Cthulhu's Car Park Read online

  Cthulhu's Car Park

  Copyright D.S. Ritter. All rights reserved.

  Cover by D.S. Ritter

  Illustrations by Rodrigo M.G.

  For more information, visit D.S. Ritter's website.

  Cthulhu's Car Park

  A Third Shift Novel

  by

  D.S. Ritter

  Chapter One

  “It’s not working.”

  Sam tried not to sigh. She looked down at the customer from her post beside the automatic parking machine. It was a woman, driving a low, red, middle-grade sports car-type vehicle, Sam didn’t know the model, with a look of utter contempt on her face. She held a blue parking ticket.

  Ignoring that the woman had not even tried to put her ticket into the machine, Sam took it and slid it into the slot. “You need to put it with the stripe up and to the right,” she explained for the millionth time. She watched the screen and was not surprised when it showed the woman had not paid for her ticket yet. There were a number of signs posted, everywhere, suggesting she prepay in the elevator lobby. “It’s going to be a dollar and fifty cents.”

  Following instructions did not seem to be this lady’s strong suit; she dug through her purse and withdrew two crumpled dollar bills. “I’m sorry, ma’am,” said Sam, using her best customer-service tone and pointing to a big sign posted right on the machine, “we only accept debit or credit cards at the gate.”

  The woman’s frown turned into a grimace. “That’s ridiculous! It’s two dollars!”

  Sam shrugged helplessly. “I’m sorry, that’s just how our system works, ma’am. This machine isn’t built to handle cash.”

  With long, manicured nails she plucked a card from her purse and thrust it toward the parking lot attendant, who inserted it into the slot and waited for the transaction to clear, hoping the machine wouldn’t screw up for once.

  It was a sleek looking device, sort of resembling an ATM, with one slot, two buttons and a screen. You might think a machine that simple would be easy for people to use, particularly with a big board of instructions right in front of them, but that was not the case.

  Thus, Sam would stand beside it, putting people’s tickets in correctly, assuring them that yes, their credit card did go there, and clearing mechanical jams. This time, she could hear the machinations inside working, and out popped the credit card. She handed it back to the customer.

  “Would you like a receipt?” But, the gate had gone up and the red sports car was already wheeling onto the street, so she plucked the piece of paper out of the machine and put it in the small pile on top of the nearby garbage can.

  The job wasn’t a hard one if you thought about it in terms of skill level. Be polite. Help people operate a system designed to be completely automated. No cash register to mess around with. Very little handling of cash at all, assuming the machine in the lobby was working. But, sometimes easy or hard doesn’t have to do with skill.

  An idling engine drew the attendant's attention to the entrance to the left of the exits. Two men sat in a black sedan, staring at her. At eleven o’clock at night on a Wednesday, the parking structure was close to empty, so Sam prepared herself for a hassle. “Can I help you?”

  The driver had an expression of slack-jawed determination. “Yeah, uh, where’s a spot?”

  Sam disliked this question, for a couple of reasons, the first being it was a reminder that management expected her to stay by the gates, so there was no way to know which spots were available. The second was the question’s lazy nature. Drive around for two seconds and find it yourself, she thought.

  What she said, politely, was, “It’s pretty empty right now, I’m sure there’s one just up that ramp.” To be clear, she pointed out the ramp to the next level.

  When the customer had driven off, not saying much other than “cool,” Sam stood there for a moment and enjoyed the quiet. The night was winding down, the electronic sign in front of the garage said there were almost two-hundred spaces available, and in a few hours, she’d be able to go home.

  It was summer in the college town of Ann Arbor, and the night, a pleasant, balmy one, so she wore her uniform polo, khaki shorts and tennis shoes, because sandals went against the dress code. A breeze tickled the sad little urban trees, pushing a receipt across the concrete floor of the structure, and the only sound was radio traffic on her walkie-talkie. Cashiers and maintenance workers checked in with the home office from all over the city, clearing special transactions and reporting problems. In a few weeks, the university would be starting up again, and then the calm nights would be a memory until around Christmas.

