Friday was the busiest night of the week for the Colonel’s Secret Coterie cell, all five of them crammed into the restaurant awkwardly sandwiched between the community college and the interstate. Fonz at the register, passing out freebies to the cops who always swung by for a magickally charged pick-me-up before a high risk warrant service, mouth always two sentences ahead of his brain but making them laugh and smile all the same. Mick on the drive through, employing his best customer service accent and killing the mic to lisp out the orders in his natural deep southern falsetto. Orlock, stripped to the waist, mesh vest like a hairnet for his torso as he slaved over the fryers. Nadia weaving neatly between them, never shouting if she didn’t have to, speaking just loud enough to be easily heard over the endless machines that shrieked and hissed and buzzed and chimed.
And at the heart of it all, the Loyal Laborer, the hero of the scene: Ozzy Packard. Thin sleeves of plastic plastered to his hands with sweat, which melted on contact with hot metal and had to be painfully scraped free and replaced. The snap of boiling oil where it leaped to kiss his face, always narrowly missing his eye. Enormous sacks of potatoes, bags of drink syrup, ice, chicken, bread, so light they might have been air. The actual air heated to the temperature of blood so that it felt like his own body, the noise blending so that orders for fries and sandwiches and cardboard buckets filled with chicken melded with his own inner monologue. A mop detaching congealed fat from the tile. Enlightenment. Oneness with the world around him. The headache gone. The bone-deep weariness gone. The pain so thoroughly obliterated by devotion to the task that he didn’t feel the oncoming fit until he was already on his back.
