Claw

by Katie Berry

  Not wearing a jacket, Dan shivered from the cold, moist air that swirled about him. The ageing sodium vapour over his head suddenly crackled and buzzed, jolting him back to the present. He looked up at the light with loathing -- God, how he hated that buzz. It sounded as if the light had been colonised by a hive of hungry mechanical bees who were now waiting impatiently to suck up the next delivery of dirty oil being delivered to the drum. Ever since that thought had first popped into his head when he’d started working at the restaurant last fall, his skin crawled whenever he heard that psychosis-inducing sound.

  Dan was still smart enough to know that whenever he had to go out back, he usually found time for a quick blaze with his vape behind the dumpster, and that definitely wasn’t helping his paranoia. Maybe the pot was making him schizophrenic. He’d read about that happening to some people. He shrugged. Whether it did or it didn’t was of little consequence and did little to dissuade him from maintaining his buzz and his personal goal of staying higher than the CN Tower at all times. He took another hit off his vape, rubbing his thumb lovingly over a recent engraving of the iconic tower on one corner.

  In addition to dealing with the shitty lighting, there was one other reason Dan loathed dumping the used oil into the collection drum at the end of his shift. It seemed he would inevitably spill some of the crap all over his kitchen issued whites. More times than not, even in the brightest, clearest of daylight, he would invariably screw up and accidentally pour some of the oil all over his shirt, pants and shoes.

  And he didn’t need to catch hell from Antoine, again tonight — the man was already cranky enough because of the broken cooler. When Dan had left the kitchen on his latest oil run, Antoine had been cursing away in Quebecois, doing a final wipe down on a malfunctioning cooler unit. The unit had broken down, unnoticed the day before, and only been recently discovered this evening. Antoine was not happy about this, and he let everyone left in the kitchen know about it.

  Inside of the cooler had been over ninety kilograms of room temperature, organic prime-rib roasts, dripping blood and juices from their brown, butcher paper wrappers. No, Antoine was not a happy man at the moment. Not only was it a smelly, sticky mess to clean up, but he knew DePascal hated having to throw out that much expensive food. Just a half-hour ago while helping with the clean-up, Dan had lugged two big bags of the spoiled meat along with wads of blood-soaked paper towel out to the dumpster. Happy now to be smelling old cooking oil instead of garbage bags full of rotting meat, Dan sighed and heaved the heavy bucket of oil up to the edge of the reclaim barrel. He paused for a moment and then started to pour the oil carefully into the drum.

  Over his head, the ageing sodium vapour suffered another electrical overload and dimmed to somewhere just above the level of dead.

  “Shit!”

  It was what Dan Lewis called ‘Lewis Luck’. Somehow, the old sodium vapour had chosen this very moment to do its imitation of the dark side of the sun, right in the middle of his pour — it was typical, really. He continued pouring blindly, his only illumination now provided by the other failing sodium vapour over the reeking garbage bin across the foggy, ice-slicked lot. Finishing up as best he could, he put the bucket down, stood and tried to scope out his clothes for oil spots in the dim light, but it was too dark to see.

  “Can’t see a goddamned thing,” he muttered, shaking his head. He pulled out his cell phone, set the camera flash to torch mode and then scanned himself from head to toe. Tonight, it would seem, he was on a roll. Despite his blind-pour of the used oil, when he stepped back from the barrel and checked himself out with his light, he was surprised to see that he was still completely oil-free. It looked like he wouldn’t be degreasing himself for a half-hour after work tonight because of another disastrous pour.

  “Fuck yeah!” New confidence filled his voice. This had to be a good omen for his upcoming video game marathon. His buddies were going to be in for a rough night if his newfound ‘mad skills’ at oil pouring were any indication.

  Bending to grab the empty white pail, Dan took one last longing look in the direction of his car, faintly outlined in the fog by the light of the remaining sodium vapour lamp. The more he looked, the more he realised that something didn’t seem quite right about the foggy silhouette of the garbage bin located next to his car.