  As her mind really started to wander, the sound of puking echoed over the poured concrete from somewhere within the structure. This time, Sam did sigh as she unclipped her radio from her belt. “Seven-One to HQ.”

  “HQ,” crackled the radio, “go ahead, Seven-One.”

  “I think I’ve got someone throwing up somewhere in the structure. Permission to check it out?”

  “Okay, Seven-One, go check it out. Let us know if you need any back up.”

  “Ten-four.”

  Returning the radio to her belt, Sam looked around for any customers, then made her way to the up-ramp. Seven-One was a small structure, with eight split-levels containing only about thirty spaces each and it didn’t take her long to locate where the sick person had been. There was nobody on 3b, but a pool of vomit beside the black sedan that had just entered gave her an idea of who the culprit might have been. Sam almost gagged, smelling the alcohol from ten feet away. She informed HQ what she’d found.

  “You got sawdust over there, Seven-One?” asked Marcus, the night manager.

  “Should be some in the basement hold,” replied Dave, one of the maintenance workers.

  “Just spread some of that sawdust and we’ll send someone over to deal with it later,” said Marcus, who sounded distracted. “What’s this guy doing? Hey, Seven-Six, you got that guy’s license plate?”

  Her part of the conversation over, Sam went back to ignoring the radio traffic and took the elevator to the bottom floor of the structure. It had three half levels underground, besides the eight split levels above.

  The basement levels creeped Sam out. Their ceilings were lower than the upper levels and there were no windows, giving them a claustrophobic air. And worse, the lights were motion activated. This wouldn’t have been so bad if it weren’t for the fact that they took a second to register, leaving you in pitch-blackness for longer than Sam was really comfortable, and once they came on, they had a tendency to flicker, like in a low budget slasher movie. Every time she had to go down for a car count or whatever, she found herself imagining the lights coming on, and seeing someone waiting, perfectly still.

  Today, she was too annoyed at the prospect of cleaning up a puddle of sick to be bothered, and made her way to the supply hold, closed off with a chain-link fence. She shoved her electronic key into the lock. It chirped merrily.

  The fluorescent lights were still flickering when she heard another chirp. It didn't sound electronic. She glanced down behind her and jumped. Mice were not unheard of in the structure. They ate garbage, and nobody cared since they mainly stayed out of sight. But this was not a mouse.

  First of all, it was green. Not lizard-green, with scales. This was booger-green and looked like one of those disgusting oozy toys that were popular in the nineties. The thing had smooth, glistening skin, too many legs and far, far too many eyes. And they all looked up at her. It chirped again though she couldn’t spot any sort of a mouth or nose. “Um, hello,” she said, and immediately felt stupid. But really, she could either talk to the thing, or let panic overtake her, so she said, “Where did you come from?”

  It chirped again, which would h
ave been cute if a large, fang-filled mouth hadn't emerged from the slimy thing like an angry suction cup. The chirp lowered in tone as the teeth extended. Before it finished its transformation, Sam had picked up the heavy snow shovel they kept next to the bag of sawdust. She slammed it down on the creature with as much force as she could and it made a disgusting, stomach-turning squash-clang!

  Gingerly, she lifted the metal shovel head and peered at what was left. The corpse was totally smashed and bright green goop was oozing out of its body like the insides of a rotten melon. And the smell! It was something like burned hair mixed with old garbage. One of the thing’s arms twitched, and she threw the shovel down and ran back upstairs to the street level and into the staff bathroom. With the door locked behind her, she got on the radio. If she hadn’t been working for Empire Parking for years, she might have gotten on her phone and called the police first, but it had been drilled into her mind, just about every weekend, that unless someone was about to die, you called management first. “Hey guys,” she said, her hand shaking as she held it to her mouth, “I need someone over here now.”

  “Who is this?” demanded Marcus, who had heard her on the radio almost every day for two years.

