritic claw. “Do you know what this is?”
    Oh, God, I sure don’t.
    I’d thought I did. But I’d been wrong.
    The rifle lay between us like a bagged corpse. Smeared with those gummy clots of yellow-brown sludge I knew all