An excerpt from GODstatic: AWAKEN, Book One — Chapter 1, "The Corvine Omen"
THE CROW WAS GONE.
Magnus felt it in his teeth: a hollow where the math of the world didn't add up, a wrongness with no signal attached yet. The body clocks these things before the mind has a name for them.
Eleven minutes. The transformer box past pump nine had sat empty for eleven minutes.
The Pinnacle was young as gas stations went. Twelve pumps. A building the county had rubber-stamped in half the time anything should take, dropped onto the pad of the old 76 station that had died on this corner years before Magnus was born.
The old concrete apron still showed through the new asphalt in places. Where the crews hadn't bothered tearing out what still held weight.
He hadn't relapsed. He kept checking anyway, like a lock he knew was locked.
He knew the difference between what sobriety felt like and what this felt like. Cravings lived in the chest. This lived somewhere else.
The orange creamsicle wrapper sat in his left pocket. His rose-tinted glasses filtered the ochre and the ash into something close to bearable.
The beard had gotten away from him somewhere past the six-month mark and he'd stopped fighting it — a foot of it now, red at the jaw as his father's had been, fading out to white by the time it reached his sternum, the two colors trading off slow with no clean line between them. Two teardrops sat under his left eye, old ink gone soft and blue at the edges. Across his throat, in a script he'd picked: Judge Me.
Tonight was one of his overnights — ten to six, the couple of nights a week he still took the graveyard on purpose — with Anthony working the other end of the floor: twenty-two, thin as a fence rail, black hair tied back under a beanie, a skateboard he wasn't supposed to leave behind the counter propped there anyway. By 5:40 the tiredness had gone past tired, into the over-clear state that showed up around hour seven, when every small thing stood out. The cooler hummed. The lot sat empty and grey, waiting on a sun that hadn't decided whether to show up.
Five rows of snack shelving stood down the middle of the floor. Always five. Always straight.
A guy in a Carhartt jacket slapped down a coupon that had expired in March and wanted to argue about it like the date was a personal insult. Magnus let him talk himself most of the way to done, then said that he couldn't ring the coupon but he could knock forty cents off the energy drink since the guy was buying two anyway. The guy took the forty cents like he'd won something and left without another word about March. That was most of the job: making sure a man got to leave feeling like he hadn't lost.
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From GODstatic: AWAKEN, Book One, by Michael Steilling. Read the full book at — and start free with The Three-Pound Debt, the free door to the GODstatic world.
