McDonald's Girl

About once or twice a week, I stop at McDonald's on the way to work to get breakfast. I really like the sausage burritos they have, so I usually order two of those with hot sauce, and a medium cup of coffee.
On one particular Friday morning, I placed my order like I normally do. When I pulled up to the first window, the drive thru cashier who took my debit card was especially perky, and said, "thank you, have a nice day" in an overly enthusiastic way, more so than someone just having a bubbly personality. It almost sounded sarcastic, but still polite, so I figured that I was just seeing something that wasn't there.
There was one really odd thing, though. When she handed me my debit card back, as she was thanking me, it felt hot to the touch. I had just handed it to her a few seconds before, and it was only out of my possession long enough for the cashier to charge my card for my breakfast and hand it back to me. I'd never experienced anything like that before, but I thought I must still just be making something out of nothing. I put the card back into my wallet and forgot about it.
Later that day, during my lunch break, I decided to eat at Taco Bell. I went through the drive thru and ordered a $5 box. I had completely forgotten about breakfast that morning, but when I handed my debit card to the drive thru cashier at Taco Bell, he reacted as if it were hot. I immediately remembered what had happened that morning. The Taco Bell employee didn't say anything about it, but carefully handed it back to me by its edge. I thought to myself that I was really imagining some strange things and that I should probably go to bed early that night to get caught up on sleep.
It wasn't until the next day that I started to actually get concerned. When I woke up, I was reading the news on a local news website and saw a headline that read, "Taco Bell Employee Dies in Bizarre Accident." I clicked on the article, and there was a picture of the guy that I had handed my debit card to at lunch the day before. According to the article, he had tripped and fallen face first onto one of the steamers, which was active and hot. The article reported that witnesses said they saw him fall and scream as his face hit the surface of the steamer. They said that he then put his hands on the counter to push himself up away from it, but began screaming that he was stuck and could not pull away. By the time his coworkers helped pull him off, they said half of his face had completely burned through. They said that the steamer was actually glowing orange with heat, and that it was far hotter than it was supposed to be able to get. The heat and burns were so intense that the employee died soon after.
As I read the online article, a sense of dread set in, but I kept telling myself that logically, it was just some weird coincidence. I remembered, though, that I had used my debit card two more times since then; once to buy a DVD at Wal-Mart, and once to get gas after that. In both of those instances, I hadn't paid attention when handing my debit card to the cashiers, but now that I had read the news story about the Taco Bell employee, I started trying to remember if either of them had acted strangely.
About that time, I realized that I had forgotten to buy a couple of items while I was at Wal-Mart, and since it was Saturday and I didn't have to work, I figured I'd go back to get the rest of the items I needed. When I arrived at Wal-Mart, there was a police line in front of both entrances, with several police cars and a fire truck in the parking lot, all of them with their lights flashing. There were a lot of Wal-Mart employees standing around in the parking lot, and I asked one of them what had happened. She said that the manager had not given them much information, but that the rumor was that one of the employees had been found hanging by the neck in the back stock room. Fearing the worst, I asked if it was a man or a woman, and asked what the employee looked like. The worker that I was talking to must have thought it was strange that I wanted to know what the person looked like, but she told me that it was a middle aged woman. She described what the woman looked like, and it was an exact match for the person that had rung up my items the night before. When she said that the woman’s name was Susan, I knew it was the same woman because I remembered having noticed her name because of some glittery stickers she had on her nametag.
At that point, I was genuinely freaked out. I immediately decided to go to the gas station where I had used my card to get gas the night before. So that I wouldn't appear obvious, I made up a story saying that the employee from the night before had given me too much change when I paid for my gas. When I got to the gas station, I asked the person working at the counter if there was any way I could get in touch with the person who was working the previous night, and gave them my made up story about being given too much change. The worker told me that that worker from the night before wasn't there, but strangely enough, he was supposed to have worked the whole night shift. He told me that he was the other employee’s morning relief shift, but that when he arrived this morning, the previous night's worker was nowhere to be found. He said he figured that he had left early and was going to report it to a manager, but hadn't yet. I thanked him for his time, gave him a dollar out of my pocket to "repay" the change back to the store (even though that hadn't happened), and left.
After all of this, I decided that it was time to go back to the McDonald's store. When I got there, I asked for a manager and asked about the girl that was working in the drive thru the previous morning when I had bought breakfast. I described her, but the manager just gave me a strange look. He told me that there was only one female worker the previous morning and that she was quite a bit older than the girl I had described. He said that no other female workers were in the restaurant at that time, and that the older woman who was working was currently cleaning tables in the dining room. I turned around to look, and the woman I saw was much older, and had a completely different hair color and style than the girl who had taken my debit card the day before. The manager also said that there were no employees working there who matched the description I gave him.
I rushed home and cut up the debit card and threw it away. An hour later, when I opened my wallet, it was right back in the card holder where I normally keep it.
Since then, I’ve tried burning the card, putting it in a dumpster several miles from home, and just plain scratching it up. No matter what I do, it keeps returning in perfect condition. When I sleep, I often think that I can see a faint glow and a low humming sound coming from my wallet, but when I get out of bed and pick the wallet up, it stops. I sometimes think I see the over enthusiastic smile of the girl from McDonald’s in front of me in the dark and it often keeps me awake at night. I find myself shivering in the dark wondering what’s going on. I've tried looking for that girl everywhere I go, but I can't find her. I keep seeing her face and her odd smile, but I can't find her. I feel like I should report this to someone, but I'm afraid they'll think I'm somehow involved.
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