by Daphne Lamb
“What about us?” he asked. “I’ve got a family to support now, but there’s too many of us. Is there another Costco or Sam’s that we can move our operation to?”
“I don’t know.” I sighed. “Maybe way across town, but it’s probably been decimated, and the trip on foot there might kill us all at this point.”
“I expect you to think these things through,” Robert said angrily. “You’re my employee. What do I pay you for?”
“Well, for one thing, you don’t,” I said.
“Yes, I do!” he exclaimed, gesticulating wildly. “Shelter! Food! Wisdom! The point is do you think any of my wives would be open to the idea of moving to another roaming family in exchange for their supplies?”
I rubbed my head. “That’s a terrible idea,” I said. “And now you’re just talking about human trafficking. That’s just cruel.”
“Shelter and food!” he said. “Shelter and food! And it’s not cruel. You can’t argue with my generosity. Robert Jr is going to grow up and have all this to look after, and you better hope he keeps you on the payroll. Otherwise I don’t know what you’re going to do.”
“You’re being ridiculous,” I said. “And just like before, working for you now is just the same as working for you then—I’m just here until I can find something better.”
I stormed off, angry, although part of me was really hoping he’d follow me and apologize.
“So quit then!” he called out after me. “Just run away and quit! I’d like to see how well you do on your own.”
“Maybe I will!” I yelled. “At least I know to put on underwear every day!”
At this point, any self-respecting woman would have probably marched out and redeemed her independence in the wild, but the truth was, I was really scared to. I didn’t want to be out there. This new world frightened me with its new barbaric practices, and there was no telling what human-sized monster waited at the next mile to kill you or steal your Wheat Thins. So I stormed to the other side of the store, hoping that Robert would find me, apologize and tell me that I was the best employee he’d ever had. Instead, one of the girls came and found me while I was laying three shelves up in the electronics department, next to some Blu-ray players.
“Hey,” she said in her mousy voice. “The girls want you to know that some of us got a can of soup for lunch and some of us didn’t.”
“Take Joaquin’s,” I said.
Then Rebecca came and found me.
“Robert’s looking for you,” she snapped.
“Tell him I’m not here.”
She seemed confused, folded her arms and gave it some thought. “But you are here. Where would you go?”
“I just don’t want to talk—” I started. “Oh, forget it.”
I got out of my steel cubby and then followed her. She gave me a sidelong glare.
“I like you, which I didn’t want to do,” she said. “But don’t be Robert’s wife.”
I started to giggle like a fourteen year old. I don’t know why.
“Um,” I said. ”Don’t worry about it.”
“It’s just,” she said. “We’ve been married for so long now—”
“Two months?” I asked. “Three weeks? A week and a half?”
“—and I see how he talks to you and how he looks at you. Like he genuinely likes you. He doesn’t come to me with things. He doesn’t complain about his other wives to me like he does you.”
“I don’t think you have anything to worry about,” I said. “I’ll be here for a while.”
She took me to Robert’s office, which was a set of kids’ bunk beds. He now sat cross-legged on the top one.
“Join me, why don’t you?” He coldly patted the mattress space next to him.
I obeyed and climbed to the top.
“I’ve given it some thought,” Robert said after a long awkward silence. “And thought about what you said.”
“Look,” I said. “I’m sorry about what happened. I still don’t agree with you, but that doesn’t mean we can’t work out a solution to our problem here.”
“Do you remember something you said to me at the Christmas party three years ago?”
I drew a blank. No, I didn’t, so I shook my head.
“You got upset with me because you had been trying to get a job somewhere else in the organization and had interviewed with Steve.”
I nodded. It was doing something I actually wanted, and I had interviewed with the head of the division about a job where I could’ve worked from home and always worn pajamas, only to realize that he was one of Robert’s golf buddies. At the time I thought I was smart and name dropped him, which turned out to be a huge mistake instead.
“You told Steve not to hire me because you were too lazy to hire someone else,” I said.
He snapped his fingers. “That’s right. And you found out and told me that I should support you more in branching out.”
“And you told me a spider monkey with a short attention span could do my job.”
“Oh yeah.” He laughed. “God, I’m funny.”
He paused, still laughing, no doubt congratulating himself for such a great joke. He shook his head and held up a finger.
“Hold on,” he said. “The point is I have been holding you back.”
Joaquin entered the room with a piece of paper and handed it to Robert, who read it. He nodded, and Joaquin left.
“So I’m trading you to another family,” he said. “It’s sort of like this one. You’ll probably like it better.”
“Excuse me?”
“We’re cutting corners everywhere,” Robert said. “We’re all making sacrifices, and your job seemed the most unnecessary.”
“Unnecessary?” I asked. “I do everything around here!”
“Maybe you can stay on for a couple extra days and train some of the girls in what you do?”
I tried to crawl with pride and dignity off that bunk bed. “Get bent,” I said angrily, swinging a leg onto the ladder. “You can’t treat this situation like a corporate round of layoffs.”
“I have to,” Robert said. “It’s all I know.”