  In fact, it seemed all wrong.

  He tilted his head back and forth, trying to dope things out from a distance. The light over the bin suddenly flared, going supernova, then dropped down to a deep amber glow, emulating its twin across the lot. Dan’s own inner light bulb brightened, and he finally tumbled as to what was different about the dumpster.

  The lid was up -- and that was impossible because he’d locked it -- he knew that for a fact.

  “What the hell?”

  From where he stood, peering through the shifting fog, one half of the lid appeared to be standing wide open. Maybe somebody had cut the lock, popped the cover, and scrambled into the bin, searching for some tasty treats? With a grimace, Dan hoped that whoever they were, that they enjoyed the smell of spoiled meat.

  His grimace suddenly flatlined, and his eyes widened as he remembered the video game he’d left sitting out in plain sight, naked and exposed on the passenger seat of his car. The more he thought about it, the more freaked-out became, thinking about his game being stolen by potential garbage/video game thieves. He decided he needed to check things out before heading back into the kitchen. But he was torn -- part of him reluctant to venture across the foggy lot to see what had been screwing around with the garbage bin. His sense of self-preservation was now standing up on its hind legs and trying to make him pay attention to it.

  Despite his reluctance to do so, Dan moved hesitantly across the slippery lot, dragging the empty grease pail behind him. The closer he got to the garbage bin, the more he saw what was wrong with it, and he felt his newfound confidence level begin to fade like the overhead light only moments before.

  As if welcoming Dan to the scene, the sodium vapour began brightening, awakening from its recent slumber. Dan saw that the lid wasn’t actually open, but was in fact still closed. The security bar was down and in the locked position, the hardened steel padlock still securing it. Dan dropped the grease bucket. It wobbled around on its bottom rim for a moment before falling over and rolling toward the green garbage bin, stopping just as it lightly brushed the closest corner.

  “Holy shit…” Dan Lewis stood motionless, looking in stunned disbelief at the back corner of the steel bin, his mouth hanging agape. The thick metal lid had been peeled back like a sardine can from the rear corner near the hinge. It jutted up, creased at an almost perfect ninety-degree angle. The dumpster’s guts hung from this mortal wound; bag after heavy-duty garbage bag torn open, their tasty innards picked clean and the rest scattered across the icy parking lot. Definitely not the work of dumpster divers.

  From taking machine shop in high school, Dan knew it took tremendous force to bend a sheet of twelve-gauge steel like the bin’s lid without a press or pneumatic ram. And yet something had folded back the entire corner of the quarter centimetre-thick lid as if it were only a flimsy cardboard pizza box from his refrigerator at home -- torn open during some half-stoned, way-too-early-to-be-straight, Sunday morning feeding frenzy.

  What in the hell could have done this? His breath hitched in his chest as a thought suddenly occurred to him. Dan held his breath for a moment, listening intently. He could hear the cartilage grinding in his neck as he slowly panned his head back and forth, but that was all.

  In a moment of panic-primed perspicacity, he realised how isolated he was, surrounded by fog on all sides in the middle of an ice-slicked parking lot, with not another living soul in sight. He decided that he didn’t want to wait around to see if the thing that ripped open the bin was going to come back for another snack of garbage and thought it best to beat his feet the hell out of the area, ASAP.

  And then he paused. Job security, combined with his desire to eat fo
od on occasion, told Dan that he’d at least better let Antoine know what had happened. Pivoting on one heel, he fell face-forward over the now-forgotten grease bucket, slamming his knee onto the ice as he landed. The bucket went spinning across the ice and vanished, swallowed by the billowing fog.

  “Bastard!” Dan said, trying to stand, but felt his ankle knee give him a shot of white-hot pain and he slipped back to the ice once more. After several tense, slippery seconds, he finally regained his feet. His breath came in ragged gasps. He was not trying to hear anything now, as he limped, slid and stumbled back toward the relative safety of the kitchen and its thick steel door. He didn’t care if anything heard him either; he just wanted to get back to safety.

