Saturday, April 30, 2011

Whispers on the Wind

This is a work of fiction. No real people, places or events were used. Copyright ã 2011 Plot Roach.

Whispers on the Wind

By Plot Roach

Regina paused at the gate of the old Victorian house, like she did almost every day that she walked past. Unlike some of the earlier days of her life here in this city, she was not in a hurry. She let the trees whisper to her through the brief breeze and the dappled sunlight. She watched the gnomes, frozen in play, frolic along the clean cut grass that edged the cobblestone walkway. Various statues were surrounded by multicolored plants spewing forth life and fragrances in a multitude of delight. And, as always, the wooden lady looked down upon her kingdom from her perch near the roof. She smiled benevolently at those who passed below her. Regina always smiled back.

“Look, I don’t care what they’re offering for the place. If they don’t have what it takes, they’re not going to get the house.” A woman said, slamming closed the front wrought iron fence and bending to pick up a plastic wrapped newspaper. Regina’s heart sank. So the place is up for sale after all, she thought. It will never be the same if the new owners take down all the ornaments. “I want to talk to them personally, not take your word for it, Mitch. I need to know what kind of people are going to get my mother’s place.”
I should be going now, Regina thought, yet still could not break herself away from the conversation. It would be like abandoning an old friend in a time of need.

“Do I know you?” the woman asked, glaring at Regina. Somehow she had lost track of the woman talking on her cell phone.

“Uh, no ma’am. I’ll just get going.”

“No, wait.” the woman said, taking off her sunglasses and giving Regina a once over. “I do know you. My mother said she knew you. Said that you and she would talk almost every day.”

Regina blushed. “I talked with her off and on when she tended her garden is all.”

“No, you did more for her than that, whether you realize it or not.” The woman said. “My name is Kathy, by the way.” she held out her hand and Regina reluctantly shook it. “Do you live around here?”

“Not really. I mean, not anymore.”

“Which is it? The ‘not really’ or ‘not anymore’?”

“It’s just that…Well…I kind of lost my home, and I’m in between right now…So…”

“Do you stay at a friend’s home or do you go to the shelter?” Kathy asked.

Regina looked down, feeling about three inches tall and definitely feeling the need to move on. “Don’t feel bad about it, crap happens and we do the best we can. Don’t let anyone make you feel less of a person for it.” Kathy said. “Now come sit in the garden with me and I’ll get us something to snack on while we talk.”

“Why would you want to talk with me?”

“Because you did what my mother’s children could not: spend time with her towards the end of her life. She appreciated it, and so do I.”

Regina resisted the urge to run away after the woman went into the house. You might as well stay, she told herself. You never know where your next meal will come from. And from somebody who doesn’t look down on you.

The woman returned with a tray filled with sandwiches and glasses of lemonade. “I hope you don’t mind warm drinks” Kathy apologized. “I didn’t realized that the electricity had been turned off and some of the things in the fridge have gone bad.” They ate for a while in silence, peanut butter and seedless strawberry jam on wheat bread. Butter cookies and graham crackers on the side for something sweet. Kathy began to tell Regina about her mother’s life. How this had been the first and only home her parents had ever lived in. And when her father had gotten a promotion and was forced to move to this city, he arranged for the family home to be moved as well. “I have such fond memories of the place.” Kathy sighed.

“Then why not keep it for yourself?”

“I move around a lot and I don’t have a big family of my own. It would just turn to dust waiting for my return.”

“It’s such a shame that you have to sell it. I hope the next owners don’t destroy its magic.”

Kathy tilted her head to the side, as if measuring what Regina had just said. “Tell me what you love about the place.”

“Well, look. I mean, it has a magic all of its own. And not just from the statues and the plants. It’s like fairies live here. And her-” Regina said, pointing to the wooden woman, “She looks like she’s the queen of them all. And it‘s silly, but there are times when I think that she could whisper to me if the wind blew in the right direction. Maybe on some winter night when the moon was full and the stars danced around her like the fairy folk.”

“Do you know anything about that statue?”

“Only that your mother talked to it when she wasn’t talking to me.”

