Inside Straight

Fortune wandered down the path, not knowing what to think, not even wanting to think. Sometime later he stumbled upon a hardtop road. This is more like it.

His hopes rose higher when he saw a building settled in one corner of a lonely crossroads, unlit and seemingly deserted. Still, there was at least a chance that it might contain something useful. Some food to soothe his cramping stomach. Some water to cool his burning forehead. Maybe a phone to call his mother. Some clothes. Some goddamn shoes. His feet were killing him.

It was a gas station, existing somewhere in a state between abandoned and decrepit. Its roof sagged badly. The dusty pumps in front of it had not been used for years. The chair by the front door, looking as if it had been used too much over the years, was half off its rocker. It was almost inviting enough to drop onto, but Fortune wasn’t sure if it would hold his weight, and the bamboo lattice seat would probably have been fairly uncomfortable on his bare ass.

The glass-windowed storefront was only slightly less dusty than the disused gasoline pumps. Encouragingly, however, of the three words—GAS FOOD DRINK—etched into its surface, only the word gas had been crudely crossed out by a couple of swatches of duct tape.

The front door was aluminum bars set between sagging screens to keep the flies out. It was locked, though it didn’t look very sturdy. Fortune considered it for a moment, then grabbed the handle and yanked at it with all his strength. A low rumble sounded deep in his throat, surprising him, and his legs, back, and arms knotted from sustained effort, as the door slowly peeled away from its warped wooden frame with complaining metallic screeches. It finally came mostly clear, hanging limply by its hinges. Fortune was breathing heavily when he stepped through the doorway, but he finally felt as if he’d accomplished something, even if the B & E made him feel mildly guilty. Still, he could pay back the storekeeper, once he’d recovered his black Amex card.

Inside it was almost as dusty as out. Fortune could see rows of canned food stacked haphazardly on rickety wooden shelves, along with some loaves of bread, jars of pickles and peanut butter, and packages of cookies and crackers, and—good God—an old-fashioned cooler set against one wall, plugged in and humming away, a soft breeze wafting off it. He couldn’t deny his sudden urge to lean his burning forehead against its metallic coolness.

He slid the cooler open, reached in, and dragged out a bottle of ice cold Coke. On the cooler’s side was a built-in bottle top remover. He popped the lid, put the bottle to his lips, and drained it in a single, long gulp, shuddering as the sugar and caffeine hit his stomach.

He finished the bottle with a satisfied sigh, and noticed for the first time a wooden coatrack with a beat-up pair of bib overalls hanging from it. They looked a little rank and far too large, but Fortune was in no position to be choosy. He pulled them down from the hook and danced his way into them, hopping on the sagging plank floor as he put them on. Fortune felt better. He had clothed himself. More sustenance was within reach. Now, if he could only find some shoes. …

He looked up and saw his face framed by a cracked mirror set in the old wooden coat tree. The thing in the middle of his forehead was like a massive pimple, red and hard and shiny. It looking ugly and freakish.

The fear struck him again like a blow to the face. He panicked, scrabbled at the amulet with grimy fingers. He tried to pry it out of his forehead, but his fingernails were too short to get a grip on i t—though in his blinding fright he scratched himself so badly that blood began to flow.

A knife, he thought. A piece of glass. A strip of metal. Anything to get that thing out of his head.

Fortune’s heart nearly stopped when a car pulled into the store’s rutted dirt parking lot, its headlights gleaming like monstrous eyes through the dirty storefront window. A strange, powerful hand clamped down on his brain, and he began to change.

The metamorphosis should have been painful, but if it was, John was too frightened to notice. His body grew massively. He felt his new overalls rip apart at the seams, as if they’d been made out of paper towels, and he was naked again. But he didn’t really need clothes. He was furry all over, with a thick pelt that shone as he had once shone himself, back when he’d been an ace. He could see a ghostly reflection of his body in the dirty glass window.

A lion. Of all the crazy, impossible things in the world, he had turned into a lion.

No. Not quite. More precisely, he was a lioness…but a lioness a lot bigger than any he’d ever seen at the zoo. And he glowed. He glowed like a beacon in the dark.