Safety (One Eighteen: Migration Book 1)

by Christopher Wiig

  My theories about this I am withholding from the file notes.

  I don't want to taint the new analyst with my own ideas. She seems clever enough, and willing to follow my lead.

  On an unrelated note, this passage seems to be a good litmus test for choosing a new analyst. The two we've lost already (see coroners reports for Staff Sergeant Vaughan (apparent suicide) and Staff Sergeant Moore (cause of death still undetermined)) ended their reports with the dreams.

  Recommending 24 hour monitoring and possible sedatives for all future analysts after every session.

  Why does this notebook effect people in the way it does?

  I do admit that there are times when I find myself removing the journal from the vault just to hold it for a few moments.

  [pause of 6 Seconds.]

  Strike that last sentence from final report.

  Chapter 3:

  The Honey Trap

  ”Now I lay me down to sleep,

  but trouble dreams, are all I find.

  I pray the Lord my soul to keep.

  I pray so I won't lose my mind...”

  Squirrel Nut Zippers, Blue Angel

  February 16th, 2008

  I'm exhausted, but I want to get this down on paper while it's all fresh in my mind. Things are happening in Greenly now... things that make me want to leave more than ever. Things I have no rational explanation for. (Which sounds so silly considering the world I live in.)

  It all started this morning.

  I woke up in a cold sweat to the banging of a insistent fist at my front door. I'd been having a nightmare, one I can't quite remember the details of except it ended with someone getting shot and I woke up angry.

  I wasn't particularly surprised by the early visit, there are no such thing as “store hours” anymore but I was certainly annoyed.

  My cot is in the back of the store, with as many quilts and blankets as the night requires. It always takes me a while to get out of bed between that and all the layers of clothing underneath, and the process is decidedly less pleasant with some asshole banging on your door.

  I sleep in the store because it's safer than my parents home, (and has fewer memories, good or bad.) It's best not to dwell on life as it was.

  Waight Hardware has two entrances, with bars on the door and all the display windows covered in sturdy wooden planks. It's a good defense from Dead Things, but there's also a fringe benefit to this.

  It keeps the Deputies from sneaking in at night and robbing me blind. A number of shopkeepers have complained to Horace about things disappearing in the middle of the night.

  I followed my normal routine, despite the racket. I brushed my teeth, relieved myself into the hospital bedpan that I use for a chamber pot, and checked my secret stockpile of batteries and non transmitting gadgets.

  Throughout it the banging continued. I figured it was one of the Deputies coming to "borrow" some ammunition for the watch towers. They'd been shooting all night, drunkenly yelling out how many they'd killed that day. Keeping score.

  I figured they might run low on ammunition, so I had a few boxes of cartridges at the ready. It's just good business. But the store wasn't open and they could wait.

  I was expecting the Deputies, but to my surprise it was Sarah Goodman banging on my door. She looked beautiful but irritated, as though we'd had an appointment and I was late for it.

  I took extra time with the locks just to annoy her. I know, it's juvenile but... well... fuck it. She woke me up. I opened the door a crack and she pushed her way right in, stomping past me and leaving the scent of lavender in her wake.

  Things like this irk me. The rest of us are huddled together waiting to die and she's wearing perfume.

  As I asked her what she wanted so early in the morning, she began to rifle through my displays, throwing things on the ground. Anything that she wasn't interested in went into the "restock after the tantrum pile."

  Sarah Goodman is used to getting whatever she wants, and the citizens of Greenly know that if you deny her anything she's just going to send her boyfriend Willie Fetch and the rest of the Deputies over for a "random" inspection.

  One personal bottle of antibiotics or medicine, hell one anything that's "contraband" this week, and you're liable to lose a quarter of your supplies or more. The good stuff. It turns out that though death is no longer inevitable, taxes are.

  And if they find electronics, banishment.

  I let her do her thing, and I restocked the shelves as she finished with them.

