Beep beep
Two simple beeps woke Red. He reached over to the beige alarm clock and gently depressed the wide switch on the top. The alarm quieted, and Red rolled back so that he could lie on his back. He stared at the ceiling for several seconds before throwing off the blanket and getting up. The dim light of predawn filtered through the narrow window on the far corner. This was way before most people woke up, though Red didn’t even think twice about the early time.
He’d been doing this for some time now.
He purposefully walked to his bedroom window and cracked it open. A faint breeze trickled into the room. It chilled his bare chest and carried with it the smells of a city. Car exhausts, hot asphalt, and the ever-present aroma of the Thai noodle shop across the street. But underneath all the smells, there was a faint tinge of rot.
The acrid scent of trash left too long in the sun seeped up from the ground level and oozed into all the nearby apartments. It was subtle—barely recognizable even—but it bothered people. On a subconscious level, it made the day of every single person who walked or lived nearby just a fraction of a percent worse. One day, it wouldn’t exist.
Red’s eyes hardened as he closed the window and got dressed for the day.
He lived alone, a single man in a small apartment in one of the many apartment buildings at the edge of the city. Despite that, his apartment was tidy—not clean, per se, but organized. Everything had a place, and Red easily found everything he needed for the day by the dim light coming in through the window.
Barely five minutes after the alarm rang, Red stepped out of his bedroom into his apartment's living room-kitchen combo.
He froze, then beat a hasty retreat back into his bedroom.
“What the...” Red muttered, rubbing his eyes before poking his head back out of the bedroom.
No. His eyes didn’t deceive him. There was a large glowing arch of shimmering glyphs on the side of his fridge. The glowing runes moved languidly across the stained white fridge and cast an eerie glow onto the kitchen table. For such a mundane apartment, the arch was decidedly otherworldly.
Warily, Red stepped into the room once again. The door didn’t react, simply glowing peacefully as if its existence was the most normal thing in the world. The thought that some vandal had broken into his apartment and spray-painted the door onto his fridge with glow-in-the-dark paint briefly crossed his mind, but that couldn’t be. The glyphs were moving before his eyes.
Red was suddenly struck by the thought that it was strange that he was so sure that it was a door. The glowing hologram was flat without a handle, latch, or even hinges. Even stranger was that the longer he looked at the alien runes, the more he seemed to understand their meaning.
Enter to Progress
A shiver rolled up Red’s spine, though that only set his mouth in a grim line as he approached the door. On the way, he grabbed a fork from the kitchen drawer and, with narrowed eyes, poked one of the glowing glyphs with the metal utensil.
The door sucked the fork right out of his hand like the world’s weirdest vacuum, and the small utensil vanished into the surface of the fridge. The surface of the magic door rippled like water as it consumed the utensil.
“Ahh, hells no,” Red said. He backed away and made a beeline for his beaten-up old laptop. Flipping open the lid, he pressed the on button, and the boot-up screen lit up. Red glanced once again at the glowing door, then gingerly set about making breakfast. Luckily, the magic door was on the side of his fridge, so Red was still able to pull items from it.
By the time the toast was ready, Red had dragged the kitchen table all the way into the living room and was sat staring suspiciously at the magic door. His computer had managed to figure out how to wake up by then, and he turned his attention to it while munching on breakfast.
Magic door in kitchen help?
The internet didn’t have any satisfactory answers.
What to do if I see a magic glowing door on my fridge
The internet gave him a few lengthy tutorials on how to fix a fridge light that wouldn’t turn on.
What to do if magic door steals your fork?
After scrolling past the mental health advisory, the internet proudly led him to an isekai forum that talked about transmigrating and some enigmatic repeat character known as truck-kun.
Red glanced at the door. Would it take him to another world? He shook his head. It was just as likely that it killed him. Or hell, it might just be a hallucination that didn’t actually exist. Red chewed on his lip as he stared at the door.
No way was he stepping through it.
He had way too much to do to randomly get sidetracked by some weird door. He was inches from promotion, where he would finally be able to achieve something real.
He’d be damned if anything got in the way of that.
Beep beep, Red’s wristwatch buzzed.
Red sighed and closed the lid of his laptop with an air of finality. Breakfast was done, so he decided to continue with his routine. Jacket, boots, bag, and Red was out the door. It was still dark, and he jogged down to the street. Then he ran all the way to the 24-hour gym, where he gave a gruff nod to the sleepy employee and started working out.
Ben, his coworker dressed in a sleeveless tank top that showed his bulging delts, joined 45 minutes later. As usual, the dude spent half the time flexing in front of the mirror, and the other half grouchily complaining while pumping iron.
Two hours later, the sun was just peeking over the horizon, and the pair took a bus to their work. The garbage collection depot was a squat building. The large parking lot in the back housed several green trash trucks, which were the lifeblood of the facility.
