Anything Can Be Dangerous (8 page)

“
Greg!” Wendy
cried.

Her voice snapped Ron back to
attention, and he bolted after his friend, rounding the corner in
time to see Greg vault the counter, half-leaping, half-falling off
the other side.

Where now over
thirty
customers shuffled about the main room,
falling into lines before each of the registers!

Ron watched with paralytic wonder as
they turned on Greg in unison.

Before the man even managed to regain
his balance, the customers tackled him to the ground, dropping over
him like bloodthirsty monsters in a zombie film. Ron stepped
forward, about to lunge after him, but several of the closest
patrons turned on him, each holding something sharp.

He froze in place behind the counter,
covering his mouth as he heard what sounded like ripping carpet
arise from beneath the pile.

Followed by a piercing
scream.

He watched the things tear and gnash
and snarl, and finally spun away when he saw the creatures begin
passing around severed limbs and handfuls of dripping crimson gore.
Fresh blood drooled from their mouths.

Wendy shrieked the entire time, crying
out so powerfully that Ron’s ears rang with each new exhalation.
Without looking to the feasting masses, he clutched her to his
chest and guided her to the kitchen.

“
Oh, God!” she sobbed.
“They’re crazy! They’re going to kill us! What do we
do?”

Ron peered through one of the heat
lamp stations, looking at the motley collection of customers now
churning shoulder-to-shoulder in the dining room. Those who hadn’t
attacked Greg clustered at the counter, no longer content to stand
in orderly lines. They pressed forward, leaning over the edge,
searching the cashier area.

A wrinkled old man crawling with bugs
jabbed a pitchfork at a register. A one-armed lady whose eyes
glared through a net of bandages threw a rock at the menu. Behind
her, a pair of suit-clad young men wrestled over a dead
rat.

But none of them followed
us
, he thought.
Why
not?

“
Because customers aren’t
allowed behind the counter,” he whispered to himself.

Wendy’s sobbing slowed. She gazed at
him as though a third eye had opened on his forehead. Ron met her
eyes, thinking of the green hand that had tried to seize Greg,
stretching out to reach him like something from a nightmare. He
sensed a revelation teetering at the edge of his
understanding.

“
We have to get cooking,”
he said. “Before they eat us, too.”

A small smile ticked at the corner of
the girl’s mouth, like a seam about to come undone.

“
Cook…” she echoed in
a tone of disbelief.
“For
them?”

Ron nodded, eyeing the sign over her
shoulder, the one Greg had spotted earlier.

Feed the Customer… Obey the
Rules
!

He looked to the crowd once again, his
gaze drifting over a dozen ghastly sights: a man with no eyes; a
woman half-enshrouded by mold; a pale sexless figure covered in
ants.

They were something else, he realized,
something super-natural, and he and Greg and Wendy had somehow
become trapped here, held specifically for their
servitude.

But Greg had broken the
rules…

Wendy was already shaking her head,
fresh tears brimming in her eyes. “You’re crazy!”

Before he could explain himself, a
chair from the seating area smashed against the opposite side of
the wall, shattering two of the heat lamps, pelting them with hot
glass. He looked up and saw the crowd massing before the registers
like rioters lined up against a barricade. A hundred voices
hollered, “Food!”

“
Trust me,” he said,
hauling Wendy to her feet. “We need to feed them! Start looking for
anything we can use!”

Together they attacked the kitchen,
clawing open cabinets, searching shelves, rummaging through the
detritus scattered throughout the room. Ron had no idea what
eatables they could possibly find—if any—but as they searched the
building, they discovered hidden caches of all imaginable
ingredients: buns, condiments, spices, vegetables, canned fillings,
pre-made mixes that declared:
Just add
water!

Ron went to the walk-in freezer,
certain that there couldn’t be anything salvageable inside—not with
that horrid smell seeping from the door—but when he looked, he
found row after row of plastic-wrapped hamburger patties waiting
for the grill. The temperature inside the freezer easily rivaled
that of the kitchen, and though Ron knew the patties had to be
rancid, he snatched up a bag in each hand and called for Wendy to
come help him.

Something growled.

The sound made him jerk with fear,
dropping the bags of hamburger as he drew the butcher knife from
his belt.

Wendy ran to his side, reaching him in
time to witness a cloudy white eyeball pop open on the gigantic
pile of reeking meat heaped against the freezer’s far
wall.

Her scream ripped across his eardrums
at the very moment a lopsided mouth tore a hole in the huge mound
of ground beef staring back at them. The meat-pile yawned as they
looked on, displaying teeth made from broken bones and disgorging a
huge bovine organ that must’ve been its tongue. Five smaller eyes
surfaced at various points around the first one.

The thing’s attention focused on the
knife in Ron’s hand. Its eyes narrowed.

A second later it coughed up a watery
stream of red-brown liquid that struck Ron dead-center in the
chest, soaking his shirt and hair, spraying in all
directions.

He slammed the door and threw the
locking pin in place, looking at Wendy, meat juice dripping off his
face. Her mascara traced the paths of her tears down both
cheeks.

“
Co…come on,” he said,
picking up the bags of patties. “We need to hurry.”

At the stove, he fired up the burners,
switched on the deep fryer. Overhead, the malfunctioning lights had
ceased flickering and now glowed bright and steady. Readout LEDs
flashed to life on almost all the other appliances.

They completed sixty orders at an
average rate of four minutes per meal, a miracle time born of
high-pressure stress and good ol’ fashion terror. The customers
came, ordered, and paid whatever they felt like paying. Currencies
from around the world disappeared into the cash drawers, along with
shells and stones, bones and teeth. At one point, a skinny girl
with blue-grey skin dressed only in fishnet stockings and a frayed
leather dog collar offered Ron a “freebee” in exchange for her
chocolate milkshake, to which he politely replied, “It’s on the
house.”

