Wind brushed my neck like gentle fingers, and a sensation of awakening came over me even though I stood firmly on both feet. The hands of the wall clock hovered close to twelve like claws reaching to pull the numbers down, and each tick of the second hand reinforced my daze like a metronome. Gong gong, it chimed, as it did every hour on the hour. The elderly folks who frequented the bakery loved it. Such antiquated devices had faded with the times, and the nostalgia soothed their old souls as they shared the stories of their lives with the wait staff.
The minute hand jerked forward like a hand waving to break my trance, and the time dawned on me. Midnight. The bakery should have closed two hours ago.
Coffee filled the cup in my hand and tapered to drips as I finished making a customer's latte. Beth manned the register at my side but, the stout old woman's presence was an anomaly. Beth worked mornings, and outside the wall of windows ahead, it was black. Not dim under the street lights or dark from the night sky, more like someone had taped craft paper over the glass.
Beth typed an order at the bakery counter as she chatted about the weather and asked if the customer wanted their usual. Except no one was there. The dining room tables in the sunroom stood empty by the faux fireplace, the booths' obnoxious, red vinyl remained vacant, and the air in front of the register certainly wasn't thirsty.
I hoped.
Customers weren't the only thing missing either. All that remained on the bread shelves behind Beth were crumbs, and I touched the bare steel just to prove it was real. My finger drew a line in the dust, pushing aside remnants of everything bagels and clumps of dry cinnamon, as well as wiping away the illusion.
The water-seal finish morphed into scathing flecks of rust under my fingertips, and I yanked my hand away to avoid bumping the jagged edges of the corroded metal. The shelf dipped with a groan of willful retirement, and screws shot out like bullets that had me jerking to the side. They clinked and skittered along broken mahogany tile to nestle into a heap of moss that covered where the floor drain used to be.
I lifted my gaze from that small screw to a world of horrors that had not been there the moment before. The once neatly lined up tables lay cracked and toppled next to overturned chairs with rotting cushions. Garbage piled the cans in receptacles that leaned perilously close to spilling their congealing filth onto the floor, debris littered a floor of broken and upturned tiles, and the worst of it was right in my face.
Beth poked at the broken glass of the register's touch screen, oblivious even as shards cut into her fingers, and her torn work apron hung from one shoulder like a dead snake skin. What had been the smell of fresh coffee under my nose turned into the tang of decay, and I dropped the cup in my hand. Bugs crawled out of the disturbed nest, beetles buzzing and taking flight, silverfish sliding away, and centipedes wriggling out last to chase me as I fled to the back of house.
I stopped in the back hall with my breath whistling through my constricting windpipes. Pain spiked in my chest, and I clutched it with my free hand. I was no stranger to panic attacks, and right now seemed an okay time to lose my marbles if any. With a slow count to ten, deep breaths, and a soft rubbing at the juncture of my collarbone, I steeled myself to face the nightmare.
That's what this had to be right?
No matter how I told myself to wake up, it didn't happen though, and I settled for taking one step in front of the other. I found my manager, Todd, in the cramped doorless back office, sitting at his desk and tacking away on a keyboard with half its keys. His hand dragged a mouse with frayed wires that I hoped connected to nothing electric, and the computer was as dead as my grip on reality.
"Todd, it's Heidi. Shouldn't we be going home?" I asked, bewildered and quite sure I was having some sort of midlife crisis hallucination. Twenty-one was a little early for that, so perhaps this was the new and improved quarterly-crisis to avoid paying too much sanity at once.
"Home?" Todd regarded me like I was a puppy off its leash, and the hairs on the back of my neck rose as he focused unduly hard on me. I felt something else watching me from behind those glazed hazel eyes, and instinct screamed for me to play it coy, to be broken like the rest of them, following a pointless routine on a corroded stage.
"It's midnight boss," I said with an oblivious smile as I wrung my hands over my thighs "Time to go home."
Todd nodded mechanically and I almost lost my cool as a godforsaken centipede fell out of his dusty hair.
"Home," he repeated like a skipping CD as he stood, and I skipped out of his way as he staggered down the hall in an unstable weave like a drunk. All the while, he kept his hands in his pockets like he'd welcome the floor colliding with his face if he stumbled.