“Hey, Jake,” Red said, tossing his bag into the locker and pulling on a set of canvas overalls. Ben waved and disappeared into the bathroom.
“Mornin’ Red. Give me five, yeah?” Jake groused, his voice scratchy as he nursed a cup of steaming coffee in a styrofoam cup. “At least...”
“I’ve been meaning to ask you,” Red joined his boss at the table, ignoring the mood. “Remember that thing I was talking about the other day?”
“Hmm?”
“Yeah, so I drafted up a design proposal, and uh...if you could look at it,” Red finished awkwardly as he pulled out a manilla folder from his bag. From it, he withdrew a set of three large drafting documents that were covered in precise geometric lines and miniature script.
“Jesus, Red,” Jake said after a moment. He squinted at the documents and spread them over the table with his free hand. “What is all this?”
“It's a new routing plan for the trucks. See, I figure we can squeeze in Greenacres on Wednesday if we take this path through Main, which means we can double up through Chelsea on Friday and Sunday. The traffic patterns on those days mean we can almost definitely even make it to the Lower West Side before 3pm.”
You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.
“How’d you make this thing?” Jake stared at the documents. They were a precisely drawn, accurate representation of the city from above, with key neighborhoods and their trash outputs listed in the margins. A map, if the map was made by a civil engineer.
“With a pencil and ruler—”
“No,” Jake shook his head. “I mean, like, how’d you finger all this out?”
“I took a course. Community had a sale for a 6-week course on logistics.”
“Jesus, Red,” Jake said again. He rubbed his face and leaned back in his chair. Then he tapped the table and met Red’s hopeful glance. “You want to try to change up our routes?”
“Yes, I think we can really—”
But Jake was already shaking his head.
“It’s not up to me, Red, sorry. The routes are set up by the guys upstairs.”
“Oh,” Red deflated a little.
“But this is... Jesus,” Jake touched the edge of one of the drafting documents and shook his head in bewilderment. “Tell you what, I’ll call up my boss and see if I can’t get you a meeting with ‘im sometime.”
“That’s great! Thanks, Jake,” Red smiled.
“Don’t get your hopes up. I doubt you’ll get a meeting before the end of the year,” Jake downed the rest of his coffee and crumpled the cup in a fist. “Mind if I take these? Might get you a meeting with ‘em faster.”
Red nodded, and the pair went out to the trucks to find Ben already leaning up against No. 4.
Garbage collection wasn’t the most glamorous job, but it was also not as filthy as most people assumed. Most residents were fairly organized with their trash, and trash bags almost never broke. That meant that the majority of the job involved chatting with coworkers as the truck meandered through the neighborhoods.
The only difficult part of the job was lifting the bags, which is where Red’s morning routine came in. A year and a half ago, when Red first became a sanitation worker, he’d had to resort to using the truck's hydraulic lift more often than not. The thing was slow, and it really dragged the whole operation to a crawl.
Nowadays, though, his morning routine of lifting weights and running had bolstered his strength and stamina to the point where the truck oftentimes didn’t even need to stop as he jogged up and down the street to collect the bags.
Was it excessive?
Probably. But that was the weird thing about enthusiasm. Red treated the job like a game, and naturally, his coworker Ben was sucked into the pace. At first, Ben had been reticent, but it didn’t take long for Red’s growing muscles to convince Ben to join in.
Ben liked impressing the ladies.
Today was Monday, which meant going through Euclid Ave. The street was the lowest point in the city and naturally collected all manner of runoff. That, in combination with the lines of Sycamore trees lining the street, meant that the water drainage grates were almost permanently clogged with obnoxiously large leaves.
It wasn’t technically Red’s job, but when they arrived at the top of the hill, it was Ben who pulled out the pair of twisted iron hooks hanging off the edge of the truck and tossed one to Red. Together, the pair took an extra two minutes fishing out the pile of leaves blocking the drains on either side of the street before moving on.
Red had made the things from rebar at the local maker space after way too many failed attempts. They were ugly as sin and were actually version two of the invention since version one had cracked the first time they had been dropped. But despite all that, the tools worked and the task of clearing grates barely cut into their timetable.
The end of the day approached, and Jake dropped Ben and Red off at the depot before driving off to empty the truck. Just as Red hopped off, he spotted something worrying.
Another glowing door made of languidly moving glyphs was inscribed right in the middle of the parking lot. It faced up with the ‘bottom’ of the door facing toward the garbage collection depot.
Enter to Progress
“Oi! Earth to Red?” Ben waved his hand in front of Red’s face.
“Oh, uh yeah, sorry, what?” Red blinked, turning to his coworker, though still distracted.
