The Drive Thru

I’ve worked at every McDonald’s in a forty-mile radius of my house. Over the years, I’ve gotten a reputation as a good “filler” guy. Someone you can call on to deal with sudden absences, firings, and unwanted nightshifts. I’m just about old enough that some of the managers trust me, but I’ve never gone far enough to get a decent promotion. I’ve been stuck in a kind of limbo. My Dad told me it happens. Sometimes if you agree to take the shit jobs, you become so useful to a company that they’ll never fire or promote you. Up until recently that kinda suited me fine. I was on autopilot for a long time and I enjoyed the quiet shifts and the way I was trusted by my bosses without ever being given more responsibility.

But some jobs are too much, even for me. One place, well… I don’t have words. I’ve been there as a customer dozens of times. It’s perfectly normal in the day, but sometimes I get called in to cover the night shift and it’s the worst place I’ve ever been. For a start, they only keep one active member of staff on-site during night shifts. Apparently it’s something to do with policy to always offer 24 hour service, but the people I’ve spoken to have made it clear the manager doesn’t want to keep the store open at night so he sticks to the bare minimum he can get away with.

One solitary person… Every time I think about covering that shift I wonder how the hell anyone could do that job and keep a hold of their sanity. I can’t even understand how anyone let it get that bad, or how anyone could ever think it’s normal. I’ve heard of managers brushing stuff under the carpet but…

I don’t know.

Y’know night shifts are always lonely but this place is something else. It’s on a motorway junction by a small village that never recovered from the recession. Nearby there’s a petrol station that isn’t staffed past 11pm, a Starbucks that never even opened its doors, and a mechanics that I’m pretty doesn’t do a damn thing no matter what time of the day it is. Oh, and a carwash that hasn’t worked since the first Toy Story came out.

So come night time, it’s just us, this little glassy McDonalds with happy mascots and bright lights standing like an island of bright fluorescent light in a sea of sepia darkness. Overhead you’ve got a ramp that leads to the motorway, close by are four dual carriageways that criss-cross an enormous roundabout, and between all of that there are speeding trucks, tricked-out cars zooming past blasting cheap electronic music, and… well there’s nothing else. No fields, no paths, no pavements, no shops, no houses, nothing. This isn’t a place made for humans, it’s made for cars. And I guess that’s why the McDonald’s survived because the drive-thru is always busy.

But at night time it means there’s this horrible atmosphere. Overhead you can hear the cars zooming by, and there are great big lampposts that bathe everything in amber, and the occasional nighttime traveller stopping for a 3am cheeseburger, but that’s it. I’ve never worked anywhere so dead. Some nights, it’s just me and I gotta be honest, it’s terrifying. It’s more than just loneliness, it’s actually terrifying.

There’s something out there.

It sounds stupid, but there is. The first time I turned up the manager took me aside and told me I needed to fill a cup up with fat from the fryer and leave it by the open drive-thru window. I laughed but he just groaned, grabbed a nearby cup and filled it up anyway. He put it by the window and told me I couldn’t move it. I was expecting some kind of banter, thinking it was a practical joke. But he didn’t even bother. It was like he just couldn’t be fucked to explain it, so he just did it himself.

That was my first night. Nothing happened, not really. Traffic died down, staff started going home, and bit-by-bit things died down until the only sound was the occasional passing engine. I started to feel severely isolated, even a little scared, which was a weird feeling to have at work. I was standing by the open window looking out on the drive-thru and the darkness on the other side started to feel like it was more than just shadow. The drive-thru was just this swervy little u-bend covered by tall hedges and at night it got no light. It was like a solid sheet of black, a total absence of light, and I was standing so close I almost touch the darkness. I wanted to reach out and shut the window or just get myself as far away as I could, but I also kept reminding myself that I was freaking out for no reason.

At least that’s what I thought until I looked down and saw the cup of fat had disappeared.

I remember looking up and staring into the darkness, trying to figure out if I was tripping out over nothing or if the cup of fat really had moved. I felt my fingers start to tingle, and my mouth became dry. But there was nothing standing outside that window. Aside from the wind and sound of passing commuters, there was no one anywhere around except me. I mustered up every ounce of bravery and poked my head out the window and looked left to right, and damn near got decapitated by a car pulling up to the window way too fast, rubber tyres squealing on the road as it slammed to a stop opposite me.

