My feet hesitated walking when I went to face the beast. The gas station was as I remembered, devoid of cars and without light. I spent several minutes in the lampless main road, and let my eyes adjust to the pale light that barely dusted down from overhead, I needed to see where I was going. As I walked into the gas station parking lot, no phone notification buzzed in warning like last time and small absence of warning gave me the confidence boost I needed.

  She thought I was ready.

  Another person’s confidence can only embed itself so far in your heart, there must be a streak of desire in your own to carry you where you need, beyond the tempest of the crucible. If you just leaned on other people your whole life, then you’d be destined to fall when they were torn away from you.

  The creature was where I had left it, nestled between gas pump two and three, and it still did not make a move as I came within fifty feet of it. I hefted my makeshift spear with both hands and approached from the side opposite where it had stuck a gas nozzle inside its body, assuming that gurgling maw was its face. Each step increased the volume of noises it made, similar to a greedily sucking piglet feeding off of its mother’s teat. It would have been for the best if I could have just parked alongside the creature and filled up some gas cans without conflict, but when I came to the last twenty feet before reaching the pumps, the sucking noise stopped and a great eye flopped open on the quivering blob of flesh.

  It did not roar or scream, the beast simply slopped away from its feast of gasoline and slouched toward me with the jittery scooching of hundreds of tiny fingers and malformed limbs dragging it along the way. Ten feet apart now, I was able to make out more details of the creature’s form, and from that sight, I almost ran away again. Human faces melted together and stretched across the slimy bulk of the monster blinked at me with silent pleading in their gazes, one in particular seemed like it was straining to rip away from the main body, but after a second of its cheeks bulging outward, a spine erupted from the tormented face’s mouth and speared straight toward me like a javelin.

  I saw the attack coming from a mile away and instead of dodging backward or tripping all over myself, I let instinct guide my feet closer to the lunging monster and attack with a piercing assault of my own. With the giant eye still staring at me, I did not need a skill to know where to aim my blade and jammed my spear toward the center of its pupil. Resistance met my attack, but I pushed through, and after I felt a small tearing the rest was like shoving the makeshift spear through soft dirt.

  I pushed half the length of my spear into the monster when it reared backward and away from me. The spear shaft was yanked out of my hands and I would have grabbed on again to keep driving it in, but an arm grew from the flabby flesh and snapped the spear in half before I could react. More arms grew under the creature, springing from the nubs of worn fingers like petals of flesh flowers and in a few moments the beast had a host of scrabbling arms propelling it even faster toward me. The faces on the bulk now gnashed their teeth and a loud sigh emanated from their mouths. The monster was not breathing, but instead the voiceless faces were all screaming without vocal cords and though I had destroyed one eye, a dozen now stared hungrily at me.

  My little hammer wasn’t going to cut it with this veritable forest of hands and teeth, but I also instinctively understood that running away was not an option since this thing would follow me wherever I went after pulping its big eye. I needed to buy some time to pull out the big guns from my inventory, so I fled into the gas station convenience store.

  Now, it was pure luck on my end that I was not running straight into a building full of hollows like the rec center, but my luck ended there with how fast my pursuer followed after me. The best move I could make was to tear down the narrow snack aisle, where the bulk of the beast worked against it in the narrow corridor. Peanuts and candies flew through the air as the many armed blob pulled its girth along the tile floor, but I did not look back at the ridiculous sight until I had reached a door with a little blue and white man on the front of it.

  The restroom.

  If I went in there, then I’d be trapped for sure, but looking back for one moment, I saw the bloated body of the monster filling up an entire aisle as it used its multitude of limbs to grab the shelves and pull itself toward me with a haste ill befitting something so fat and ponderous. I had no other choice and I ducked inside the gas station bathroom, making sure to lock the door behind me.

  The restroom was clean as a whistle, no graffiti, sticky puddles, or lingering skunk odor, which was another clear sign that this was a dive system and not reality, but I couldn’t stop to appreciate this fact. The blue light of my phone was all I focused on, swiping through the screens, and going through my digitized inventory. My weapon of last resort was there and taking up fifteen out of thirty space, I jammed my finger pressing the confirm button to bring it out of storage. Another blue light appeared, brighter than my phone’s, and started growing in the center of the floor. Yet experience told me it would take thirty seconds for the item to fully materialize.

  The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

  Time I didn’t have.

