Happy Shack pt. 4

Behind Happy Shack, spewing out and around the back door, were piles of broken down restaurant equipment, greasy guts now rusted to shit. I sat on what looked like an old heating unit, it’s warmth long since spent, sent out into nothing until it becomes nothing itself.


“Man, what are we doing back here? I’m growing ice on my boys.”

“That’s not all you’re growing on your boys.”

I puffed on a cigarette and tried to climb inside the glowing cherry.

“Nobody’s tied you down. You can leave anytime you want.” I wasn’t in the mood. “In fact, it’d probably be more advantageous considering I’m about to engage in a romantic interlude.”

I always use big words when I was pissed at my crew. It drove them crazy. I keep a list of good ones, picked from an old dictionary I lifted an upper-level do-gooder. Advantageous. Interlude. Words are power, man.

“You’re crazy.” It was Turtle’s turn. “No way that mech is going on a date with you. Besides, why would you want to stick it in a mech?” Turtle. King of class.

“More importantly,” Skin (on account of his abundance of it) piped in. “Why would a machine want to get stuck by a crab?”

One by one they peeled away, dissipating into shadows, tucking their skinny bodies around steam pipes, under dreck piles, inside skiffs too worn out to safely sail, now abandoned and picked clean. It was getting colder. I should have found a spot too.

Each shed housed three mechs, locked up tight behind a rolling door and a time-release bolt. Each mech, being the wireless variety, had to plug in at least every twelve hours. That’s if Happy Shack used the high end units, which is unlikely judging on the rehash rat patties they serve (all respect here, as I live on the stuff).

The plan was to wait. Twelve hours was doable. I’d gone without grub for longer. I could outlast the cold and eventually the shift would change, the doors would open, and...well then I’d leave it up to my wily ways (a.k.a. I didn’t have a clue).

I must have drifted off because the next thing I remember was the sound of the shed doors grinding open. Nested within a pile of limp paper and who-knows-what, I watched two servers and four cooks power-up, unplug themselves, and bright-eyed and gleaming teeth, step from the shadows of their locker. The servers were two of the male models, Tyr and Sveinn, both about six feet tall, both blonde-haired blue-eyed, spotlessly clean. Without a cup of coffee or a scratch of their ass, the good morning crew bounced through the back door of Happy Shack which closed behind them with a decisive thump.

Silence. The ever-present keen of wind through net. Waiting, until finally the door opened again, and there she was. She moved slower then her replacement. They all did. In the yellowed light of sodium bulbs, they looked tired, worn out, human. One thing was for sure, they were filthy. One of the cooks had a crimson slash across his grease-speckled apron. Clots of the same sauce clung to his chrome spatula hand, evidence of a crime of protein passion. I never thought about how they got clean. Does some poor schlep have to scrub them down twice a day? The thought of rough hands jostling sleeping Erin made my stomach tighten. Jealousy?

The mechs were plugging themselves in when the doors clicked on and began to roll. That’s when I got a really stupid idea. The metal panels were about three feet from shut and, in an explosion of dreck, I sprinted for Erin’s shed, banging my shoulder hard on the door. The entire locker shuddered and the door rattled violently. It wasn’t until the bolt had snapped into place and the clamor dissolved into the cold that I noticed three pairs of eyes watching me from the darkness.