It all started because I had to go to the bathroom.
I was on my way home after having worked a double and if I had just gone before I left work, it wouldn’t have been a problem. I was in such a hurry to get home because I knew I was going to have to go back and do it again in eight hours. My relief had called out about thirty minutes before my shift ended, and though the manager was sympathetic, he said I had to stay unless I could find someone to work for me. Eight hours later, I staggered out the front door and into my car so I could go home and pass out in time to do it again tomorrow.
I was about halfway home when I was struck with the overwhelming urge to use the bathroom. It wasn’t one of those” you can hold it” kind of warnings. It was a “ You are going to pee in the toilet or pee in your pants, but you only have about two minutes or so to pull the trigger on that decision.” kind of warnings. I was about twenty minutes from home, and every place I passed on the way was dark and locked up for the night.
I had just about decided to pull over to the side of the road when I saw the comfortable glow of a Dollar General sign in the distance. I pulled in, figuring if it was actually open I’d use their bathroom, and if not I’d just go behind the building. It was about 10: 30 at night, and I was surprised when I saw that the OPEN sign was lit up. The sign was a little different too, not the usual Dollar General logo, and as I got closer, I saw that I had pulled into a Dollar General Beyond.
It wasn’t a type of Dollar General I was familiar with, but beggars could hardly be choosers.
I heard the comfortable ding of the automatic door as I walked inside and it put me at ease. The personal speakers that some manager had rigged into the sound system were playing soft rock from one of the local stations, and the overhead fluorescents flickered and crackled in a way that makes you think they were just about to go out. The doors closed behind me with an almost ominous thump, but I shook it off as my bladder throbbed again. I found a tired-looking blonde woman standing behind the counter and she seemed barely coherent. She didn’t even look at me when I walked in, and when I asked for the bathroom key, she turned her head minutely and offered me a fluorescent pink flyswatter with a key hooked to the bottom.
I nearly ran to the bathroom, slipping the key in as I opened the door and paused in confusion.
I opened the door to find another Dollar General.
It was the same as when I went in. The same stagnant soft rock played over the speakers. The same fluorescent buzzed overhead. The same tired salt and pepper fake linoleum scuffed underfoot. I was a little mesmerized as I stepped inside, the feeling of vertigo momentary but awful as I let the door snap shut behind me. My need to pee was forgotten as I looked around, and I would be too distracted to remember it for a while.
There were only two differences between this Dollar General and the one I had stepped out of.
One was the disappearance of the blonde woman. I had thought maybe I had just gotten turned around somehow, just a tired trick of the mind until I walked up to the counter. The woman was gone, but it wasn’t something that seemed odd right away. She had probably gone into the office to count the drawers so she could go home, and I rang the bell on the desk as I called for help. I rang it a dozen or so times, calling loudly for someone, but no one ever came out. I jumped the counter then, but the office behind it was empty. I checked the back, checked every aisle, but they were empty too.
The second difference was that all the doors out of the store were locked and refused to budge.
It was getting too weird by now, and I really wished I had just peed behind the store. I went to the doors and pushed on them, looking for a lock or something, but there was nothing on the smooth surface. There was no mechanism to unlock the door, either. The door was simply unmoving. I went into the back, meaning to go out the backdoor, but that door was also locked.
After about thirty minutes of looking for a key or some way out, I sat down on the counter and decided that maybe I had been locked in for the night. The blonde had looked half brain-dead and had probably just left suddenly and locked me in. If she had, then why leave the lights and the music on? I pondered it for a few minutes, but eventually, I just shrugged and decided to call the police so they could come get me. I didn’t want one of the cops to drive by on a routine patrol and think I was stealing. What's more, I had to be back at work before Dollar General opened up. My boss was not going to be happy if I was late and was unlikely to believe I was trapped in a Dollar General. So I took out my cell phone, but when I dialed 911 all I got was weird static. I dialed a few more numbers, but each time I did the static got louder and angrier, and eventually, I stopped trying.
