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Ice Sucky
by starlastumbleine

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For the first time in at least eighteen months, Randal Graves was early to work. Dante Hicks stood wondering over this as Randal contemplated the wall.
Randal scrutinized this wall and the giant block-lettered graffiti gracing it until Dante finally lobbed his keys at the side of the blond's head. They made a dull thunk, and fell to the ground with a clatter. Dante hunched his shoulders and marched up to the door of the Quick Stop to open it. Randal was still transfixed as he heard Dante yank open the door and yell across the parking lot: "go open the damn store! I'll hit Home Depot on my lunch break."
He was, of course, only concerned with the clean-up that this strange marking would require. But it unsettled Randal in a different way to witness such clean lines and clear text lumped up on the wall between the video store and the ally way.
This was no crime of stupidity or vandalism. This was someone making a conscious effort to put a clear message forth to the duty-driven world that cushioned the everyday lives of patrons like those who utilized the services of Quick Stop and RST Video.
Randal cowered down before this message to scoop his keys off the ground. He then tore his gaze away from the fresh black painted Z? on the brick, only to encounter a set of huge, bulging eyes.
"Shit!" Randal scrambled backwards and fell painfully on his ass. A child looked down on him with a "Squee" of surprise.
The small boy gave Randal pause. He got up on his knees and shoved his keys into his pocket while taking in the alien-like kid. Big, freakish head; huge, fearful eyes. As Randal's scrutiny intensified, the pipsqueak's bottom lip began to quiver and one eye bulged wider than the other.
Suddenly desperate to avoid any raging parent who might exit the Quick Stop with their nicotine fix in hand, Randal quickly inquired as to what the 'little shit' was doing lurking around like that.
The boy squeezed his eyes shut and held the video tapes in his hands high above his head as if offering them for Divine Placation. "Member number?" Randal inquired.
"26146!" he shouted.
Huh. Returning videos on time. What a concept.
Warily, Randal nodded and rose to his feet again. He awkwardly patted the child on the head and pried the video tapes from his hands before diving for his keys and lunging for the front door of RST Video.
The next time Dante saw him that day was after Jay came into the store to report that Randal had locked himself in the video store and was hiding behind the counter humming to himself.

xxxxxx

After lots of coffee and a chat with a psychology professor from the local community college who had dropped by for a packaged danish and his copy of "Anal Creampies 9," Randal was no longer crawling the walls. Nor was he humming to anyone.
But near the end of the night, Dante caught him crushing his nose to a comic in Playboy whilst holding back a flood of tears.
"Do you see it?!" he cried in a panicked voice. Randal thrust Playboy at Dante and poked repeatedly at a strip that expounded on the results of a lousy blowjob. The panel Randal was jabbing at contained one line of text: "Zzzz..."
"You see it-" Randal assured himself "-I mean, you must understand it! The thing on the wall and the thing in the thing!" Dante turned back to his friend and gave him a look that said "2+2=5.9?"
Randal waved his hands in the air and started raging and ranting on about the sleepless youth - the drug culture and homework don't mix! Their speeding Hondas and the fucking Internet! These kids kill their house pets for fun!
"We've been marked!" he concluded. "Marked, I say, and don't you dare- oh, don't you DARE, Dante, tell me that this doesn't mean the invasion of the rabid brain suckers is afoot! I know 'afoot,' Dante, and there's DOOM afoot!"
There was a moment of heavy silence in which Randal breathed rapidly and Dante straightened the gum display on the counter.
"Okay." He started delicately. He didn't want to startle the other man into another fit, so Dante kept his voice low and his movements to a slow minimum. "I see," he finished with as much sanity as was possible. "Go home, Randal. Get some sleep. These new late-night, early-morning hours are just getting to you. That's all." He was going to add something about maybe stopping by for some of Jay's special Tylenol, but didn't want to be on the business end of another throwing fit, and Randal already had a cigarette carton half-way above his head.
In a few seconds, Randal lowered the would-be weapon and shrugged. He dropped the Playboy on the counter and exited the store without another word, or even so much as a glance.

