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

about.
    Yes, she’d been a bit of a know-it-all. But her words stuck in my mind; an American gun nut with an oh-so-proper English accent. Sometimes I wondered if she ever felt like a cultural orphan, forsaken by both sides of the pond.
    I shivered.
    The temperature in Joe’s Guns was now plunging. I could feel the air change around us; a gathering chill that seemed to originate on the floor and rise in drafts. Cold pillows. Not as bad as the subzero heat-death of the Jitters parking lot, or the woods outside my house, but it was getting there. Fast. Like something else, something not of this world, was greedily siphoning the warmth.
    I wondered: why is it always so cold?
    “You look familiar,” Not Joe said, his breath fogging the air between us. “You on TV?”
    I wasn’t listening. Something else had occurred to me, something monumentally terrifying. Just one sentence. But the most terrifying sentence I’d ever read, because now I understood its meaning. The last thing Ben Dyson ever typed on that sweltering July afternoon in Macon, Georgia, via a WordPress post on his laptop, seconds before blowing his face off with the cursed Mosin Nagant I’d so willingly introduced into my life.
    SO COLD IN HERE.
    Not Joe paused and looked over my shoulder.
    As I turned around, my mind whispered: The ghost in the Soviet greatcoat. He’s here.
    * * *
    He was standing at the door.
    Perfectly still, statuesque, as if he’d been out there for hours, peering eagerly into Joe’s Guns like a Black Friday shopper. Today’s milky daylight exposed every inch of him in crisp detail. I’d been right; that greatcoat was definitely Russian military-issue, worn in patches to reveal tufts of decayed yellow. So was the leather-brown utility belt encircling his belly, bulging with flapped pouches, pockets, and a dirty oilcan. All things I’d only seen before in black and white.
    He wore a gas mask. It encircled his head in flattened walls like a half-crushed beer can, and two round eye apertures gave it a vaguely insectoid look. The nose of the mask was protracted, snout-like, and from it dangled a flaccid air tube. About a foot and a half of corrugated black rubber, attached to nothing. It looked like the design of the apparatus — some antique trench-warfare thing designed to guard against mustard gas or blister agents — called for the breathing tube to coil around the cheek, into a goiter-like filter box on the neck. This creature was wearing the mask incorrectly, but it hardly seemed to matter. I don’t think it breathed.
    And it was standing outside the door. Staring at us, through the jail-barred glass, right over the REACH OUT AND TOUCH SOMEONE sniper sticker.
    I shivered.
    Not Joe regarded the man in the gas mask with dull suspicion, like he’d seen much worse, and glanced at me. “You know this guy?”
    My throat dried up.
    “ Hey . You know him?”
    “Kinda,” I managed.
    “You don’t kinda know someone. Yes or no?”
    I hesitated — actually, this could be the literal definition of kinda .
    “I think he’s here for you,” Not Joe said.
    I remembered the poor homeless guy who’d hitchhiked three time zones just to hang himself upside-down from the Kalash ceiling with barbed wire. And his nonsensical final words to his buddies: Well, the Gasman has summoned me.
    This was the Gasman.
    He still held the severed upper half of Adelaide’s savannah monitor in one fist, like a toddler clutching a favorite toy. I recognized Baby’s front legs, her toe claws hanging limp. Several inches of bloody spine dangled from her torso, making her resemble a two-foot tadpole. With his other hand, the Gasman reached for the door.
    “Oh, shit—”
    I lurched backward, off-balance, bumping a rack of blue gun manuals—
    THUNK. The front door clicked.
    Not Joe rolled his eyes.
    I looked back and the door was still shut. The apparition was still outside. It took me a moment to realize — the Gasman had pushed it with his gloved hand.