I got a night job at a grocery store. It was supposed to be a part-time stopgap while I found better work out here, but even before everything went to hell, it was pretty hard to find a job. This paid a little over minimum and was in walking distance from my place, and inertia is hard to overcome, so I just stayed.
I’d never done a really hard physical labor job before, or at least not since I was a teen, which was… a while ago. The whole back area is poured concrete, studded with drains so they can clean the floors by just spraying it with a hose. (Not that anyone ever does.) It’s hell to walk on all day, even with good shoes and gel inserts. My feet swell like cantaloupe every morning when I get home. I had to start propping them up on pillows when I slept, just so I could fit into my shoes the next day. After a few months, it got a little better, or maybe I just got used to being exhausted and in pain all the time.
Anyway, once all the mask shit started up and everyone was working from home, I couldn’t risk losing the job. Housing was expensive as balls and my resume wasn’t getting any prettier, not to mention half the businesses in the country closing and everyone getting desperate for work. I toughed it out and worked my butt off. (Literally: I lost about ten pounds even eating junk food for half of my meals.) It wasn’t what I’d call fun or pleasant, but I was keeping my head above water.
The trouble started a couple of days ago. Now, I want to preface this by saying that while I don’t work janitorial and I’m not trying to downtalk those guys, it’s not like there’s no bad smells anywhere else in the store. One time, the new guy from the seafood counter put a box into the cardboard baler while it was still full of crab guts and trash. The machine juiced up those rotten crabs until there was a little yuck-slick for two feet on the floor around it. The entire back hall stank like wet death for two weeks. Another time, the sewer lines got backed up into the drain behind the meat counter. (That whole area is prone to clogs because the animal fat gets washed down and then congeals; whenever it rains, the whole area around the drain is usually half an inch deep in rancid water.) Anyway, this wasn’t just the usual gross water, but full on untreated sewage. We had to close the whole store even though the manager yelled and tried to get us to stay until it got fixed. The meat guys straight up refused to cut or serve anything while they were splashing through inches of raw sewage (though I don’t know if it was on ethical grounds of serving it to customers afterward or just the personal health factor.)
The point is, I’ve seen some bad smells. I mean smelled some… You know what I mean. So understand that when I say the other day, the drain in the extra storage room started putting out the most outrageous odor I have ever had the misfortune to suck into my nostrils, the bush is not a thing around which I am beating. It was something like rotten fish, but with a horrifying acrid undertone and a real meaty bass note. It smelled like something that shat itself, ate the shit, vomited that up, then ate the vomit and shat it back out again. And it smelled *sick*. You know the weird metallic taste you get in the back of your mouth when you’re really unwell? Like your own body is rotting away and you’re trapped inside it about to suffocate? That’s what this smell reminded me of, a little. It was sharp enough that it was physically painful to breathe it. I’d been sent to get a new pallet of paper plates and plastic cups - that’s what we used the storage room for, since it was so small and out of the way - and when I opened the door for the first time I threw up a little in my mouth. I had to dive back outside and bend over to lean on my knees until the dry heaving stopped. I had never encountered something so foul. I held my breath and got the pallet out as fast as I could manage, and then I went to report to Ronnie that we needed a plumber or maybe an exorcist for the small storage room.
Ronnie’s a nice lady, but she gets distracted pretty easily. I checked in with her the next night about it, and when she told me that there hadn’t been any other reports about the storage area and she’d take a look the next time she had a minute, I didn’t pay it much mind. I figured she’d just forgotten, because there was no way the dairy guys at least hadn’t noticed it. That room is right in their work area, the fridge behind the milk racks; hell, I was surprised customers weren’t complaining that it was seeping through the dairy case. I checked, and it was even worse that night; you could smell it through the door from ten feet away. I’d only been in the room for under a minute almost twenty four hours previously and I felt like it was clinging to my face and hair.
But later that night I made an offhand joke to Vic, one of the other stockers on my crew. I don’t even remember what it was, but I said something about the smell in the milk closet - that’s what we called the extra storage room - and Vic gave me a really weird look; not disbelieving, but almost suspicious and a little hostile, like I’d asked him if he knew where to score some oxy or if his girlfriend was busy that weekend. Instead of telling me I was smelling my own farts again or some other dumb joke, Vic got all quiet and said, way too serious for the topic, “I haven’t smelled anything unusual today.”
“Well go take a whiff,” I said, trying to keep it light. “It’s fucking grotesque.”
Vic just shook his head and turned away without a word.
So that was weird.