  Dan shrieked as he scrambled through the still-open delivery door. “Antoine! There’s a problem out back! Oh holy shit, do we have a big problem!” He spun and slammed the heavy door shut, twisting the deadbolt home with such force that he thought he might break it off.

  Antoine DePascal stood slowly from the cooler, rubbing that back of one blood-smeared hand along the side of his equally blood-smeared forehead. He sighed. Standing before him was the kid, a wild look in his eyes, again. Antoine knew he was going to have to deal with some more of the kid’s shit and sighed a second time, then said, “What the hell did you do? Spill the grease bucket all over the place, again?”

  “N-no! Some thing broke into the garbage bin!”

  DePascal frowned, “What do you mean; some ‘thing’ broke into the bin? How do you know it wasn’t a bear again?”

  Still short of breath from his running and shouting, Dan paused before replying, “T-That’s what I mean. It must have been some ‘thing’ that broke into the dumpster, because of all the bending of the metal, don’t you understand! There’s no way it was a bear! And there’s garbage all over the place!”

  “Did you forget to lock it, again?” Anger growled in his DePascal’s voice.

  “No sir — I mean yes-sir, I locked it!”

  Antoine furrowed his heavy brow. “How could something get into that dumpster? Those things are bear-proof! You must have forgotten, and some starving coyote got in there or maybe a dog.”

  “No, sir! I remember locking it one hundred percent just after the first seating clean-up!” This evening, he definitely remembered putting the security bar down and locking it. Since his fall encounter, he’d decided he didn’t want to attract anything wilder than himself when he was taking another bag of smelly garbage out to the trash. He continued, “And you still don’t get it! Like I said before, it’s STILL LOCKED!” he shouted at Antoine, his voice a mixture of fear and frustration. Dan finished, “The lid’s been bent over at the back corner near the hinge -- just ripped open like a tuna can!”

  “You mean sardine can? That’s impossible!” Antoine folded one blood-smeared arm over the other and stood, poised in doubt.

  “It’s true! Go and see for yourself then!”

  “Can’t you see I’m still busy?”

  “But…”

  “The garbage bin lid was most likely defective; you know how old that thing is getting. It’s just about as rusted as your goddamned car and probably falling to as many pieces!” Antoine couldn’t resist a barb at the expense of the kid’s rust-bucket of a ride. He finished, saying, “It was probably damaged during the last garbage pickup, but you were just too stoned to notice! Did you ever think of that?”

  “Well…” Dan doubted this line of reasoning but knew there had been times in his life where he’d forgotten a thing or two or didn’t notice something because of his pot use, but this wasn’t one of them. “I’m super sure…”

  DePascal held up a hand and interrupted Dan, saying, “The only thing I want you to be ‘super sure’ of right now is your ability to pick up the garbage you said is strewn all around outside! Now get the fuck back out there and clean up the goddamned mess this bear made!”

  Dan just stared at him, incomprehension clouding his face. “But Antoine!” A tremor of fear filled his voice, “I told you it couldn’t be a bear! And what if it comes back and it’s still hungry?”

  DePascal grumbled, “You’ll be fine. It’s probably miles away from here by now.”

  “Can’t I just…”

  “Yes, you can!” Antoine said with feigned enthusiasm. “Look, here’s a flashlight!” DePascal grabbed a magnetic emergency light plugged into one of the kitchen wall sockets and shoved it into the kid’s hands. He finished the conversation, saying, “Now, If you don’t get out there right now and clean up that mess, you can go ahead and hang up your apron.”

  Dan knew that his boss didn’t mean he’d be done for the day; and that he could hang his kitchen whites up in his locker and go home and relax while Antoine cleaned the mess. No, he knew that it meant he’d be fired. And that meant no more car repairs, video games or mind-altering substances.