  Sarah spent the better part of an hour tearing my store apart as I thawed some clean snow and enjoyed a terrible cup of home-brewed coffee with a couple of saltines.

  (Breakfast of Champions.)

  I cut the bitterness of the overused grounds with some honey (that was frozen, so I had to cut from the stomach of the whimsical plastic bear it came in with my knife. Disemboweling what's essentially a honey filled gummy bear was amusing and cathartic.) I'm all out of sugar, along with most of the rest of the town. Honey does the job, keeps better than people expect, and it always exists alone in the backs of raided cupboards of people who assume that just because it's crystallized, it's gone bad. A little heat and it softens right back up, and you've got poor man's sugar.

  Sarah took nearly all of my ballpoint pens and about a dozen sewing needes, along with few pieces of cloth I'd torn into dish rags. Nothing I couldn't replace. I was starting to see the humor in the tantrum.

  When Sarah went after my back room, though, I panicked. I didn't want her to find the batteries, and she was getting into everything.

  When I grabbed her arm to stop her she screamed "Don't fucking touch me!" and began to flail around like a wounded bird.

  I started to become genuinely frightened. Her eyes rolled back slightly and I swear to God she started snapping at me with her teeth. I was afraid she was having some sort of psychotic episode.

  Not knowing what else to do, I put my forearm into her neck and pinned her against a pillar. The store is filled with a number of nasty things; axes, saws, and my father's lazy habit of just hammering rusty nails in the walls to serve as display hooks.

  She could have very easily hurt or killed herself the way she was acting, and I'd have been blamed. Her arms flailed, and her pretty painted fingernails became razor blades, slashing at my face and neck. I've never been so thankful to be wearing the parka.

  I don't know at what point I hit her, but I do know that I was dangerously close to becoming a cyclops when it happened. I smacked her, open handed, and her jaw just dropped. The sound was electric, out of place, like a thunderclap on a sunny day.

  She froze, and touched her cheek. I watched with not a small amount of concern as her wide blue eyes went cold. She stared at me like a lizard, or a snake, and the hatred I saw was cold and deep and honest. I held her steady for what felt like several minutes as she studied my face.

  Then like the sudden end of a rainstorm, she was all weepy eyed and sobbing and whimpering, "You HIT me!?"

  I explained to her that she was, for lack of a better term, acting like a fucking psychopath, and again asked her what she wanted. Turns out it was my rubbing alcohol.

  All of it.

  "You got it from Jackson Tate for three cartons of Marlboros, and I can't find it anywhere else anymore. I want yours," she said, "Please Jonas? I need it."

  Rubbing alcohol is precious stuff. You can clean wounds with it. You can sterilize with it. You could even clean with it, if you've got those kind of resources to throw around. A thimbleful can get you a cup of rice, or a decent can of vegetables.

  I've still got half a bottle and she might as well have walked in and demanded my revolver.

  Not wanting to be the one to poison our town's beauty queen, I explained to her the difference between pure alcohol, and the sort of alcohol that assisted her in losing her virginity on prom night.

  She spat back at me a number of colorful words that I presume they did not teach her in charm school, and assur
ed me that she wasn't, and I quote "fucking retarded."

  Then she dropped a bombshell on me.

  "I've seen you after dark, using that flashlight."

  It's true that my previous entries into this journal, along with, I'm ashamed to say, this one, have been written by flashlight.

  At that point my mind missed the important question. Why was Sarah behind my store in the middle of the night? The only place she could have seen the flash light was if she was behind the store. What was she doing back there?

  Watching me?

  Anything but the damned rubbing alcohol and I'd have caved right then and there. But I already had a deal in place for it with Alex. He's been looking for something worth cooking, and I've been bartering with the Peterson's to get a hold of the six cans of button mushrooms they've been hoarding.

  Alex has some great swag and for quality ingredients he'd trade anything up to and including his first born son. (I suppose that's a cruel joke considering Alex did lose his son.)

  I offer to give her some and she laughs at me. I offer to trade and the word travels through one ear and right out the other with no recognition. Tit-or-tat is a foreign concept to her.

