Chapter 6: The Beginning… (Part 2)

The Beginning…

– Part Two –

  I pulled into the car park of Hell Pizza, and noticed my bosses’ car there. I walked over to it and placed my hand on the bonnet, stone cold. He had been here for a while.

“Shit!” I cursed out loud. No making excuses this time, my boss Nigel was notorious for turning up late. He leads a double life you see, during the day he is a Pizza Manager extraordinaire, and the evenings, local friendly meth dealer. “Just my luck that he would turn up early on the day that I’m late” I thought to myself.

I walk through the front door, and the place is a sty. Tomato sauce is smeared all over the walls and floor, the neon lights kept flickering on and off, and the place smelt like a rubbish sack which has been sitting around for a few weeks fermenting. A customer had fallen asleep in one of the booths, obviously recovering from a hard night like me and just catching a few zees.

How embarrassing, I thought when I saw the state of the store. The stench was overwhelming, and I couldn’t see Nigel anywhere. My immediate thoughts were that Nigel had been smoking some of his own shit, and just flipped out and trashed the joint.

I tried to wake up the customer, and get them to leave the store but they wouldn’t respond, so I just left them where they were, locked the front door and wrote a lame as sign saying we were closed due to unforeseen circumstances. Once I had done this, I then went out the back to get a mop. As I was walking back to the main entrance to clean up the shit, I noticed the freezer door ajar and I could hear what sounded like crunching inside.

“That’s strange”, I mumbled. Curiosity took over from here; I just had to see what that noise was in the freezer. As I opened the door, nothing could prepare me for what I would see in there. Nigel was standing over an open box of Pork Ribs, and was chewing away at the frozen meat.

He looked like shit, the exposed parts of his body looked like it was smeared in tomato sauce also. He was wearing his work apron with one of those stupid novelty T-Shirts they made all the staff wear underneath it, although hidden, I knew what the shirt would say. Nigel favoured one with the saying “Eat-Me”, which is pretty fucking hilarious in hindsight don’t you think?

Completely convinced that Nigel had gone absolutely bonkers, I dropped the mop, which made an audible crack when it hit the ground, reverberating throughout the small freezer.

“Nigel? What the fuck are you doing?!”

In these next moments, I knew I was fucked. Nigel turns around to face me, and I see the dead look in his eyes. It takes a while for Nigel to register me there, but as soon as he does this horrible visage appears on his face. It all becomes crystal clear to me now, as Nigel slowly stands up and stumbles towards me.

Those smears on the wall, they weren’t tomato sauce. That smell of rotting garbage I thought was coming from the bin, that wasn’t from old rubbish bags. And Nigel, coming at me with his arms reaching out in front of him, a hungry look plastered across his pale face, wasn’t doped up on his own merchandise.

He was a Zombie, and “I’m about to be his morning fucking tea”, I thought to myself as I tripped over my own fucking mop, and blacked out after banging my head against the floor.