One Last Drink

[kindaemissary]

This is where it all starts, at the liquor store at the corner of State Street and Rineland Lane in upstate Louisiana.

It's almost three o'clock in the morning when a young woman heads out to purchase more liquor for a party only to end up locked inside a convenient liquor store by a cashier, who just so happens to have a dead body in the supply room behind the counter. Everything would have been fine, but she noticed fresh blood on the ground. There's no one else around and he could have let her go. It wasn't in the cards for him to just let her walk out of there. It would come back to haunt him as soon as she stepped a foot out of the store. Sure, he might have acted hastily, but when the future is on the line, people will do like crazy things.


Like killing more people.


Yeah, happy 4th of July to her.

 

[kindaemissary]

"No one's going to believe me. I'm headed straight to jail, no matter what. Who will side with me and say that this was self-defense? No one! I'm fucked! He just - He jumped at me and I reacted! If I wouldn't have acted, I would be dead right now, but I'm not. I protected myself. Isn't that what self-defense? So, I accidentally killed him in the process, but these things happen. I watched on the news last week that a lady stabbed a man in a grocery store when he pulled a gun on her. This is the same thing. It's the same thing, exact same."


Adrian Matthews walked up and down the front of the liquor store he worked part time at, pacing like a mad man, hands gripped tightly in his hair, and tried not to look down at the dead man lying on the ceramic below him. There was a short handle sticking out of his neck.


It was an accident.


"Fuck!"


None of this was planned. Adrian had just finished his first year of graduate school - biochemistry - and now he was going to have to deal with this for the rest of his life. You couldn't just erase a dead person from your past. It wasn't possible! These things didn't leave your side. They were like fucking thorns. He was going to get dropped out of his program. He'd never be able to find a stable job. He'd be working in fucking liquor stores for the rest of his life. Liquor stores.


"I can clean this up," he told himself. "I can clean it up. There's bleach in the back, towels. No one uses the bathroom here anyway. I'll shove him in there, and when I call the cops after my shift, they can watch the security tape. They'll know it was self-defense. They'll see it." He stopped pacing and stared down at the man. Adrian covered his mouth.


He huffed and headed to the supply closet. It took a bit of yanking and pulling, but he got a towel wrapped around the man's neck and torso and dragged him through the door behind the counter.


The bleach smelled putrid. It was too clean, Adrian thought. Too fucking clean. But it did the job. He didn't see anymore blood on the floor, so he did a final wipe down with a dry towel before shoving everything back in the storage area with the body.


Tonight was supposed to be a slow night. Maybe a few teenage stragglers trying to use fakes to get some beer, but nothing like this. Some man wasn't supposed to come into his store and come after him from behind with a knife. Adrian wasn't supposed to turn around the situation and stab him instead. Seriously, how did he do that. He barely made it to the yellow belt in karate when he was younger. He wasn't supposed to be able to stab a person.


He locked the door to the closet and shoved the key into his pocket. The store closed down in two hours. He could manage until then. Most cops were at firework shows anyway. His call wouldn't be answered until at least 4AM.


It took a long time before anything happened, but around 2:30 a car pulled into the parking lot. A little beaten up, but still in good enough shape to make it another year or so.





Oh, great.

 

[Elysion]

"So you're telling me that I'm not allowed to drink much tonight because I'm the designated driver?" Earlier in the night, the words had left Lucy like they were dripping in venom. She was pissed, yes, as she hated to go to a party, where everyone else would be drinking, legal or not, and she'd have to stay sober. It was entirely unfair, in her mind. They should have designated someone else to be the sober one. She hadn't been asked about this, either! She was told.


About six hours into the night, the party having started at around ten o'clock, it was four o'clock in the morning. And the party's alcohol had run dry. And who did all of the party-goers run to? Lucy, of course. It wasn't a huge party, so she was easy to find. Only about twenty people in someone's house, with a pool.


She was almost thankful to be able to leave, though, as it would give her a moment to collect herself and get in a better mood. A short drive filled with unknown music later, and she found herself at the liquor store that her friends had said was the cheapest to buy from. Of course, she had to buy it on her own debit card, but she'd been told that she would be reimbursed. She knew better, though. It was likely that the person designated to reimburse her would forget about it.


The car she drove was her own, bought with her own money. It had too many miles on it, and had been bought off of an older woman who sold it to her for rather cheap. It had many things wrong with it, such as how the air conditioner only blew cold air if it wanted to, and how some warning lights went off for no reason, as she'd been told by her father, a mechanic, that nothing was wrong with her car.


She got out of the car, and walked into the liquor store laxly. She was clearly not intoxicated, or under the influence of any drugs, as evidenced by her straight, hip-swaying walk and her clear gaze.


The store smelled of bleach, which she thought was a bit weird. She shrugged, though, looking at the clerk, giving him a smile and a nod before walking off. She needed to get more vodka and rum. They still had plenty of beer at the party, she'd been told. She put her faded pink hair, from an old dye job on her naturally light blonde hair, into a messy bun on the back of her head and then grabbed the two glass bottles of liquor. She had one in each hand, as she had cash and her ID in her bra and pocket, respectively. She'd just turned around from getting the vodka from the back of the store, and began to walk towards the checkout desk, which was near the front, when she spotted a bit of red liquid seeping out from under a doorway.


