3 AM. Greek Town. I’m standing on the roof of a parking garage, overlooking the neon. Its one of the few places that seems safe to walk around Detroit at three in the morning, so I like it here. I’m with a girl, someone I met. She’ll probably end up abandoning me for something different. I’m already getting used to the idea. It happens so often its like they get a merit badge for it or something.

Its been a few weeks since my ‘encounter’ with that whatever-it-was. Spider Man? Body Snatcher? Who knows. I haven’t decided yet whether I think its an alien or a monster. When it comes down to it I guess it doesn’t matter. Its off in the woods being monster-y, and I’ve got music to write.

I just released my fourth single, “Throw Away” out into the big bad world. If people knew what it was about they’d probably give me a Nobel Prize just for surviving it. But they don’t ask, and I don’t tell.

Have I told anybody about the monster? Hell no. Lets consider my options: I call the police. Tell them there’s a crazy human-impersonating THING out running around the woods of Detroit. At best I get fined for “pranks.” At worst, I get shipped to a mental institution. And while I should probably be in one anyway, when it happens it will be on MY terms.

As it is the pathetic excuse for police here have already demonstrated their intense and unjustified hatred for me. I get pulled over at least once a month. Not for speeding, or anything illegal, mind you. When I asked the officer what the problem was the last time it happened, his question was “Do both you have jawbs?” (I had a different girl with me in the car at the time.)

Excuse me?” I asked, more than a little confused as how my employment status had anything to do with this guy protecting or serving.

Jawbs,” he said slower, presumably so I could hear more clearly how stupid he sounded, “Do you two have jawbs?”

Um… yes,” I told him.

Detroit cops. Proven worthless since 1865.

So no, I haven’t told anyone. It wouldn’t do anyone any good. Least of all me.

Which is usually how it is anyways.

After Greek Town I drop the girl off. A quick make-out session fails miserably so I head off to the supermarket. I’ve landed a couple movie trailers, but ASCAP takes months to pay out, so for the next few days until I see some fundage from my releases its sardines and rice for lunch and dinner.

Ah, to be a rockstar. If people only knew.

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but supermarkets are pretty depressing. Here is shelf after shelf, aisle after aisle, of products brightly packaged in an attempt to manipulate you into buying them. They’re one huge monument to who can trick you better.

Changing three CMYK values will cause you to be more sympathetic to that box of crackers. It cost them three trillion dollars to figure that out, but don’t worry, you’ll pay them back in spades for it, and think you’re getting a deal.

But I’m not here for crackers.

In the canned meats aisle I give the various fishes a good once over. No one ever teaches you how to shopped for canned fish. Its like aluminum-tinned russian roulette. Pull the wrong trigger, twist the wrong key, and you’ll sure as hell regret it. I make my choice (because I like the blue color of the mascot) and turn to head for the checkout.

But there’s a guy standing in my way.

Scratch that.

There’s a guy standing almost ON TOP of me.

I don’t know how I didn’t hear him come up next to me. I’ve got pretty good ears and an overdeveloped (I call that “healthy”) sense of paranoia. But he’s here and I’m almost running into him so my step falters and I take a step back to avoid it.

He just smiles, squints one eye, and points right at me.

Hey, don’t I know you?” he says.

This dude does not smell right. He’s got a filthy corduroy jacket on that was probably beige at one time over a dark blue sweatshirt thats missing all of whatever lettering used to be on it except an  “E” and part of what I’m guessing is an “S.” His jeans are stained with God-knows-what-but-it-was-reddish-brown and frayed and torn in all kinds of places that are probably uncomfortable given the temperature outside. And his shoes…

His shoes are brand new. White running shoes. No swoosh, look generic, but still clean as a whistle. I resist the natural urge to step on them.

I think I’d remember if we’d met before,” I tell him. “Sorry for almost running into you.”

I make the move to pass him, but he’s having none of it. He side-steps so he stays in front of me, scratching his three day old beard and squinting at me again.

Yeah…” He says, “You’re that Blues Trolley guy.”

Blue Stahli,” I correct him, already wishing I wasn’t having this conversation.

Yeah, yeah! Man I saw you at a coffee house a few weeks back.”

I remember all five of the people who were at that coffee shop, and this dude was none of them.

I…I was outside in the alley,” he continues. “You probably didn’t see me. But I heard all your songs. Wanted to meet you afterwards but you were talking to that girl. Didn’t wanna be a cock block.”

Fantastic. Exactly what I need more of in my life: Considerate vagrants.

Listen, I wanted to tell you…” he stops. I’m guessing he’s choosing his words carefully.

Your voice is kind of sissy.”

He shoves out his hand which is as dirty as his clothes. “I’m Mort. Mort Greenley. Its good ‘ta meet you.”

Something in me resigns itself to my fate. I grasp Mort’s hand. “Hi there Mort. I’m Bret.”

Hi Bret,” Mort says.

His face does this weird twist and my stomach instinctively drops to my balls. Mort tightens his grip into a death-clasp and jerks me suddenly into an aromatic and extremely awkward embrace,  throwing his free arm around my neck so I can’t pull away. (Which believe me, I’m trying to do.)

