I Am The Local Atheist

by Warwick Stubbs

  I knew the creature was still waiting around the corner but there was no other way out so I ran full bore back out into the crate area and dodged to the right, hitting the end of the shed and dropping the full bag of overalls in the open space ready to be collected later. Holding on to my loot bag, I dropped off the ledge but fell awkwardly hitting the ground and falling on my shoulder.

  “Major fracture detected.”

  “Automatic medical systems engaged.”

  “Morphine administered.”

  I felt fine, but who was I to argue with a hazard suit designed to repair me?

  I got back up and ran across the road towards the slaughter sheds, jumping up onto the raised concreted area, ignoring the cattle as they curiously watched me sneak past. Here I found two laundry lockers filled with dirty overalls. I didn’t wait. The overalls were shoved into a spare bag as quickly as possible and left at their pick-up spot as I bolted out of the dimly lit area, around the corner into the black morning, and away from the dangers lurking over at the loading shed.

  I needed to reach the elevator that would get me back up to the office complex. There were some large box crates that could be hopped across to reach a door on the other side of the slaughter shed. I carefully jumped across, fearful of the fatefully long drop below that the dew-stained grass not far from my feet represented, reached the door safely, went through and turned down a couple of dark corridors before hitting the elevator that took me up to the offices.

  The door opened and there I was facing a stingy and badly lit hallway with a faulty electrical circuit flickering on the ceiling. A couple of crab-like parasitoids dropped out of nowhere but were zapped dead instantly by random bolts of electricity. To my right on the floor was a grating, but there was no way I was fitting inside that so I decided to take my chances and sprinted past the faulty circuits just as the lanky homeworld slaves with their big red eyes and hunched backs began zapping in and firing green lightning at me.

  A couple of bolts smashed into me draining power from my suit, but there was no time to rectify the situation so I dived for the swinging doors to Ed’s room, landing harshly, but rolling behind the desk where I fumbled through the draws for his spare key, found it and quickly unlocked his locker, shoving my loot bag in for safe keeping on top of his belongings and next to the random crowbar (but pausing to carefully position it so the contents would fall out when the door was opened again).

  Homeworld slaves were zapping in with full force down the hallway and pouring in through the open doors, but I was completely out of ammo and could not hold up against this onslaught of green electrical bolts slamming me.

  “Warning: Life signs critical.”

  Oh Shit. I was starting to panic and could feel sweat puncture through my skin over my eyebrows. The overalls, I mean hazard suit, I wore was already stained with enough blood, I didn’t want to have to be smearing that shit across my forehead just to wipe away sweat.

  Green bolts of lightning were flashing everywhere, attacking my suit, draining my power and hitting my life-reserves as I tried desperately to swing as many attacks with my crowbar out in front of me, smashing bodies blindly with as much speed as possible, alien parts splattering through the air as often as their attacks were landing themselves against me.

  “User death eminent.”

  Blood rushed across the screen as I fell to the hard floor beneath, my breathing laboured, my vision blurry; life slipped away as the last thing I heard was the death-tone of my hazard suit.

  Beeeeeeeeeee…(p)

  Game Over!

  Chapter 5:

  Mein Ego gehört zu mir

  Part I

  – An end –

  I finished that job on the Friday following the Monday that I started and the stupid idiot of a boss left me there by myself until I finished from about twelve o’clock onwards. It was practically an open invitation to steal something.

  So I did.

  He hadn’t even checked his locker yet, which I was kinda thankful for but someone came in asking about reporting lost property. I told him to check back with Ed at two o’clock, “as he’ll be finishing up then and grabbing his stuff before he goes, but will be happy to talk to you about it. I’m sure.”

  As soon as I was done putting the last clean pair of overalls into the last locker, I went back to the office, did a quick scan of the room and decided to grab a towel, a cotton singlet, a clean pair of overalls and a set of big black rubber gumboots. The boots, however, wouldn’t fit into my bag. I had to shove the overalls in so tight that the zipper nearly broke and the bag was almost a round ball, but I didn’t care – I wanted a souvenir for having stuck with this shit of a job for a whole week. I looked at the boots sitting there on the floor as I shouldered my bag, looked at the shoes on my feet, looked back at the boots… the shoes… the boots. Damn. I felt sad that I might have to leave the gumboots behind.

  It must have looked odd – it must have – but shit, no one stopped me. I just waltzed out of there, down the front steps of the building, across the courtyard, around the building that led to the front gates and right through the front gates – giving a curt wave to the guard – with a bulging back-pack over my shoulder, shoes dangling from my right hand and big black rubber gumboots on my feet.

  Fuckin’ idiots!

  * * *

  The job at the laundry company had dried up over winter while the Freezing Works wound down into its off season. The boss advised me to look for other work, but told me that I was more than welcome to come back in a few months when the hotel season started winding up again around October.

  “I’m sorry about that David. We sure will miss ya,” she said shielding her eyes from the sun.