  Sam almost screamed with frustration. “This is Seven-One," she said, trying to keep her voice calm.

  “Okay. Go ahead, Seven-One.”

  “There is some sort of… animal in the basement. I don’t know if it’s still there. Can someone come check it out?”

  “Okay, we’ll send somebody over.” Sam listened as Marcus arranged for Dave to drive over and take a look. She also listened for customers driving down, but had no intention of leaving the bathroom until there was someone else there. She looked at herself in the mirror over the sink. Her long, black hair had come out of her ponytail. Her face looked somber and pale under the fluorescent light. What the hell was that thing? She put her hair back up and rubbed her arms, for a second, imagining its green, slimy remains sliding under the door crack. The lights had probably gone out in the basement again. It was just sitting down there, in the dark; a strange, hopefully dead, little thing.

  Only the sound of one of Empire’s big blue maintenance trucks idling outside brought her out of that bathroom. Dave rolled down the window of the big F150 and leaned over. “Where is it?”

  “Down by the hold,” she said, rubbing her arms again. “I don’t know what the hell it is, man, but it was gross.”

  Dave nodded, rolled up the window and rolled the truck down into the basement. Not an easy task, considering how tight the structure was. Sam stood near the bathroom door, ready to bolt back inside or run to help, she wasn’t sure which. Her fight and flight instincts warred with each other while she waited what seemed like an eternity of silence on the radio. After about ten minutes, Dave drove back up, and she got him to roll down the window while he was trying to get the gate to read the truck’s automatic pass. “Did you find it?”

  “I didn’t find anything but some spilled coolant. No animals or anything. I put some sawdust on it for you.”

  “That wasn’t coolant, that was—” but, it was too late; the gate had popped up, and he was already driving away. “—its blood, I think…” she finished.

  Left alone in the silent structure, the semi-darkness of a college town on a Wednesday night surrounding her beyond it, she wondered if she’d seen what she thought she’d seen. Maybe it had been just a goober of coolant? Or something non-living, at least. With the lights flickering like they did, and her tendency to get creeped out in the basement without any reason, it was plausible that her imagination had run away with her. She got out her phone and put some music on, something not strictly allowed, and tried to calm down while she waited out the clock until two in the morning.

  "This was not a mouse. First of all, it was green."

  Chapter Two

  “Got training tonight?”

  Thursday night found Sam in the break room at HQ, sipping a Coke and reading a novel on her phone. Tina Gerardi, sat across from her, looking over her time sheets.

  “I guess so. ‘Joe’ somebody, I guess.”

  “I heard he’s a burnout. Shelly over at Seven-Three said she smelled weed on him in the booth,” said Tina, completely matter-of-fact. “She doesn’t like him.”

  Shelly was a fifty-year-old woman who’d been working the parking booths for eight years. Frankly, she didn’t like anyone, though Sam guessed she was probably right about the new guy being a stoner. How many prospective employees had come in expecting they could be high on the job? “Well, we’ll see how long he lasts,” she said, trying to get back to her novel.

  Training employees meant an extra fifty cents an hour, though the four dollars almost wasn’t worth the energy spent babysitting them all night. Sam had signed up out of some ridiculous loyalty to the company, hoping to improve it.

  Being a bit of a loner, she didn’t always like having to make conversation during the slow periods. Sometimes it got awkward, though it could be interesting getting to know the new guys. Eight hours with plenty of downtime often proved more than enough to get a person's life story. Or at least, their last three marriages.

  The two parking attendants sat in the break room in silence, savoring the last ten minutes before they could clock in. It was a featureless room containing the table at which they sat, three bulletin boards and a counter, taken up by an ancient microwave and the time clock widely known to be three minutes slow.

  Sam looked up from her phone when the door opened. A young man she didn’t recognize let himself in. He had a long, thin face and mud-brown hair, cut close to his head.

  “Are you Sam?” he asked, addressing both women. Sam stood up, and he held out his hand, which she found interesting and maybe just on the kiss-ass side of being polite. Also interesting was that his green eyes were already a little bloodshot. “I’m Joe Huckabee.”

