Legion Of Rockstars

We traveled to the abandoned little gas station in a nondescript van, the sort of van kidnappers use without windows in the back and two doors that open up like the back of an ambulance. Ours wasn’t white, though; it was an odd tan-like color, a color that blends in wherever it sits. It only took ten minutes to get to the alleged hide-out, and then the five of us dropped out of the back of the van. It reminded me of those crime shows on television where one of the guys go undercover, and then everything goes awry and his fellow crime stoppers climb out of the back of their hidden surveillance van to help.

We weren’t crime stoppers, though, at least not in that sense. We were agents, alright, but agents of rock. There’s a difference.

As I straightened up after climbing out of the van, I squinted through the sunshine across the street at the rundown old gas station we were sent to investigate. It looked like it just had to be a shady hide-out for somebody, even if the Jonas Brothers weren’t using it; some shady person had to be. Seriously, this place was the definition of “middle of nowhere”. Imagine a lonely, rough road winding through the country that needed to badly be repaved. Now, just smack a rusty, vandalized gas station that looked like it was the first gas station ever built on a random place on said road, as far away from civilization as you can possibly get.

You now have a visual of what I’m seeing.

“Asher and I will go in around the back,” Jimmy volunteered both of us with that air of agent confidence I hadn’t quite mastered yet. Frank nodded, and Jimmy motioned at me with a hand. We walked across the street, slinking around the old gas tills still sitting outside of the station. They were brown with rust and crumpled with age. We both glanced into the shattered windows of the gas station before ducking down and running around the side of the building in a slight crouch.

Jimmy pulled out his stun gun—you think they’d give us real guns?—and I quickly followed his lead. They were like the stun guns policemen always get themselves in trouble with by stunning people who shouldn’t be stunned—“Don’t taze me, bro!” Jimmy stopped at the back entrance, holding out his hand to stop me. I paused, glancing around the landscape behind the station. It was mainly bushes and dirt; nothing too special.

Jimmy tried to open the door, but found that it was locked. He looked around—we weren’t given lock-picking kits unless we were given a mission to break in somewhere. As I studied an oddly-shaped bush, not paying much attention to Jimmy, he reached out and snatched a hairpin out of my hair. I grabbed for it, but he just swatted my hand away and shook his head. I huffed out an impatient breath and brushed the hair that my hairpin had held back away from my face. The nerve of some people, stealing my hairpins!

As Jimmy picked the lock with my hairpin—bending it into a useless shape as he did so—I wondered if there would be rats in this abandoned old place. If we found a rat, I wouldn’t be able to hold in a scream, I knew that much. I turned to tell Jimmy that if he saw a rat to slap his hand over my mouth so I wouldn’t scream, but he’d already disappeared into the darkness of the back storage room. I closed my mouth and quickly followed him into the darkness.

It was pitch dark in the storage room. I nearly jumped out of my skin when a gust of wind slammed the door shut behind us, but managed to hold in my yelp. I heard a faint clicking noise, and then the little room was filled with flickering orange light. Jimmy turned towards me, holding his lighter above his head, the source of the orange light. He jerked his head towards the door leading out of the storage room.

I walked over to it and pressed my ear gently against it. I heard no noise coming from the other side, so I gently clutched the doorknob in one hand and tightly clenched my gun in the other. Glancing at Jimmy, and receiving an encouraging nod from him, I turned the knob and pushed it open.

We stepped out into the slightly lighter interior of the gas station. The only light came from the sunlight seeping in through the shattered windows. At one end of the gas station, there was a long counter complete with cash register, even though it was covered in rust and probably empty of cash. The rest of the gas station was taken up by ten to fifteen empty shelves. One whole wall was taken up by empty refrigerators that hadn’t chilled anything in several years.

“I’ll go check out the bathrooms,” I offered in a whisper, raising my stun gun slightly and remembering all the tips Jimmy gave me earlier that day, just in case I needed to use my gun. Jimmy nodded silently at my offer, and I set off along the wall to the doors marked with faded blue signs.

It smelled stale in the men’s bathroom—the first one I stepped into, since it was closest. The once-white tile underneath my feet had turned brown and green with grime over the years. A quick once-over revealed no one in the bathroom, but someone could be hiding in the stalls. I didn’t even want to look at the toilets, though, so I wandered over to the urinals instead.

Wrinkling my nose, I investigated the urinal closest to me. We weren’t only looking for a sign of the Jo Bros...We were looking for any secret hiding places they might’ve built inside the gas station. You know the ones, like in Scooby-Doo when they’d pull on a book and the bookcase would flip around to reveal a secret passageway. It didn’t look like there was anything special about this bathroom except for the tiles’ surprising ability to attract grime.

“Girls aren’t allowed in here.”

I jerked upright at the sound of a male’s voice I recognized from somewhere, but wasn’t sure where. Before I could respond more, headphones were slipped down over my ears, those really big headphones that cover your entire ear. And coming from them was the most horrendous sound I’d ever heard.

A cruel medley of Jonas Brothers and Miley Cyrus songs ripped through my eardrums. Their annoying, whining voices made me want to shoot myself in the head just to make it stop. All my concentration shattered, and the gun in my hand fell from my slack fingers to fall with a clatter that I couldn’t hear. I knew I whimpered—I felt it vibrate my vocal cords—but all I could hear was that horrible music pounding in my eardrums, reaching right down deep into my soul and tearing it to shreds.

A sharp pain sparked through my knees as I collapsed onto them. I fell forward onto my hands, and I could see a shadow thrown across the tile in front of me. I couldn’t think to look around to see who it was, or to even take the headphones off. I clenched my eyes shut as my body finished its descent to the grimy tile. Despite the darkness, the music played on, and I could feel my sanity slipping away.

”I might even be a rockstar...”