I know you saw one of ‘em,” He hisses into my ear.

THAT gets my attention. I stop struggling and he lets me stumble back into my own personal space. I open my mouth to speak but he holds up his hand.

Not here. Out back,” He says with gravity, turing on his new sneakers and disappearing around the corner of the aisle.

I have a scale I measure bums on. I had a lot of opportunity to develop it when I worked at a downtown coffee shop back in Phoenix.  On one end you have your ‘normal bums,’ the guys who either choose to live that way or have the kind of luck that I would refer to as “a good day.” On the other end you have your batshit crazy ones, the ones who’s jars just don’t hold any marbles. Mort was fairly normal according to the scale. He certainly didn’t meet nickname status like some of my favorites from back home such as“The Thruster,” or “Bird Lady.” I didn’t really trust him but I figured a back alley meeting for a little more information on what the hell had happened a few weeks ago was worth the risk. I headed to the checkout to pay for my rice and sardines.

Mort was waiting for me behind the store.

Mort was also not alone.

He had two other guys with him. From their state of dress I’d guess they were also fairly homeless. One had a dirty “formerly black” trenchcoat on over a couple of old christmas sweaters and a few pairs of sweatpants. His shoes were definitely not new. The other guy looked a little bit cleaner, but not by much; curly salt and pepper hair frizzed out in all directions, gray vinyl ski pants and a hoodie sweatshirt in about as good a shape as Mort’s. I couldn’t help but feel a certain disgust at the realization that Detroit humiliated even its homeless. These guy were dressed bad; even for bums.

This is the guy Jim. The guy from the car,” Mort pointed at me as I approached. “Bret this is Jim and Reggie. Jim told me about that thing you saw. He saw it too.”

What’s proper etiquette for saying ‘hi’ to a group of homeless guys in a dimly lit alley? You’d think I’d know this by now.

Evening gentlemen.”

Th…thats him! H…he’s the guy!” trenchcoat guy stutters out. The guy’s eyes looked like his skull was trying to squeeze them out like a couple of boiled eggs.

It was about this time that my paranoia kicked in like a mule. Here I was standing in an alleyway with a single dying streetlight talking to three guys about a creature I didn’t know the first thing about. Maybe they were connected to it somehow. Maybe they were talking to me to make sure I was ‘the guy’ before the lead pipes and boards with nails came out and I ended up another tragic Detroit statistic.

I th…th…think this is yuh…yours,” he says, interrupting my considerations and holding out something from his pocket.

My cellphone.

Jim found that after you cooked the critter and took off,” Mort said, pointing to the outstretched phone.

I muh…made a couple of calls. But they wuh…weren’t long distance or nothin,”

I took the phone from Jim and held it up to the light. It was scuffed from its tumble down the embankment that night but otherwise fine. I flipped it open but the screen stayed dark.

Battery’s duh…duh…dead,” Jim explained. “They duh….don’t last long in the cold.”

I put the phone back in my pocket, making a mental note to soak it in a gallon of bleach when I got back to the apartment.

Thanks,” I told Jim the bum.

People’ve been disappearing,” Mort said, looking at me. “Out on the streets, you get t’know people. We all stake our territory and do our best not to get in each other’s way. But you help each other out too. If someone’s handing out food or blankets and you find out about it, you let the others around you know. Its kind of a code.”

Lately though, its been different. People just vanish. One night they’ll be at their spot, the next night ‘poof!’ gone. So we got to talking. Started trying to get people to group up before they bed down. Then a few weeks ago while Jim there was settling in a drainage pipe he saw you and that creature. We’ve been looking for you ever since. We’d hoped…” he licked his lips, his breath rising like a cloud, “We’d hoped you might know something.”

I told Mort you had hair like a fuh…fuh…faggot!” Jim says, obviously pleased they found me.

I weigh my words carefully in silence while the bums look on. What do I really have to tell them? I didn’t know the first thing about the monster. It had showed up, tricked me, ripped its face off and tried to eat me. End of story.

I’m not sure how much help I can be,” I start. “The thing…”

I stop there.

Something isn’t right, and I know it.

There’s a new noise in the alley. Thats whats doing it. A sort of scraping dragging noise. I think it must have started while Mort was speaking and I’m just now realizing that its both picking up speed and getting closer. The bum’s are hearing it now too. They start glancing around, no longer concerned about what I might say. My paranoia kicks my heart into high gear. Jim’s eyes look like they’re gonna shoot out of his head. Mort bends down and picks up a piece of a broken pallet with a couple rusty nails jutting out of it.

Who’s there!” he yells, his voice echoing into the darkness.

We wait. I got the shit kicked out of me in all kinds of ways growing up, so I’m ready to get right the fuck out of here. I don’t have any kind of training to take someone on in a fair fight so I rely on speed and nerd rage, both of which I’ve made very good use of in the past.

The guy steps into the edge of the orange flickering light. He’s got a trenchcoat on like my buddy Jim and a knitted beanie pulled down almost to his nose. My “time to go” meters shoot through the roof.