  DePascal took only a handful of steps on long legs to cross the kitchen and unlocked the door, opening it wide. Still limping slightly from his fall, Dan Lewis moved slowly through the doorway, reluctantly heading outside once more. He turned to look back. DePascal stood behind him in the doorway, watching him go. “You’ll be fine!” he shouted encouragingly, then slammed the heavy door shut. Dan sighed and slowly angled across the ice-glazed parking lot toward the large, green dumpster. Shining the light about, he could see nothing in the greyness that surrounded him and clicked it off again.

  The sodium vapour light overhead crapped out just as he arrived at the bin, leaving him standing in dim, jaundiced yellow light. Dan held his breath again and repeated his imitation of a radar dish, tilting his head this way and that, as he listened for any sign of something lurking out there, just beyond sight.

  There was no sound. Dead silence was his new companion.

  Though the mist impaired his sight, Dan’s other four senses were working overtime, and he felt more isolated than ever. The freezing fog settled onto his exposed skin as he stood listening, making him shiver. After many seconds, feeling ready to burst, he exhaled all at once then took in great coughing lungfuls of air. He gagged on the dense mist that filled his mouth, throat and lungs. The combined taste and smell of rotting meat remnants from the scattered trash bags at his feet was nauseating. He gagged once more, feeling ready to hurl.

  “Son of a bitch! Why is it, every gig I get, I’m the low man on the totem pole stuck doing these shit jobs,” he wondered aloud to the swirling fog. “Goddamned Lewis Luck,” he concluded. Placing the flashlight on the ground next to the open half of the garbage bin, he pulled out his keys. He removed the padlock and pulled the security bar down, then opened the metal lid covering the other side. Crouching down to pick up the slimy buffet scraps, Dan grabbed one disgusting chunk after another. He tossed them over his shoulder into the bin without looking, presuming they’d make it inside as he worked his way around.

  “Shit, shit, shit,” he muttered.

  Grimacing as he tried to pick up a particularly slithery piece of gristle, Dan felt a drop of liquid hit his neck but wiped it off and continued work. After a moment, another, more substantial drop splashed onto his neck. He looked upward into the fog at the anaemic glow of the sodium vapour and screamed, “Shitty freakin’ light!”

  It seemed that when the light wasn't making him play Stevie Wonder in the darkness, it was making like Niagara Falls and dripping water down his neck. And it wasn't just over at this light with the water, no, it was a problem over near the reclaim barrel as well. He almost always got a splash of water down his neck from the leaky rain gutter when he was over there, too. Just one more thing fanning the flames of his job dissatisfaction, he smiled ruefully. He just couldn’t win, and wherever he went, Lewis Luck was all around him. He couldn’t seem to shake it -- anything that could go wrong did go wrong.

  “This is it, I’m so done with this job,” he groused. But he kept working, crawling around on his knees on the ice, picking up the last few scraps off the ground. Soon, he found himself on the other side of t
he garbage bin, well away from the reach of the dripping light. Still on his knees, he reached out, his hand closing on the edge of the last shredded garbage bag. Another dribble spattered down onto his neck, quickly followed by a small torrent of liquid. It was as if the light had moved over top of him while he wasn’t looking in order to dribble all over him again. He touched the fluid -- warm and slick to the touch, not how the water from melting ice and snow off the lamp usually felt.

  As if reading his thoughts, the sodium vapour overhead crackled and buzzed, surging to life once more. The garbage bag still grasped in one hand, Dan turned and looked up into the light, and his stomach shrivelled into a small, hard ball.

  A mountain of matted, grey, fur stood behind him. Thick-muscled shoulders supported a massive, sharply-sloping head which peered hungrily down at him through the fog. The beast’s mouth flew open and long stringy ropes of saliva splashed down into Dan’s upturned face. He stared dumbstruck, frozen to the spot like a deer caught in a car’s headlights. Row upon row of spittle-slicked razor teeth gleamed in the now-brightening light of the sodium vapour, once again surging toward overload.