But what was really weird was what I saw at the end of that shift, right as we were doing the last push before the store opened at six. I’d gone to ask Luke and Gina - the dairy crew - if we could borrow one of them to help get Frozen under control because we’d fallen behind for some reason. Neither of them were in the dairy cooler when I peeked, and I knew they weren’t stocking on the floor because I’d walked up the cheese aisle and through dairy to check on exactly that on my way to the back. I was about to shrug and head back to work when I heard a weird slithering, bumping noise from the back hall. I poked my head around the corner and was about to call out to Gina and Luke, but instead I gagged. The door was open and the smell was stronger than ever. Then I saw them, both of them, along with Vic and at least two other guys I couldn’t see clearly in the back. They were all standing around the drain in the center of the floor, staring at it, standing rigid like they were at attention, except for Luke, who was crouched beside the hole, his mask pulled down around his neck. That part wasn’t too weird because Luke is kind of an asshole and never wore masks right to start with, but I swear I saw him lifting his hand from the floor to his mouth and *licking* his fingers. I made a little involuntary noise when I saw that, I felt like I was watching someone bite lovingly into a turd. I know Gina and Vic both looked up and saw me staring; Luke had his eyes closed, and the two other guys had their backs to me and honestly could have been almost anyone in the store, especially since it was getting colder now and everyone working backline was bundled up because they just leave the doors to the loading docks open most of the night.
I got the fuck out of there, but later on I saw Vic pull Ronnie aside and mutter something in her ear, and then they both just looked daggers at me. I pretended not to notice, and Ronnie didn’t call me over to reprimand me or anything. What would she have said? ‘Don’t walk into the back room and look at your coworkers acting like gross freaks or you’re fired?’
I’ve been feeling paranoid. I didn’t get a good look at the two other guys so now I’m worrying that anyone in a jacket - which is basically everyone, like I said - could be one of them. They’re all mad at me and I don’t even understand why.
I think someone just tried to kill me.
Okay, so we have two freezers in the back area. One of them is just off the meat counter and there’s an extra door that leads directly into there from the side. It’s full of what you’d expect. The other one has ice cream, TV dinners, all that sort of thing. Now, because we live in a capitalist hellscape and all that jazz, the door on that second freezer has been broken for a year and no one has gotten it fixed yet. There’s supposed to be a little handle dealie on the inside that you can push to unlatch it and get out so you don’t freeze or suffocate, but it broke off and there’s just a jagged little stick of plastic and metal that will perforate your kidneys if you back into it. Everyone props the door open with the tote or the lifter they brought with them and we all just kind of accept that we walk into an airtight frozen death vault several times a night.
So we’ve been short-handed in the frozen food section and I was working there basically alone. I didn’t want to go ask for help because of all the weird hostility yesterday, so I just tightened my kneepads and fortified. But I still needed to actually stock the groceries, and that meant I had to visit the freezer to load up the totes. Connie had brought in a cinderblock the other week to use as a doorstop, but I couldn’t find it. I shoved the cart into place and went to grab the Banquet Chicken Pot Pies, which were on sale because Janusz over-ordered them by accident.
Have you ever gone into an industrial freezer? It’s unsettling. Cold, obviously, and dark, and dry enough to make you cough. When you walk in, the skin on your face tightens like you’re being wrapped in cling film. It’s almost refreshing in the summer, but at night, in the late autumn, when you’re already chilly because the loading dock doors are open and the whole back area is a wind tunnel? I don’t like to spend any more time than I have to in there. It makes my joints ache.
I’d filled my tote with cheap frozen meat pies when I heard a scraping noise. I turned around and saw the door swinging shut. I tried to run, but the floor is coated in frost from the condensation that melts and freezes every time the door opens. I slipped and hit my elbow so hard my hand went numb. I got up, banged on the door, called out, “Hey, I’m working in here!” I tried to keep it casual, as though it was an accident, someone thought someone else had been careless and left the door propped open.
There was no answer.
The lights went out. They’re automatic, they’re supposed to go out a few seconds after the door is closed, but it still scared the shit out of me. I stood there in the complete blackness, feeling my breath hot inside my mask. The cloth was already stiffening from the moisture of my breathing freezing solid.
“Hey!” I called again, louder. I kicked at the door with my steel-toed work boots, since my arm was hurting too badly to try knocking again. “Hey, open the door up! It’s me, I’m still in here!”
Then I heard a noise I’d never heard before but which was unmistakable: a clattering and clanging and a very final click that resonated through the metal of the door. Someone had put the chain and padlock onto the outside of the freezer, something only done when the store was being completely closed for whatever reason.
