This story was originally submitted for an anthology about tropes, especially overused ones, and purposely uses several for effect. Sadly, the story wasn’t published in the anthology, though I still though it was a fun thing to try and write. Trying not to avoid the tropes made it pretty interesting as a writer.
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“All I’m saying is, it doesn’t make any sense to let a dead man near the fryer,” John said. “They won’t even know they caught on fire.”
“We aren’t here to tell them how to cook their food,” Mark said, looking behind the counter at the dead man. “We just need to see if McGill was right for this place.”
As they waited in line to order their food, they continued to watch the dead move around behind the counter. Back and forth, slowly sulking from one machine to the next. This one making ice cream cones, that one flipping burgers, another piling trash in the corner, a constant shuffling of the dead bringing food to the living.
Mark and John stepped forward as the line shifted again. They were still a few people away from ordering their food, watching now both the dead and the living.
“So, the dead here go about cooking up dead animals,” John chuckled, “only to serve it to the living. Circle of life?”
“Or death, maybe. I mean, Clucker’s could have built their restaurant anywhere. But no, they had to build on a native burial ground. And they only moved the headstones. And, on top of all that, the radioactive satellite landed in their parking lot, waking them all up. It’s like a bad movie, and here we are,” Mark said.
John looked up at the menu, smiling. “Well, they do have good chicken.” The children at the front of the line gave a happy clap, grabbed their food from the indifferent cashier of the dead, and ran along. The line shuffled ahead, John and Mark now just a couple of people from the front.
Mark looked over to John. “Why did McGill have to die here anyway? Didn’t eternal rest ring a bell for him?”
“I don’t think he quite planned it that way,” John said. “Having a massive heart attack at the bench over there wasn’t what he was thinking about.”
Mark shook his head back and forth. “He was thinking about his greasy, bacon-filled triple burger and bushel of fries. Let’s face it, death is exactly what he was courting.”
John laughed, and thought about McGill. In life, Mcgill had been four hundred pounds of insatiable eating machine. Nothing was off his radar, and often the unhealthiest thing on the menu was his favorite. Forty years of eating killed him, and the triple burger tipped the scales.
What no one knew was that McGill was part native, enough so that the curse of the burial ground made him rise again. He was now part of the Clucker’s dead, somewhere in the back of the store.
His death made him locally famous, the only person to have died in the restaurant and rise again. Several others tried, for various reasons, to become immortal. Most of them were either depressed, overly religious, or just off their nut.
Some tried slitting their wrists in the bathroom. Others brought weapons to shoot themselves, and one sad man tried to blow himself up. It never occurred to any of them that they could just put in a job application.
John saw the applications over on the counter, and chuckled. “Do you remember that joker that stabbed himself in the chest a few weeks back?”
Mark smiled, and looked behind the counter at the other, living employees that also worked here. “The one that cried like a baby in that video, when they told him about living staff members? I might have watched that a few more times than was healthy.”
The people in front of them took their food and walked away. Mark and John stepped forward, looking at the dead cashier in front of them. The cashier’s eyes were as dried up as the rest of her dusty, gray skin, but she still seemed to stare at them. The bright red Clucker’s outfit stood in sharp contrast to her muddled appearance.
Mark looked up at the menu again. “I’d like a number four, large size, with the chicken bits on the side, and a large iced tea.” He looked over to John, indicating he was finished ordering.
“I’d like the special, hold the onions, and a cup for water,” John said. “I’d like to see McGill McGee too, if I could.”
Dead or not, the cashier’s eyes seemed to roll in her head. She let out a quiet, grunty sigh, let her shoulders drop, and turned to one of the other dead clerks. She grunted a few times, and then turned back to the men. “Eh perr chaa,” she said, pointing towards the display.
Mark reached in his pocket, found the right card, and swiped it through the machine in front of them. It beeped at him, giving the message, “Please retry card.” Mark swiped it a few more times, getting the same response. He looked up at the cashier.
The cashier’s head was now leaning to the side. Her shoulders rose, slumped again, and she turned back to one of the living managers. “Ugh,” she grunted.
The manager was the exact opposite of the gray dead. His uniform, and his cheeks, were brightly colored. He was peppy, smiling from ear to ear with eyes like headlights. “How can I help you today, friends!”
