The Night Shift – Epilogue

Anatomy of Typewriters Story / 1,399 words / 6min Read Time

The content below was originally paywalled.

An old station wagon pulls into view on the CCTV in the control room and a young man exits on the passenger side, hoody up to shield him from the pouring rain, he runs around the car towards the side entrance. He stops. The driver side window rolls down and a woman sticks her head out, shouting to him. He turns and hesitates but walks towards the car eventually, bends low, and kisses the driver on the cheek before hurrying inside the mall. The driver sticks her head out the window, a mop of wet grey hair blowing in the wind, and spits at the ground, then pulls her head back inside the car and pulls out, leaving her window rolled down.

The young man wipes his boots on the mat just inside the heavy metal door and starts to unzip his jacket. His boots echo in the corridor accompanied by the grumble of his stomach. He preferred the morning shift because it meant he could buy breakfast at one of the many options in the mall food court and didn’t have to suffer through his grandmother’s lack of cooking skills.

He reached the control room and knocked like he does every week night, expecting Tripp to be there to let him in. But this morning there was no one. He looked through the long, thin, rectangular window next to the door handle that stretched the height of the door and saw the office was empty. He punched in the four digit code on the door handle and pulled it open when he heard the buzz and click.

Taped on one of the CCTV monitors was a typed note:

“Loading dock.”

That was all it said. The monitor the note covered happened to be for the loading dock and the man squinted to try and make out if who he saw bent low with gloves and a bucket and mop on the screen was Tripp.

Unable to make out who it was, he made his way down to the loading dock. It was frowned upon to have overlapping time cards so he couldn’t clock in until Tripp clocked out. He needed every penny this job was paying him so he could  move out of his grandmother’s tiny cramped two bedroom house. He only agreed to move in temporarily when grandpa died, with no other siblings and his own parent’s gone, she needed him to help out around the house.

The way he saw it he had two options: Wait for her to join his grandpa, who died of natural causes in his sleep, or work two jobs so he could afford a home aid to help his grandmother and he could finally move out. It was coming onto a year of living under her roof and it didn’t take him long to understand why his mother moved out when she turned sixteen. How his grandpa lasted as long as he did living with her, he couldn’t figure out. Maybe he really did love the woman.

At the start of the long corridor towards the loading dock he smelled the bleach first, it was strong and it made his eyes squint. It was only six in the morning and the cleaners weren’t due in for another hour.

“Hey, Tripp, that you? Man, are you cleaning down here? It’s six, man. Time to hit the—” He stopped talking when he got to the end of the corridor and rounded the corner, surprised to see Guy standing there, yellow gloves on both hands, a mop in one hand, sitting in a bucket of sudsy water, and a large sponge in the other, that was once yellow but was now clearly pinkish red.

“You must be the new guy, right? Remind me what your name is again?” Guy let go of the mop and dropped the sponge in the bucket so he could take the gloves off  and extended one hand to shake.

Not making eye contact with Guy but instead surveying the area around them that had been recently mopped down heavily with bleach, he extended a hand and said, “Yeah, I’m Lonnie. But I’m not new. I mean, I started here six months ago so I don’t feel like the new guy anymore. You must be…Aaron?”

He met Tripp before, every morning in fact, and he knew that Aaron was the relief should Tripp ever need to leave early, from studying the calendar on the wall inside the control room.

“Oh, no, I’m Guy. Seems Tripp had an emergency and Aaron just wasn’t as obliging,” Guy said, a big grin on his face. “Cut his hand and left blood everywhere on his way out. Crazy night, but now that you’re here I guess I’ll leave the rest for the cleaners. I’m sure you want to clock in.”

Guy put his arm around Lonnie’s shoulder and directed him back around the corner and back down the corridor. “Man, musta been a lot of blood,” Lonnie said, observing just how much mopping and scrubbing of the walls Guy had done. 

“Yeah, I told him to take a couple weeks off to heal. Between you and me, I don’t think he’ll be coming back. Some guys just can’t hack the night shift. They get a wild imagination. Scared of what happens in the dark,” Guy said, making his voice low and almost like a whisper to sound spookier. “How about you, Lonnie?

“Me, sir?” Lonnie winced at calling Guy ‘sir’ but it was a force of habit he picked up from his grandfather to give his elders the proper respect and Guy was clearly much older than him.

“Are you afraid of the dark, Lonnie?”

“Uh. Uhm…” Lonnie stammered, for some reason he felt unsure of how to answer.

“Relax, son. I’m only kidding,” Guy said, patting Lonnie hard on the back to reassure him. “But seriously, if Tripp doesn’t come back, how do you feel about covering the night shift for a while? At least until we could find a replacement.”

Lonnie wondered why Guy seemed so sure that Tripp wasn’t coming back, just from cutting himself. Then again, it seemed this injury caused a lot of blood loss and that might make anyone rethink coming back to work. Lonnie never got injured while at work. Not even at his night job working in the kitchen of an all night diner. And there he comes into contact with all kinds of sharp knives regularly as the washer.

As he clocked in he thought about the extra money he could make working the night shift. Everyone knew, or at least, he’d heard, the shift to get if you wanted to make way more money was the night shift. And while Lonnie had been working there for six months he was only able to get the morning shift on the weekends. It already earned him more than twice as much as working five days a week at the diner.

Lonnie looked at Guy and smiled as one man clocked out and the other clocked in. “Sure, man. I could handle the night shift. How hard can it be? I ain’t scared of the dark.”

“Excellent,” Guy said, his grin making Lonnie feel a bit uneasy. “That’s what I like to hear. I’ll let corporate know. I’m sure we’ll be fast friends, Lonnie.”

The control room door buzzed and clicked open and the morning cleaner burst in without a word to grab the small trash bin. Lonnie thought he caught a glimpse of a name badge inside but couldn’t be sure as the silent cleaner moved quickly and in an instant was gone. Guy gave one final pat on the back before he left as well, leaving Lonnie alone in the control room to watch the monitors as the mall started to come to life and start the weekend rush.

From his chair, Lonnie leaned forward to take a closer look at one of the monitors that was showing the view of an escalator and some old antique shop that always seemed to give him the creeps. A fact he’ll never tell Guy, he thought to himself. In their display window he could barely make out a doll, rocking. It’s head seemingly looking up at the camera, at him? Then the monitor blinked and showed a different camera in a different part of the mall.