In his dreams, Caleb saved everyone.

  “Hey asshole, get your head outta the clouds and fix me a damn burger.” The ruddy faced trucker leaned out of his truck window with his hairy arm outstretched. He knocked twice on the drive-thru window.

  Caleb rubbed his red eyes, shook his head and let his dream of a cure for dementia fade away.

  This world is nothing but assholes, Caleb thought. It had only been 6 months since he had left for college, and he’d almost forgotten how grim his hometown was. But it was summer break, and he needed cash like he needed air.

  “That’s not the first time you’ve been told.” Oliver said, handed Caleb the greasy brown bag containing the trucker’s order. Oliver adjusted the gleaming gold “manager” badge on his lapel.

  Caleb rolled his eyes and slid the window open.

  “Here,” Caleb said, his voice cold and indifferent. “Thanks for ordering. See you again soon.”

  The trucker shook his head and accelerated forward in a plume of black smoke.

  Obviously one of those guys who modified their rigs to be even less environmentally friendly, thought Caleb. What a piece of crap.

  The next customer slid right into the noxious fume. The brown-haired middle-aged woman coughed as she rolled down her car window.

  Caleb grabbed the tray of drinks Kayleigh had just slid over to him. She didn't talk to him much, but she smiled every time their eyes met. Maybe one day Caleb would strike up the courage to ask her out or something. He thought he probably needed to hit the gym first, though.

  He hadn’t had much luck in college with girls, but then again he didn't have much time between the brutal studying schedule and the demands of his favourite game’s battle pass.

  “You’re welcome.” Kayleigh said, as Caleb turned away to serve the woman at the window.

  S-sorry,” he said. He held the tray of iced coffee up and flashed her a grin. “Thanks for the coffee.”

  Where did that come from?!

  He felt energised, excited even. That was a first in this line of work. The long hours and ceaseless peace gave him little stimulation mentally. Only physically. And the physical demands were absolutely back-breaking. His feet ached in the stiff, cardboard-like shoes he had to wear and the company polo shirt was stiff and scratchy. He never really noticed how much he sweated in a day until this job.

  That’s why we do it now, he thought. So we’re grateful when we’re stuck in that office job daydreaming out of the window.

  Caleb came back to reality. The middle-aged customer tapped her watch with a sour look on her face. He grabbed a bundle of straws and stuck them in the middle of the drinks. He opened the window again.

  “Here’s your coffee.” he shrugged. “Sorry about the wait.”

  “Too many straws.” the woman said. “Don’t you care about the environment?”

  “Sorry.” he said again, sliding the door shut. “Can’t please some people.”

  “Well, you’re here to please all people.” Oliver had been watching Caleb’s customer interactions like a hawk. He glared with an anger usually reserved for the guy who stole your grandma’s jewels.

  “Sorry,” Caleb said. Again. So many sorrys. Pathetic was a word that flashed up again and again in his psyche. He needed to do better. He knew it. At everything.

  “You’re on break in 6 minutes and 37 seconds.” Oliver said, glancing down at the store tablet he used to track all of their performance. “Come see me in my office.”

  Oliver stormed away. Caleb glanced at the window. It was 10:54. Too late for breakfast and too soon for lunch. That didn’t matter on a weekend, but on a random Wednesday it meant a rare moment of quiet.

  “He wrote me up once ‘cause I was on the phone to my mom in the chiller.” Kayleigh said as she poured a fresh coke for an in-store customer. “She was in hospital.”

  “Sorry to hear that.” Caleb said. Well-placed this time, but still, that word again.

  “It’s okay. She’s fine now.” Kayleigh smiled. “So, what’s your deal? You didn't introduce yourself a couple weeks back. A bunch of us new hires started in January.”

  “Yeah, I’m a seasonal worker.” Caleb replied, trying to stay as casual as possible. “Just trying to get through college.”

  “Oh wow, that’s cool. I would have loved to go to college. But you know, you need the grades and the funding. Maybe later in life, you know?”

  Kayleigh disappeared to hand the coke to a customer at the front desk.

  Caleb hadn't thought of college like that before. He guessed he was pretty lucky. “I’m sure you’ll get there if you want it bad enough,” he said as she wandered back. “But trust me, it ain’t that great.”