I jumped a mile and suddenly the whole world returned to its boring normal self. It was just a bunch of drunk guys who wound up staying for about half an hour while they repeated their order a dozen times each. By the sixteenth time I’d been asked to remember dips, I was so angry that I’d forgotten all about the cup of fat. After that, I sort of just dismissed all my anxieties. The drunk guys were total idiots, but they did help me feel like my feet were back on the ground and the rest of my shift passed nice and quickly.

I hoped that would be the last of my creepy experiences in that place, but after that things got worse. Despite telling myself that nothing had really happened I kept filling the cup of fat and leaving it by the drive-thru window. Each time I’d leave and come back to find it gone, I’d feel a little anxiety and that made it hard to stay by the open window. I just felt like anything could reach out and grab me, like I could be standing there looking right at something and I wouldn’t even know it.

And the sounds… Sometimes you’d catch the faintest scrape, or shuffle, or hushed breath. It’s like when you know someone’s looking at you, or how you’re not alone in a room. I just knew on some weird instinctual level that there really was something outside in that yawning darkness. Even if it just looked like shadows moving in darkness, I could tell that I wasn’t totally alone.

That’s why I took to staying a little longer after the end of each shift, just to go look outside by the window. Most days I never saw something but sometimes I’d see bits of the hedge looking broken or busted up. Nothing serious, just a few odd snapped twigs, but it definitely looked like someone or something big had scraped up against them. Of course, that could easily be a car or a van so I was never sure. But sometimes I’d see the odd drop of fat running down the leaves, no more than a small drip. But enough to tell me something was out there.

I even managed to get a hold of the security tapes. Unfortunately they were piss-poor quality, and all they show of the drive-thru itself (aside from me standing in a window) is total darkness. You can’t make out a thing. As for the disappearing fat-shake? Well, when that happens all the camera sees is a shadow blotting out the window. When the shadow moves, the cup of fat is gone. I’ve stared at that grainy footage for hours and all I ever really saw was the faintest sense of something big moving in the darkness. But even knowing what I know now, I’m still not sure that’s anything more than my imagination.

There are others, of course. I’ve heard a few strange stories. A while back some girl supposedly went missing from her shift, but a quick google of her name showed a news story where she’d been killed by a violent ex, although no body was found. I spoke to one guy who mentioned a kid finding a nearby drainage ditch filled with hundreds and hundreds of empty McDonald’s drinks, which is supposedly where the cups of fat go. I did try looking one day but never found anything. Then again, it’s a nightmare to walk around here, especially in the day. And I can’t quite bring myself to abandon my shift and go looking at night.

Another story said that it’s common knowledge that if a fat fryer is left for long enough, things start to live in it. One day, years back, some new manager finally went in and ordered a new fat fryer but when they emptied the old one (an ancient piece of kit that I was told had never been cleaned, ever) something black and slimy was left at the bottom. Caked in fat and looking like no animal or person anyone had ever seen, this thing slipped away when no one was looking, leaving a trail of fat between the restaurant and a nearby sewage drain. I did mention this story to one manager and he pulled one hell of a face and told me:

“Yeah I remember that but there wasn’t anything at the bottom of the fryer. Besides nothing could have crawled because we tipped it straight into the drain anyway, so there couldn’t have been a trail.”

Which I took to be a reasonable explanation, although someone else told me that particular manager hadn’t even been in on that day.

But after just a few days of asking around, I had enough stories to fill a book and almost all of them conflicted in some way. None of them ever really made much sense to me. In some ways, they felt more like lazy attempts to fill in the blanks. They were just urban legends, but I wasn’t happy with just tall tales. A few people even asked me: why do I care so much? And the answer was real simple:

Because I had to share my shift with something, and no one could tell me what it was. Something was out there taking that cup of fat!

I tried tying a string around the cup once but came back to it rolled up neatly by the window. Another time I left one empty cup and one full cup, only to find both cups gone when I came back. Later that night the empty one was returned, untouched, outside the front of the restaurant doors. Writing it out now, it all seems benign, playful even. But it wasn’t. I know it’s hard to explain, but it didn’t feel playful, at least not a friendly kind of playful.