“I asked if you’d want to join me, Becky, and Will for pizza and video games.”
“Uh,” Red’s eyes flicked back to the door menacingly drawn on the asphalt. “Yeah, sure.”
“Dude,” Ben glanced at the door, then back at Red. “What’s gotten into you?”
“Nothing, just...let’s go.” Red firmly walked to the depot.
As he passed by the door, he shot a look back, only to see Ben standing right on the door as if nothing was there. The glowing light of the runes lit the underside of his coveralls in an otherworldly glow. It didn’t suck Ben in, nor did Ben give any indication that he noticed the door in the ground.
“What?” Ben asked, stepping off the door, glancing down then back up at Red with a suspicious expression.
“Nothing,” Red muttered as he intentionally ignored the door and continued on to the depot.
----------------------------------------
A week passed and the doors kept popping up. The third door appeared on the back of Red’s dresser. The fourth on the fourth seat from the back of the bus. The fifth made the second treadmill in the gym inoperable.
And on and on and on.
Each day, one to two new doors appeared in random locations all across the city. Sometimes Red found them, other times they were hidden for days until he spotted them. When this happened, a sense of foreboding crept up on Red, and he developed a paranoia that had both Ben and Jake worried for him.
But he wasn’t going to step through any of those doors. Especially not when Jake informed him at the end of the week that the head honchos at MSL Environmental wanted to meet with him on the first of the month and they were very impressed with his proposal.
The date was barely three weeks out, damnit. He wasn’t going to miss it just because some fanciful portals started popping up everywhere.
And Red also wasn’t going to tell anyone about the portals. The various tests he conducted over the week showed that he was the only person who could see the doors. Red was under no illusions of what would happen if he informed the world. A doctor would give him something, and it would help. However, it might also make the company executives unwilling to meet with him.
Which was unacceptable.
So Red waited, but he couldn’t help but poke at the doors a little. Each one was identical, with the same chilling message scrawled out in unidentifiable script. The internet couldn’t help him decode it, nor did his message sent to the cryptography expert at his local college amount to anything.
They also each retained their suction effect. Red’s utensil drawer was now missing three forks, a knife, and two spoons. The suction effect wasn’t getting stronger and was slightly more powerful in the center of the door. The utensils had been relegated to the shadow realm in order to confirm these observations.
Another week passed, and then another after that. Three days out from the meeting, a portal appeared at the base of Red’s bed. It nearly gave him a heart attack and only served to spike his paranoia further.
He doggedly and stubbornly held his silence on the matter, determined to survive whatever evil trial this was no matter how many doorways appeared. Every step he took was carefully examined, and he began to look around corners before stepping around them.
Each morning, he trained until he was wheezing, and every night, he spent hours poring over the internet in a desperate bid to understand what the hell was happening. The lost time wasn’t really a problem. His proposal was complete and had been complete since day one. The only thing he truly lost was free time with some friends.
They worried for him, but he brushed them off, saying that it was just stress from the upcoming meeting with the execs.
Then the meeting came. Red was almost vibrating with nerves as he maneuvered out of the laundry room window of his apartment complex in the predawn light. He glanced up and down the street, hoping desperately no one saw that. No one had, presumably, so he brushed his suit and briefcase of any lint and walked onto the street.
It was safer on the road. The density of doorways was lower, and he could easily walk around a doorway on the ground. He just desperately hoped that no doorways appeared during the meeting.
Luckily, they didn’t. He arrived at the meeting, and a professional receptionist guided him to a large office. He sat in front of a mahogany desk and explained his proposal to three older balding gentlemen in three-piece suits. They smiled and nodded and, to his utmost surprise, promoted him.
Such a sense of relief washed over Red that, for a moment, all the stress and paranoia of the previous month faded. He couldn’t help but grin openly as he shook hands with an elderly man who introduced him to another man — Mike, was it? — who would be his direct superior.
He was to work in the planning division. Responsible for the complex logistics of garbage disposal for not just his home city, but the entire county. It was such a leap in position that Red could scarcely believe it.
He’d done it. He was finally in a position to actually enact real change in the community. It was small in the grand scheme of things. After all, who really cared about trash? But Red couldn’t wait.
The entire bus ride home, his mind was entirely engrossed in an endless list of plans and procedures, processes and methods, and all manner of implementations that he would enact in the future.
It was because of this that Red didn’t notice the glowing doorway of runic glyphs waiting menacingly underneath the bus stop. He didn’t notice its glow as he thanked the bus driver, nor did he realize it as he stepped off the bus.
The asphalt rippled as his foot touched it, and instead of supporting his weight, his foot slipped right through. Red gasped, scrabbling desperately at the bus’s door handle, but the suction force was too strong.
In a brief instant of inattention, the doorway claimed him.
And then there was only darkness.