At first, thinking it was wine, Lucy began to report it to the clerk, but there was no glass, and she noticed the consistency and color were just as wrong as she thought as she moved and the light shifted on the surface a bit. Paint? No. It wasn't opaque enough. Wine? No, it wasn't transparent enough. The only thing that was left that had that color and consistency was blood.


Knowing that there was no good reason for blood to be seeping out from under a doorway, the girl promptly and accidentally dropped one of the glass bottles- the vodka. The bottle shattered on the tile floor. The vodka spattered everywhere. She covered her mouth with her now-free hand, and then looked at the clerk involuntarily.

 

[kindaemissary]

Adrian smiled when the girl walked in, albeit nervously, and watched her head to the back where they kept the hard liquor. She looked young, so she was probably right at drinking age. College student, maybe. He didn't think anything of it so he turned around and started organizing cigarettes and hookah.


A crash came from behind him and he quickly twisted around to see the mortified look on the girl's face.


The floor was soaked with clear liquor, but when he leaned over the counter he knew that he had missed a spot.





Fuck.


"I can explain," he said, and he walked around the corner and locked the door front door. Circling in on her definitely wasn't a good idea, but there wasn't anything else that he could do. If she left, she'd run away screaming bloody murder, and, okay, yes it was a bloody murder, but it was an accident. It's not like he went into work thinking "Hey, let's stab someone to death today!" He gestured wildly at the floor and shook his hands, trying to get his mouth to work, but nothing was coming out. Nada. Zip.


Just calm your shit and tell her what happened, dumbass, he cursed inwardly at himself.


"Okay," he started, and he pointed down at the floor where the small splotch of blood was spreading thin with vodka. "This - this guy came in. He was gonna rob the place. He came at me! With a knife!" He pointed towards the camera in the upper right corner of the store next to the locked box of expensive cigars. "It's on camera! The whole thing! He came at me and I just barely managed to turn the situation around."


Adrian took a deep breath and tried to read the girls face, but it was just making him more nervous. "Look, you can watch the tapes," he started again. "It's just the fourth of July and cops are still busy cleaning up from fireworks and making sure people get home safe, so I didn't report it yet. I was gonna wait a bit longer until we were closed. By then they'd be done with all the holiday shit and could worry about me. If I had called right away, I would have had to call my boss and close down the store and lose my paycheck."


He huffed and pressed a hand to his forehead, breathing hard and heavy. "Please say you believe me."

 

[Elysion]

The movements of the cashier were obviously not normal, either. She knew he'd killed someone, now. He moved nervously, knowing he'd been caught, she guessed. Her body shook, as she felt anxiety overwhelm her. At first, she'd been still, but now she was shaking like a leaf. Her eyes became flooded with tears as she took in short, shaky breaths. She'd been diagnosed with an anxiety disorder a few years back, and she had medication to take if she had an attack. This attack wasn't unfounded, though. Knowing that there was something bloody behind a closed door seemed like a good enough reason to Lucy to have an anxiety attack.


The man that came towards her made her back away, but not before grabbing the broken neck of the bottle that she'd dropped. She held it in her hand as a makeshift weapon. She backed away from the clerk and her shaking kept happening. Had the piece of glass in her hand been broken, it would have clanked together with the force of her tremoring hand. She took in one deep breath and stopped as the clerk started to explain himself.


She obviously couldn't leave the store. She'd seen him lock the door, and most late-night store windows were made of glass that didn't break easily. It would take a car or a heavy, solid object to break the window. So, with no option to escape, and her heart beating, she decided to listen.


The man had an excuse, yes, but the last thing she wanted to do was believe him and go into a small back room where she could be cornered to watch the supposed security tapes that would excuse his actions.


"Oh, hell no. I'm not going to go back there and let you kill me next." Lucy shook her head at the clerk. "Open the door. Let me see what happened." She pointed to the door that blood was seeping out from underneath. She'd seen dead bodies before at funerals. Surely this couldn't be much worse, could it? She knew that if the body was hacked to pieces, she was facing a murderer, but if the body was not, then she was facing.... a murderer? It was still a dead body.

 

[kindaemissary]

"Yeah, okay." Adrian turned away and walked back behind the counter, still watching the girl from the corner of his eye, and opened the door. The man's body was sitting upright against the wall, white-turned-red towel pressed to his neck tightly. Adrian turned his attention back over his shoulder. "I stabbed him in the neck," he admitted. "It was only once, but somehow it was enough to kill him."


None of this was planned, and hopefully she saw that. Adrian realized that he should have called the cops to get this entire shebang figured out and that waiting was stupid, but the thought came after it was worth anything and now he was stuck defending himself to a girl who would most likely not believe him.


There wasn't a lot of blood from the neck would but enough that it was caking along the man's throat. It wasn't a pretty sight, but Adrian wasn't trying to win an Emmy here for Best Actor in an Accidental Murder Scene. So his clean-up was sloppy, but if it was methodical it would have looked more suspicious. Adrian had never thought that he would come to a point like this in his life. He didn't even eat animals, for Christ's sake. It made him feel sick.


But now there was a dead guy in the storage room and he looked a tad crazy.


"I'm a grad student at LSU. Biochemistry. I would never kill someone on purpose. He came after me and I acted quicker. He had a loose grip on his knife, and I turned it around and hit him instead. The security tapes will show that if you saw them, if anyone saw them!"