For a while I didn’t have anything to back that feeling up. That is until one night I decided to do one more experiment. This time I left the cup further back from the window, by about ten feet. I don’t even know what I was expecting? I just wanted to try and learn something more I guess – something about what was taking the cup. You know the weird thing is, looking back I can tell that people were giving me pretty strong hints to leave it be. It just pissed me off. I go from place to place, never fitting in. They all have their in-jokes and their petty cliques. I just resented that I had to be so directly involved in this one. I mean, I had to be the one who actually put the cup out there, but no one was decent enough to explain why. I think some other frustrations got caught up in it all, and I couldn’t quite bring myself to just leave it be.

I never saw it, at least not all of it. What I remember more than anything was the sound. It’s like the image in my head changes all the time. The details move around and the size and order of events change. But the sound was a constant nightmarish squeal. I remember that sound with perfect clarity, even as the image fades away like a nightmare on waking.

When I came back in that night, having left the cup alone for a few moments, I stopped by the doorway. Nothing had appeared, yet. But a hot gust of wind blew in from outside like an animal’s breath. It tussled my hair and I immediately knew something was wrong. I couldn’t see a thing outside that window, just a veil of black. But I got the sense something was pressed up close to the other side. And then, like a dream, that something reached out, groping towards the corner of where I usually left the cup. It looked like a hand made of elephant skin? It was bony and gnarled, but the skin looked thick and crumpled like the hide of a rhino, except paler. And even though the arm was thin, like really bizarrely thin, the hand had these chubby fingers like an oversized kid’s.

You know I nearly laughed? That can happen during shock. This thing was like a dream. It took a second or two before the fear caught up with me. And when it did I couldn’t even move a muscle. This hand just came out of the darkness and just started swatting around, looking for the cup. And when it couldn’t find it, it didn’t just stop. It kept going. I found my heart racing as it started to strain in my direction. It reached out and slowly started to stretch.

The room filled with a sound like nails on a chalkboard. And I remember thinking that none of this was possible, even as bones and skin grew and pulled themselves out of all proportion. Muscles snapped, skin turned paper-thin, revealing blue spidery veins and slick looking flesh. And eventually even the skin gave way so that tattered flesh and strips of tissue hung off… I don’t even know. It wasn’t bone. It was black, and pitted, like tar rolled into a long thing strip.

One foot, two foot, three, and soon much more. By the time I realised it was going to reach me I started to scream and tried to move backwards but I fell. My mind and body became useless to me and I was just crying hysterically as this fat-fingered monstrosity came closer, my imagination filled with images of me being dragged into the darkness beyond even as I tried to desperately get some purchase on the slippery tile floor.

I kept screaming even after it reached the counter just above me, grabbed the fat, and slowly withdrew back into the darkness, that awful chalkboard screech fading down as the arm disappeared back into shadow.

They found me in the disabled bathroom in the morning. I didn’t remember going in there, but I do remember waking up feeling as though I was still stuck in a nightmare. I opened the door and fled back home and, as if confirming my suspicions, I later found out my manager didn’t say a thing about it to anyone. When I later tried getting some CCTV footage off him he told me it wasn’t available. He knew damn well what had happened. I heard one kid whining about having to clean up after me. When I asked what he meant he talked about the “fucked up paper and rotten chicken” he found all over the floor.

The only thing I ever got out of the manager was when he got frustrated and snapped at me after I threatened to go to the police.

“No one’s been hurt for years!” he cried out. And then suddenly realising what he’d said, he added, “No one’s been hurt. So there’s nothing to report! I’ve tried, plenty of times.”

But I wouldn’t let it go. In the end, you know what he did to get me off his back? He installed bars on the window. They had a little square where you could feed some items through, and they could even be opened from the inside to let us hand out the bigger orders. And then he acted like that was it, job done. But I remembered that hand stretching out and those bars didn’t do much to comfort me. They’d stop a random attacker, sure. But that thing that came out of the darkness?

It wasn’t enough to get me back on my shift. I only had one left, but I still threatened to quit if they tried to make me do it. I only gave in when the manager himself agreed to sit in on it with me. After that, I was told, I’d never have to work in that branch ever again. Reluctantly, I felt like I had to agree. I didn’t exactly have other options and my parents were pretty ruthless when it came to charging me rent. Plus… I don’t know. This is stupid. But I still kinda felt like I was dreaming, y’know? I wanted to wake up. I wanted to prove that this was just a fucked up nightmare.

It was a tense shift. The manager was pissed he had to stay up all night and I was pissed he’d covered up what had happened, so there wasn’t much conversation. The only time we interacted was when he placed the cup of fat by the window and then checked the bars. I took the time to tell him he’d have to stay by the window, because I sure as hell wouldn’t. For a moment he looked like he was going to try and have a go at me, but I think he realised it was pointless and let it go.

