When I ran into her the first time, I had only been working for about three weeks, and aside from the job, I wasn’t too familiar with Milwaukee overall. I had been there countless times throughout the decades, but usually only to certain areas. So when someone was hailing me from a car window in an area that was said to be dangerous, I didn’t know what to expect. While she was asking me about the job from inside of her car, someone rushed out of a nearby house talking crazy and walking straight towards us quickly. Then he smiled, and I managed to smile back from half of my mouth after realizing he wasn’t going to do anything.

“Shut the **** up!” Shaquanna yelled at the young man, and then they started talking. He was her younger cousin.

One day I heard her cousin, perhaps a different one, was going to start working for a different company that was assigned to our same warehouse in Sussex. When they found out Shaquanna was working out of the same warehouse, they said they weren’t going to work there and took off. My cousin Tom shared a route with her one day, and he said she was yelling at him the whole time and pushing the pace past what he was used to, and he was the owner!

One late morning I bought a bunch of bananas at Kwik Trip just after loadout and was walking back to my van as Shaquanna was going inside.

“Make sure you save some bananas for Thomas,” she said as she started making “Oo oo oo” noises like a monkey.

I never had any problems with her, but one day at the warehouse she called me corny and made fun of my laugh because I was laughing at something she said. Then she proceeded to ask me for a bunch of favors like grabbing some of her empty tote bags as she sat in the driver’s seat of her van with the rear sliding door open. I thought it would be the gentleman thing to do to oblige her.

“Is there anything else you need from me this evening?” I asked mildly sarcastically, and she just laughed.

Then I shut the rear sliding door and she drove away to the warehouse exit as I finished my own duties for the evening.

Shaquanna did not have a lukewarm personality. A person could only love her or hate her, because she would leave no room in between. I thought she was very direct and funny sometimes, so I got along with her fine and managed to stay out of the path of Hellfire.

One of the checkout attendants at the warehouse named Leon eventually joined our team. I guess he was done working in the warehouse. As strict as it is in there, and the fact that there are cameras in every inch of that place, I couldn’t accuse him of anything. It’s funny that he joined our team since he was the warehouse worker I had the most fluid conversations with by far. Leon was a good worker. Though there was something slightly serious about him, he and I could talk about a lot of different things and laugh.

Another driver on our team named Dave began to stand out from the others. He was a bit older than most of us and was pretty big with a mustache. We’d chat a little bit while we were waiting in the offsite parking lot for our assigned van and route for the day. The Amazon warehouse parking lot got so full they had to send us to a location about five miles away on a road called Duplainville Road. Our new company office was also located a few doors down from the offsite on the same road. Duplainville Road seemed like a road most people wouldn’t be interested in driving on because there wasn’t much there except a few companies.

During one of our conversations, Dave asked me if I had ever delivered to the Concord House near Dousman because he knew I often delivered there. I wasn’t sure which place he was talking about, but I eventually ended up delivering over there. It was in a very quiet and abandoned-looking section in the town of Concord. The reason why Dave was so interested in the place is because some people were murdered there. The place did have some kind of underlying feel to it, like something wasn’t what it seemed. It also felt like it belonged somewhere in the past, perhaps a hundred years ago. Dave said one night he and his girlfriend drove there to check the place out, and a pickup truck got behind them immediately, so they left in a hurry.

A young couple was killed there, and the man’s body was actually discovered in August 1980, the day before I was born! I don’t know if there was some weird energy present during that time that brought us together or what, but now I was here, and I was feeling every minute of it each time I made a delivery.

One night I was doing deliveries within a mile of the Concord House to an old house that was next to a cornfield. I had to drive around the house to get to the rear door just in front of the cornfield. When I got out of the van, something didn’t feel right. It was almost like a feeling of pure evil, the same kind of feeling you would get if Michael Myers was standing in the darkness watching you. It felt like Halloween Eve, and it was way too late to be out trick-or-treating. Fortunately, nothing happened to me, but that didn’t mean there weren’t other horrors that were brewing.