Chapter 3: Death is Only a Slurpee Away

Chapter 3: Death is Only a Slurpee Away

The payment notification from Sunny Side Up Transitional Services hit Kael’s bank account before he even made it out of the Stater Bros. parking lot. The amount was enough to cover rent and then some. For a single, glorious moment, relief washed over him, clean and simple. He could have stopped there. He should have stopped there.

But the image on his phone burned brighter than the digital bank balance. Back in the relative cool of his trailer, with the swamp cooler rattling like a dying man’s last breath, he studied the picture. The glowing sigil was clear as day, a complex, geometric pattern humming with an energy that felt ancient and predatory. It was the source. The why. And it mocked the clean, sterile report he had filed.

For two days, he tried to ignore it. He paid his landlord, bought a week’s worth of groceries, and even splurged on a six-pack of actual, non-generic beer. He tried to sink back into the comfortable numbness of his old life. But the mechanic in him wouldn’t let it go. It was a busted part, a phantom engine knock that signaled catastrophic failure down the line.

He kept going back to the photo, staring until his eyes blurred. He wasn’t a scholar, but he knew patterns. The sigil wasn’t just a random scrawl; it was a circuit. A diagram. And like the shimmer he’d seen above it, it seemed to vibrate with a specific frequency.

On the third day, he gave up on pretending to be a good employee. He got in his truck and just started driving, the Soul-Tab tucked under his seat, his phone mounted on the dash displaying the photo. He wasn't looking for another assignment. He was hunting for the shimmer. He drove the forgotten backroads, the dusty service lanes, past sun-bleached trailer parks and skeletal Joshua trees, his eyes scanning the horizon not for landmarks, but for a distortion in the very air itself.

He found it hovering over a sprawling junkyard off the I-15, a place locals called the ‘Iron Orchard.’ It was a vast, chaotic graveyard of metal, where cars were stacked like discarded toys and mountains of rusted scrap metal baked under the unforgiving sun. The shimmer was larger here, more intense, a wavering curtain of heat that didn't move with the wind. It made his teeth ache just looking at it.

He parked by the collapsed chain-link fence and grabbed a heavy tire iron from his truck bed. Not for a fight, he told himself, but for leverage. For poking things. It felt better than walking in empty-handed.

The air inside the junkyard was thick with the smells of rust, oil, and sun-cooked vinyl. A narrow path snaked between precarious towers of crushed sedans and gutted appliances. He followed the distortion, which seemed to lead deeper into the metallic maze. The silence was unnerving, broken only by the crunch of his boots on broken glass and the groan of stressed metal shifting in the heat.

He rounded a corner piled high with old refrigerators and stopped dead.

Ahead, in a small clearing, was a man. A scrapper, by the looks of him—weather-beaten and thin, with a canvas bag full of scavenged copper wire slung over his shoulder. He was frozen in terror, his back pressed against a wall of tires, his face a mask of disbelief.

Between Kael and the scrapper was the source of the shimmer. It was a creature, a vaguely humanoid thing born from the junkyard’s own refuse. Its body was a churning mass of jagged steel, tangled rebar, and rust-colored razor wire. A shattered side-view mirror served as a multifaceted eye, and a length of heavy-duty chain dragged behind it like a tail. It didn't walk; it flowed, a tumor of tetanus and fury, held together by the same shimmering, impossible energy as the sigil. It emitted a low, grinding hum, the sound of a thousand broken machines screaming at once.

Rule one: You only observe and report. Do not, under any circumstances, get involved.

The Administrator’s voice was a cold slap of reality. This was it. This was the thing that had turned a man into a pillar of salt. His job was to pull out the Soul-Tab, scan the impending termination, file the report, and collect his pay. It was simple. It was the job.

The creature raised a limb—a mangled car axle ending in a claw of twisted metal—and the scrapper let out a thin, choked whimper.

Kael saw the man’s face, the raw panic in his eyes, and the rules evaporated like rain on hot asphalt. He saw a guy just trying to make a living, same as him. Another working-class ghost trapped in the desert’s grip.

He wasn’t a hero. He was a guy with a tire iron who was perpetually late on rent. But he couldn’t just stand there and watch. He couldn’t be a census-taker for a slaughter.

“Hey!” Kael shouted, his voice cracking in the dry heat. “Scrap-heap! Over here!”

The creature paused, its mirror-eye swiveling to fix on him. The grinding noise intensified. The scrapper didn't hesitate; he scrambled over the tire wall and fled, a desperate scrabble of boots and canvas.

For a moment, there was only the oppressive hum. The creature seemed to consider Kael, a minor annoyance in its path. Kael’s heart hammered against his ribs. He felt a primal, gut-wrenching terror he’d never known. This thing didn’t just kill you; it unmade you.

It moved.

It wasn't fast, but it was relentless, a wave of grinding metal that tore through the junk in its path. Kael took a step back, then another, his boots slipping on loose gravel. He tightened his grip on the tire iron, a pathetic ward against an avalanche.

He did the only other thing he could think of. He reared back and threw the tire iron with all his might. It sailed through the air and struck the creature square in its torso with a loud, unsatisfying clang. It didn't leave a dent. It barely even slowed it down.

But it did piss it off.

The humming rose to a deafening shriek. The creature surged forward, covering the twenty feet between them in a single, fluid lunge. Kael had a split second to register the tangle of razor wire and sharpened rebar that was its center mass. He saw the warped reflection of his own terrified face in its mirror-eye.

Then came the impact.

It wasn’t a cut or a stab. It was a brutal, all-encompassing shredding. Pain, white-hot and absolute, exploded through his body as a hundred different points of rusted metal tore through muscle and bone simultaneously. He heard a wet, tearing sound that he dimly recognized as his own body coming apart. His world dissolved into a crimson supernova of agony, the screech of metal, and then—

…the cheerful, tinny sound of a top-40 pop song.

Kael gasped, a ragged, desperate intake of breath that felt like his first and his last. He was on his knees, his hands braced against a sticky floor. The air was frigid, smelling of sugar-syrup and disinfectant.

He looked up. He was staring at the glowing, brightly colored levers of a Slurpee machine. Wild Cherry, Blue Raspberry, Piña Colada.

He scrambled backwards, crab-walking away from the machine until his back hit the magazine rack. He looked down at himself. His dusty work shirt was intact. There was no blood, no gaping wounds, no rusted metal pinning him together. He was whole.

“Dude, you good?”

Kael’s head snapped up. Behind the counter, a teenager with a name tag that read ‘Kyle-with-a-Y’ was looking at him with monumental boredom, not even pausing in wiping down the counter.

“I… I just…” Kael’s voice was a hoarse whisper. He could still feel it. A phantom echo of being torn to pieces, a ghost of the grinding metal and the final, blinding agony. He touched his chest, his stomach. The pain was gone, but the memory was seared into every nerve ending he possessed.

“Yeah, yeah, brain freeze. Happens,” Kyle said, popping his gum. “You gonna buy somethin’ or just kneel before the frozen beverage gods?”

The reality of the Administrator’s “comprehensive continuity of service package” crashed down on him with the force of a physical blow. This was it. This was his anchor point. His respawn. It wasn't a clean slate or a second chance. It was a violent, disorienting tear in reality, a jump-cut from a bloody death to a fluorescent-lit convenience store. He hadn't just died. He had been reinstated. Like a crashed computer program.

He shakily got to his feet, his legs feeling like jelly. He could still smell the junkyard oil and his own blood, a phantom scent underneath the cloying sweetness of the Slurpees.

Death wasn’t the end. For him, it was just a messy, agonizing, and humiliating commute. And he had a terrible feeling he’d be making the trip again soon.