Mark very nearly said, “Ugh”, himself. “Your machine doesn’t seem to like my card.”
“I can take care of that! Hand it here, sir.” The manager took the card, and ran it through the cashier’s machine instead. This time it worked, and the receipt started popping out as the manager handed Mark’s card back.
The manager smiled more broadly as Mark took back his card. “Thank you so much for your patience, sir, and have a wonderful day!”
“Thank you,” Mark said. “Actually, while you are here, we’re hoping to see our friend McGill. Or, well, former friend I suppose.” He flashed a quick smile at the manager, hoping it looked friendly enough.
The manager’s smile faltered. “He doesn’t work here any more.”
Mark and John both looked over at the manager, incredulously. For a moment they were speechless, until John finally muttered, “come again?”
The manager nodded to the right, and all three shuffled away from the other customers. The men simply stared at the manager, not knowing the right question. Seeing their confusion, the manager whispered, “come with me.”
He walked around the end of the counter, and walked to a table in a far, quiet corner of the restaurant. Mark and John followed him, sitting across the table. “How,” Mark started, “do you possibly fire the dead?”
The manager leaned across the table, trying to keep his voice down. “Since the… incident, we’ve noticed that there are still things from their original lives that the dead do. Mostly it’s little things, small actions that don’t really matter. Sally, the cashier you met? She always tries rolling her eyes, even if they aren’t there any more. Those kinds of things.”
The two men turned and looked at Sally. She was angled towards them, finishing up with a customer. As she looked their direction, her shoulders slumped a little, her head rising slightly with a subtle motion in her eye sockets.
“See,” said the manager, “and she’s usually more obvious than even that. I get the feeling she was a teenager when she died.”
They turned back to the manager. Mark took a deep breath, and after a quick look around him leaned forward. “What did you do with him? Did you kill him again or something?”
“No, no,” the manager said as he raised his palms to them. “Nothing like that. We’re not even sure that any sort of final death is possible. We’ve seen some try.”
John perked up when he heard that. “Do you mean the one that was blown up by the cops? I heard they reburied it.”
The manager looked around, raising himself up to make sure no one was close enough to hear him. He sat back down, leaning into the table again. “He’s in the back, in a box. We never knew what to do with the remains. It still shuffles every so often, it gives me the willies late at night.”
Both men reached up to scratch their foreheads, not quite slapping their heads in disbelief. Eternity in a box, eternity working fast food, it’s quite the afterlife these corpses were having.
John motioned with his hands for the manager to keep going. With a quick peek over the men’s shoulders, he did. “He wouldn’t stop eating things. You probably know that the dead don’t need to eat, right?”
The long lack of an answer and solemn looks on each man’s face told the manager that yes, indeed, they understood.
“Okay, okay, sorry,” the manager said. “The problem was, McGill would not stop eating. He’d be fine for awhile, working away at the fryer or the burger station. Then he would just start shoving handful after handful of food into his mouth. He wouldn’t stop until…”
The manager looked out the window. They waited patiently for a few moments, before John finally said, “and?”
The manager looked back at them. “Since the dead don’t eat, it all just came right back up. Everywhere.” He looked down, shaking his head back and forth. “It wasn’t wet either, like ours. It was mostly dry. The little bits made it into everything. Into the food on the shelves, on the equipment, other zombies, even food going out to customers. One little girl came back crying, McGill’s tongue in her chicken fingers.”
Mark chuckled, then stifled it when the manager gave him a sharp look. John had turned towards the window instead, trying his hardest not to burst out in laughter. Mark gave a him an elbow in the side, and after clearing his throat John stopped.
“Look, I have to get back to work,” the manager said as he started to slide out of the booth. Just before he stood up, John quickly said, “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean anything by it. Please continue.”
The manager looked over at both of them, contemplating what he should do. He took a deep breath, and slid back over his seat towards the center. He gave a stern look to both men, who in return sheepishly mouthed their apologies.
“We clearly couldn’t keep him on food duty, so we moved him to janitorial. At first, we tried having him deal with the constantly full garbage bins. That went about as well as you can guess. He would eat a bunch of it, turn, and BOOM! Throw it all back up on the closest table. We’re still paying one kid’s psych bill.”
