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spookyspaghettisundae · 7 years

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Lost Number

Even at sunset, the yellow fireball in the sky was scorching hot, and there was not a single waking soul around for miles. A dusty old tour bus softly swayed in the unforgiving desert winds. Beached in the sand like a steel whale, the bus stood several steps away from the road, a thin strip of cracked asphalt that cut through the landscape of red sand, sparse vegetation, and rocky hills.

The door on the side of the bus burst open, and a lean figure stumbled outside. If anybody but a vulture perched on a rock had been looking, they would have had to have taken a moment to discern the gender of the person who had emerged from the large vehicle.

It was Kevin. His androgynous attire was typical of a grungy stage persona, perhaps a rock musician of sorts. Black boots and fingerless gloves, nylon stockings, a weird blend of half-cut and half-ripped shirts and vests as well as shorts. His fingernails were, in an alternating pattern, painted black and white each, his face smudged with stark white paint and smeared mascara that had dried after running from his eyes, and his bright red hair was a mess of strands of hair jutting in all directions. In a way that looked like a deliberately stylized mess. Well, mostly.

As he leaned forward, he staggered as if he was losing balance but then braced himself against his knees with both hands. Accompanied by squelching sounds and a disgusting stream of orange-beige something ejecting from his mouth in a stream, he vomited onto a patch of sand in front of him. And then some more. A few minutes passed there. After spitting a few more times, he wiped over his mouth with the back of his hand and convulsed, visibly fighting the urge to vomit yet again.

Kevin stood back up straight and looked wobbly on his feet. He looked around, unclear as to where he was. As if the desolate sight of his surroundings made him dizzier than he must have already been, he stumbled back towards the bus door he had exploded from. He paused when he heard a coyote howl in the distance.

The blue sky was melting into a painting of red and pink tones, dabbed with strokes of clouds pulling up. The sun was setting quickly. With one more glance towards the dying light, Kevin winced and pulled himself into the bus with the aid of the railing inside.

He looked around. The inside of the bus looked like it had been hit by a hurricane. Part of that was to be expected, as it belonged to the usual scenery. Half-empty beer cans, a crumpled stack of pizza boxes, an ashtray that had been overturned, leaving a chaos of ashes and cigarette butts strewn all over the place, a used condom hanging from a drawer handle, lines of cocaine that had been haphazardly sniffed off of a bass guitar now resting on a cushioned bench, a bag of chips that crunched under one of Kevin’s boots as he took a cautious step inside, and so forth. In fact, it was impossible to stand anywhere without stepping on trash of some sort.

What was not to be expected was the absolute absence of anybody else.

Kevin shoved the toilet door open. Nobody. He gripped the handle to a back room and felt something wet. He looked at his hand and it was covered in red. He raised the hand to his face and sniffed. Then timidly licked it. Ketchup, but really sour. Disgusting. He swung the door open. Nobody. With more sounds of cracking and crackling and crunching under his boots as he traversed the bus, he returned to the driver’s seat. Nobody there, either. No keys in the ignition.

At this point, he was trying to reconstruct what had happened to everybody. The events of the night before were a jumble. He blamed the brownies and seven cans of beer. Their band was called The Lost Number. He was Kevin Fuller, the bassist. After last night’s gig at a roadhouse, and an encore of their fan favorite Sexy Vampire in the Basement, they had wound up in the bus in the company of some groupies with a lot of food, booze, a modest amount of drugs. And they had partied. Hard.

Some of it was coming back to him. Him and Brent had dunked Rick’s head in the toilet after he had passed out from snorting coke with a nosebleed and they could barely stop laughing at how he flailed around with a sopping wet head while waking up like that. One of the girls had dared Kevin to make out with her guy friend and he did it nonchalantly as he was bi-curious anyway and had been way too stoned to care. Brent pulled a gun and shot through the roof of the bus, yelling something about nobody calling the cops—and right now, Kevin looked up in the middle of the bus and saw the bullet hole. Then blinked. His hands were shaking.

He pushed his cocaine-covered bass aside and finally sat down in the messy booth with an exhausted groan. Leaning over and struggling with his head spinning from the motion, he fished a half-smoked joint off the floor. He blindly grabbed a stainless steel lighter off the table, flicked it up and lit the roach all in one fluid motion that spoke volumes of pointless drug excesses.

Where the hell was everybody?

Instead of calming him down, the hits he took brought back the most important memory. It was more like a flash of bright light, and he pressed his palm against his forehead, as if it would help against a surge of searing pain that shot through his brain.