  I didn’t really believe her, but thanked her anyway. I told her that I would be more than happy to come back and left feeling a little dejected, knowing that other work for someone like me wasn’t so easy to come across. The work shifting laundry had been alright and I had managed to lose most of those cheesecake rolls around my waist while moving the bundled up sheets from their containers onto the trolleys. The other jobs had mostly sucked but at least I had found a way to enjoy them.

  I walked away, shouldering my bag and trying to avoid eye contact with the prison across the road. I had the funny feeling that it knew what I had done, despite the fact that it made no attempts to imprison me. I couldn’t really excuse the thefts that I had got away with. On the other hand, I didn’t exactly care and doubted that what I had stolen would cause anyone else to care anyway.

  As I crossed the parking lot next to the a brick building around the corner, I noticed two young kids sitting on the steps up to the footpath. They looked highly suspicious and seemed to be hiding something in their jackets, occasionally looking behind and over the steps to make sure they weren’t being watched.

  As I got closer they pulled out a bag filled with donuts and sandwiches and started munching down on the food while laughing about how no one had seen them and that they had gotten away with it.

  I gave them a smile as I walked past and climbed the steps wondering if it was boredom or hunger that had resulted in them stooping to theft for something to eat.

  Then I suddenly realised what was lurking behind me, shadowing my steps as a gentle reminder… A laugh erupted from my stomach as I turned around and stuck both my middle fingers up at the prison that loomed beyond. It seemed to diminish from view like a coward who knows he’s beaten and slowly crawls away in the hope of not being followed.

  Fuck you! Fuck you! You will not scare me any more!

  Part II

  – Difference –

  As it happened, Lucas suggested I start working at Southland Pastries with him. Jobs were easy to come by and the work was pretty straight forward. It seemed like another good opportunity to occupy myself with something other than my past that Lisa seemed so keen to drag up.

  I just wanted my body to do the work, not my mind. Plain and simple.

  After my initia
l introductory guided tour I was signed up and told to turn up at six o’clock with the receptionist asking rudely if I could handle that. After dealing with the early mornings at the Freezing Works, I was relatively used to getting up and arriving at work when it was still dark so I couldn’t have cared less. I shrugged my shoulders and just said “sure”.

  They started me out on the factory floor wearing the same white overalls that everyone else around me was wearing. We were like ants surrounded by white walls, moving amongst silver machinery that mixed, kneaded and shaped pastry along a conveyor belt system that stretched from one side of the room, around two corners and half way up the other side, but with enough space between itself and the wall that several people could still walk past.

  My first job was to stand by an attached conveyor belt and pack twelve thin slabs of wrapped pastry into a box at a time as they came down the belt off a wrapping machine. The boss showed me how he did it by boxing three at a time which made the counting “so much easier” but I wanted to smack him in the face for assuming that I could even count to twelve in lots of three in the first place (I can, but the assumptions he kept making really pissed me off); so I packed them in six lots of two just to be a dick.

  I ended up doing this with every new job they gave me – listening to how they said to do the job, then doing it a completely different way but still getting the same result. Some of the bosses didn’t care, others were starting to get pissed off because they knew that I wasn’t following their orders. But knowing they were pissed off only helped me to enjoy the job a little more, otherwise I would’ve been bored shitless.

  So many of the jobs at Southland Pastries seemed so pointless. I wondered why they hadn’t created machines to do them, save mind-numbing boredom and save me from having to debase myself in such pathetic work.

  And here was the most pointless job ever: Packets of sauce that had taken a full 20 minutes to be transferred from where they got packaged above me, falling into the troughs of water, slowly cooling down and slowly being passed from bucket to bucket before, finally, reaching the spot where I was standing, falling onto a short conveyor belt that would slowly, but surely, drop them onto another conveyor belt and take them around to where the two boxers were standing ready to place twelve in a box and put it through the tape machine ready to be frozen and then shipped off to Japan. It was my job to ‘pat’ the packets of sauce down when they fell onto the second conveyor belt. Why? Apparently the owners of the food being produced wanted it to be perfect when it was boxed, yet the second conveyor belt had two places where the packets fell and landed on their opposite sides, either undoing or redoing what I had already done. Not only that, but the people boxing the packets of sauce were practically doing this job themselves anyway. It was completely pointless! I couldn’t even imagine myself in some other role waiting for those packages to reach my patting hand. Maybe I was a factory worker in a drug cartel, a cocaine or heroin producing factory in Tijuana with a wife and kid waiting at home for me to bring my meagre earnings home so we could scrape up another plate or two of nibbles from the fridge. The heroin packages came through the conveyor belt for me to pat. No they didn’t. It was sauce. White sauce. Fuck. Not even imagining Mario running around on the conveyor belts did anything. It was like I was standing there in my own skin watching myself do a mindless job that anyone could do and provided absolutely no entertainment or job satisfaction whatsoever.

  But I had to do it.

  I wanted the money without the responsibility.

  So I stood there at the conveyor belt dressed in my white overalls, patting packets of white sauce as they slowly came to me via the slowly turning water buckets, and slowly made their way onto the conveyor belt giving me ample time to sit and wait before finally standing and smoothing them out with a good solid whack from my thinly gloved palm.