  “Nice to meet you Joe,” she said, shaking his hand. “Your other trainers showed you how to clock in, right?”

  He ran his hand through his hair in a “shucks, ma’am,” sort of way. “Yeah, I think so.”

  The three employees sat quietly for another few moments. Without warning, Tina and Sam got up and walked over to the clock, stamped their time cards and put them in a slot on the wall. Tina headed for the elevator, and Sam waited for Joe to finish filling out his card.

  They went up to the office where assignments were handed out. “Are you going to need a ride?” asked Sam as they headed back out.

  “No, I’ll follow you.”

  When they got there, Seven-One was quiet, despite rush hour starting. Carter Evans was manning the machine, a bored look on his face. He was more senior than Sam. She thought he was nice. Maybe a little too smart to be at Empire, but that could be said about a lot of the people she worked with. “Hey man, ready to go home?” she said as she and Joe walked up.

  “You know it,” said Carter, handing her his bank bag. She had Joe count it and looked around.

  “Seen anything weird today?”

  “Weird? I had an asshole try to dump his garbage upstairs…”

  “No, I mean like, I don’t know, really weird.”

  “No… nothing like that. Why?”

  She shrugged. “Thought I saw something weird last night. It’s nothing.”

  Carter packed his stuff up and headed back to HQ, and Sam showed Joe the machines and everything that could possibly go wrong with them. Before long, she had the back of one unlocked and was demonstrating how to clear ticket and credit card jams. “Ok, so, if there’s a ticket jam, you stick your hand in there and feel around for the metal tab. Lift it up. It should swing easily.”

  “Uh huh.”

  Joe had a vapid look on his face, indicative of a wandering mind. Sam continued with her instructions anyway. The likelihood of Joe having to deal with one of these machines was growing smaller every moment. She’d seen his type before. He’d come in, having seen the other attendants sitting idle in their booths and
thought, Man, this job’ll be easy. And sure, in the middle of a shift on a Tuesday afternoon in certain parts of the city, it was an incredibly easy and lucrative job. But the laid-back positions were coveted by more senior attendants, the waiting list for which might go on for years.

  New hires tended to face trials by fire. Chances were, Joe would end up at the one of the structures on Liberty on a Friday and have to ring up hundreds of customers at a breakneck pace all night, dealing with drunks and young obnoxious kids out to party. He might find himself handling a thousand dollars in cash, or more, on weekends when the Wolverines played. One wrong move, one moment of complacency, and all hell would break loose. Honking, angry customers would curse him out, or worse, someone might reach in his service window and snatch the two hundred dollars he was frantically counting out for a deposit, and so long, Joe, thanks for playing. Dismissal.

  That would be pretty dramatic though. A safer bet would be that after a week, he’d just stop coming back. She watched him as they served customers and decided he had to be the laziest trainee she’d ever had. He did almost nothing, sometimes didn’t greet customers, or even acknowledge them unless they spoke to him first. She doubted he would last until that first Friday.

  “Do we get breaks?” he asked as another nonplussed customer drove away.

  “We get thirty for lunch whenever we feel like taking it,” she said, straightening her growing pile of discarded receipts. “You can take bathroom breaks whenever since I can cover you right now, but you’ll need to call them in later.”

  “Can I go down to my car for a sec? I forgot something.”

  “Sure, go ahead.” Sam felt a little relieved as the guy walked away. Sometimes, no conversation was more awkward than too much. She didn't dislike all trainees. She’d bought a few of them lunch over the years, but this guy was going to be on his own.

  The machines at Seven-One were terrible. Sam didn’t know if the machines were dirty inside or had seen too much abuse over the years, but they often had mechanical trouble, requiring a lot of attention during high volume periods, so she dealt with ticket jams and finicky credit cards for about forty-five minutes before she realized that Joe hadn’t returned from his car yet. A little worried, she got on the radio.