  The door rattled as the beast attempted to open the door. Upon finding it locked, it did the unthinkable in that moment, and knocked. I was taken aback by the absurdity of it, but the polite tap became a thud and then further deepened into a bang that made the flimsy gas station door rattle and sent me scurrying to press my back against the far wall.

  Fifteen seconds had passed and the weapon was still materializing. I cursed, pleaded, and begged it to go faster, but the system seemed to not have ears to hear my prayers. Bathed in the neon light of a hope unfulfilled and serenaded by the drumming of the damned, I swore that if I made it out of this alive, that I’d find a way to make these stupid items come out faster.

  Fingers wriggled under the space between the door’s edge and the tiled floor, finding purchase for the final effort of the creature’s chase. The thing may have had better luck just breaking the door itself, as those heroic hinges whined in protest for a good ten seconds before their battle ended and the entire door was ripped from its frame. A final flash of blue light illuminated the multitude of beady eyes glaring at me from the doorway, but also hailed the arrival of my item from storage.

  It was dead center between the monster and I.

  I reacted faster than the lumbering behemoth and darted forward, towards the creature yes, but towards my weapon also. Just as I hefted the weapon in my left hand and yanked back its cord with my right, the gas station horror slithered forward and seized my legs with its tangle of cancerous arms. The canvas of faces smiled at me, contorted and stretched out in a blend of eyes and smacking lips. The creature thought that it had finally caught its prey and dragged me towards a multitude hungry grins like a mother bird feeding her chicks.

  I fed them the end of a revved up chainsaw instead.

  Gore and gasoline spattered my face as the chainsaw ripped into the soft stretch of flesh I had planted it in, yet my grim satisfaction was supplanted by the growing horror of the beasts total lack of reaction to my counter attack. Inexorably, it drew me closer to the gnashing maws of a dozen mouths, and my mind’s eye drew a terrifying image of one of those mouths crunching down on the soft cartilage of my nose and then starting in on the rest of my face. I pressed in deeper and yanked the chainsaw up at the same time, widening the gap of the cruel wound I inflicted, and the monster finally seemed to be affected. The arms stopped pulling me forward and the faces contorted in pain.

  “Yeah, you like that, you fat piece of g-“

  A spine spear like from earlier, erupted out of one of the face’s mouth and struck right in my guts. The blow was hard enough to drive the wind out of me in one strike and interrupted me midsentence. It came again and again, like a desperate counterattack of its own as the metal teeth of my hungering chainsaw continued biting in. The force of the repeated blows with that sharped spine made me want to vomit and it was all I could do to just lean my weight behind the chainsaw and make one last push. A shiver took me, a warmth from the bottom of my spine and to my chest, my counterattack found new strength, my grip on the chainsaw held.

  Something hard resisted against the metal teeth of my chainsaw, but in an instant it broke and the blade slid all the way until the front handguard was mushed against the mottled flesh. The spine stopped its frantic jabs and went limp, lolling out of the creature’s mouth like some macabre tongue, while the rest of the roiling body likewise sunk in on itself like a slowly deflating balloon, but instead of air leaking out it was more of that black fluid that hollows’ had for blood.

  The hands released their grips on my ankles and I nearly fell on my rear cushion stumbling away from the dying monsters, only my chainsaw blade getting stuck in some bit of bone on the way out of the corpse stopped me from falling. I left it there and stepped back, appreciating the shrinking blob, and marveling at the horror of its death. The captured faces, though now finally put to rest, were twisted in disturbing spirals of collapsed heaps of skin that no longer had fluid or mass supporting it. The black goo had reached every corner of the small restroom and shined with the rainbow hue of gasoline mixed in with it.

  I sat on the room’s toilet and massaged my sore stomach. My shirt was ripped in several places, but that wonderful level I armor had held up against the creature’s strikes. The fight had been close, a little too close for comfort, but at the end, it was me sitting on the throne and the enemy collapsed at my feet. The colorful shine of mine foe’s blood reminded me why I had come here in the first place. That gasoline it had been so greedily guzzling was integral for the next part of my plan.

  It was a simple plan, dealing with those hollows in the rec center. I was going to burn the place down and give those creatures a little reminder of what was waiting for them on the other side.

  I spoke to the dead monster and splash kicked some of the bloody gasoline on it with my boot, “I hope you left some for me.”