I started breathing heavily, but tried to get ahold of myself. I cast back, trying to remember the lessons from the maybe two years of Boy Scouts about how long I’d have at sub-zero Fahrenheit before I was in trouble from hypothermia. I only had on a light windbreaker, since I spent a lot of my shift moving around and working up a sweat and just needed long sleeves for carrying frozen boxes. I also had work gloves, but the rest of my clothing was a thin t-shirt and jeans. My elbows and knees were already cold enough to start hurting.
How long I was in there, I don’t know for certain. I tried to keep walking, keep the blood circulating, but in the dark I didn’t dare move around and risk another fall so I was just sort of wobbling in place. When my feet started to hurt, I leaned against a stack of boxes, but that was so cold I could feel the heat getting sucked out of my body so fast it felt like actual movement. I went back to standing in the void. I’d read about sensory deprivation, how you start to go bonkers and your brain gets so anxious for new input that it just makes it up wholesale. The noises I heard in the dark, shifting and whispering, were hallucinations from the quiet and the lack of vision, that’s all. And the smells. Just the drains in the milk closet right next door.
They’d better be.
Obviously I’m not dead, you guys, so I’m not going to pretend there’s suspense there. Ronnie let me out in the morning. She told me that the shift was over and everyone was going home. I asked her how long I’d been in the freezer, told her that someone had locked me in - obviously it hadn’t been my fault; the padlock had been on - and showed her my pants and jacket, stiff and crackling with ice. Her response was really off. She just kept repeating that the shift was over and everyone was gone, and she didn’t seem to understand what I was saying. I didn’t smell alcohol or anything and Ronnie’s not a drinker, but if I wasn’t sure about that I’d have said she was a bottle and a half of wine into it. She kept peering at me muzzily like she wasn’t sure if she knew me or not.
When I got home, it turned out it was still two hours till the actual end of my shift, but the back area had been deserted, sure as Ronnie had said. I didn’t see a single soul on my way out, but I gotta admit I was hurrying more than a little. I thought I heard shoes click-clacking behind me when I went out through the early-morning aisles, but I didn’t see anyone.
I smelled something though. Something rank and rotten, something sick and feverish. The smell from the milk closet. It followed me all the way home. I still think I can smell it, like it’s on my clothes. If I could afford the thirty dollars, I’d throw away my whole outfit. Maybe burn it.
I’m in trouble.
Not trouble at work. Well, yes trouble at work, but not… look, this is what happened:
I was really spooked by the goddamn empty-ass store and Ronnie acting like a drugged-out freak, but I’m also not going to lose my stupid job for leaving before the end of my shift. If I could at least get Ronnie to sign something telling me to go home for whatever insane reason she sent the rest of the staff away, I’ll be happy and then she can be happy and we can all be happy together, or extremely far away from each other, rather.
I got back around… maybe five a.m.? Still a little before I’m supposed to leave, and way before we usually actually finish the work. The front door was unlocked, which… it shouldn’t be. The worst thing that can possibly happen, according to corporate, is for a customer to learn that groceries aren’t produced by magic elves and that real human beings have had to chop up the salads, sweep the floors, and make the boxes on the shelves look neat.
The store was completely dark, and a total wreck. All the pallets were still standing ready and transport-wrapped at their aisles; the produce section looked like the aftermath of a hungry fruit tornado; the frozen section doors had stood open so long that the ice cream was melting and running onto the floor. I kept hearing a sliding noise, like someone dragging a tarp along a tin roof, but whenever I looked around, there was no one there. It sounded like it was coming from underneath the floors.
As I approached the rear of the store, I thought I saw a shadow moving behind the milk cartons. I called out, but no one answered. I pushed through the swinging doors and stopped like I’d hit a wall. The stench was back, stronger than ever, a physical blow to my nostrils and tongue. It burned my nose. I coughed and suddenly vomited, breathed in and doubled over again. My eyes were stinging; my nose was running; I swear I felt my hair burning. I was in some protests the last couple of years and got pepper spray on me. This smell was like that. What could be in the drain? Were we getting some kind of wackadoo terror attack at a grocery store? Had someone flushed a canister of bear spray? Except it didn’t smell like chemicals; it smelled like disease, a hot and swollen blister, a throbbing tension under the skin, in the throat. Then I heard voices, shouting. Cheering? A rhythmic sound.
I pulled off my windbreaker and wrapped it around my head. Shirt ninja, like when I was a kid. With layers of cloth in place, I could almost breathe without gagging. I followed the voices.
To the milk closet.
The whole crew was there, standing in a little ring around the doorway. They were yelling and hollering, saying the same phrase or syllables over and over, except I couldn’t make out any words. It put me in mind of throat singing, or a discordant postmodern opera, a growling and guttural noise that zipped up and down the scale in what felt random except for the clear repetition.