Wendy refused to follow him to the
counter, opting instead to watch the grill while he dealt with the
horde of unearthly customers up front.

“
We’re out of hamburger
patties,” she said when he rushed to change the baskets in the deep
fryer. She cast a furtive glance at where they’d stacked a dozen
canisters of soft drink mix in front of the freezer
door.

Ron sighed. “There’s something that
looks like meat hanging in the janitor’s closet…I’ll go cut some
slabs off that in a minute.”

He reloaded the fryers and returned to
the registers, delivering a tray of fish sticks. Ahead of him, a
sea of pale-skinned patrons waited their turn at the
counter.

A teenage girl dripping mud and
seaweed stepped forward.

“
How…” he began, then had
to stop, trying to work up saliva. He wiped sweat off his face.
“How may I…”

But he pivoted away without finishing,
leaning against the ice cream machine, which currently churned a
mixture of vanilla soft-server and black sludge.

“
Screw this!” he cried. “I
can’t. I can’t do it anymore––”

“
Hello, sir,” a voice said
at his back.

Ron flinched and spun around,
recoiling at the sight of a tall gaunt figure dressed in a paper
hat and apron. Behind it stood a trio of men with wads of bloody
gauze taped over their eyes.

“
We’re here about the
jobs,” the tall one said. He handed Ron a quartet of papers labeled
‘Application for Employment.’

Ron blinked, stammering a string of
unintelligible sounds before finally saying the one thing that
seemed the most appropriate. “You’re hired.”

“
Thank you, sir,” the
emaciated creature answered. It immediately took up a position near
the deep fryer, causing Wendy to scream when she saw it coming. The
thing reached into the bubbling oil with its bare hands,
transferring the cooked food to the proper containers. The other
men each manned a register, two up front and one at the drive-thru
alcove.

Wendy hurried to Ron’s side. “What…”
she started, but then trailed off, perhaps knowing he’d have no
rational answer for her question.

The hours passed. Customers continued
to arrive, flooding the dining room far beyond what would normally
be acceptable by state safety regulations—yet the restaurant
managed to accommodate them. More employees showed up, as well.
They no longer approached Ron, acting out the formalities of
regular job applicants as the first few had, but just turned up and
went to work.

The rhythm of the restaurant filled
the air. Pots clanking, registers buzzing, voices calling out the
orders. From the dining room came the constant slavering sounds of
snapping teeth and chewing jaws while the patrons devoured meal
after meal after meal.

And they were getting stranger, too.
As were their orders.

Ron glimpsed a walking jumpsuit with a
mass of purple vines sprouting from the neckline; a mound of black
fur whose hidden claws clicked against the tile; a skinless beast
that reminded him of the malevolent mound of sentient beef in the
freezer.

He avoided the front line as much as
possible now, busying himself by stocking mundane supplies that
mysteriously showed up in the storeroom: plastic forks; paper cups;
napkins; straws. Occasionally he’d come across a box labeled ‘Dried
Monkey Heads’ or an economy-size can of ‘Powdered Semen’, but at
least those items were contained and out of sight. It was when he’d
encounter a worker delivering some hideous tray of ingredients to
the kitchen that he felt his stomach somersault inside him. Twice
he’d vomited on the floor, not having time to find the restroom.
The first time a dutiful employee appeared with a mop and bucket;
the second time they brought a carryout bag.

He was more concerned about Wendy than
himself, though. She followed him like his shadow, crying out each
time one of the malformed workers came within arm’s reach of
her—which had become a regular occurrence given the cramped
conditions. More than once he’d needed to lift her from the floor
after she’d slumped into a corner.

Now he looked up as he deposited a
fresh container of salt and pepper packets at the counter, shocked
to see a normal-looking gentleman in glasses approach the register.
He had a nervous, sheepish way about him that reminded Ron of the
acting style of Woody Allen, and he almost screamed at the guy to
run and find help.

Then the man smiled a mouth full of
razor-pointed teeth. “Do you happen to have any live children?” he
asked.

Ron stood frozen. “Fresh out,” he
replied, praying it was the first and only time such a request had
come in.

The gentleman snapped his fingers. He
pushed his glasses up. “I guess I’ll just have a chicken sandwich,
then.”

Ron keyed in the order and fled back
toward the kitchen—

Where he noticed Wendy had
disappeared.

“
Wendy!” he shouted. He
hurried through the kitchen, pushing past the workers as they went
about their chores, but couldn’t find her. He dashed past the
freezer. “Fucker!” the thing inside barked—and rushed down the back
hall.

He found her in the manager’s office,
tucked into the corner beside a plastic potted plant. The small
room appeared immaculate, a far cry from when he’d first viewed it.
The furniture all looked new now, as did the various office-related
supplies and corporate-themed decor. Behind the desk, the picture
of the Last Supper gleamed as if just painted.

“
It’s my fault,” Wendy
wailed when she saw him. “I knew something was wrong when I drove
up. The place was fixed! When I first toured it last month, the
building was just a burnt out shell. But today…I should’ve said
something, anything, but I needed the commission…”

Her confession deteriorated into a
sorrowful moan.

He sat down beside her. Took her hands
in his.

“
We’ll be all right. We
just need to feed the customers and obey the rules.”

“
But what does that
mean?”

“
I don’t know,” he said.
“It’s like we’ve skipped the Twilight Zone and gone straight to
Hell. All I know is that we’re still alive, and if we can stay that
way long enough, we’ll find a way out of here…this place seems to
need us.”

“
Which is why we’ll never
get out,” she said. Despite her tears, the words came out soft and
calm, sounding frighteningly like acceptance.