This year I am working on a story called Bob vs. The Alien Slug Monsters. Instead of an outline I have a basic list of plot points I want to cover between meeting Bob and sending him off to fight the king of the slugs. There is more of a cast of characters than an actual outline, so we will see how the story develops. And with that intro we continue with Bob Versus the Alien Slug Monsters…
Day 73: Bob slipped out of the booth and made his way to the back of the diner.
Bob slipped out of the booth and made his way to the back of the diner. He waited by the back door, listening. There was no sound he could hear. He adjusted the lock on the knob to make certain he could slip back into the diner using the back door if need be. When he knew he was not going to be locking himself out, Bob Cracked the door open slowly. He peered through the slid he allowed in the open door.
From here he could see the back door of the Bowl-a-Rama. He half expected that since it appeared to be used as the slug headquarters they would have posted a guard. If they had, he wondered off from his post.
Bob listened. There was no sound of anything moving. Certainly not the slugs and their mechanical disks. ‘I so don’t want to do this,’ Bob thought. He had never been the hero type.
‘And I am not being a hero now,’ he reminded himself. “I am just sneaking into the back and seeing what is going on.’ He patted his trusty and currently heavy bag of salt. ‘If I see anything I have enough salt to throw at them and run.’
He thought about the weapons they carried. ‘As long as they don’t shoot me,’ he corrected. Bob felt his insides quiver. ‘They won’t even see me,’ he reminded himself. ‘Remember when you used the back mechanical sections to avoid Austin and his friends? They never saw you there and you watched them until they left.’
Bob wasn’t sure if reminding himself how he hid from his middle school bully was considered an acceptable pep talk, but it did help calm him down. ‘After all Austin knew I was there somewhere and the slugs don’t.’
Realizing that this quiet silence was probably going to end soon, Bob opened the door wider and slipped out of the diner. He walked briskly towards the back of the Bowling alley. Only as he approached did he think that the door might be locked. There was some relief to see that the door looked banged up. The lock was removed and the hole where the doorknob would be was filled in. Bob thought of their filaments the slugs used to repair other things and guessed that was what happened here. The door and it’s frame were bent slightly and even though the destroyed lock was removed and the door repaired, it was still slightly bent. Bob avoided touching the repaired areas and used a finger in the dent of the door to pull the door open. It swung easily and Bob slipped inside.
He didn’t stop once he was in the building, instead moving blindly down the dark corridor to the door leading to the mechanicals space. The key was hidden on the top of the door frame, just as it always had been and in the darkness, Bob took the key, used his thumb to find the keyhole in the doorknob and unlocked the door. He slipped inside and put the key in his pocket even as he closed the door behind himself.
The lock on the door snicked shut and Bob let out the breath he was holding. He knew he key would not only let him out of the machine area, but it was a master key that would unlock anything in the building.
‘Providing no one upgraded anything.’ While the Bowl-a-Rama no doubt had some new features since his last visit, Bob doubted they had gone in for a full overhaul. He didn’t know what other doors he might need to unlock, but liked options. He took a deep breath, the scent around him comfortingly familiar.
Ten til Midnight 