The Passenger Seat

He flicked ash out the cracked window and watched it vanish into the wind.

Some losses don’t stay buried.

They ride with you.

They sit in the passenger seat.

They wait in the dark between towns and in the silence between songs on the radio.

Drake tightened his grip on the wheel.

“Happy birthday, bro,” he muttered to nobody and somebody all at once.

Then he drove on, chasing coffee, ghosts, and whatever was still hungry out there.

Drake pulled off the dusty highway into the first decent gas station he saw.

He took one last drag and let the smoke curl toward the roof of the Impala.
—————
The dead never stayed quiet for men like Drake Crowley.
Not the monsters.
Not the memories.
Not the ones you loved.
—————-
“Wendigo’s, demon’s, vampires, zombies, zombie-vampires & vampire-zombies {there’s a difference}, you name it I’ve seen it, probably worse. “ I thought as I strolled, navel gazing, a habit of the haunted.

Cling-cling

The simple pull string bell chirped. I glanced lazily, sleepily toward the coffee. I almost always had to trance myself out into the Laminae….

Why? Every-fucking-where I go - Eidolons.

Haunting me.

Sometimes it’s Morgan: blaming me for his death or trying to trick me that he’s still alive; sometimes it’s a distorted echo of Ash, calling me or appearing just briefly, in a Laminae layer: calling, tempting, warning, but always scarring… Scarring me, reflecting what I’ve lost, or worse, what you could lose.

It’s our bloodline as hunters. It’s our covenant.

I didn’t choose this life.

I didn’t choose this life.


Drake shuffled innocuosuly towards the coffee display

“But it’s up to me, and the others born into it, to stand between the dark and the people who’ll never even know it was there.

That’s the covenant.

That’s the curse.

it’s up to me and others like me to protect those who may never even know of it’s existence.”
——————-

I reached for the pot, my fingers brushing the cold metal of the refrigerated aisle. The coffee was there, but so was the silence…….a heavy, pressurized quiet that even the hum of the refrigerator couldn't drown out. As I turned, the bell chimed again, not from a door, but from an unseen presence moving in the shadows of the aisles behind me.

A shadow that didn't belong to a man buying caffeine. It was too tall, too still. The air in the store felt thinner, as if the oxygen itself were being exhaled by something that had been holding its breath for a century.

I caught my reflection in the glass of the warmer. For half a second, it wasn’t just me staring back.

Another hat.
Another set of shoulders.
A shape I knew better than my own shadow.

I froze.

Then the image was gone.

I tipped my hat anyway.

“Happy birthday, brother,” I muttered under my breath.

And somewhere behind me, deeper in the store, I heard boots that did not belong to any man who’d come in through the front door.

And on days like this, when the ghosts ride closer than usual, the dead feel closer than the living……. I just tip my hat to the dead, light another cigarette, and keep driving.