Thaw & Serve

So this is what it had come to. Prone on the floor of a convenience store, his face mashed against the frozen Breast-O-Turkey he had picked up for his solitary holiday repast, Mal Spencer railed against his fate. He did so silently, and without moving a muscle, because a rabid delinquent in a ski mask was pointing a gun at his head. Beside him, his shabby briefcase had burst open on impact with the floor, spilling student term papers all over the dirty linoleum tile.

He didn’t want to die this way, not as an adjunct professor at a community college, not as a lonely, aging intellectual clutching the over-processed remains of a creature nearly as benighted as himself. No. It wasn’t fair. He’d tried so hard, first a student and then as a professor, but time and time again, he was passed over for promotion by clowns who favored style over substance.

“Hurry up,” the gunman shouted at the boy behind the cash register. Mal snuck a glance up at the pair. The gunman was stocky, thickly muscled in the shoulders and dressed all in black. Oh God, how cliché.

The young man behind the register was trying hard to keep it together. Mal admired that. His hands shook as he opened the cash register and handed over fistfuls of tens and twenties, but the look on his face was one of brutally enforced calm. With a start that could have cost him his life if the gun-wielding miscreant had not been distracted, Mal realized he knew the boy.