Short Stories

Gas Station Raccoon (Whitty Fanfic)

(All characters belong to Sock.Clip on Instagram. Plz check her out)

I could just start that by saying I'm just an average man with a boring life. I have worked at a 24/7 gas station on Barker Street for 5 and a half years, usually just the night shift. Nothing special goes on in my life, I wake up, cook my breakfast, yell at my neighbors, take a shower, watch TV, go to work, repeat. In this city, I'm just another man who has a low life compared to others. I didn't expect anything out of the ordinary until a few months ago. After the most recent accident at the supermarket near me, I started to notice the unusual things about the usually mundane gas station that I go to every single day.

The very first thing I noticed was how often the raccoons came by, but every time I tried to shoo it off, they would be gone in thin air. They're surprisingly loud, throwing empty beer bottles and soda cans on the ground, which to me is unusual to a small animal as a raccoon, and usually going in just to take the fresh food that was just recently thrown out, which again to me is odd for a raccoon to be having a taste for something that isn't trashed yet. Speaking of, these raccoons took almost all the fresh food from the dumpster outback. One day they took FIVE recently thrown trash bags from the dumpster, I was shocked. I didn't expect these animals to take five bags of trash. Where exactly? I'm not sure, all I know is that they have a large appetite.

There is a camera out back but during the night, it's hard to figure out what's rustling in the dumpster when the shadow comes out, but I know they're there when a big black blob takes over the dumpster and then runs off when I open the backdoor door. I usually ignore the raccoons since they are just wild animals who are just trying to survive. I could care less about the amount of food they take, how loud they get, or their odd presence. But then it started to get weirder.

The second thing I noticed, gasoline marks leading to the back of the building. Big black marks lead over to the dumpster. Gas gets everywhere at a gas station and at first, I thought my gas tank in my car was leaking and at first, it was just my car. Then after getting it fixed by a friend of mine, the marks started to become more noticeable as it became more of a path than just random gas leaks. This wasn't normal for a random line of gasoline starting from the brushes at the rim of the parking lot to the dumpster, I started to worry that someone was trying to kill me.

I thought of those raccoons, maybe they weren't raccoons? Maybe it was some man trying to blow up the gas station? This did just appear more often after what happened at the supermarket that was shot up by a madman. So every night, after my shift, I would check the dumpster to see if there wasn't anything that could cause explosions. There was nothing, which scared me for the rest of the days I worked there. On the news they said the madman wasn't caught, so I decided to catch that bitch myself.

Every day, I could throw out big bags of fresh food, keep an eye on the camera outback, and track the marks as much as possible. Until one day, I noticed a shadow of human walking in the back. I got up from my old rusty chair in the front, brought a big knife, and slowly made my way back there. Quietly, I heard the man rustle in the trash, breathing heavily and...crying? There I bust open the door.

It wasn't a raccoon

It wasn't the madman

It...wasn't human.

This...thing fell to its back into the shadow of the dumpster. Its eyes glowed bright orange in the dark shadows. I froze there, with a knife in hand, questioning whether the thing I was seeing was real or not. They stared at me with pain in their eyes, with this black thick liquid dripping from them. I realized then, they were the thing I was hearing from the dumpster for the last months...I was in shock and terror.

"C-could you kindly show yourself to me?" I broke the silence between us as the thing continued to stare at me as if they were a deer in headlights.

"I w-want to know why you came here for the...past few months digging through my trash." I calmly said.

The thing looked at me and then crawled to the barely burned-out light only to reveal something I couldn't forget. His skin was pure black, light reflecting off of him as if he was made of metal, which he might've just been and I recall he had a large "X" marked on his chest in white. He was ripped, which made me fear the idea of what this man could do to me in a split second but the most important thing that shocked me into my heart the most...that he didn't have a normal human head. It was shaped into a bomb, with two glowing orange eyes and a fuse sticking from the back of his head.

What the hell am I looking at? I thought to myself

He barely spoke a word to me, coming out in small brief sentences that were trying to explain his reasoning for being here. He knew English, he somehow knew how to be human.

He said to me, "P-please...p-put that down..I just...I wanted to get food..." in a rashy, rough guitar-sounding voice. He pointed at my knife, so I put it away. One thing I knew at that moment was that I'll do what he says as long as he doesn't blow up.

"...Listen, I don't know who you are or what you are. But I might have to call the police if you--" Before I could finish he screamed a loud "NO!" and sparked up. His fuse lit up and I was freaking out. "Shit! No! Please!" I tried to calm him down but he just wouldn't stop freaking out.

"I DON'T WANT TO DIE. PLEASE DON'T LET HIM FIND ME HERE." More thick gasoline tears overflowing his eyes as he holds his head, I'm assuming to stop it from blowing up. Who is he? What the hell is this bomb freak talking about? I thought of these after the fact, all I wanted to do was to calm him down and not die.

"LISTEN, IF YOU CALM DOWN I WON'T CALL ANYONE ON YOU OKAY?!" I said to get the point across, he looked up to me, hands on his head, tears staining his face and the ground under him. His fuse went out, but yet he was still shaking and crying. I watched him calm down just enough where his tears evenly stopped, I didn't know if it was the right thing to do but I didn't want to leave him alone during this, "Look...I'm sorry for freaking you out. The last weeks have been shit for me and I have been scared off...things." He left his head up, now without his hands supporting it, and stared at me once again. "I...I'm sorry..." He didn't sound like he knew the meaning of "I'm sorry'' but it did feel like he didn't want to harm me, "Look you probably should go before whoever "he" finds you..."

One last look at me and he got up to his feet. I didn't expect him to be so tall, he was almost as tall as the wall of the building, I'm assuming he was 8 or 9 feet tall. After that, he looked down at me with his gasoline-stained eyes on his bomb-like head and turned away from me. He walked away from the door, the dumpster, the light, to an endless void of darkness. I was still in stock and couldn't move from that door.

And the raccoon never came back after this.

...Was that enough information, Mr. Updike?