We made our way back to the main counters, and when Todd stopped at the walk-in bread oven, I prayed not to become a baked good. My coworkers gathering behind Todd like sheep, and he yanked the heavy door open with a screech and thunk of metal on tile to reveal a decaying set of metal stairs that descended into only the devil knew what hell.
That stairwell hadn't been there before, but who knew? Maybe Todd had built a secret lair in the back of the walk-in oven. Sounds like something corporate would have approved.
My coworkers filed down the stairwell after Todd, and I wandered after to keep up appearances but kept my eyes peeled for danger. Each step was a creek of anxiety as I waited for the one plank that buckled, and a clack, snap, clack, snap drew me Tanya's platform heals that hung on by a single strap that slapped her ankle with each step.
She marched at my side with her sky eyes as dead as the rest, and I couldn't help but look her over for some alien attached to her back or brainstem. While I found no culprit for her condition, the rags covering her mocha skin told a harrowing tale of how much time we'd lost in this delusion. The sleeveless, cream top's neckline ran jagged against her skin like moths had eaten in while it was still on her, and the side seams unraveled more with each movement.
My clothes were no better condition wise, but I recognized my go-to comfort clothes that I wore to relax at my computer after long shifts of bread and bagels. A striped, purple sweater covered my upper half, but my elbow poked out of a hole at the joint, and a tear up the right hem had it flapping like a skirt slit. My jeans were mostly whole, but a chunk of denim dragged and thumped on each step like a dead rat tied to my ankle.
With one last thump of my new pet rat, our little flock finally hit the bottom of the stairs where dim lights flickered on a warehouse ceiling above. High metal walls and wide corridors without windows made me feel like rat in a maze, and the musk of mold and moisture crinkled my nose. The floor beneath my feet trembled like a pack of bison was charging just out of sight, and a stream of people rounded a corner to swallow our group.
The current of human flesh herded my coworkers further in, but I struggled to stay afloat. A guy twice my size pushed me to the outside of the halls as he barreled past, and the steel wall bit with ice against my cheek until I steadied myself into a hole in the procession. There was no way to fight the flow of movement, and the crowd's mumbling drowned out all other sound in a cacophony of what modern life had been before this collapse of time and sentience.
Gonna miss the new episode tonight.
The car payment is overdue.
Why do I have no likes?
I can't put my phone down now. My followers are watching me.
Can't you watch him tonight?
I haven't gotten a day off in ages.
What do you mean 'let go'?
Negativity swam the air like humidity in early summer, and it clung and dripped down my skin just as uncomfortably. I could somehow feel their emotions like tangible expressions of their dismay, and there was no escape from the suffocating grumbles of their misfortune until the crowd around me thinned as people broke off to living quarters around us.
Rooms lined both sides of the hall, but with steel walls, concrete floors, and no windows, they were more like doorless cells that anything. My coworkers headed into the rooms as the lights dimmed for the night, and I ducked into one to avoid suspicion. I felt like a cameraman in a nature documentary as I peered out my door to observe the behavior of the new animal species without disturbing their natural routines.
Each person settled onto a makeshift bed ranging from an old mattress to stacked up laundry, and junk scattered the floors around them in bits and pieces of the lives they'd lived before—a picture of a family with a broken frame, an old videogame system with no working parts, some wilting plants, and my heart sank on one with a broken rocking horse meant for a child.
Tanya curled up on a tattered blanket and cooed words of affection to a stuffed cat with half its body ripped away in exploded fluff, and I couldn't look anymore. No one deserved this, and yet I didn't know what this was. Why was I the only one who realized everything was wrong? And what had happened to the real world? Was this a dream or a prison? Was there escape outside of this bunker or was there nothing left of the life I'd known?
Questions circled but answers remained out of reach.
The lights faded to darkness as eyes closed, and I slid to the floor to lean against the wall. There was no use wandering in the dark, and I had no way of knowing how long I'd been awake before I'd escaped the control of whoever held humanity captive. I felt like I had cinder blocks tied to my eyelids as I slumped against the cool metal, and exhaustion dragged my face onto my arms.
The only truth I knew was that someone was dancing us like dolls in houses of their design while they watched behind the eyes of their puppets. If they thought I would prance oblivious on their stage, then they had sorely underestimated this tired minimum-wage worker. I fully intended to yank on the strings of the mechanism until it all came crashing down.
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Word Count: 1898