Of The End

Part 1: The trapping
Ugh, Saturdays. I hate Saturdays. While all of my friends are going around having fun, guess what I get to do? Sit around and act guard of the Chicago Dinosaur Museum (which happens to inhabit the largest dinosaur in the world, the petasaurus, which needed the whole 35 foot tall entrance-way dome, in the very center of the building, to be able to stand). And the first people were starting to leave at 4:51pm. Today, there was nobody to argue with, not even a parent to blame for letting their kid touch the 1.5 million dollar skeleton. You’re probably asking why I’m complaining, I mean, you don’t have to do anything at all. Well that’s exactly why I am complaining. How would you spend a day from 10am to 5:30pm when all you’re supposed to do is look for “suspicious behavior” and keep the visitors in line? Its the most boring job in the world. Of course, the pay is good ($50 per hour), but it’s still a pain.

I had decided to go outside, in the snowy cold, for a moment, just out of the door. I put my coat on, so I wouldn’t freeze to death. There was a nice young man carrying a stroller down the stairs… with her spouse. A group of high-school kids were just leaving (I don’t know, research?). The nice song birds weren’t here anymore, they had all gone south for the winter. I began to wander off as I watched the silhouettes of the cars and their head-lights flashing by, my cheeks burning cold…

“MS. MELLER!” Someone barked at me. I snapped out of my trance and looked to my right, where the sudden noise had come from. I then spotted him, wearing a jacket.

“What is it, Mr. Webber?” I replied at the manager, trying to look attentive.

“Well, look at you. Slacking on the job. You should be more concentrated, like I’m going to let…” He started lecturing me again. Something else, though, had caught my attention for the moment.

There was a man, walking up the steps with a purpose. He briskly stepped up the long, short stairs and went toward the museum doors. I wondered why he was here, when the museum was going to close in about half an hour.

“Are you listening to me?” The manager questioned me. Getting out of my security trance.

“Excuse me one moment.” I replied to him. I walked past him and continued on towards the man. I stopped the man in his tracks, “What do you think you’re doing?”.

“Oh, ummmm… I was going to… uhhhhhhh…” He seemed as if he’s never been questioned by an authority in his life, and probably not a female authority either.

“The museum closes at 5:30 sharp. And we don’t accept new visitors after 3:00.” I replied to him coldly.

“Oh really? I thought it was 6:00,” He tried to act innocent. He failed.

“You’ll have to come back on Monday. Tomorrow we’re closed.”

He opened his mouth to say something, but decided not to. Instead he simply blushed and walked away, defeated. He then sat on one of the mid-stairway railings to relax.

The wind was blowing really hard so I looked back at the museum to hide from the harsh cold. The man had done the same a few moments before I did.

When I looked back, I saw the doors shaking a little bit. The manager started walking toward me to continue whatever he wanted to say, so he hadn’t noticed.

The wind continued to pick up and I felt a firm tug on my long, black hair.

I didn’t move but continued to ignore the wind and wonder why the doors were shaking.

Suddenly I was lifted off the ground by a huge drift of wind that seemed to ignore me like a feather, then it suddenly rushed into the museum with me still in the current of air. When I fell inside the museum, the wind suddenly stopped and I skidded across the floor. I popped up off of the ground as soon as I stopped. I looked around and saw that the manager, the idiotic man, and I were all sucked into the museum by this weird wind current. They were both still on the ground, laying on their backs like up-turned turtles.

The doors suddenly shut themselves closed. I reacted by running toward the nearest door while reaching for the keys beside my badge. And then the predictable happened:

The lights went out.

-Of The End