“My mother hated that statue so much in the beginning. It was on my father’s fishing boat, right at the front. When the boat was damaged in a freak storm, the insurance money he got from it went to pay for the house. Almost everyone was hurt in that accident, and my father should have died. But he clung to that woman and survived. When the boat was demolished, he kept holding onto her and insisted she come to be part of the house as well. Every day he came out here to talk to her, and my mother felt like he was having an affair on her.”

“But it’s just a statue.”

“That didn’t matter to her. He spoke more to that statute than he ever did to her or his own kids. In the end, she was the last one he talked to. He was working in the yard when it happened, he had a heart attack. But rather than go inside and get help, he sat on the bench we’re on now and died with his eyes gazing up at her.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“Not half as sorry as my mother. She almost yanked the statue down and burned it in the fireplace. But in the end she felt like the statue might now be her friend, since they both lost someone they loved.” Kathy said, wiping a tear away from the corner of her eye with a napkin. “But here I am, telling you my sob story, when I’m sure that you’ve got more than you can deal with on your own.”

“I’ll leave if you want me to, I didn’t mean to trouble you…”

“No, stay. Tell me about yourself. My mother spoke often of you, almost as if you were one of her children.”

“Then you already know about me.”

“No, she talked about the conversations that they two of you shared, and about how you helped her with little things around the place that she couldn’t do on her own toward the end. Please, tell me about yourself, so that I can see what she saw in you.”

“I’ve lived here for ten years. I came to this city with my fiancé. We always meant to get married, but life got the better of us, always making us either too broke or too busy to do it. We decided to start a family anyway, and we were doing well until my hours were cut back at my job and he got sick. We couldn’t afford the insurance, and I earned too much to qualify the family for free medical assistance. He died six months ago, after a long battle with cancer. In the meantime, I tried everything to get more work to pay the bills. But between medical expenses, the funeral, and everything else in between… I just couldn’t make it.”

“Any what of his family or yours? Couldn’t they help?”

“He was abandoned as a child and was sent from foster home to foster home. As for my family… Let’s just say that I would have preferred my fiancé’s upbringing.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Then, when I couldn’t keep us under a roof and I lost my job, CPS took my two sons, they’re two and five years old now. Evidently the state feels that they’re better off split up and being raised by strangers than by a mother that loves them."

“Aren’t there programs that could help keep you all together and help you get back on your feet?”

“Only when they don’t have a waiting list that lasts for two years… in the meantime they took my kids until I can provide proof of income, housing and other basic necessities.”

“And?”

“I’ve looked for a job, but none will pay me enough to pay all the bills and feed my family. It’s either one or the other, but not both. And the social worker is threatening that if I can’t do the impossible soon, the state will give my kids up for permanent adoption.”

“No, they won’t.” Kathy said. “SHE won’t let it happen.” she said, pointing to the wooden woman smiling from above them.

Regina smiled, still crying. “I would love to believe that, but how?”

“You said so yourself, she’s magical.”

“But how is all the magic in the world going to get my kids back?”

“Her magic brought you to me. I saw you smile up at her as you walked past. You’ve been her friend for a while now. And it’s about time that she returned the favor. As for the house, it’s yours. It’s mine to do with as I please, and I think no one would respect my mother’s garden and her wishes quite like you. So consider the house thing solved. As for employment, I have need of someone in my office. It will be full time work with medical and dental as part of the perks. I’m sure we can find you a licensed day care to watch the children until you can get home in your own company car. And as for getting the kids back, don’t worry too much about it. I’m a lawyer and I think I’d love to rip apart that social worker of yours for not giving you the proper information about your case and about keeping your options from you. You just leave the details to me.”

“And all of this because of the statue?” Regina asked, dumbfounded.

“I think the wind blew the right way and she whispered to me too.”

Friday, April 29, 2011

Busy Body

This is a work of fiction. No real people, places or events were used. Copyright ã 2011 Plot Roach.

Busy Body

By Plot Roach

What was left of nosey woman lay in a lump on Anita’s kitchen floor. Anita had been waging a war with this woman for nearly a month, and now it was finally at an end. Tough not in the way that I had wanted, Anita thought, looking at the corpse. Anita was new to the apartment complex, and the woman had been the neighborhood gossip. Anita liked her life private, and did not want her business spread around the complex like so much fertilizer.