Joaquin waited for me a few feet away. He grabbed my arm and ushered me to the front exit of Costco. The other women watched.
“You’re not leaving us, are you?” one of them asked.
“I’ll be back,” I said. “This place is going to fall apart without me.”
“But how will we find the lotion?”
Chapter 11
Karma is Always Just Around the Corner
JOAQUIN DROVE ME to a part of town that used to have this really great Italian place where Bruce took me on our first date. I remember the risotto was really good and the waiter was super cute and I had to tell myself to stop checking him out.
I allowed Joaquin to drive me away from Robert and the Costco because I was angry. Fine, I thought, as I sulked with my arms folded. Let him see what it’s like. Let him have the walls come down around him or his wives starve or worse, bitch at him because there’s no more peanut butter. Then we’ll see who’s holding who back.
“Joaquin?” I asked.
He said nothing.
“Who’s the worse boss you ever had?”
To my surprise, he actually gave thought to the question. “I used to work at that Costco,” he said. “My supervisor just rode my case nonstop.” He shook his head. “I remember this one time, I was taking classes at the community college and they scheduled me during a time where I had class and I had a test. I told them I couldn’t do it, and so my supervisor fired me.”
“That sucks,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be,” he said. “I told her to go fuck herself and left. Then I marched out to the parking lot and saw a giant mushroom cloud in the distance and knew that nothing I cared about mattered anymore.”
We pulled up at an abandoned gas station, where someone had sprayed Ezekiel 11:10 on the door. We sat in silence, and I felt a change of heart swirling in my veins.
“What if you took me back?” I asked. “Robert has flares of moods, but he never stays mad for long.”
“They said they’d be here about now,” he said, looking around.
“Come on, Joaquin,” I said. “We could just leave. Go have an adventure somewhere else. We could do fun things like pillage mansions or finding my family. You don’t have to work for Robert or anyone else if you don’t want to.”
He stared at me in heavy silence. It occurred to me that I might not be completely understanding of where he was coming from.
“Or we can find your family,” I said. “I’m not made of stone.”
“What, and hang with you?” he asked. “You, the girl who blamed me for every time the bathroom got backed up?”
“No, just every time you ate processed cheese,” I said. “It was deductive reasoning, which I may have been wrong. It’s happened and I apologize.”
“Screw you,” he said. “This is a world where I don’t need another woman telling me what I should or shouldn’t be eating. And if I die because I ate too much fried food, then hooray. At least I died doing something I loved.”
“Fried chicken?” I asked. “This is the flag you’re waving?
At that moment, a beat up van pulled up. On the side of the door read the words “Sunshine Hills Christian Church,” but when the door opened, two people stepped out who didn’t look like they had spent much time in worship. Their faces were covered by woolen ski masks and they carried large guns with them. They marched up to the Civic and banged on the doors.
“Get out,” Joaquin said.
I obeyed, emotionally shaken up. I opened the door and was immediately grabbed by one of the gunmen, who was about half an inch shorter than me and a bit on the stocky side. They looked me up and down.
“Hey, man,” he said to Joaquin. “She’s got on a UCLA shirt. How do we know that UCLA isn’t coming back for her?”
“UCLA is dead. Don’t worry about him. She’s yours now. You got her payment?”
The other gunman nodded and went back into the van while the one who held me grabbed my sweatshirt and went to pull it off, exposing my Batman shirt.
“Dude,” he said. “Does she belong to Batman too? I’ve heard that guy is nuts; kills anything that crosses his path. If they come looking for her—”
Joaquin raised an eye at me. “Did you belong to Batman?”
“That’s a real thing?” I asked. “That’s not really a thing, is it? I thought I made that up so UCLA would leave me alone.”
One gunman turned to the other. “Remember when we killed that UCLA guy?”
The other gunman nodded. “Yeah.”
“That guy just cried that Batman was coming for him. So pathetic.”
“I think that was before I got hired here,” said the shorter gunman.
“Eh,” he said. “Killing him was good, but not great.”
“Forget it,” Joaquin said. “She’s fine.”
The other gunman returned holding three dogs of mixed breeds on leashes I incredulously looked from them to Joaquin.
“Dogs?” I asked. “Robert traded me for dogs?”
The dogs were led into Joaquin’s Civic as the gunman went back into the van and reemerged this time holding cases of shampoo and conditioner.
“Come on,” the gunman said, pushing me to the van. “Darren Warren waits for no one.”
“Wait. What? I said. “Darren Warren? That guy?”
I was thrown into the van. The last glimpse I got Joaquin was trying to handle a corgi retriever mix while it barked and jumped up and down.
One gunman drove while the other sat next to me.
“Funny story,” I said casually. “I’ve actually met Darren Warren. He ate my ex-boyfriend. And it wasn’t that long ago.”
Neither of them seemed interested in hearing the remainder of that story, so we rode the rest of the way in silence. I stared out the window, alternating feelings between fear and hopelessness.
We drove to a house up in the hills that had been boarded up, like every other house so far, but this one was still in decent shape. When we arrived, the gunman escorted me inside into what was once a living room with a floral border print around the walls. The only piece of furniture was an overstuffed recliner with branches and twigs sticking out of it, making for somewhat of a weirdly makeshift throne.