  “How come?”

  “Well, your whole life gets scheduled out. Up at 7:30. Physics at 8:00. Theoretical physics at 9:00.”

  “I guess yeah, if you're studying a physics degree. I always thought you should study something you actually like. Then it’s like a dream come true.”

  He laughed. “Too much of what you love can turn into a nightmare.”

  She drummed her fingernails against the metal countertop. She kept them short, with clear nail polish. They weren't allowed to wear anything else. Caleb wondered what she wore outside of work. Did she paint her nails bright pink or jet black when she had total freedom? He couldn’t quite tell. Everyone looked exactly the same in that stifling nylon uniform.

  She laughed, her cheeks turning red. “What are you staring at?” She held her fingers up and waved them in front of her face like a magician. “Is this what you like? You got a thing for a girl’s fingers?” She giggled. “That’s a new one on me, I must admit.”

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  She locked eyes with him. “And believe me, I’ve seen it all.”

  Caleb blushed and turned away just in time to see a new customer drive up to the window. “What does this guy want?” He asked, happy for a reason to change the subject.

  Kayleigh glanced up at the screen by her station. “Cheeseburger. Small fry. Chocolate shake.” She shouted down the line, then grabbed a cup and pushed some buttons on the milkshake machine.

  Caleb served the customer and checked the time. 11:01.

  “I’m here to relieve you of your duty, squire.” Caleb turned his attention to the burly idiot who stood before him. Dave was a monolith of a man, despite being around the same age as Caleb. He was another lifer at Squish Burger. Late. Lazy. Rude. He was otherwise unemployable, or at least that was how Caleb saw it. Now that he was in, he kept his job through sheer intimidation.

  “I passed the bossman on the way in. He’s not happy with you, bro.” Dave said, as he placed the baseball cap on top of his thick head. His ears sprung out from the sides of the cap like a cartoon ogre.

  “You better go.” Dave patted Caleb hard on the back as he passed. “Hopefully you’re still here in a few hours to cover my first break!”

  Dave headed upstairs, taking the corrugated metal “staff-only” steps two at a time.

  “Sorry I’m late, Oliver.” Caleb burst into the manager’s office. “Dave was late on shift. Can’t do anything about that.”

  Oliver sat at his sparse manager’s desk. He placed the tablet on the desk and tented his fingers like a supervillain.

  “I know your priorities don’t exactly line up with making this place the most efficient quick-service restaurant in town...”

  Fast food slopshop, more like, thought Caleb. Instead, he held his tongue and nodded.

  Dave continued. “But I assumed you did indeed value your paycheck.”

  Caleb knew it. He was about to be fired. Just his luck. There weren't enough sorry’s in the world to get him out of it. He hoped Oliver at least gave him enough time to get Kayleigh’s number on the way out. Why not? Now that he had absolutely nothing to lose.

  “Tell me, Caleb. Why do you want to work here?”

  “Well, sir, as I said in my interview, I loved coming here as a kid and wanted to be a part of instilling that kind of positive experience in future generations. And the flexible working policy works great with my college breaks. The ability to just pick up shifts with the careers app is great.”

  Caleb did at least have the gift of the gab. A childhood spent at the top of the class prepared him well for saying absolutely nothing in a lot of words.

  “Hmm,” Oliver said. “It all sounds very good in theory, doesn’t it? I hired you for a reason, after all.”

  Caleb had clearly given Oliver something to think about. He grabbed the tablet again and started flicking through the Colleague Performance app.

  “The problem is, in practice you just don’t measure up. You’re slow to serve. You’re sloppy when you do. And nobody has given you a smiling face.”

  Three massive yellow buttons sat at the bottom of the window frame on the customer side of the drive-thru.

  SHOW US HOW WE DID WITH A SMILE

  There were three options: a grinning face, a neutral face and a smiling one. Squish Burger’s mascot was a pale cartoon boy with brown hair and matching flat brown eyes. He wore the same uniform they all did: a blue polo shirt with a pale yellow collar. Caleb always found him a little impersonal. A little cold.

  “Squishboy represents everyone in the world,” the CEO had said in Caleb’s induction video. “Everyone can see a little of themselves in him.”

