Selena
rubbed her eyes, leaned back in the old, squeaky chair that her boss still
hadn’t put in a replacement for, and yawned. “Come on, just one more half hour
and I’m out of here. “ She said to herself.
Night-shift shift security at a bank really wasn’t what Selena had
wanted to do as a child, but it paid the bills and she didn’t need a fancy
degree to get the job. Still, she wished
that she could find something that didn’t include watching 7 screens that only
gave her insight into how many raccoons lived in the area. The dullness of the work was numbing. Her boss bitched more than she did, and he
didn’t even have to worry about his chair being a fragile antiquated thing that
had trouble even supporting itself sometimes.
One of the
screens blinked for a split second, calling Serena’s attention to it. Her head piqued with a mix between curiosity
and annoyance, she focused on screen 5 and kept an eye on it for a minute.
Nothing
happened. She rewound the video 4
minutes, as the books called for, and watched again. Maybe she was imagining things, she
thought. The screen went blank for less
than a second at the same time it had before.
As she inspected it closer, she noticed that the clock had advanced 13
minutes in that split second. To make
sure it wasn’t just a system malfunction, she checked the time stamps on all of
the other current feeds. Screen 5 was
the only one with an incorrect time, and it remained 13 minutes ahead of the
others. She leaned back in the chair
again. The chair squealed like a dyeing
poodle, and she jumped back up to the edge of the seat. Not a moment after that, there was a knock on
the office door.
“Who is
it?” Selena called. She checked the time again. Still 27 minutes left on her
shift. Arlen didn’t usually show up early to his shift, he was too busy
drinking most of the time.
“It’s
Arlen. Open up, I’ve got donuts!”
Selena
opened up the door, letting Arlen in.
“What brings you in early this time?”
“Eh, I was
bored. The donut shop was open, and I thought you could use some. You’ve stayed
here too long, you know.” He said with a grin.
There was something about it Selena thought was slightly wolfish
tonight. She couldn’t really be sure, though. It was only a hint.
“I’m sorry,
what?”
“You’ve
been here too long. Relax, I’ve got it.”
Still, that grin. Something was
different about it.
“I only
have about 20 minutes left in my shift, I can finish i-“ Before Selena could
finish her sentence, Arlen exploded, taking the entire office with him.
A few
seconds later, a raccoon crawled atop the smoking remains of the security
office, softly chuckling to itself. It
pressed a button on what remained of screen 5, and beamed the ‘ok’ signal to
its brethren in orbit. Then, it
fashioned a chair out of ceiling tiles and muttered to itself, “I told her she
had been there too long. Did she listen, noooo.”
No comments:
Post a Comment