The 5G, however, still worked so I guess that's lucky for you guys.
I decided that if I couldn’t reach them, I would at least tell them what was going on. I opted to make a sign so that if someone saw me they wouldn’t think I was here robbing the place. So I set about looking for something to make a sign with, and luckily for me, it was a Dollar General. About two minutes later, I had a sign made out of construction paper taped to the door, letting them know that I was stuck in here and needed help.
After that, I stepped away from the door and tried to decide what to do now?
My bladder groaned again and I remembered why I had stopped here in the first place.
I opened the door to the bathroom and, hey, wouldn't you know it, but there was another Dollar General in there.
I must have opened the bathroom door and stepped through about four times before I just decided to go in the water fountain.
My business completed, I decided to have a bite. I walked around, finding some cold sandwiches and chips, a soda, and a little ice cream, and took it to the front. The self-checkout wouldn’t work so, in the end, I just left some money on the counter and figured I’d pay the difference when they opened tomorrow.
As I sat eating, the food balanced in my lap as the law chair I’d found allowed me to eat off something other than the floor, I found myself feeling oddly uncomfortable. This wasn't the kind of place you were supposed to eat in, it was tantamount to camping in a carwash, and it felt like something was watching me as I munched my food. I had set up near the door and as I found my eyes straying back to it again and again I noticed something else strange. I was next to a pretty busy road, and approaching midnight or not I should have seen headlights of some kind by now. We were right beside a pretty busy highway, and the idea that not so much as a log truck of a delivery vehicle had cruised by all night was very strange.
It was then that I noticed, after looking back at the door for about the tenth time in two minutes, that my sign was gone.
I left my food in the chair, thinking maybe it had fallen down, but it was nowhere to be found either. The tape I had used to stick it up there, the markers I had left on the counter, even the package of posterboard was gone. I walked around saying hello again, thinking someone had come and found my mess before cleaning it up, but I was still alone in the store. I made a new sign and hung it up in the window, and as I returned to my slightly melted ice cream I kept looking back at it.
I looked at it mistrustfully, waiting for it to disappear again, but it stayed stuck to the door just as the last one had.
Until it had suddenly gone missing, that was.
After finishing my little dinner, I grabbed some bedding from an endcap near the middle of the store and some chair pads from the same area. I figured I wouldn’t get more than a few hours before someone came in and asked what the hell I thought I was doing, and settled in to get some sleep. I tried to send a text to my boss to let him know what was going on, but the text just sat there unsent.
I sighed and closed my eyes, getting comfy as I tried to fall asleep.
I nodded off eventually and woke up ten hours later to much the same scene.
I was a little concerned when I looked at my phone and saw what time it was, but I was even more concerned when I realized the sun still wasn’t up. No one had tried to call me and no one had arrived to ask me what the hell I was doing, and that was when I sat down to write this. As I said, the 5g seems to work very well, but I can’t so much as make a phone call from my phone. The outlets seem to work as well, and there are plenty of chargers here to keep my phone from dying. I don’t seem to be in any danger of starving either. I have food, water, and power, but no way out. I don’t know how long I can stay here or wherever I am, but it appears I have found something incredible.
Incredible and inescapable.
It’s funny. My friends and I used to joke about the number of Dollar Generals in any given place. They always seemed to get closer and closer to each other and I once made a joke about how one day I’d turn down an aisle and find myself in a completely different Dollar General. Enter the back area? A new Dollar General location. Fall through a hole in the floor? You’d drop right into a newly constructed Dollar General. We’d laugh about it over our beers, but it seems a lot less funny now.
I’ll keep you all posted, I suppose this would count as my first day in Dollar General Beyond, and I’ll let you know if I discover anything new.
If you come across one, I cannot stress enough to avoid Dollar General Beyond at all costs.
If you do, for god sake don’t enter the bathroom.
There are forces at work that I don’t think anyone understands.
Anyways I came across mana cube on a dream video.