So when the woman had stopped to feed her the latest gossip, Anita cut her off, saying that she did not believe in talking about people behind their backs. That had been the first nail in her coffin, as the woman now began to gossip about Anita. Not that she knew anything about the new tenant. But she made up stories and circulated them like chain letters. And of course, no one would believe Anita’s side of the stories, being new and all.

Then the woman insisted that Anita volunteer to help her, either asking for help lugging groceries up the flight of stairs to her apartment, or else ’borrowing’ items that she had no intention of returning. Anita, trying to turn the other cheek and foster a sense of goodwill in the complex to make up for the stories the woman had told about her, tried her best to appease the woman. She even smiled weakly when the woman’s two dogs, a hideous crossbreed of Pit-bull and Shar-pei that not even blind man could love, snarled at her as she carried the woman’s groceries into her home.

“I need to borrow two hundred dollars. Be a dear and get it for me, would you?” the woman asked one evening as she walked her freakish mistakes of nature she called dogs out on the front lawn of the complex. Anita eyed the dogs, knowing that the woman never bothered to clean up after them.

“Excuse me?” Anita asked, not sure if she heard the woman right.

“I need the money. And I’m sure you’ll be grateful to give it to me. I mean, I’ve done so much for you, and all…”

“YOU have done so much for me?!” Anita balked. “I’ve done nothing but good things for you, and all you have done in return is spread rumors about me to make yourself look good. You can piss off, lady! This gravy train is gone.” Anita slammed the apartment gate closed behind her and headed back to her apartment. Not ten minutes in its solitude, there was a knock on the door.

It was the dog woman.

“What in the Hell do you want now?” Anita asked.

The woman pushed her way into Anita’s apartment and pushed her onto the ground. “Now you’re going to give me three hundred dollars, or I’ll tell the police that your evil little dog did this.” she said, brandishing a bitten arm at Anita. It was red and swollen. And though the bite marks had to have been from one of her own dogs, she knew that animal control would seize her beloved Kiwi, a fifteen year old golden retriever. And he would be euthanized before she could blink an eye. After the ice in her veins seized her heart, the coldness spread to her brain. It was a wonderful numbing feeling, and just what she needed for the situation at hand.

“I keep my emergency money in a tin in the kitchen.” she said, closing the door behind the woman.

“I knew that you’d see things my way-”

Anita cut off the woman, quite literally, in mid sentence. She had grabbed a large kitchen knife from the sink, grabbed a snatch of the woman’s hair and pulled her head back as she carved the front of the woman’s neck into a large red smile. She let the dog woman fall to the floor to pump out the rest of her life onto the cold pitted linoleum. When the woman stopped twitching, Anita checked to make sure that the door was locked. It’s no use to get caught in the middle of cleanup, she thought. She returned the knife to the kitchen sink and grabbed a handful of dark bed sheets. Anita rolled the woman onto one of these sheets in order to drag her to the bathroom without leaving a trail behind her.

Once in the bathroom, she pushed and pulled the woman into the bathtub, making sure to plug the drain so that the blood would not flow down the pipe, congeal and plug it up. Anita stripped down into her underwear and grabbed a handful of knives, scissors and a Black & Decker handsaw so that she could begin to work on the corpse.

Goodbye, dog lady, she thought. I never did know you real name. She used the power saw to chew through the thicker parts of the woman, and used the heavy scissors to cut through tough muscles the knives were too blunt for. She separated the woman into small sections and placed them into heavy garbage bags. Once done, she used a cup to transfer the blood from the bathtub to the toilet, repeatedly flushing to get rid of the red liquid and small scraps of flesh that had fallen away during the butchering process.

Now what am I going to do with you? Anita asked herself. If I dump her in a trash bin, even in another city, chances are I will have forgotten some small scrap of something that will tie my DNA to her body. I can’t burn her, there’s not a big enough barbeque pit here. She set the parts of her nosey neighbor into her deep freezer until she could think up a way to finally be rid of the woman.

She showered, bagged up the bloody clothes and bed sheets to dispose of later, and was about to fix herself dinner when there was a knock at the door. Not again, she thought. I just don’t have enough room in my freezer for TWO bodies today.

Another neighbor was waiting for her to open the door. Did he see her come in here? She asked herself. Does he suspect something? Her heart pounded as she opened the door. She tried to put on her best I’m-a-normal-person-and-not-a-killer smile. “Yes?” she asked.

