chapter 1 - the artery attacker

“Oh gosh. I just can’t decide,” the mammoth man shuffled in what Henry surmised was a blood-sugar crash fueled anxiety.

“Yeah, we get that a lot,” Henry said leaning on the counter, his gaze settling on a stretch of mismatched tiles on the far wall. One errant vertical tile disrupted the horizontal pattern lining the seating area. Why have a zig where it should zag?

The man turned to his nimbus of a wife. “What do you think, honey?”

Her round face was lit aglow by the billboard-sized neon menu above Henry. The garish lighting highlighted each crease and fold under her chins and jowls. She contemplated the menu like it were a life-or-death decision.
It may just be with how much they’ve already ordered.

She rubbed her gut absentmindedly, and darted her tongue past moist lips like a serpent as she silently mouthed off the listed items as if she could sample the food by names alone.
Henry twisted his own mouth. Can probably taste the grease in the atmosphere too.

“How about four Big’ol Buckets of their Southern baked mac? Oh! And definitely a few of those aorta clogger sliders, babe,” she said.
Shocked by his oversight, the man slapped his forehead, sending his forearm wobbling from the impact.

“Good call! Alright, we’ll add that onto the rest of our order.”

Henry straightened with a sigh and looked down at the tablet displaying their
of an order. With a few deft flicks of his thumb, he scrolled through the pages. “Is that all, folks?” Henry asked.

Just as he was about to finalize their treatise of an order, Riley trotted out from the kitchen with a mischievous look. He immediately regretted his droll rhetorical.

“Are you guys sure that’s all you want? We have a great buy-two-get-three deal,” she said from beside Henry.

“Bitch,” he hissed.

She smiled up at him, as doe-eyed as a manifestation from the dregs of Hell could manage.

“Let’s look one more time, babe,” the man said without a hint of shame. His wife nodded with enthusiasm.

He watched the couple waddle to their bench in the feeding pen as he wiped the sugar-stuck counter down with a damp rag.

Working at the Artery Attacker was one of his deepest shames. He’d gotten his degree so that he wouldn’t have to work a food service job ever again; but as luck would have it, only a few months after finishing his business classes the world was upended when the virus hit the states, quarantine was enacted in short order, and the job market plummeted as unemployment soared. Everything was out of commission aside from what the government, in their wisdom, decreed as 'essential businesses and workers'.

And so it was either working in a hospital or a greasy-spoon fast-food joint like this. He never heard back from the local hospital.
The job was awful; shoveling literal bucketfuls of battered and fried garbage into grease stained bags, and then hearing a room full of hogs snarfing and moaning at the trough as they gormandized. All of it made him sick.
Almost the worst thing about working here, Henry thought.

He glared back through the kitchen service window. Catching his eye, Riley quirked her head and flashed a saccharine grin before dunking a row of battered rotisserie chickens into the frier which erupted into a crackling sizzle. Ever since he’d started she’d had taken it upon herself to shadow his every step and torment each minute.