Ted approached Queequeg's and decided that the best way to avoid Michelle's wrath over his now-seventeen-minute break would be to try to sneak in the back and pretend he'd been back there arranging bags of sugar or something.
He walked through the filthy alley behind Queequeg's, squeezed past the rusting dumpster and winced at the smell, then cursed as something brown dripped from the dumpster's black plastic lid onto his apron. He opened the back door and beheld stainless steel counters, the fridge, a mop bucket, giant jugs of ammonia and giant foil bags of coffee. He threaded his way past the cleaning supplies and giant bags of coffee, and pushed the stainless-steel swinging door to the front. The door refused to swing open wide enough to allow him access to the front.
"Shit," Ted said under his breath, "I bet fucking Michelle did this, just so I'll have to pound on it and then she can come and yell at me about my seventeen minutes. Shit!" At the last word, he pressed his shoulder against the door and shoved with all his weight. It moved a crack. He shoved it again and again until there was just enough room for him to squeeze through. He had made so much noise it was going to be completely obvious he was late, but at least he'd deny Michelle the satisfaction of having him pound on the door.
He squeezed through, and immediately tripped over whatever had been blocking the door. "Fuck!" he said as he went sprawling. "Michelle, you'd bett—" He stopped as he realized that Michelle was what he had tripped over. Well, Michelle's big, long body anyway. Ted felt a sick rush of adrenaline such as he hadn't felt in a decade, and he screamed—Michelle's apron was soaked in blood, and Ted felt it, still warm, seeping through the fibers of his clothes from the floor.
His brain shut down. What was happening was clearly impossible, which meant that he was actually in bed having a nightmare, and if he could only scream loud enough, maybe he'd wake himself up. He kept screaming. He stood up and looked around. He had a second to register the fact that there were two corpses at the corner table, and that the new artful splatter pattern, red against the orangey-yellow walls, was probably their brains. Something dripped off the wall and landed with a wet splat. Ted continued to scream. A man in a suit lay in front of the counter, half of his face hanging off of his skull, and intestines drooping out of his abdomen. There was blood everywhere.
All of this took maybe a second. Ted's brain started to kick into gear again, and he was annoyed by the sound of screaming, unaware that it was coming from him. He turned and saw another guy in a suit, Mr. Half-soy, Half-caf, standing in front of him with a gun.
"Where is it? Where the fuck is it, slacker boy? Do you want to die fast or slow?"
Now, this was actually a question Ted had given a fair amount of thought over the last ten years. Not simply the speed at which he wished to die, but whether he wanted to live at all, whether there was any point to his being alive. His grandmother had always told him that God has a purpose for every life, and he figured that his purpose was to dispatch a colony of vampires from a major research university, that God had wanted him to remove that evil from the earth He'd created, and the fact that he was still alive was pretty much of an oversight on the part of the Almighty. And it was a shame that his purpose hadn't been to be the patriarch of an enormous happy family, but most people don't get what they want.
So now a man with dark hair and a gray suit that was covered in blood was pointing a weapon at him and asking him how he wanted to die. If he'd wanted to, Ted might have been able to have a quite lengthy conversation about this issue, but something in him, the part of him that had killed multiple times in one evening ten years ago, woke up for the first time in ten years and asserted that it would rather not die at all.
Without thinking, Ted grabbed a pitcher of milk that still had steam coming from it off the cappuccino machine and tossed it in Half-caf's direction while diving under the counter. The gunshot and the scream happened almost simultaneously, and Ted was showered with broken glass and crumbs of muffins and brownies as the baked-goods counter exploded over his head.
Half-caf was still screaming, and Ted said, "I've killed a lot worse than you. I killed a fucking colony of vampires—vampires, man, not some pussy with a gun, vampires! With a fucking axe! So Don't!" As he said this, Ted saw himself grabbing the gigantic stainless-steel urn of Decaf Sumatra off the warmer and tossing the steaming contents over the counter onto Half-caf's prone form, "Fuck!" And now it was the Ethiopian Yirgacheffe, "With!" And good old Colombian to finish, "Me!"
Half-caf was still screaming and would hopefully be covered in third-degree burns. Ted turned to run away, then stopped. He grabbed a cloth and wiped the foam off the wand. He hadn't liked Michelle, but her insistence that the milk always be steamed fresh had probably just saved his life, and he wasn't going to pay her back by letting her be found with a dirty wand. He ran through the back room and out the back door, and, with no plan in mind, he ran for the harbor. He reached the fountain at Post Office Square—jets of water hitting columns of slate. A few early lunchers were already gathering on the benches that ringed the fountain, and they gaped as he ran through it, watching the blood diluting and running off him, staining little streams of water pink until they swirled down the drain. He ran again, past men and women in suits and the odd family of tourists. Finally he could see the Boston Harbor between the buildings ahead of him. He came to Long Wharf and ran past the tourists signing up for whale watches, the school kids filing into the glass-and-steel aquarium, past more tourists strolling obliviously out of the lobby of the hotel on his left, all the way to the end of the pier, where he stood, looking out at the boats going back and forth across Boston Harbor and the planes coming in low to the airport across the water. He vomited until there was nothing else left in his stomach, and then he just heaved over and over again, while strings of bilious mucous dripped down from his mouth and made iridescent streaks on the surface of the water.
He wiped his mouth on his damp, cold apron and decided he could not continue to wear it. He reached back to untie it so he could throw it in the trash, and as he took it off, he felt the CD in the pocket. He grabbed the CD and stuffed it into the right butt pocket of his pants, then stuffed the apron into a garbage can overflowing with Dunkin' Donuts cups, and dialed Laura's number.
"What's up, Ted?" she answered, and Ted suddenly found himself unable to speak. He knew that the minute he opened his mouth, he'd start to cry. He tried whispering.
"Laur," he said. "I'm in trouble."