“I was wondering if anybody let you in on the summer potluck get-together yet?”

“Excuse me?”

“Well Charlene was supposed to tell you. Didn’t she say anything about it yet?”

“Charlene?”

“You know, the lady with the two dogs upstairs.”

“The pit-bull things?”

“Yeah, that’s her. I’m surprised she didn’t tell you though. Since she’s so good at telling everything else here.”

“I noticed the gossip streak.” Anita said, smiling.

“Oh, don’t let that get to you.” the neighbor said. “Everybody knows that she’s full of crap.”

Blood, tendons and a huge amount of fat, actually, Anita thought. She smiled, took the flyer from the neighbor and told him that she would be glad to participate. Provided I’m not in jail, she thought. She skimmed the flyer. It looked like it would involve a good number of people. That’s going to be a lot of food, she thought. She winced at the price of the ingredients to feed so many people. And then the thought crossed her mind: she would let Charlene help her with the expense.

A week later the streets were closed off, the picnic tables were set out and people came from each part of the apartment complex with plates, bowls and trenches of food. Anita asked for help from a few of the neighbors to trundle out the feast that she had prepared.

There was rump roast, marinated ribs for the barbeque, homemade sausage and lean hamburgers.

“It’s a pity Charlene isn’t here to see all this.”

“Whatever happened to her, do you think?” Anita asked.

“She was always a bit flighty, if you ask me.” said another neighbor. “The landlord keeps feeding her dogs, but he says that he’s going to send them to the pound soon if she doesn’t show up in a day or so. He’ll probably toss her stuff out too. She’s been behind in her rent for nearly three months now. Not that any of us will really miss her, though.”

Anita smiled and said nothing, taking a big bite out of the fruit salad on her plate.

“Aren’t you going to eat anything off the grill?” a neighbor asked.

“No.” Anita said. “I’ve decided to become a vegetarian and I thought that I would use up all the meat in my freezer at once rather than letting it go bad.”

“It’s a shame Charlene isn’t here to enjoy all of this.” one of her neighbors said. “She just loved homemade food like this”, the man said, biting into one of the ribs.

“Oh, I’m sure she’s here in spirit.” Anita said, taking another bite off of her plate.

Thursday, April 28, 2011

The Contract

This is a work of fiction. No real people, places or events were used. Copyright ã 2011 Plot Roach.

The Contract

By Plot Roach
 
Susan curled up with a good romance novel, a roaring fire in the fireplace, and the rain a staccato of drumbeats on her roof. The cat curled up beside her, and her favorite tea in a mug on the end table next to her. What more could I want? She asked herself.

She turned the pages of the novel and devoured half the book by the time the clock chimed midnight. The witching hour, she smiled. She thought of her grandmother who scolded her to get to bed before this time. She claimed that women who stayed up past a ‘decent’ time were tempted by unholy desires and that the devil would come and take their souls away into the dark of the night.

Her smile faded as the last chime of the clock struck with an odd sound. Mercedes, her cat, dashed off into the bedroom as if something were chasing her. Silly cat, Susan thought. What could have gotten into her now? She reached out for her mug of tea, and found it missing. Had Mercedes knocked it from the table in her mad dash to leave the room? She checked under the table and began to look around her chair when she was interrupted with a loud slurping sound.

“I didn’t think that you would mind.” said the tall dark figure from behind her. “It gets awfully hot where I’m from and the journey here to see you tonight had left me rather parched.”

The figure slinked off from behind her chair, to reappear like a shadow mere feet from the front of her overstuffed chair.

“Do you mind if I take the other seat?” the shadow asked.

Susan shook her head and gestured to the seat. She would have screamed long before now, but a mysterious feeling had overcome her. She was unable to use her voice. Her hand shook as she pointed to the other, unoccupied chair. She thought she would faint, prayed for it actually, but she was not that lucky.

A fear held her heart in a tight grip, the likes of which she had not felt since childhood. This is why we fear the dark, she thought. Because of things like this.

“I’m a him, my dear. Not a thing.” said the shadow perched beside her. He returned the mug to the end table and waved to himself. “Though with such a shoddy appearance, it is easy to understand the confusion.” With a grand sweep of his hand, the being materialized, and Susan wished he had not.

