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

too well. I could smell it again, that familiar stew of yeast and insect musk, and under it — yes, maybe Holden had been right — the sharp stench of decay? Putrid flesh, souring and bulging with trapped bacterial gases. Had it been hiding from me before? How did I miss it the first time? More importantly, when was the first time? Like a snake eating its tail, time was a dizzying loop.
    “It’s a blood gun,” Not Joe answered his own question.
    “Yeah. I know. It’s killed someone.” This was a deviation from Friday’s first timeline; I’d jumped the dialogue forward a few beats and stolen his line.
    He didn’t seem to mind. “Do I know you?”
    I didn’t have time to recite the script. “What time is it?”
    “Twelve thirty.”
    I checked my cell phone: 4:01 a.m.
    Yep. Time and space is still broken.
    “I . . . I don’t want to buy the gun,” I blurted out. “I changed my mind.”
    The air thickened between us.
    Not Joe eyed me crookedly, like I was an alien wrapped in human skin. He was right to be suspicious; I was an imposter in this world of Friday, March 19. I looked the part, I sounded the part, I literally was the part, but I felt stranded on the moon. Wearing my body as a spacesuit. In the corner of the store, a fluorescent light buzzed like a hornet, then flickered and died.
    “Just now?” he asked. “You changed your mind?”
    I shrugged aimlessly and leaned on the counter, as chilly as lake ice. “Like you said. It just feels . . . wrong, somehow.”
    He looked puzzled. “I didn’t say that.”
    “Believe me, you did.”
    If this really was time travel, I supposed wishfully, perhaps I could just rewrite the past here by not purchasing that damn thing and simply leaving the store empty-handed. Maybe the Head-Scratching Rifle would retcon itself out of my life. Like entering the Cretaceous period and stomping on the right butterfly — squish — and then I could stand back and let Ray Bradbury’s temporal physics do the rest—
    He shrugged. “Sure.”
    “Sure?”
    “But you still owe the transfer fee. To reimburse us for—”
    “Deal.” I scooted my debit card across the glass. He punched buttons and tore a receipt. Thirty-nine dollars. I signed with a half-assed Nike swoosh and threw the pen down, glancing over at the rifle. “Done?”
    “Done.”
    “Transaction canceled?”
    He nodded, making a sour face. “Something smells like cat pee.”
    I wiped my hands on my jeans. I remembered that leering customer — the guy with cat piss on his breath who’d told me the story of Laika, the Soviet Union’s unlucky first cosmonaut — and wondered with a nervous tremor if that had been his breath after all. Time seemed to be porous; maybe odors seeped through. Was that even the first time I’d been here?
    I stepped back, away from the Mosin Nagant on the counter. Technically, it wasn’t mine — not anymore — but that didn’t make me feel any better. Demonic evil probably doesn’t abide by Federal Firearms License paperwork. Somehow I knew with a grim certainty; I could flee Joe’s Guns right now and never look back, but the Head-Scratching Rifle would remain with me, its tendrils hooked inside me, its alien cells quietly multiplying in my brain like cancer.
    I glanced up at a wall bristling with cutting-edge tech — P90’s, SCAR’s, F2000’s decked out with red lasers and holographic sights — and found it darkly amusing that the most dangerous thing in this room full of assault rifles was a wooden, single-shot clunker. Then again, I remembered, assault rifle is a misnomer. Adelaide had corrected me once, in this very same gun store: Those are just scary-looking semi-automatics, Dan. Real military “assault weapons” have fire selectors for automatic fire, and they’ve been illegal in the US since the 1930s. So when you hear people wring their hands about how we need to ban those evil “assault rifles,” it tells you that they have no idea what they’re talking