Dan sat at the bottom of the tank, surrounded by numerous other lobsters that resembled him so exactly that it would have been all but impossible for anyone to distinguish him as being at all different.
Interestingly, there might have been one way to tell him from some of his fellow tank mates, which ranged from bluish green to brown with red spines, and a few other color variations in between. Dan knew that lobsters only attain their vibrantly red exoskeleton as a result of...
"Oh god...being cooked!" The thought refused to stray far from his mind. "Boiled alive! Steamed in a pot of scalding water!"
Dan tried to calm himself, trying to make his own rather dull brownish red body with sections tinted a muted blue stop scuttling around the tank floor. For one thing, he kept disturbing the other lobsters.
It's not like the restaurant staff appeared to mind. The humans went about the closing chores as they got ready to shut down the restaurant for the night. Dan wondered if lobsters sleep. Would he dream?
"Fuck..." Dan cursed. Thinking about dreaming caused him to speculate, and he knew that his arousal would permit only dreams of being served on a platter, his body almost glowing a healthy red, shining from butter oozing over his cooked carapace.
He thought of testing his mother's promise and calling out to her to come save him and take him home, but he tamped down the impulse. What sort of man, or lobster as the case might currently be, turns to his mommy when he encounters a rough patch?
His thoughts so absorbed him that he didn't noticed when the last of the staff turned out the lights and departed. The tank became something of an isolation chamber. In the darkness of the dining room, Dan could only turn to his own thoughts for stimulation, and his thoughts about being cooked and eaten were way too stimulating for his own good.
So Dan didn't know how much time had passed when the lights came on and momentarily dazzled his tiny eyestalks. Outside the tank, a man and a woman carrying large plastic buckets made a beeline across the room and stood next to the front of the tank.
The man had long hair, a straggly goatee and mustache. The woman had frizzy brown hair and wore a severe pair of thick eyeglasses.
"There's too many of them," the woman said in a tone of distress. "We should have brought more buckets!"
Dan, having no magical connection to these humans, couldn't hear their words. He did feel feeble vibrations moving through the water of the tank when they spoke.
"Maybe they have some buckets in the kitchen," said the woman's partner. "I'll go look, but you start getting them out of the tank."
When the woman picked up the pair of tongs left on the table supporting the large glass tank, Dan scuttled toward a corner of the tank farthest from her to give himself time to figure out what the hell was happening. He watched, shocked, as she began removing some of his fellow lobsters and dropping them into her bucket with a sloshy plop.
"This is all I could find," the man said as he returned with a yellow mop bucket, sans the mop, in hand.
"My bucket's almost full," the woman pointed out as she dropped another lobster into the already crowded container.
"I think we can rescue them all," the man said, borrowing the tongs from her and quickly snatching lobsters and filling his bucket. Somehow, Dan managed to become one of the last two lobsters in the tank. He still didn't know why these people were moving the lobsters.
The man, noticing his bucket at capacity, grabbed a water glass from a stack on a nearby table. He began scooping the salt water from inside the tank to fill the slimy old mop bucket, at least realizing that fresh water could have been very bad for the lobsters he planned to liberate.
The man plunged the tongs back into the tank and grabbed Dan, who managed a surprised squeak to feel the metal pincers dig into his hard exoskeleton. Dan got hauled from the water and dropped into what had been a mop bucket. His eyestalks and network of gills instantly detected the hint of chlorine that remained leached into the plastic bucket. As Dan dealt with that irritation, he felt the last lobster join him before the man picked up the buckets, sloshing water, as he and the woman hurried back toward the restaurant's front entrance.
After they were outside the man pinned a note to the door proclaiming the theft the work of the Lobster Liberation League, complete with a website URL.
After the man got his buckets into the back of an old pickup, he lifted the woman's bucket into the truck before they both got into the cab of the vehicle and began a 30-minute drive to a section of rocky Maine coastline.
Dan, like it or not, had been liberated. In the purloined mop bucket, Dan felt breathless, unsure if that fact had to do with the sudden change of circumstances or the irritant of the bleach residue in his bucket.