xxxxxx

The next time Randal worked a night shift, there was a new boxed-Z? painted on the sidewalk, a few feet from where the old one had been painted over. Though he no longer raved about the supposed meaning behind the symbol, Randal labeled this new menace the 'inky terror' and scoffed at Dante's musings over borrowing a neighbor's powerwasher to try and clean the cement. It was hopeless, he declared. And it meant death was gonna go down in their little New Jersey neighborhood.
Dante proposed keeping the metal shutters down in case of a drive-by. Randal huffed at his impertinence.
For he saw death coming. It creeped into his vision through the inky terror. He saw his days in pencil, now. He saw his daily activities, his duties at work, even his little leisures in only scratchy black and white.
There was a lanky kid, Dante had said, with blue hair who had attracted all sorts of others of his ilk towards the Quick Stop in recent days. Dante was now prone to worrying over trivial thinks like the Brain Freezy machine and, Randal felt, refused to see the big picture. Times were a-changing. And when the ubergothies with their long limbs, wide eyes and sallow skin took over the world, they may only be spared if they did not get in the way and continued to provide the late-night services they were paid for. Stocking twinkies and selling condoms and synthetic energy pills.
Randal became diligent in his job. He was determined to make his services available to psychotic, homicidal children of the night who might spare his sanity if he correctly tallied how many purchases they each had on their membership cards. He ordered extra copies of "The Nightmare Before Christmas."
Randal feigned interest well when the inkies were around. He acted fascinated and enthralled by a nightmarish squeaky toy, which highly amused a glittery, purple-haired girl with studs all over her face and black liner spilling into her eyeballs. Just the other night he chastised Dante for backing up company policy on turning off power to the Brain Freezy machine. This was clearly where the inkies got their power. Through tremendous amounts of ice sucky. 'Provide the service,' he encouraged. He was working on squeezing valuable information from a contact of his, a janitor at a local sleep clinic. For, as he foresaw, this was to be the final gathering place of the inkies before they went on a bloodthirsty rampage against intolerant peons like those who worked at convenience stores. If he knew their deepest desires for power, perhaps he could save his feeble ass in the end.
However, this neurotic behavior came to a sudden halt one day when he learned that the blue-headed inky had sliced up the drug dealer, Jay, and left him for dead in the parking lot.
Dante had asked, in the face of Silent Bob's vengeance-seeking, what Randal would do if he were killed. Would he seek revenge for his friend's death?
Randall thought about this for a few seconds. "Well, if you were going to get killed, it would be from a holdup at the store. And since we usually have the same shift, he'd probably kill me too, 'cause I'd be there. So, in answer to your question, if someone killed you, I would probably lie there, not breathe, and bleed all over the floor."
It was the most logical explanation all along. Silent Bob would kick this kid's ass and be back in a week to keep selling smoke, and Dante and Randal would be back in at work the next day and people would be bitching and complaining at them all day like they normally did. Well, not Randal, he planned on calling out. But the world would go on because the inkies didn't really have the power in the first place to terrorize the world as much as they were threatening.
In fact, Randal didn't even think about it for weeks after.
He was reading the paper with the light that filtered into the video store around Bob's lone, hulking figure, when the skittish kid with the large head popped in to return two more videos. Before he left again to the tune of his mother, who was outside complaining about how much of a complicated name the damn kid had to keep that she couldn't even remember it, the child gazed up towards the end of the counter where a stolen ice sucky sat melting.
"Brain Freezy!" he exclaimed.
"Yeah." Randal affirmed as he scanned the videos back in. "We sell 'em in the Quick Stop. I recommend the new ham flavor."
"My neighbor loves those! He says Cherry Doom helps dull a sensorial assault when human excrement overcomes a man as he's exsanguinating his subjects!"
Randal tried to say something to this, but only his right eyelid twitched.
"I like Frosty Peanut better! Well, bye!"
Randal fell back into his chair as the little boy thumped out the door. He contemplated sleep.

.end.
any happiness in my life is only a brief prelude to the tiresome descents into levels of hell even a convenience store clerk could never imagine

.starla.
question sleep