After all, it was just one more night, right?

Around half three, I heard a noise from the drive-thru. There was a bang and a loud cry and I rushed to my feet, heart pounding. I burst around the corner only to find the manager stood there swearing loudly, his feet and legs covered in fat. He’d knocked the fucking cup over hadn’t he? Bang, smack, straight down his legs and all the floor. I laughed, which pissed him off, even though I was laughing from relief and not at his misfortune. I tried to explain but he just barked at me to get another cup.

I was filling it up when this time, the screaming came back. I knew on some level this was different, so I didn’t run straight around the corner. I walked, slowly, and turned to find the manager backing up towards me as that grotesque hand flailed around looking for a cup. Immediately the manager turned, saw me, and grabbed the cup I held and threw it in the direction of the window. But it just limply hit the bars and thudded to the floor where the hand, quick as a whip, followed it down. Except the cup had only ever been half-full in the first place.

I’d never had the time to fill it properly.

So those lifeless grey fingers just dabbed at a small pool of fat, somehow managing to look disappointed. And then… it snapped up, like a snake fixing its eyes on prey. The manager and I both looked down at him and saw his legs covered in fat and I immediately started to scream for him take his trousers off. But it was too late. Before they were even around his shins, the sound started. God, it got into your head. It was like a drill piercing your deepest thoughts. It hurt just to hear. And the manager was left trying to pull his fat-soaked trousers off with one hand while he covered his bleeding ears with the other.

And that hand… it just kept coming. When it was a few feet away I grabbed him and started to pull, but we both slipped and fell on some of the fat that had dripped off his clothes. We were both so terrified we were trying to climb over each other just get away. If we’d just taken some time, we probably could have escaped real easy. But something about that hand filled me with a hysterical need to get away.

And just like that it grabbed him. And just as slowly as it had reached out, it started to pull him back in. It dragged him all the way, his screaming desperate and pitiful until finally, he reached the bars.

I don’t think either of us knew what to expect. But just as his knee reached the bars, he looked up at me with wide eyes.

“Open the bars!” he screamed. “Jesus Christ open them now! Open them now!”

I ran forward and tried not to look as I fumbled with the padlock.

“Where’s the keys!?” I cried, only to hear a loud cracking.

His knee had been forced through the bars. Blood was now running copiously down the metal frame and onto the counter top, and the manager’s cries were the worst sound I’d ever heard a human mouth make. His eyes were like marbles, and I realised I’d be lucky if he could manage even a simple word.

And those screams just kept getting louder.

And louder.

And louder.

It never sped up. It dragged him through, and he stayed alive for so long. Even when it pulled his thigh through, leaving long strips of gored fat and muscle dangling from the bone, even when loud thunderous cracks filled the room, even when it pulled so hard his free leg was pushed up against the side of his face, it never slowed down or sped up.

And his screams…

It pulled him through. All the way through. And what was left on the other side looked like blocks of meat and bone. The last thing I saw was his head started to crack and crumple, his face pushed together like a squashed tomato while the skull behind grew elongated and broken. He was long-dead by that point, but somehow he still looked like he was in so much pain.

Eventually, something broke, and I ran screaming into the disabled toilets. When I awoke, guess what I found?

Nothing.

No mess. No blood. No gore. Sometime ago an article was published mentioning how the manager had gone missing, but there are a few managers in this branch and I wonder if one of the others had got here early and cleaned up? Or maybe that thing on the other side did it? I don’t know. Deep down I’d be happy to call it all a dream…

Except you know what I found waiting by my car that morning when I finally left?

An empty McDonald’s cup filled with bloody fat. This wasn’t the kind of fat you’d find from a fryer. No. This was more like the kind you’d strip out of a cadaver, or maybe off a piece of meat. I even heard reports of a fox being found with a bloody shoe in its mouth somewhere close by. Just yesterday, someone posted to Facebook talking about an old McDonald’s uniform found blocking a drainage pipe in the village.

They’re still trying to get me to take over from the manager who went missing. I guess I finally found the shittiest job of all, and they think I’m ideal. Ring ring ring ring ring. The phone keeps going, but I won’t answer. It’s like it’s just another working hazard to be swept under the rug. But I can’t… I can’t possibly go back to that sound. I can't keep serving that awful thing.