  She practically growled, "Maybe I'll just have Willie come down here and look for it for me."

  That pissed me off.

  If the Deputies come, I'll have to trash the flashlight, batteries, and a number of other non-receiving toys I've been hoarding. They may just be trinkets, but to me they're valuable. They're important artifacts of a world that was lost.

  She put her hands on her waist, looking spoiled and defiant. "I really will. He'll come in here and find it anyway, and probably take a whole lot more than that one little bottle!"

  "Great," I told her, suddenly and somewhat unexpectedly short with her. "It'll be a puddle on the floor when you get back with him."

  I practically snarled it at her. She snapped. The tantrum she threw was epic and I rode the waves of it like a fishing boat in a hurricane.

  From obscenities and demands, she moved from threats to vague offers of favors she might perform, if I'd only give her what she wants. Then she became pitiful and for just a second I was tempted to give it to her. To show her what a good guy I am.

  Then I remembered what a snake she is.

  You let your guard down for two seconds with Sarah Goodman and she's likely to walk out of your place with half of your best trade goods. Heck you may even carry them for her. If anyone could pay, Sarah Goodman could.

  And she was going to.

  I gave her my bottom line. Five cans of food. Good stuff. RARE stuff. Mushrooms. Condensed Milk. Spices. Saffron. I tell her if there's a single fucking can of beets I'll dump the rubbing alcohol on the floor in front of her.

  (Beets are EVERYWHERE. Turns out everyone buys them, nobody eats them. Creamed corn is just as bad.)

  She capitulated, but only after giving me a look not unlike a caged lioness. She'll do my tricks, but only so long as I have the whip and chair. If I let my guard down she'll skin me alive, all while maintaining perfect hair and makeup.

  We made a date to meet around sundown at her home. We still have watches in Greenly, but it's amazing how few wind-up timepieces are available. Most appointments are morning, noon and nightfall. I had things to do.

  With a snarl that made her look beautiful, in an "I'm a psychopath who'd like to murder you" way, she left, slamming the door so hard half of my merchandise fell off my front display and I spent most of the day restocking it.

  Sarah Goodman... the fucking QUEEN of Greeley, South Dakota.

  I do have to admit that I put half of the rubbing alcohol into an old water bottle and hid it well. No reason to deal squarely with her. She'd never give me the same courtesy, and I was 95% sure she'd find some way to make me regret it, so I figured I was owed it. (I was, and then some.)

  I spent the rest of the morning catching up on my sleep. My dreams, as usual, were not peaceful. I dreamt of Sarah, sinuous and covered in fig leaves and serpents; offering me the forbidden apple.

  “Please Jonas.”

  The Dark Thing doesn't come. He's not welcome in this garden, and I know it's because of her. He doesn't like her.

  “Just one little bite, Jonas.”

  She moans and writhes and babbles on about some sort of music as an apple floats in front of my face, pure and shiny and fresh. But I can feel the worms writhing underneath the slick, red skin, multiplying and twisting around the core.

  One bite and they'll be inside me, and I'll never get them out.

  “Why are you frightened of me, Jonas?”

  I feel the Dark Thing out in the wastes, cast out of the garden and furious. He's angry, and he's angry THAT he's angry. Anger is irrational to him.

  “Just a little bite, Jonas. Please?”

  His hatred of her almost makes me take a bite. But I don't cut off my nose to spite my face.

  “A taste. Come sit with me, Jonas.”

  All around me strange music, deep and melodic and temping, pulls me towards her. But I know the garden is as poisonous as the wastes outside.

  “I can make you content. Have you ever been content, Jonas?”

  She smiles a jackal's smile and slides her arm around me, cozying up. She waves the fruit under my nose, letting me inhale it's delicate, complex aroma.

  “Be free Jonas. Aren't you curious?”

  An apple but not an apple. A dream apple. The Dark Thing roars, a long and loud bellow, and she giggles. I don't bite.

