The Complete Beginner's Guide to Saving the Multiverse! Episode 2

The man smiled, unzipped the bag, and swallowed the drive in one gulp. Jack blinked. He wanted to ask, what the hell he meant by ‘key to the universe.’ Then, when he thought his night could not get any weirder the guy just left.

He followed the man, who seemed not to notice. He almost hummed as he half-skipped, half-jogged down the hallway and across the kitchen, back to the drive-through window. He wriggled out and dropped onto the pavement. He tapped against the glass with his gun, smiled, and waved at Jack, then moved away from the building at an odd lope.

Jack involuntarily waved back, turning past the blank drive-through screen, to the security monitor. The back door security camera caught a flash of movement as the man ran past the dumpster behind the restaurant and out into the night.
Jack sank onto the stool, gulping breath after breath. He looked down at his hands -they were shaking. He checked himself for unnoticed injuries.

He swallowed hard and took off the drive-through headset, which he had worn throughout the ordeal. He was glad he hadn’t died he decided. Who wanted to die wearing a drive-through headset? Jack looked at himself in a small mirror over the sink. He seemed okay.

He looked up at the clock and reached for his keys. He was making an executive decision. As assistant manager, he was going home three minutes early. He earned it.

Thump, thump, thump!

“What the hell does he want now?” Jack said. He was sure it was his recent visitor, coming back for the microfilm he had, no doubt, forgotten was hidden up inside the commercial dishwasher.

The pounding came from the back door, down a second hall on the opposite side of the kitchen from the drive-through. These were his thanks for pulling this extra graveyard shift. When he was in charge, things would change. Jack could not wait to either make things the way they ought to be around here, or sell this dump and travel!

Thump, thump, thump!

Jack moved to where he could see the security monitor. His hands were still shaking. On the screen, he could see two large men in suits with a cop-like demeanor glaring up into the camera. The ghostly robber was nowhere in sight.

Jack walked toward the back door, picking up his baseball bat. The pounding continued. He took the key from a hook, over the door and inserted it in the lock, putting one eye up to the peephole. One of the men had his face almost pressed against the hole on the outside of the door.

The other man stared into the darkness. Both had bulges under their jackets, they appeared to be armed. Jack guessed it was his night for armed encounters. He put the bat back in the corner. What was he going to do with that? Jack was about a buck fifty, soaking wet, not big enough to tangle with these two.

The lock squeaked, as Jack pulled the door in. One of the men -the one with his eye to the peephole- flashed something that Jack assumed was ID and smiled.

“Does it have anything to do with the weirdo who crawled through the drive-through?”

The men exchanged a glance as they walked through the kitchen, not pausing. They headed straight for the office as if they had been there a million times.

The two men were becoming more different from each other with each observation. For one thing, the first guy was tall, really tall, must have been six-foot-eight. The odd thing was he was still perfectly proportioned, which made him seem even larger. The second man looked like a bowling ball on legs. He had a tough time squeezing into the hall to the office.

Jack decided to think of them as Thing One and Thing Two.

Thing One, the tall one, had a glistening black head of hair held in place by something that looked like an antique pomade. His smile revealed sparkling white teeth, and old-fashioned movie-star good looks. Coupled with his size, it gave him an extremely creepy air.

Thing Two, the round one, was bald as a brick and looked like he knew how to make you talk, or at least how to order other people to make you talk. He was wheezing just rolling around the restaurant. Jack doubted this man could survive anything more strenuous than carrying a sack lunch to work.

Thing One was in the office. Jack was right behind him, straining to see around him. Thing Two was behind Jack in the narrow hallway and coming fast. He pressed Jack up against the back of Thing One. He somehow managed to get the office door closed behind them. Thing One reached into the back of the now empty safe and pressed against it. The room spun, like a bookshelf in a castle out of some old movie, halfway around and stopped.

Jack blinked, there was no way that what he was seeing was real, there was nothing beyond this wall, but there it was. A room had opened up behind the desk, with a stairwell leading down.