The Mall of Cthulhu Read Free Page B

goddammit, it had been ten years. She needed to carve out a little bit of Ted-free time.
    "Oh . . . " He looked a little crestfallen, and Laura felt guilty. "Well, okay. I'll probably have a date by tomorrow anyway." He glanced at his watch. "Oh shit. I gotta get back or Michelle is going to chew my ass, and if she were just a little more attractive, I might enjoy that, but as it is, it's just no fun at all."
    "Okay. Say hi to Sara for me."
    "Ha! It's Rhiannon!" And he was gone, running back to his coffee-slinging. As Laura headed inside and began the x-raying, metal-detecting, badge-showing, and badge-swiping ritual that would allow her to get back into her office, she did kind of envy Ted. Usually she felt some combination of tenderness, gratitude, worry, and annoyance, but now she added a little dollop of envy. Ted was the fuckup, the perpetual slacker who had his life ruined, and she was the achiever, the one who didn't let the trauma hold her back. And yet he was practically skipping back to his workplace, while she was definitely trudging. And neither one of them seemed able to sustain a relationship with anybody else.
    Well, there was really no point in thinking like that, or in thinking at all, except about whether Whitey was dumb enough to open a bank account and access it from a strip mall in Boca Raton. She took a long sip of her latte, and while she was nowhere near orgasm, she did have to admit that Ted made a hell of a good coffee drink.
     

Three
     
    Ted approached Queequeg's and decided that the best way to avoid Michelle's wrath over his now-seventeen-minute break would be to try to sneak in the back and pretend he'd been back there arranging bags of sugar or something.
    He walked through the filthy alley behind Queequeg's, squeezed past the rusting dumpster and winced at the smell, then cursed as something brown dripped from the dumpster's black plastic lid onto his apron. He opened the back door and beheld stainless steel counters, the fridge, a mop bucket, giant jugs of ammonia and giant foil bags of coffee. He threaded his way past the cleaning supplies and giant bags of coffee, and pushed the stainless-steel swinging door to the front. The door refused to swing open wide enough to allow him access to the front.
    "Shit," Ted said under his breath, "I bet fucking Michelle did this, just so I'll have to pound on it and then she can come and yell at me about my seventeen minutes. Shit!" At the last word, he pressed his shoulder against the door and shoved with all his weight. It moved a crack. He shoved it again and again until there was just enough room for him to squeeze through. He had made so much noise it was going to be completely obvious he was late, but at least he'd deny Michelle the satisfaction of having him pound on the door.
    He squeezed through, and immediately tripped over whatever had been blocking the door. "Fuck!" he said as he went sprawling. "Michelle, you'd bett—" He stopped as he realized that Michelle was what he had tripped over. Well, Michelle's big, long body anyway. Ted felt a sick rush of adrenaline such as he hadn't felt in a decade, and he screamed—Michelle's apron was soaked in blood, and Ted felt it, still warm, seeping through the fibers of his clothes from the floor.
    His brain shut down. What was happening was clearly impossible, which meant that he was actually in bed having a nightmare, and if he could only scream loud enough, maybe he'd wake himself up. He kept screaming. He stood up and looked around. He had a second to register the fact that there were two corpses at the corner table, and that the new artful splatter pattern, red against the orangey-yellow walls, was probably their brains. Something dripped off the wall and landed with a wet splat. Ted continued to scream. A man in a suit lay in front of the counter, half of his face hanging off of his skull, and intestines drooping out of his abdomen. There was blood everywhere.
    All of this took maybe a