  I flee. She laughs as I run from her.

  “Soon, Jonas.”

  When I wake up I feel dirty... defiled.

  I spent the rest of the afternoon hunting down Alex, who I found screaming at his two sous chefs as they did kitchen prep in the Greenly Civic Building. It's the biggest kitchen in town, so instead of having people handle their own food, Alex prepares it.

  Caroline Smith, who used to be Jeb Greenly's nanny before the Dead Things got to his kids, and Wendell Cooper, the town hoodlum before all of the mess, act as his seconds in command and he seems like a very good, if profane, teacher.

  They were occupied with cutting the moldy parts off of potatoes, (some of which appeared to be more mold than potato, honestly.) I'd entered on what apparently was we in the industry call a “teachable moment.”

  “Wendell, I don't want to see any more of this shit, you hear?” Alex was saying. He was yelling, but he wasn't.

  “Yes, chef,” Wendell said, looking embarrassed, but not upset at the grown man yelling in his face. Alex was shouting, but Alex loves to shout.

  Though he never quite picked up the accent, his work in New York definitely gave him a “big city” attitude. Wendell not only doesn't seems to be fazed by it, I think he respects it. I think Alex is the first person who ever treated him like a grown up. I hear Jeff Cooper was rarely around, and so for all intents and purposes he grew up without a father.

  “It's just a speck there, Alex,” Caroline said, “It would have cooked off in the oven.” Caroline often stands up for Wendell, which embarrasses him more than helps, but it's sweet to watch. And she's one of the few people who can knock Alex out of his stubbornness on the rare occasion that he's wrong, and on the common occasion where he's too plain spoken.

  "Mold equals sick diners, Caroline,” Alex said. “If it can kill someone, it will kill someone and you can't look at it any other way and stay in business for long. Sure it could burn off, but if it didn't, it only needs to happen once and we'll be digging a hole from someone.”

  “It won't happen again, Chef,” Wendell said like a soldier to their drill sergeant.

  “I'm serious,” Alex said, watching Wendell's eyes for defiance. “This is the last restaurant in the fucking world and for Christ's sake our food is going to be good, it's and it's going to be SAFE.”

  ”Horace said-” Caroline started, but Alex cut her off.

  “I don't give fuck all what Horace says, if it's not up to MY standards we throw it the fu
ck away," Alex said, then catching himself, explained more gently:

  “We can't fuck around with safety. There's no ER for someone to go to. He was wrong, and he could kill someone being wrong.”

  Alex is used to working in bigger cities, running a team of chefs, and his kitchen is definitely a benevolent patriarchy. He's used to being right, and used to being obeyed. Alex also doesn't belong here, and I think that's why we get along.

  He opened his Bed and Breakfast in Greenly as a summer gig, a place to vacation while still being able to do what he loves (and write it off the losses on his taxes.) He expected to lose a little money and relax, and ended up in the middle of the Feudal States of the Apocalypse. You can tell he misses leading a team, though. It's a shame his only interest is feeding people.

  Alex is a born leader.

  I like both Caroline and Wendell, even though Wendell ripped me of half a dozen times before the world went to hell. The world grew him up fast. He took losing his parents hard; his mother in the first few days, and his father on the Paradise Falls expedition.

  Ever since then Wendell, Alex has taken on that fatherly role (whether he intended to or not, which is up for debate.) When Alex speaks to him every reply is "Yes, Chef!" and "No Chef," like a marine to his commander.

  As for Caroline... well, keeping Alex and Wendell level speaks for itself. Her influence makes them better than they are without her. I can see why she made a good nanny, she's got far more Wisdom and perspective than a 19 year old girl should.

  Visits to Alex's kitchen are a three stage process.

  Stage one consists of listening to him complain about trying to cook good food on propane camp stoves and wood ovens. Alex is kitchen appliance addict, and he talks about stick blenders and Viking ranges in the loving tone of a gear-head describing the car the classic muscle car they're restoring.