“After that, we took him away from the front altogether. He was cleaning the women’s bathroom one day, when a seven year old came screaming out of there, going on and on about an octopus man. It turns out he had tried to eat the mop, and couldn’t quite throw it up. Each mop strip was flying out and around his mouth, and it terrified her.”
Mark tried to hold back his laugh. “That would even terrify me.” Both men put their heads down on the table, trying to hold in their wild laughter. This time, perhaps realizing how silly it all sounded, the manager at least smiled.
The men composed themselves, and looked back up at the manager. He stared at them for a few moments, then decided to go on.
“We thought he should go somewhere else, we were kind of hoping that taking him off the premises would work. None of dead had ever tried to leave the restaurant before, not even the parking lot. It’s not like some horror movie where all the zombies wander around, they didn’t seem to have any interest in leaving. He wouldn’t wander away on his own.”
The manager looked out the window, and gently pointed out the window. “Have you been to Gilbert Park down the way, maybe a mile?”
“Sure,” Mark said, “we go sledding there sometimes in the winter. The kids love the hills, steep but not too steep.”
“It’s a fenced area, and we thought he’d be fine, yet contained there. He showed up two days later with a raccoon tail hanging out of his mouth, and “Ded” spray-painted on his back.”
John quickly said, “at least he found the smart kids.” He had to put his head back down at that.
The manager gave a sigh, and waited patiently for John to get over his so-called humor. When John finally looked back up, he continued.
“We thought if we went far enough, maybe he couldn’t come back. So we piled him into the back of the truck, and drove to him to Newbed Lake. We chained him to a tree, and left him there.”
Mark sat up, and leaned into the table. “You chained him to a tree? That’s maybe six hours from here, you didn’t think the distance alone was enough?”
“I wasn’t taking that chance, I didn’t want him finding his way again,” the manager said. “At worst, we thought he would get out and do the whole ‘wandering the earth thing’ that you see on TV.” He pushed back from the table, leaning back into the bench seat more. He looked at the men, then looked away out the window again. His hand rested on the table, his fingers tapping slightly.
John noticed the movement. “There’s more for Mr. Kung Fu, isn’t there? We’re this far, let’s have it.”
The manager thought for a moment, then leaned back up. “While he was gone, the strangest things started happening.”
John shook his head, and shrugging his shoulders said, “You really are going to have to elaborate on the word strange, especially here.”
Raising his hand to his face, the manager slowed rubbed downward. He looked around again, but no one had come any closer. “Accidents started happening. Weird ones. One of the dead lost his hand at the fryer. A man slipped and fell on a package of crackers. Weird things.”
Mark looked at the manager. “Neither of those things sound weird, just unlucky. That doesn’t prove any–”
“We don’t serve crackers here,” the manager interrupted. “And by lost, I mean literally we couldn’t find that dead man’s hand. One second he was cooking with it, the next he’s just standing there trying to grab the handle with his wrist. We spent half an hour looking into the fryers, even under them. It just disappeared.”
“All kinds of weird things kept happening. The mop handle was broken, half found on the roof and half in the back of the freezer. A dog was found yapping all alone in the dumpster that had just been cleared, and locked, ten minutes before. One day, all of the menus were gone. Even the one way back in my desk drawer.”
“We decided to drive to the lake and bring him back to the restaurant. By the time we made it there, he had eaten dozens of branches, lots of bugs, his clothes, and most of three rabbits.”
“Not that I want to see a naked zombie,” John started, “but he is still in back?”
The manager hesitated, but finally let it out with a heavy breath. “He’s locked to a couple of pipes near the back door. He almost gave the night manager a heart attack when she came in. I don’t think she expected a naked dead man staring at her.”
John looked back towards the kitchen, but couldn’t see McGill. Luckily, the back door was out of sight of the public side of the restaurant, or there would have been a lot more commotion. He turned back to the table, noticing that Mark was also turning back around.
“The weird things stopped happening once we had him back on the property, but now we don’t know what to do. He’s obviously a part of the place now. I can’t leave him chained there forever, eventually he’ll just come apart and make a mess.”
Both men thought about it as they watched the manager, who had no answers. Mark turned around towards the kitchen, while John decided to offer his own solutions.
“What if you just buried him in the back lot?”
“I can’t have that on my conscience. The thought of burying something and have it still moving underground is horrendous.”
“Wrap him plastic wrap, and keep him chained? He won’t come apart that way.”
