Chapter 3: The Strip Mall Mausoleum

Chapter 3: The Strip Mall Mausoleum

The drive was a twenty-minute journey into a past he wasn’t supposed to have. Leo’s hands were slick on the steering wheel, his knuckles white. Each red light felt like a moment of judgment, a chance to turn back to the sterile safety of his apartment. But the pull was stronger than his fear. The phantom taste on his tongue seemed to intensify the closer he got, a ghostly compass needle pointing him toward this forgotten corner of the city.

His mother’s words replayed in a tight, looping soundtrack in his head. He’d hanged himself, Leo. Inside the restaurant. The story had transformed the cartoon chef on the pizza box from a kitschy mascot into a grim effigy. He was no longer just chasing the source of a bizarre food delivery; he was driving toward a crime scene, a tomb.

He followed the directions his GPS dredged up for the old highway, turning off onto a service road that was more pothole than pavement. And then he saw it.

The strip mall wasn’t just boarded up; it was a skeleton picked clean by time and neglect. It stood silhouetted against the bruised twilight sky, a long, low monument to failure. A graveyard of forgotten businesses, just as his mother had described. The asphalt of the parking lot was a fractured mosaic, with thick weeds erupting from the cracks like stubborn, green ghosts. A sign for "Cavalier Cleaners" hung by a single rusty bolt, its plastic letters spelling out a promise of freshness that had expired decades ago. Next to it, the ghost of a sign for a video rental store was still visible, a faint blue-and-yellow stain on the faded brick.

Leo parked his car at the far end of the lot, the engine's dying rumble sounding deafeningly loud in the oppressive silence. For a moment, he just sat there, the weight of the place pressing in on him. This was a place of endings. Of bankruptcies, of dreams turned to dust, of a life cut short by a rope fashioned from an extension cord.

Then his eyes found it. Tucked in the center of the decaying row of storefronts, under a sagging awning, was a sign whose colors had been bleached by twenty years of unforgiving sun. The red was now a sickly pink, the white a grimy yellow. But the image was unmistakable. The mustachioed chef, smiling his wide, empty smile.

Uncle Sal's Pizza.

It didn't look like a sign. It looked like a tombstone.

A cold certainty settled in his gut. This was the place. Taking a deep, ragged breath, he killed the headlights and got out of the car. The air was heavy and still, thick with the smell of damp concrete and decay. The crunch of his sneakers on the gravel-strewn asphalt was the only sound.

He walked toward the storefront, his steps feeling heavy and sacrilegious, as if he were treading on a grave. The windows were vast sheets of grime, caked with so much dust and dirt they were nearly opaque. Yellowed newspapers and faded flyers for missing pets were taped to the inside of the glass, their edges curled and brittle.

He reached the entrance and wiped his sleeve across the filthy glass, clearing a small portal into the past. He pressed his face close, cupping his hands around his eyes to block out the dying light.

The world inside was perfectly preserved in a thick blanket of dust. It was exactly as his mother had described it, a scene frozen in amber. The red vinyl of the booth seats was cracked and peeling, the chrome edging dull and pitted. On a checkered linoleum floor, a table stood with salt and pepper shakers still waiting for hands that would never come. In the corner, he saw it—the claw machine. Its glass box was a dusty aquarium for a heap of faded, sun-bleached plush toys, their button eyes staring out into the gloom. The fragment of memory from his phone call with his mother sharpened, a flash of bright lights and loud, cheerful music that felt utterly alien in this silent crypt.

His gaze swept across the room, past the hulking, silent arcade cabinets, and landed on the service counter. A vintage cash register sat with its drawer agape, like a silent, screaming mouth. And next to it, placed squarely in the center of the counter as if waiting for pickup, was a pizza box.

Leo’s blood ran cold.

It wasn't just a pizza box. It was the pizza box. A plain white box, softened and stained with age. He could see the faded red stamp of the cartoon chef from here, its smile a dark slash in the gloom. He could see the specific pattern of the grease stains darkening the top corner, the slight water damage wrinkling the left edge. He knew those stains. He had traced them with his finger just this morning. It was identical to the one in his pantry.

Impossible. The word was a useless, flimsy shield against the reality before him. This place had been sealed for over two decades. No one had been inside. No one could have placed that box there.

The terror that had been simmering in his gut erupted, a volcanic surge of pure, primal fear. His carefully constructed world, with its spreadsheets and logical certainties, shattered into a million pieces. The barrier between his sterile, digital life and this dusty, haunted place had dissolved. The ghost wasn't just online. It was here. It was real. And it had reached across twenty years of silence to find him in his apartment and deliver a piece of its tomb.

He stumbled backward, away from the window, his breath coming in short, sharp gasps. He tripped on a loose chunk of asphalt and caught himself, his hands scraping against the rough pavement. He had to get out of here. He had to get in his car and drive and never, ever look back.

He fumbled in his pocket for his keys, his trembling fingers struggling to grasp the cool metal. As he pulled them out, his phone came with them, clattering onto the ground. He bent to pick it up, his heart hammering against his ribs like a trapped bird.

The screen lit up.

And then his phone buzzed. A single, sharp vibration that cut through the dead silence of the strip mall.

It wasn't a call. It wasn't a text message. It was a push notification. The logo was sickeningly familiar: the green and white icon of Uber Eats. An app he had deleted from his phone that very morning. An app that no longer existed on his device.

He stared at the screen, his mind refusing to process what he was seeing. Across the notification bar, in clean, sans-serif font, was a single, chilling sentence. It wasn't an advertisement. It wasn't a glitch. It was a personal invitation.

Why not reorder from Uncle Sal’s Pizza?