Dead Stock
Jenna is having just another day at work until someone tries to kill her. Her attackers are about to discover just how bad of an idea that is.
Fiction—Written May 2024 for the NYC Midnight Flash Fiction Challenge. The prompt was Action/Adventure / A crater / A vulture.
Jenna glanced out the window, past shelves upon shelves of useless tourist paraphernalia. The desert expanse outside was pale and empty, but beautiful all the same, especially where it fell away at the edge of the crater.
Jenna jiggled the cash register drawer, which was stuck again. A stuffed vulture, its bald head grey with age and dust, perched on the desk. According to management, it added to the ambiance, but Jenna thought it just looked sad. The bell over the door jingled passive-aggressively as someone stepped into the gift shop.
“Welcome to the Barringer Crater gift shop,” Jenna said. She looked up from the register just in time to see a man aiming a gun at her head.
Jenna threw herself to the floor and a bullet pierced the wall where her skull had been.
“Who robs a gift shop?” Jenna asked.
The man approached, his footsteps squeaking on the linoleum. “We’ve finally found you,” he said. “At last, I'll get revenge for my brother.”
Jenna sighed. A robbery would have been easier to handle. It had been a long time since anyone had hunted her down, and it was always troublesome and bloody to brush her past back under the rug.
Yes, Jenna had killed people, but they had deserved it. Or they had usually deserved it, and that felt good enough.
She had retired from the gun-for-hire business at thirty and a decade later was an entirely different person. She hiked, went to trivia nights, and hadn’t killed anyone in years. Mostly.
It was just petty, even rude, for someone to chase her down for revenge after so many years had passed. And at her place of employment, too. At least it was the slow season, so the gift store was otherwise empty.
Jenna stood, picked up the stuffed vulture, and threw. The dead bird, drier and more desiccated than the corpses it had once eaten, exploded into feathers as it collided with the man’s head. He looked more perturbed than hurt, at least until the stick the vulture had been perched on crashed into his temple. He went down, his head dripping a steady stream of blood on the polished floor.
Jenna hefted a chunk of petrified wood off a shelf, then put it down again. The wood was the realest thing in the store, and she didn’t want to destroy it against some incompetent’s skull. She picked up a paperweight instead. Solid glass, with a peaceful desert scene inside.
The man groaned. The paperweight made a wet thunk against his cranium as Jenna smashed it down. The man was quiet after that.
Jenna let the paperweight drop to the floor. It would have her fingerprints on it, but everything in the shop did. There was nothing to do about it now.
The man had said “we’ve found you,” not “I’ve found you.” There would be more.
Jenna stood up straighter as the part-time retail worker receded, leaving behind who she used to be, who she would always be under the frumpy button-up shirt and the name tag.
“Alright,” she said. She curled her fingers, glad she always kept her nails short. She picked up the dead man’s gun and checked the magazine. Three bullets left.
Jenna stepped out of the gift shop and into the main hallway of the visitor center. A couple wearing wide-brimmed, sand-colored hats took one look at the blood on her shirt and the gun in her hand and ducked out of the way. Jenna moved across the hallway and stepped through the automatic doors.
The dry heat of the desert hit her like an anvil dropped from a window. A path ringed the top of the crater, and a waist-high plastic partition blocked tourists from meeting the geographic feature up close and personal.
Another man, wearing a long black coat entirely inappropriate for the climate, stood on the path. Sweat beaded on his face and his cheeks were starting to burn pink. Jenna fired once and he went down in a spatter of blood.
A fist collided with her head, knocking her sideways. She fumbled for the gun and it fell, vanishing into the sand. Jenna threw herself to the side, dodging a second blow, and turned to face her attacker.
He was taller than she was, with the steady gaze of a professional. While she was still unsteady, his knuckles connected with her stomach.
Jenna hit the railing, the edge sharp against her spine, and then she was over it. Jenna rolled down the slope, choking as sand filled her mouth and nose. She slid to a halt at the bottom with a susurrus of shifting sand.
Her assailant looked down at her, considering, before throwing himself over the wall. His descent was cleaner than hers, even if he did look ridiculously like a child going down a slide. Jenna tried to climb to her feet before he reached the bottom, but her hands sank into the sand.
The man stood, only stumbling a little.
“Did I kill your brother too?” Jenna asked from the ground.
The man laughed, then spit out sand. “No,” he said, “this is just business. You have a higher price on your head than any other retail worker I’ve taken out.”
“Kill a lot of people who work at gift shops, do you?”
The man shrugged and stepped closer. Jenna scrambled backward, but he approached faster than she could retreat.
He leaned in, smiling. “Goodbye,” he said, reaching for her. “Nothing personal.”
Jenna threw a fistful of sand in his eyes. The man swore, clawing at his face. Jenna grabbed his sleeve, using it as an anchor to rocket to her feet.
She placed a hand almost tenderly on either side of his head and twisted. His neck broke neatly and without fuss, easy as cracking an egg. Some things were like riding a bicycle—you never forgot how to do them.
The man fell to the sand and Jenna kicked petulantly at his body. She craned her head back, taking in the long, steep slope of the crater. She sighed.
It would be a long climb back to the surface and that would only be the start of what was bound to be a long rest of the day. It was time to become someone else yet again.
Author’s note:
I had a lot of fun with this one; I wanted to write a (mostly) unrepetent killer as a main character, and one that was snarky to boot.
I think deserts are fascinating, beautiful places, but they are not an environment I thrive in. I get sunburns, heat rashes, bug bites, etc. I got all three on a research trip across the American Southwest during which I visited the Barringer Crater. I still had fun, though!
Thank you for reading!
Emily