My captors held me up as one of them stuck duct tape over my mouth. Darren entered, wearing a deep blue thick robe with a cute bulldog embroidered over the front pocket.
“And what have my friends brought me today?” he asked. “Is this the exchange we had prepared with my Costco warlord friend?”
I moved every muscle around my mouth to loosen the tape. Once I’d lifted it over my lips, I worked more frantically to tear it off until one side just hung off part of my cheek, gently tickling it.
“Robert’s a warlord?” I asked as I jerked my head to the side, hoping to get that piece of tape to fall off. “Someone get that put on his business card. Or better yet, update his LinkedIn profile.”
“He is a wise man,” he said. “He teaches that you motivate by lowering the bar of happiness.”
They shoved me forward as Darren stared me up and down. The tape fell off as I stepped forward and I accidently stepped on it.
“Well,” he said. “Someone’s beauty regiment doesn’t agree with an Apocalypse, now do they?” He laughed at his own joke. “Back when I wrote theater criticisms, I remember one actress, seven-year-old Abigail Williams, trying to play Annie, but her orphan exterior could never belie her spoiled twenty first century luxuries that she was used to.”
My foot stuck to the carpet as tape ground in deeper to the floor. I went to bend down, hoping to pick it off but one of Darren’s henchmen jerked me back up.
“You are just a fake orphan still expecting people to hand things out to you,” he said. “So you might wonder why I’ve been looking for you.”
“Mr. Warren?” I asked while pursing my stinging lips. “Perhaps you don’t remember, but when we met a few months ago, you ate my boyfriend. I just ask that you don’t eat me.”
He squinted as if trying to remember. “I do.” He smiled. “We don’t let those come and enjoy our community, then run away. So congratulations for getting around so much. Most people haven’t been so lucky.”
“You’ve moved up from a trailer,” I said nervously. “This seems nice.”
“Thank you,” he said, sighing heavily. “It hasn’t been easy. Good help is always so hard to find. We travel from place to place, sad quarantines, tenements, houses crammed with people with no way of surviving. I do those a favor because, what else are they going to do in this existence?”
He gestured to a group of people, mostly dirty-looking women who were crouched in the doorway, trying to get a good look at everything going on.
“Did I tell you to gawk and stare?” he shouted. “Go! Work! Earn your survival so I’m not tempted to serve as part of our Sunday feast!”
“Sunday feast?” I asked. “Should I assume that we’re all still really into eating people?”
“Like you’re going to trust what’s currently in the meat of cows and pigs,” he scoffed as he walked toward his chair. “So many chemicals nowadays. There were before, but you don’t know what surviving livestock has been eating or put through.”
I nodded. I smiled as I rolled my foot to the side finally dislodging that awful piece of duct tape. “I guess not.”
“You were brought here as an exchange,” he said. “Your old employer, Robert, was actually a friend of mine a long time ago and has kept in touch with me since the Incident. I may not remember your lover, but I remember yo
u, Verdell.”
“And you know Robert.”
“Sure, we’re old college buddies,” he said. “He mentioned that you were looking for more challenging opportunities.”
“Did he now?”
He leaned forward and gestured for me to come closer. Which I did, realizing that I had no idea what was about to happen next.
“I run a well-formed machine,” he said. “I operate to the rhythms of the universe, which has no room for chaos. Should you choose to love me and pledge your devotion to me, I won’t reject it, but you’re going to have to make some serious sacrifices if you want the favor returned. Understand?”
I nodded, unsure of what else to do or say.
“Robert tells me you’re very talented at coordinating things. Like lunch meetings.”
I was a little offended. “That’s not my only talent. There was a time I could make it look like I’d done a lot of data entry.”
“Don’t sell yourself short,” he said. “Not everyone can do that.” He waved me away. “Go join my other servants. Let them show you the ropes.”
I gingerly walked in the direction of his minions, who were clearly eavesdropping. “You’re not going to want to—”
I stammered the words to an awkward question.
“Yes?” he asked.
“Well, sometimes when warlords like a servant girl very much—”
He winced as if I had pitched him a musical retelling of The Dukes of Hazzard. “Please, you’re not my type or gender. Don’t flatter yourself.”
I nodded and made my hasty retreat to where the others waited.
Darren had a group of almost twenty working for him. They were all haggard-looking, but operated the house like some kind of hippie commune. Stepping forward, I recognized my old co-worker, Tatiana, who immediately took me aside as soon as I left Darren’s presence.
“You’re the new girl!” she breathily exclaimed. “I’m Starshine.”
“You’re Starshine?” I asked, shaking my head, pointing at myself. “No, you’re Tatiana. We used to work together! Remember?”
She nodded. “I had another name, but once the Incident happened, I realized I could be whoever I wanted. So now I’m Starshine. Also, our Lord kidnapped me and held me for four days in a dark room without water until I forgot everything.” She took a breath and smiled brightly while extending her hand out to me. “So I’m Starshine.”