  I had no way of thinking my way out of this job.

  Part III

  – Library –

  I don’t remember how I got to the library – and I certainly don’t remember meeting up with Lisa there, or at what point she began talking to me in a heated ramble, but either way I had the feeling that either I was smoking way too much pot lately or someone had mixed some funky chemicals in with that last lot of cabbage I had bought.

  I specifically remember the moment I got bored with the computer game though. I was on this stage where my character was trying to wield a large sword in front of a demon with several tails that would flick about behind him, occasionally stabbing forwards at the victim (in this case, me). There was a lot of talk beforehand about what the demon was going to do to me, stuff like ‘rip my body apart into thousands of pieces while I was still alive and then banish my soul to the deepest darkest recesses of hell’. That last part didn’t really scare me – I was pretty much convinced I was going there anyway. There was also a lot of cut-scenes that tried to evolve the storyline in a way that I really didn’t care about – I just wanted to get to the next stage where I got to fight more and harder demons; who cares about why the great crystal of Rohrn has allowed access to the worlds above releasing all kinds of demons and bringing forth a new apocalypse? Not me. I just wanted to slaughter more demons. That was my mission.

  But there was this one problem: only some of this demon’s tails were cut-offable, and whenever one of the other tails darted out and stabbed me, at least twenty percent of my health stats were destroyed instantly while also stunning me enough to give another tail time to get in another stab, which would stun me even more and render me practically helpless to the point where the next few stabs were impossible to defend against and then it was game over. That sucked. But that isn’t what sucked the most. What sucked the most was that there was no manual ‘quick save’ in which you could save the game each time you attacked the demon and destroyed some of it’s health stats (a highly unlikely prospect anyway); there was only an auto save and instead of loading up at the start of the fight so you could begin fighting straight away again, the game would load up at the start of the cut-scene so you were forced to sit there and listen to that interminable ramble all the way through without being able to fast forward or skip through it. I hated games that made you sit through shit that wasted the player’s valuable time!

  I decided that, yes, my time was way too valuable to be wasting hearing the exact same speech over and over, so I turned the computer off, found my pipe and loaded it up with a mixture of first-class weed and some cabbage that I had taken off the hands of my dealer for cheap.

  There are lots of places you can go to get away from the city and be somewhere peaceful while smoking. I could have gone to that park just around the corner from me, but it was in a bit of a bogan area and I didn’t want to start getting paranoid while I was stoned. I could’ve stayed in my room, but I could see sunlight creeping through the curtains as they wavered against the draft, and I knew that after playing that last game, my thoughts might still be re-jigged into ‘demon mode’ – something that being stoned had no defence against (I could only imagine the waking nightmares that gamers on acid experienced). The museum was far enough away that walking back afterwards would help assist a gentle comedown until I reached the perfect plateau where I was void of any true emotions. I loved that feeling, it was like someone had drained all the negative emotions from my body, but with the negative went the positive emotions as well so that I was in this place where human problems no longer mattered; it was just me and my unfeeling body going forth into the world. And I say that I ‘loved it’ not in the way that you love happiness because happiness makes you happy, but because you know that there’s no chance of falling from the happiness that you have obtained, that there’s no dyer consequences of the sorrow that has taken you in its grip; there is just this feeling of not-feeling, like the plate of your soul has been wiped clean. I was beginning to find that I wanted that feeling more and more.

  “According to police reports, Serene had been drifting away from her parents and anything to do wit
h them. There were also small traces of THC in her system but a much higher dosage of alcohol. The police report made it clear that these were probably the causes for the girl – ” Lisa raised her fingers to quote the next part with a good dose of sarcasm “ – ‘terminating’ her life. They said that the effect of THC could have put her into a delusional state, either of being indestructible or making her problems seem a lot worse than they were.”

  I still didn’t understand why she was telling me this stuff. I had stopped caring about anything to do with church a long time ago. I had tried leaving it all behind and had almost succeeded, but Lisa’s re-entry into my life had suddenly changed all that. I didn’t mind so much that Lucas harped on with his opinions, or that he, an atheist, had forced me into thinking on a much deeper level about things I, probably, had always taken for granted. I didn’t even mind hanging around the officers of The Salvation Army, but anything to do with the church that I had once belonged to only made me want to puff my way deeper into the haze of marijuana, or playing computer games to reinvigorate my brain afterwards while being worlds away from the one that I was forced to acknowledge right now.

  It was easier to forget, sit down behind some trees in a quiet peaceful area of the world, light up and drift off into oblivion. Distance walks itself closer and closer but never touches, the trees above part molecule by molecule, all is the same but infinitely changed and the clouds go on as always while the air around me explodes and contracts; switches in my head get flicked on and off at random intervals like a scene from a badly edited movie cutting the walking motion of a character into caricatures, caracatures… caro catures… carrots or shore… carrons foreshore… Karen’s foreshore… Karen for sure!