Grimm Awakening Read Free Page A

bucket. “Aim's off.” His disappointment sounded genuine. “Yeah, you're dead. And no shit, Sherlock. What are you, a dee-tective?”
    “Uh...”
    The big man chuckled. “You gotta pay for another night if you don't check out in an hour.”
    Jack wondered where else in hell he might spend the night, realized he would not arrive at an answer to that horrifying and perplexing question within the next hour, and made his decision. “I'll stay another night.”
    “You gonna put that on the same card as last night?”
    Jack pondered the implications of that question a moment. “Huh. Um...those work down here?”
    The clerk rooted around some more in the same nostril with a plump pinkie finger. “Ya got a lot to learn, newbie. Any active account you had in life is mirrored in the Bank of Hell when you get here. As long as you make your payments on time, you'll be able to use 'em.”
    “Well...” Jack shook his head. He still clung to the hope none of this was real. Maybe one of his drinks last night had been dosed. It had happened before, so it could happen again. But, no, nothing about his current predicament was at all like his previous experience with dope. He wasn't hallucinating. And he wasn't having a bad dream. This was his real, waking life. Or death, rather.
    In hell.
    Jack palmed sweat from his forehead. “Goddamn.”
    The desk clerk laughed. “Ain't that a fact? God has damned us all, the bastard. Aw, hell, man, you'll get used to it after a bit. It ain't so bad, really. It's not like they made us believe back on earth when I was little and we'd get all dressed up and go to church on Sundays. It's more like what I'd hear sometimes, that hell is whatever you hate most in life. Me, I slaved twenty-some years behind the front desk of a little motel in Alabama and hated every miserable goddamn day of it. And now it's what I'm stuck with forever. I couldn't go apply for some different job somewhere else in hell.” He laughed again, but this time there was a note of sadness in it. “No sir, I'm stuck here front-deskin' it for all eternity.”
    Jack thought back to the way he'd awakened this morning and was struck almost dumb with horror. He wanted to scream. The notion that he was now doomed to spend forever waking up hungover and disoriented was just too awful. He pictured every day playing out the same damn way. Stumbling his way through the wreckage of the night before and not realizing where he was, or what was happening, until it smacked him in the face. It'd be like living that movie Groundhog Day .
    Only in hell.
    Jack choked back strangled laughter.
    Damnation Day .
    The new blockbuster starring Jack fucking Grimm.
    The desk clerk peered at him with something close to actual concern. “Listen, it's best not to dwell on it. What's done is done. You can still do some of the things you like to do. You can go out to a bar and get drunk. You could pay that whore out at the bus stop to do any kinky thing you want. Lots of shit like that. You just can't change the basic facts of your fucked-up existence.”
    Jack decided he'd try to come to terms with this insanity later. He still had avenues of investigation to pursue. Maybe nothing that mattered anymore, but he had to try—there was simply nothing else to do. “Listen, when I came in here last night, was I alone?”
    “You don't remember?”
    Jack sneered. “Look, I had a fucking blackout. No, I don't remember. Was I alone? Was there a girl with me?”
    The desk clerk flinched at his tone. “Don't get all nasty with me, asshole. Unless you had some whore waitin' for you outside, you was alone. Now, I got me a goddamn cinematic masterpiece to watch, shitbrain. I'm done answerin' your dumbass questions.”
    The man spun around on the squeaky stool and stared up at the screen again. Jack glanced at the image of the moaning fake blonde. Another woman, a Latino, had just joined the on-screen action.
    Jack sighed. “Look...I'm sorry. I'm just very upset.