  Caleb saw nothing at all. He also suspected that nobody was ever pressing the grinning face button. Only angry people bothered to fill out customer feedback forms. If you’re happy with the service, you’re happy for the customer to continue business as usual. If you didn’t get your money’s worth, heads needed to roll until there was change.

  “How many Happy Faces does Kayleigh get when she’s on the drive-thru?” Caleb asked. If he’s getting fired anyway, why not rock the boat a little?

  “I can’t discuss the performance of other colleagues with you for legal reasons. Besides, it’s not relevant. We’re talking about your performance.”

  Oliver swiped across a few times, frowned and clucked his tongue.

  “She didn’t get any, did she?” Caleb leant back in his chair, feeling kinda smug.

  “Okay,” Oliver said, taking the challenge personally. “Look. Your service time is only 1.75.”

  Caleb couldn’t remember what the metric stood for exactly, or even how it was calculated, but the target measure had been drummed into him over the very long orientation day.

  “But the target’s 1.5.”

  “But the standard here at this store is 1.78.”

  Caleb laughed. He couldn’t help it. “Oh, c’mon. How many fragments of one customer is that?”

  “0.075.” Oliver said, without even thinking about it, before realising the question was rhetorical.

  Caleb laughed even harder. “At the countrywide average of 6 bucks per order, you’re firing me over a few cents.”

  “A few cents make a dollar.” Oliver said. He probably thought he sounded incredibly smart. Smart for this place.

  “Look, let’s be honest.” Oliver leant his elbows on the desk and re-tented his fingers. “It’s just not working out here. You’re just not Squish Burger material. I’ll let you work 2 week’s notice, but after that I’m afraid your employment here has come to an end.”

  The ground beneath them shook.

  “What the fuck was that?” Oliver headed over to the wall, where an array of security alarms blared red.

  “The sprinkler system’s been set off,” he said. “and the till warning system.”

  Caleb had sprung up too. The both of them had forgotten briefly why they were in that room together.

  “Are we having an earthquake?”

  “Can’t be. We don’t get earthquakes here. Follow me. Customers are going to need help.”

  “I thought I was fired?”

  Oliver pounded the wall in frustration. “Ugh. Don’t be like that. Do well under pressure and maybe this whole conversation didn’t happen. Do you understand?”

  Caleb nodded. He’d seen Oliver angry before, sure, but not violent. A vein bulged at the corner of his temple and his knuckles were turning white from making such tight fists. Caleb wondered if Oliver was actually going to hit him.

  Instead, Oliver turned towards the exit. He tried to wrench the door open, but it wouldn’t budge. “Caleb, help me with the door.”

  Caleb grabbed the metal handle in both hands and pulled as hard as it could. The door didn’t move an inch. It was like there wasn’t a door there at all, and he was just pulling on a section of wall. “It must have been an earthquake. The door frame is bent. There’s no other explanation.”

  The septic yellow lights of the manager’s office flickered, then turned off entirely.

  “Humans, please sit down.” The voice spoke every syllable in a flat cadence, with no particular stresses on any one section of each word. Like it had never heard English before, and it was reading it aloud for the first time.

  Caleb turned back. A creature, made from purest light forced into vaguely human shape, sat in Oliver’s chair. He didn’t want to admit it, but it looked like an angel. Vast wings shimmered at either side of its sinewy body.

  “The humans inside this concrete box are the most pathetic examples of your already weak race. We are here to train you to become survivors. But we cannot train you on the planet you call Earth, so we are no longer there.”

  Caleb grabbed the back of the empty chair to avoid collapsing.

  “Wh- where are we, then?”

  “We cannot translate the place we are now, but we have found the closest analogue in human culture.”

  The angel thought for a moment, then said:

  “This is a place… of survival horror.”

  The angel retracted its wings. The wall behind turned from grey to jet black. Viscous blood dripped from the wall to form words in a tortured, scratched script.

  YOU ARE DEAD

  The words lasted just long enough for Caleb and Oliver to read, then disappeared. They exchanged wide-eyed glances. Was this real?

  NEW LIFE?

  Caleb stood frozen. Oliver began to sob. The creature watched them both with a cocked head, as if it was testing them both.

  YES

  The moment he read that single word scribbled in blood, Caleb’s world turned dark.