“I can show you real magick,” Michael had said. “That’s magick with a ‘k’, the real deal.”

Michael was the guy he had made out with on the dare. Their strange conversations from later on that night were surfacing.

“The general rule of magick is that you always get what you give. Kinda like baking a cake but without the oven. With magick, you exchange the oven for something else, like getting the raw energy from something else. Like what? Y'know, like, human sacrifices.” He had followed that up with a magnetic chuckle.

Michael’s smile had been most enchanting. Kevin remembered feeling entranced by him as the night had dragged on. Kevin recalled having thought to himself that he thought that Michael had been magic—or magick with a ‘k’.

“Of course not. You’re only a monster if you look into the mirror and see one. See, the exchange rates on magick are way better than currencies. Depending on your breed of crazy, you will always get something for something else. Like, you never get a bum deal unless you try to game the system. You ever try that logic out in the stock market, you’re gonna get reamed. It’s an accountant’s wet dream, everything adds up. Pass that bong already?”

Kevin wracked his brain and looked around, pushing some junk off the table. Then rummaged through some drawers, though it was aimless and mindlessly done. They—as in all twenty-one people—had driven out here in the bus in the middle of the night. There had been no other cars. There were no clues. He had no idea what he was even looking for.

He took another drag from the joint, then coughed and dropped the thing and stamped it out on the stained velvet carpet.

“Lemme show you a, like, a trick,” Michael had said. He had led him to the back room and looked around. Then spotting the half-open safe, he had looked inside, pulled some drugs and other items out of it, and dumped them on the floor. Michael had looked around suspiciously, and put something into the safe. What it was, Kevin had not seen. He had been too trashed at that point to tell. Michael had toyed around with the safe and turned around to Kevin again. “You wanna find out what’s in there? Then you’re gonna have to figure out the combination, and I won’t tell you, but you can figure it out. If you’re willing to work some magick. With a 'k’. Yeah, I knew it. Your mind is fully open right now. You’re open to the whole universe up there.”

Kevin remembered seeing the clear, starry night sky over the desert. He also remembered digging in the sand with his bare hands. His gaze jolted down and his hands shot up, and he inspected his fingernails. The paint was chipped and flawed now, and there was dirt underneath his nails. A lot of it.

“So here’s how it’s gonna work. You dig a hole and read these words out loud. Then you bury this with one of the most prized possessions you have with you here, in the sands of Nowhere, US of A. Because a sacrifice is only a sacrifice if it means something to you.”

The familiar sting of cactus needles flared up from his left calf. Kevin remembered how he had drunkenly stumbled into one of those things out there, last night. On the way out to digging or on the way back? It was all too blurry. But what was in the safe, that did return to him. He had found his lighter in the safe. Though he reckoned that Michael could have picked it from his pocket like a stage magician, he only remembered it not making any sense how he had instinctively known the combination to get it back by just looking at Michael. Or how he had thought he was starting to hear people’s thoughts while looking at them last night.

“Neat, huh? Okay, look. I can show you—I can give you the real deal. Not just a minor bit of reality re-mixing, but the whole nine yards. The price is—it’s gonna cost you more, though. Way more. Y'know? The real question is, what do you want? What do you really want?”

Kevin made his way to the back room and looked at the safe. It was locked. He punched in a five-digit code. The device beeped, and nothing. He tried another. Still nothing.

“That kind of trade, that's—that’s woof. You’re messed in the head. Maybe it’s just the drugs talking. Look, it’s up to you. I just teach you how to fish, okay? The rest is your responsibility. But I mean, man, by paying a price that steep on this, you’re gonna be rocking some serious mojo. But there’s no telling what kinda bad juju will be following you around.”

Kevin did want to be number one. The main attraction of the Lost Number. Another star among the musical gods in the celestial halls of rock 'n roll legends. He had had a plan: he was going to have his breakthrough by the year 2020. But with his poor musicianship talents, too many drugs and too much alcohol, and misguided ambitions, that would have been difficult. Until now.

“And after this, we go separate ways. If we meet again one day, there’s no telling how that’ll end. You’ll start seeing the world in different ways soon. You won’t be going back. You sure you really, really want this?”

He punched the code one-one-three-three-three into the safe’s number pad. It beeped in a lighter tone and a green light flashed on the display. The small safe door clicked open. He looked inside.

Inside the safe was a mirror and Brent’s empty revolver. Kevin saw his own reflection.

—Submitted by Wratts

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