Chapter 1: One Topping, House Special, or The Usual

Chapter 1: One Topping, House Special, or The Usual

The hunger arrived just after two in the morning, a vicious, gnawing thing that clawed its way up from the pit of his stomach. Leo Martinez knew the feeling well. It was a constant companion during his bouts of insomnia, a physical manifestation of the empty quiet of his apartment.

He lay in the dark, the only light a cold, blue glow from the phone clutched in his hand. The screen illuminated a face pale with fatigue, framed by dark circles that seemed etched into his skin. His minimalist apartment, all sharp angles and monochrome grays, offered no comfort. It was less a home and more a holding cell where he served out the long, silent sentences between his work-from-home data entry shifts.

Giving up on sleep, he swung his legs over the side of the bed. The hunger was demanding now, a roaring beast that a handful of stale crackers wouldn't satisfy. He needed something substantial. Something greasy and immediate.

He unlocked his phone, the familiar Uber Eats icon a beacon of saturated color in the gloom. His thumb swiped through the usual late-night suspects: greasy spoon diners offering sad, lukewarm burgers; 24-hour convenience stores with their pathetic selection of microwavable burritos; kebab shops with one-star hygiene ratings. Nothing appealed. The hunger was specific, a craving for something he couldn't name.

He kept scrolling, swiping past closed restaurants and "unavailable" notifications, his thumb moving on autopilot. Then he stopped.

A new listing had appeared, wedged between a shuttered taco joint and an all-night pharmacy.

Uncle Sal's Pizza.

The name didn't ring a bell. The logo was a blurry, pixelated cartoon of a chef with a ridiculously large mustache, the kind of cheap graphic you’d see on a local cable commercial in the 90s. Below the name, where an address should have been, it simply said, "Local Delivery." There were no photos of the food, no customer reviews, not a single star. It was a digital ghost, an anomaly in the data-driven world of food delivery.

Leo’s logical mind, the one that spent eight hours a day spotting inconsistencies in spreadsheets, screamed at him to close the app. This had to be a glitch. A "ghost kitchen" scam. But the hunger, ravenous and irrational, urged him on. A sliver of morbid curiosity, born from the soul-crushing monotony of his life, pricked at him.

He tapped on the listing. The menu was absurdly simple, almost a parody.

One Topping - $12.99 House Special - $16.99 The Usual Slice - $4.99

Just three options. No descriptions, no choice of crusts or toppings. It was the menu of a place that either didn't care or knew exactly what its customers wanted. It was the third option that held his attention. The Usual Slice. There was an unnerving intimacy to it, a suggestion of familiarity that he couldn't place. It felt less like an item on a menu and more like a question directed at him personally.

His thumb hovered over the order button. This was stupid. Insane, even. He was a man who planned his grocery trips down to the last coupon, who organized his digital files into a labyrinth of nested folders. Impulse was a foreign language to him.

But the beast in his gut roared its approval.

He tapped "The Usual Slice," added it to his cart, and completed the purchase before he could talk himself out of it. The app confirmed his order with a cheerful chime that sounded obscene in the dead silence of his apartment. Estimated delivery time: 15 minutes.

Leo watched the map on his phone, expecting to see the little car icon make its journey toward him. But there was no car. No bicycle. Just his own address pinned on the map, a lonely beacon in the dark. A glitch, he told himself again, his heart starting to beat a little faster. A new restaurant, probably still working out the kinks in their system.

He went to the living room window and peered out at the empty street, bathed in the sickly orange glow of the streetlights. Nothing moved. Twelve minutes later, his phone buzzed.

Your Uber Eats order has arrived.

No knock on the door. No call from a lost driver. He checked the app again. The order was marked as "Delivered." A cold knot of dread tightened in his stomach, overriding the hunger. He unlatched the three locks on his front door—a habit from a life lived in less sterile, more dangerous neighborhoods—and pulled it open a crack.

The hallway was empty. He scanned left, then right. Nothing. He was about to close the door, ready to chalk it up to a five-dollar lesson in online scams, when his eyes drifted down.

There, on his doormat, sat a pizza box.

Not a modern, glossy box with a corporate logo, but a plain white one, its cardboard softened with age and speckled with grease stains that looked decades old. The cartoon face of the mustachioed chef was stamped on top in faded red ink, the smile a little too wide, the eyes little more than black dots.

He hesitated, a primal sense of wrongness washing over him. But the smell… a faint aroma of pepperoni, cheese, and something else—something warm, sweet, and overwhelmingly familiar—wafted up from the box. It smelled like a memory he couldn't quite grasp.

With a deep breath, Leo picked it up. It was surprisingly light and barely warm. Back inside, with the door securely locked again, he placed the box on his stark kitchen counter. It looked like an artifact from another era, a relic unearthed and placed in a modern museum.

He lifted the lid.

Inside lay a single, sad slice of pizza. The cheese was pale and slightly congealed, sweating a thin layer of orange grease. The pepperoni discs were curled up at the edges, leathery and dark. It looked old. It looked stale. It looked like it had been sitting under a heat lamp since before he was born.

Disappointment warred with a creeping horror. He had been scammed. And yet… that smell. It was stronger now, filling his small kitchen. It was the scent of childhood birthday parties, of sticky arcade floors and the deafening cacophony of animatronic bands. It was a phantom, a scent that didn't match the pathetic slice before him.

Driven by an impulse he would never be able to explain, he picked it up. The crust was stiff, unyielding. He brought it to his lips and took a bite.

The taste was… nothing. It was chewy, bland, the sauce a vague, metallic tang on his tongue. It was every bit as disappointing as it looked. He chewed, swallowed, and was about to throw the rest in the trash when the aftertaste hit him. A ghost of a flavor bloomed on the back of his tongue—rich, savory, and impossibly delicious. It was the taste the smell had promised, a fleeting echo of a perfect pizza that wasn't there. It was deeply, hauntingly familiar.

He finished the slice in a fugue state, chasing that phantom flavor, but it never returned. He was left only with the greasy texture and the profound sense of unease. He tossed the ancient-looking box into the bin and went back to bed, the hunger gone, replaced by a cold, queasy confusion.

The next morning, Leo woke up feeling gritty and unrested, the phantom taste still coating his mouth like a film. He needed to know. He grabbed his phone, his thumb already heading for the Uber Eats app. He would check his order history, find the restaurant’s details, maybe even leave a scathing one-star review about the strangest, most unsettling meal of his life.

He opened the app. He tapped on "Orders." His history was there: last week's Thai food, the sushi from two weeks ago. But the order from last night was gone.

A jolt of adrenaline shot through him. He searched for the restaurant. Uncle Sal's Pizza.

No results found.

He typed it again, slower this time, making sure he spelled it correctly.

We didn't find a match for "Uncle Sal's Pizza."

It was gone. Vanished as if it had never existed. His mind raced, trying to find a logical explanation. The app must have purged a fraudulent listing. The company went out of business in the eight hours he was asleep. It was all a bizarre, late-night glitch.

But as he stood in his silent kitchen, the sun streaming through the blinds, he could see the greasy, faded pizza box sitting right on top of the trash. Physical proof of a digital ghost. And on his tongue, faint but insistent, lingered the phantom taste—a flavor he knew he recognized, from a time and place he couldn't remember. A creeping dread, cold and heavy, settled in his chest. This wasn't a glitch. This was something else.