Vic was inside the closet, standing over the drain, the one with the smell. Except he wasn’t standing. I thought at first he was dancing, maybe, with the shouted chant as music, but no. He had one boot off, his pants torn and bloodied to the knee. His foot… he was jamming his bare foot down over and over onto the grating of the drain, which I could see now was splintered into sharp and jagged metal spears. He’d get it partway in and then get stuck, at which point he’d haul it manually out with his arms and try again. I could see the flesh of his foot lacerated, blood spattering in every direction. Bones were sticking out; he’d smashed his ankle, destroyed his whole lower leg almost. He screamed every time, but not at the pain of impact; no, he screamed when his foot stopped moving, when he got wedged and couldn’t keep… squeezing himself into a hole thinner than his arm. There were black lines creeping up his exposed skin, infection following the veins of his body like sewage backing up a clogged pipe.
I cried out, shouted to stop, to get a doctor, asked them all what the fuck they were doing. They turned as one, and I could see Ronnie, Greg, Gina, everyone. Ronnie pointed and shrieked at me, still no words, and I suddenly saw why: her tongue was shriveled and black, like she’d been licking hydrochloric ice cream. All of the crew, their mouths and nostrils stained with purple-black gunk, all pointing and hooting and shuffling toward me. I staggered backward and tripped over a pallet jack. I dropped my jacket and the smell hit me again full-force. They’d have gotten me then except something happened to Vic.
He threw back his head and gave a crow of delight, and I saw he’d gotten his leg into the hole all the way up to the calf. His flesh filled the gap like a rubber stopper and I didn’t see how he could feasibly force more inside, but he was screaming with excitement nonetheless. The crew all turned back to face him and started their droning chant again, and I saw Vic’s skin bulge as something dark squeezed up under his skin. The rest of the crew were all grinning and laughing and cheering, and I took advantage of the distraction to get the hell out.
Unfortunately, my movement attracted their attention again. Gina darted forward and cut me off from the swinging doors out to the main store area. I dodged around her and into the dairy cooler, dragging the door shut behind me. I heard them start thumping on the door - they seemed to have forgotten how the handle worked - but now I was just trapped behind the rows of milk cartons and the fogged glass doors on the customer side.
I didn’t have time to be choosy. I pushed one of the stacked piles of milk yet to be shelved and toppled it into the shelving from behind. I followed it up with a few good kicks, and the old cheap aluminum screws snapped off. Cartons tumbled out onto the white tiles, bursting open and spraying milk in an enormous puddle. I followed after it, surfing a wave of white like the world’s most horrible breakfast cereal mascot. Soaked and shivering, I bolted down the cheese and yogurt aisle, heading for the door. Ahead of me, I saw the tiles buckle and break, something pushing up through the concrete and into the store; a gray metal pipe, oozing purple-black from the seams, raising an odor like Satan’s asshole. I reversed direction, but found myself staring down a pair of my former coworkers, their arms bleeding from scratches where they’d been reaching into the awful drain, their eyes wild.
I went cheeseward. Up and over, packets of shredded mozzarella and Mexican Blend tumbling, and then sprinted along the top of the case, knocking lawnchairs and cardboard boxes aside. Why do we put all that crap up there anyway?
At the end of the aisle I dropped onto a display of cranberry sauce cans, sledding down a hill made of little tin cylinders. I’m pretty sure I still have one wedged up my ass. Bruised but still alive and free, I slammed against the front doors and scrabbled them open. Behind me I heard footsteps, hoots, and, most upsetting, a low slithering hiss, like a wet string being pulled out of a straw.
I didn’t look back.
The air was freezing on my wet skin. I made it to my car and peeled out. Let the cops pull me over. Let them go deal with whatever was in the drain and now is in the store. My car still reeks of milk, and in a few days that’s going to get really bad, but I’m not so worried about little smells like that any longer.
No, I’m worried about something else. When I got home, the first thing I did was head for the shower. I was filthy and the awful smell clung to my hair, my hands. I washed and scrubbed until all I smelled was Herbal Essences. But when I was drying off, I heard a soft gurgle.
And then a smell. Just a little at first, enough that I could have attributed it to the dirty clothes in the other room, but I know better.
I’m going to get back in my damp car and drive, but where, and how far? Pipes run everywhere, and where they don’t, we’ve built ditches, storm drains. Heck, even caves, maybe. Who knows how much of it there is or how far it can get?
I’m planning on heading for the southwest and the desert. And I’ll be buying a lot of bottled water.