The Worst Thing That Could Happen

I Work as an Obituary Clerk

(Author's Note: This story contains armed assailants in a workplace. While not a story about a mass shooting, it may be distressing for some in light of current events.)

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I'm not going to lie—my job sounds a lot more dramatic than it actually is. You'd think it would involve sitting in a mortuary somewhere, surrounded by the bodies of the deceased are embalmed or cremated or whatever, typing up the last words they'll be remembered by as a crow caws in the distance somewhere. It's nothing like that. I'm a data entry person, basically, at the newspaper. It just so happens that the data I enter is obituaries the funeral homes email to me. While it's not as exciting as it sounds, it is the best job I've had to date. I get to sit at a desk, work at my own pace as long as long as everything is in by the deadline, and I don't have to smile 24/7 at people. After spending a few years in retail hell and fast food hell, it's the best outcome I could've asked for.

The only downside is that I live in a weird area. It's allegedly on the rebound, but there's enough random crime and traffic violations to make it feel like a rougher area. We're not Gotham or anything, but I did drive past two car accidents and a drug bust on my commute in the past two weeks. And when you work at a newspaper, you inevitably find out about the crazy shit going on around two within an hour of it happening. Nothing makes you feel worse about the state of humanity than getting constant press releases about guys being busted for larceny or child porn.

I've tried not to let it get me down, though. I come into work on the weekends, I do my job, I only pay attention to the bad stuff going on if it seems like an immediate threat to me, and I don't stress. But that can only take me so far. The incident last week proved that.

It was on a weekend. Those shifts are always super quiet. I was the only one in the building that day. There had been someone else in accounting or distribution or whatever, but they left after an hour and a half. There weren't a lot of obituaries, either, so I had them all posted quickly. I started going through my work emails while I waited for more to be sent in (or for the deadline to hit, whichever happened first). I hadn't been to the office in a few days, so there were a lot to go through. Most of them were junk, or emails that were important to other people but not me. As I went through the messages, occasionally flagging one for the events calendar or moving it to another folder, I happened across an email from the cops. It was a request to put out an announcement to the public.

Oh, great now what?

Lacking anything better to do, I read it. As it turned out, some guy had committed a triple homicide in a neighborhood on the other side of town. He'd been cornered by the police, but managed to give them the slip. Now they wanted the public's help in finding him. Subject is armed and dangerous. That was what it said. I didn't remember seeing a follow-up email about them having caught the guy in an earlier email, so I forwarded it to our editors, just in case. After that, I went back to deleting emails.

I remember there were a lot of inexplicable letters from vape dealers. It's such a funny thing to remember, considering what was about to happen. I think I remember because I was blocking the third or fourth address trying to get me to buy vape juice when I got a new email. It was an update from the police. Apparently, the guy had been spotted in a different neighborhood not too far from where I worked. That made me nervous. I forwarded that email, too, and texted a few other guys from work on top of that. I tried to play it cool, more for my sanity than theirs, but it was hard. The fact that one of the editors texted me back to remind me that the dark room locked from the inside didn't help matters.

He's not going to break in here, I told myself as I tried to get back to work. Why would he break in here? It's a damn newspaper office. It can't be a good place to hide. No matter how many times I told myself it wasn't going to happen, I couldn't get the thought out of my head that it might. I've always struggled with anxiety and it made getting even the most irrational of worried thoughts hard to shake. It was the reason why I made sure everything I'd brought with me to work was in my backpack and that my backpack was in arm's reach, just in case.