Chapter Five: On the way to Adams
(Author's note: a year has passed since Garrett left Indianapolis.)
It started out to be an uneventful spring day in Eastern Tennessee.
Garrett pulled into a service station to get some gas and a bite to eat. There was still about an hour of riding, by his reckoning, before he made it to Adams, where he had a gig that night in a place called the Bear's Den. He filled up his bike and then went inside to pay.
He was milling through the aisles looking at snack foods when two men came in through the automatic doors. They were wearing what appeared to be panty hose over their faces. One of them was wielding a .38 revolver. The other had a shotgun.
"Open the goddamn register and give me everything inside!" the man with the pistol yelled at the frightened teenage girl behind the counter. She cringed, terrified and began to do as she was told.
"Hurry up," he shouted, "unless you want one in the face!"
She let out a small yelp as she began to cry and sob. "Please don't hurt me," she said, trying to put the cash in a paper sack as fast as she could.
"Shut up!" he shouted as he pistol-whipped her in the side of the head. She went sprawling to the floor, bleeding. The man jumped over the counter and started shoving money into the bag.
Garrett tensed up, but for the moment stood motionless.
The man with the shotgun covered the first man's back and instructed everyone else to get down on the floor. Garrett was the only other person in the establishment; he stood there, unmoving.
"Are you deaf or something?" the thug said as he made his way towards the tall Native American at the end of the aisle. "I said get the fuck down or I'll put you down!"
Garrett let his trench coat fall to the floor as he said, "I don't think you want to do that."
Unnerved by the response, he pressed the shotgun to Garrett's chest. "I'm gonna give you to the count of three, or I'm going to put a hole through your chest big enough for me to crawl through. One... Two..."
Garrett moved as fast as he could in homid form, knocking the shotgun away from his body as it contorted, shifting into his crinos form. Blood sprayed a fine mist from his arm as the gun went off, causing the bags of chips behind him to explode.
The shotgun man visibly started to blubber as the half man, half puma facing him gave a menacing growl.
He tried to wheel the shotgun back around to get another shot, but it was no use. The massive beast swatted him, sending him through a sliding glass door into the beer behind it.
The man with the pistol wheeled around to see this and fired a shot wildly.
Garrett ducked down into the aisle and moved up it quickly, shifting to chatro, his war form. He came around the corner as the man fired another shot, catching him in the shoulder. The girl behind the counter fainted as the huge, saber-toothed, catlike creature plowed into the man and sent him back through the automatic doors. The automatic open feature could not react fast enough, just starting to part as the man hit the doors, shattering glass and bending the frame before passing through them. He spilled out into the parking lot where thankfully, there was no one else to witness it. His gun went skittering along the pavement, almost into the road.
He was struggling to crawl away, but the beast was upon him again. Garrett shifted back up to Crinos form and picked him up by what was left of his shirt collar.
He heard a noise behind him. It was the first man, the one with the shotgun. The bastard had managed to free himself from the confines of the drink cooler and was struggling to stand. He still had the shotgun and was staring at Garrett. The delirium had pushed him into the fight or flight instinct. As he lifted the shotgun, it was clear he intended to fight.
Without a second thought, Garrett hurled the broken man at the door. One last shot was fired as the two men collided. The body in motion absorbed the entire blast as it impacted the other. Neither man was going to live through this.
Garrett's sense of reason suddenly kicked in. Get out of here now before the cops show up.
Reacting quickly, Garrett shifted into his feline form and bolted back into the building. He reverted to homid, picked up his coat, retrieved the video tape that had recorded the events and paid for his gas before riding out as fast as he could.
After getting a few miles down the highway, he pulled off down an old dirt road and stopped. He got some clothes out of one of his saddle bags and put them on. He hated having to constantly buy new clothes after every gig, but right now he didn't know what else to do.
Oh well … next stop, Adams.