“And terrify anyone who ever comes through the back door? Pass.”
“Burn him up?”
“If the place goes nutty when he’s just away, what happens when he’s permanently gone? No.”
“Chain him up out front then, and give him one of those twirly signs to wave!”
“I don’t think the families that visit here want to see someone chained up. Or one that falls apart when the wind blows, that might ruin their appetite.”
Mark turned back to the table. He looked around at both of them, and with a slight smile said, “I think that’s it, the parts business.”
Before the manager could object, Mark stood up and started walking towards the kitchen. As he passed by an open trash container, he grabbed the bag out of it and headed to the back. Sally rolled her dusty eye sockets again as he passed her.
John and the manager were trying to catch up, but Mark had enough of the lead to get to the back first. The dead, moving back and forth to keep serving customers, kept getting in their way as they tried to catch up.
They finally caught up to Mark, now standing near the back door. Just as the manager said, chained right near the door was McGill. Mark had unchained one of McGill’s arms, and held the bag up to him. McGill’s glossy eyes were wide, and he was quickly shoving handful after handful of trash into his mouth.
Dumbfounded, the two men stood watching as McGill suddenly leaned back to throw it all up. With a great belch he opened his mouth, just as Mark put the whole bag right in front of McGill’s face. Out came the trash, only now it was in tiny shreds and mashed bits.
When Mcgill stopped, Mark lowered the bag and looked back at the manager. He looked at John, who shared the still dumbfounded look on his face as the manager. He looked back at the manager, hoping for acknowledgment. “Well?”
The manager closed his mouth, swallowed, and continued to look dumbfounded. “Well what?”
Mark waited, but neither of the others would see what he saw. He finally blurted out, “compost!”
With only the barest motions of figuring it out, Mark finally explained it to them. “You take Mr. Eat-It-All here, put him in back with all the trash, and let him chew it into confetti. You either sell it as compost, or at the very least have a lot smaller trash to pack up.”
Both the manager and John seemed to understand, slowly nodding. The manager moved over towards McGill, unchaining him from the wall. He opened the back door, and led McGill outside.
On the ground were a few forgotten milk crates. The manager turned them over, and had McGill sit down on them. He then took the trash bag from Mark, laying it down in front of McGill. The dead man leaned over, grabbed a handful of garbage, and started eating.
The manager found a few large boxes in the back room of the restaurant, and put them down in front of McGill. He was very nearly covered by McGill’s next outburst, managing to move just in time. “There. Most of it went in the box, I’d say that’s good enough for now.”
Mark and John watched as McGill went back and forth, eating and throwing up. Over and over again, McGill went through the trash, and the manager seemed pleased enough. He motioned for them to go back inside. At the door, he took a few more trash bags out of the nearby dumpster, and dropped them in front of McGill.
“As long as we keep him at it with fresh bags,” the manager said, “it should be fine.” They let the door close behind them as they walked in, the manager picking up the chains on the way. He put the chains on a cabinet, and led the men back to the front of the restaurant. Sally turned away from them as they walked by, shoulders slumping again.
“Thanks gents, I appreciate it! I just realized you didn’t get to eat, one sec.” The manager moved back to the counter, talking to one of the living staff. A minute later, she handed the manager two bags of food and a small book.
“Here’s your lunch, and a fat book of coupons to go with it,” the manager said. “I hope you’ll still come back and dine with us.”
Mark looked at the manager, taking the bags of food from him. “Thanks, and we definitely will. At least we’ll come back and see how McGill is doing.”
“You’re always welcome,” said the manager.
Mark and John turned and went out the automatic doors, walking through the parking lot towards John’s car. As they reached it, they both glanced towards the back of the restaurant. They could just see the shadow of McGill, a stream of confetti erupting in the shadows.
“Maybe death will make those bad habits useful,” Mark said.
“It sure looks like it. We’ll check back next week, how about that?”
They sat down in their seats, closed the doors, buckled up, and headed down the road. They started eating just as they passed Gilbert Park, chuckling at the whole story.
In the back lot, McGill was picking up another pile of garbage to eat. His glossy eyes ignored the detached hand in the pile, slightly fried and covered with peanut oil, as he shoved it into his mouth.
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Copyright 2025 Russell Dickerson. All rights reserved.
