****
The setting sun was already half-hidden behind a hill, and Tax Stuart glanced nervously toward the east. He still had another forty minutes until the landfill closed, and by that time it would be dark.
He didn’t like working here when it was dark.
He turned up the CD player in the weigh-station booth. Long shadows were forming between the piles of refuse and in the pit, and while the brush pile had been burned and the fire was out, smoke still hung heavy over that section of the dump, making the area even gloomier.
He was thinking of changing the landfill’s hours so he wouldn’t have to be here when the sun went down. He knew it was childish and irrational, but though this fear had only started recently, it had become a growing concern, and for the past week he’d dreaded coming to work each morning, knowing what awaited him at the end of the day. If he could afford to do so, he’d hire another worker, have him close up, but unless the population around here drastically increased, that wasn’t going to happen.
Tax looked to the left, hoping to spot the telltale dust cloud that meant someone else was coming to dump trash or yard waste at the landfill.
Nothing.
Looking to the right, he saw that the shadows had grown and lengthened from even a few moments previously. The entire far side of the pit was now so engulfed in murk that he could barely see it. Closer in, near the mounds of rubbish that had been dumped this week, shadows within the shadows moved. They had to be rats, but not all of them looked like rats, and he was afraid to go out and check for fear of what he might find.
The CD ended. From somewhere nearby, there was a high birdlike whistle, and for the first few seconds, he thought it was a bird. But the phrase went on too long, a song not a fragment, and it actually seemed to have a tune. There was no one here but him, and, frowning, he peered through the sliding window to see if he could determine the source. He saw nothing, and he opened the door behind him to peer out the back but saw nothing unusual there, either. The whistling continued, the sound becoming increasingly disconcerting.
He thought of that thing they’d accidentally shot out of the sky on New Year’s Eve, shivering at the recollection of it. He knew what Father Ramos and everyone said it was, but he’d helped carry it into the smokehouse, and if that thing was an angel, it was an angel from Hell. He’d always been one to laugh at those liberal pansies in places like New York and Los Angeles, where politicians passed laws against shooting off guns to ring in the new year, but he wished now that there’d been such a law on the books here in Cochise County. Maybe not everyone would’ve abided by it, but some of them would have, and one might have been the guy who shot the fatal bullet.
It was that angel creature that was the reason he was so spooked out here now when it started to get dark. He’d dreamed about that thing, and those nightmares had left him feeling like a five-year-old boy coming out of an R-rated horror movie. He’d been going to mass every Sunday morning and Wednesday evening since it happened, praying for his soul the way Father Ramos told him he should, but God wasn’t giving him much strength these days.
Tax saw movement out of the corner of his eye and turned back toward the window.
Where a small shriveled hand was reaching up and placing a dirty coin on the narrow shelf in front of the sliding glass.
He cried out in surprise and fear, immediately backing up, his heart hammering crazily in his chest. The whistling was louder now, and it was obviously coming from the thing in front of the booth. Whatever it was, it was too short to reach the window, and he was glad that the shelf was there to block it from his sight. That shriveled little hand was creepy enough by itself, and he did not want to see what it was attached to.
The hand withdrew, leaving the coin, and the whistling lessened in volume as whatever it was moved away. Tax was breathing hard, and he quickly turned around, realizing he had not locked the door behind him. Leaning over quickly, he did so, just as there was a faint knock on the thin wood.
He held his breath as though trying to fool the thing into believing he wasn’t there. He had never been so scared in his life.
The knock came again, slightly stronger this time, and with it, the whistling, muffled by the closed door.
Had he heard that tune before? It seemed to him that he had.
Tax took out his cell phone, but it had been acting up lately, and of course this was one of those times when it was on the blink. In fact, it didn’t even turn on at all; the battery appeared to be dead.
He heard a new noise, and was surprised to find that it was coming from his own mouth as he hummed along to the whistled tune. He stopped humming and clapped a hand over his mouth the way a cartoon character would. It knows I’m here, he thought wildly.