Whossat? Barry?” Mort hisses.

Then a lot of things happen at once.

The guy throws his coat off and rushes us. Only its not a “guy” its… mouths. Hundreds of mouths. Maybe thousands. All snapping, chomping, gnashing silently. Covering a body shaped like a naked fat dude with really skinny legs. And I mean COVERING. There are mouths on its legs; mouths covering its bulbous jiggling torso; mouths all over the arms so the thing doesn’t even have hands, more like a couple of fleshy snapping tentacles.

And then there’s the head. Its shaped like a human head, but everywhere there’s supposed to be a hole there’s mouths. Mouths in where the eyes go; mouths where the ears go; and something that seemed even more horrific, a mouth where the mouth went.

With lipstick around it.

The thing pounced onto Jim. Full on belly-flop.  Jim started screaming and blood started shooting out from all directions.

Mort yelled “FUUUUUUUUUCK!” and splintered the piece of pallet across the thing’s back. His bravery was rewarded by the thing wrapping one of its arms around his head and putting him into a headlock. I can’t really describe the sound a dozen mouths makes as they tear into a man’s face, but it was covered quickly by Mort’s screams so I didn’t hear it long.
Something funny clicked in me and it was like I was suddenly outside of myself, watching this all happen. I watched me swing my plastic grocery bag full of tuna cans at the thing like a morning star. As soon as the bag touched the thing a bunch of mouths shredded it and the cans went scattering in different directions down the alley.

Then me and Reggie were running, sprinting towards the end of the alley. I could still hear Mort screaming, but Jim had stopped. The me-outside-of-me knew this was probably a really bad sign.

Fifty feet.

Forty feet.

Thirty five.

Mort stops screaming too.

Thirty.

Twenty five.

Reggie’s not beside me anymore.

Twenty.

Ten.

Silence.

I burst out of the alley, arms pumping like an Olympic sprinter. I run as fast as I can to the front of the store. The automatic doors almost don’t make it out of my way.

“Call the cops!” I yell at the nearest cashier. “There’s a thing in the alley! Its killing people!”

She looks at me for a second, half-gallon of milk in her hand, and then goes back to swiping.

“Did you not fucking hear me?” I yell, “People are DYING back there!”

A dude with a combover comes out of an office behind the lotto counter and heads my direction. I can read the look in his eyes perfectly. It says “Great. Another whack-job hopped up on meth.”

“You gotta… you gotta call the cops,” I tell him, out of breath from my escape. “There’s something in the alley behind the store. Its killing people!”

“Okay okay, calm down,” the dude, who I’m guessing is named ‘Bill’ if his managerial vest and nametag were any indication, says. “Lets go have a look.”

“Did you not hear me? Bad things! Dead people!”

“I need to see it for myself before I call the police. Its policy,” Manager Bill tells me, hoisting up a 3-cell Maglight. “Lets go.”

Against my better judgement I go with him. Its a tough sell to the 80% of me that’s still in “Oh Shit!” mode, but I know we need dudes with guns and we need them fast. Manager Bill and his delusions of grandeur walks about five paces ahead of me, flashlight on even though we can still see clearly thanks to the light from the storefront.

We round the corner of the store and keep heading for the alley. The closer we get the faster I’m breathing.

We reach the final corner and I grab Manager Bill’s arm to try and get him to go slower but he shakes me off and marches around it like the pompous ass he probably is. I slowly walk up behind him.

And see nothing.

The alley is empty. No body parts. No blood. No dead bums. No monsters. Nothing.  Just a dying orange streetlight, some boxes, and a lot of loose garbage. Manager Bill calls me a couple choice names he reserves for people who waste his time and takes off back to the store. I’m left standing there, totally stupefied.

Am I losing it?

Am I seeing things again?

Did I even meet Norm in the store in the first place?

I don’t know how long I stood there.  When you think you’re losing your mind you start to spend extra time thinking about things to make sure they don’t sound too crazy.

I’d almost come to the conclusion that I’d made it all up when I saw it. A glimmer of cleanliness amongst all the garbage. I approached it slowly, still wondering if the mouth-thing was going to jump out again and finish me off.

I kicked the cardboard boxes and empty energy drinks aside and there, buried beneath it all, hardly visible, was a formerly clean generic white running shoe.

It was almost completely covered in motor oil.

That shifted things in me. A lot. I started looking around the alley, realizing that there was a LOT more puddles of oil than when I had been back there earlier.

Almost like someone had come along and poured it back there.

I don’t know if hyperventilating is the right word for what I did. Panic came back tenfold. Not only had the mouth-thing killed the bums but SOMEONE HAD COVERED IT UP.

…and I was the only one who knew about it.
My phone rang and I flipped it open, hoping it was the girl from earlier. I wouldn’t tell her what had happened, of course, but I needed some sort of anchor to reality.

“Hello?” I said into the handset.

Now I know what you’re thinking. And you’re right. Jim had told me the battery was completely dead. I eventually remembered he had said that.

After I woke up in my car.

Two days later.