The tall, long shadow was replaced with and equally lithe being that Susan was sure was the inspiration for many a horror movie. His black pebbled skin reflected red in the light from the fireplace. It looked too thick to be anything other than the pebbled hide of an alligator, yet framed him in such a delicate nature that she could make out every pore. He wore a cream colored suit that reminded her of a gangster in the old black and white movies her grandmother loved so well. And the thought of her grandmother stabbed at her heart. Oh why didn’t I listen to her? She asked herself. I thought it was only an old wife’s tale.

“She tried her best, Nana Willow. But despite all of her good intentions, she joined us just the same.” the demon sighed. For that was what it was, and Susan could no longer deny it. The beast of the dark places had come for her soul. “Would you like the ability to speak now?” he asked. “I froze your vocal cords because I so hate it when a woman screams. At least when it isn’t at the end of my claws.” he said, flexing his hands against the firelight.

She nodded. Though she did not know what good her voice would do for her in a situation such as this. He flicked a finger in her direction and the stiffness in her throat disappeared, like snow thawing in the sun. “It wastes my energy to read your thoughts.” he said. “And I have so much power to show you tonight, so many reasons for you to see things our way.”

“Our way?” she asked.

“Why the legions of the Dark Lord, of course. We need every soul we can get if we’re going to win this one.”

“But why do you need me?”

“You see, some people are useful to lead the armada of the damned, once the end of days dawns upon this diseased land you call Earth. Some souls are needed to fight fiercely, face to face with the Angels of Order.” the demon paused, as if savoring the mental image of a battle yet to begin, yet highly anticipated. “But there are those, like you dear woman, who could have a hand harvesting far more souls than I could do on my own. In fact, it was something like what your grandmother did for us, for so many years.”

“Nana Willow? I don’t believe it.”

“Oh, I know, such a hard thing to take for ‘gospel’, so to speak. The woman appeared to be such a god fearing woman, always a churchgoer and more than willing to lend a hand in the most dire of situations. She touched a lot of lives, changed the way that they saw things. A fact for which we are grateful. But the fact of the matter was that she did fear God, and what punishment he would cast upon her. For you see, she was the only one of her mother’s nine children to survive the Great Depression, and do you know why? Because she poisoned the others. With less mouths to feed, she thrived in conditions that would not have kept a dog alive. And back in those days. The doctor thought it was just the flu that got her siblings. No one would suspect an eight year old girl. It was genius, really.” the demon said, studying a smudge on his suit. “So when she found out that she was going to go to Hell for murder, she decided to make a deal with the Big Man himself.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“What makes you think that I need to lie to you?”

“Couldn’t she have asked for forgiveness?”

“Not in true Christianity. For once you have sinned in some way against Him, there is no forgiveness. The other versions of a benevolent, loving God were mere watered down copies of the Great Creator. Something we used to confuse the masses. And eventually lure them to our side.”

“So no one who asks for forgiveness can get into heaven?”

“Funny enough, only those souls who suffer and think that they do not belong there are the ones who end up going.”

“So I’m…”

“Yes, my dear. You are on the slippery slope to Hell, riding on a hill of butter and strapped to a bobsled. So you might as well enjoy it. Become one of us, and we can make it worth your while.”

“But what happened with Nana Willow?”

“She served her time, and now her reward is to torture those souls who caused her the most pain while she was alive.”

“I didn’t think that she had it in her.”

“Evidently neither did your Grandpa Charlie. Though he found out the hard way.”

“So there’s no going back? No way I can be saved?”

“There’s no technicality in the fine print of our contract. A contract by which you were entered into against your will.”

“How?”

“Your mother had you out of wedlock. You’re a bastard and doomed from the moment that you took your first breath. Had she been married just a month earlier, you might have had a chance.”

“That bitch.”

“Don’t worry about it. If you join us, you might get the chance to torture her yourself, if Nana Willow lets you have a crack at her, that is.”

“And am I on Nana’s bad list?”

“No dear, she loved you the most. She knew that you would have a lot in common, both in life and in death. In fact, she’s the one who suggested we approach you. She’s quite the head hunter.”

“And to avoid an eternity in never ending torture?” she asked.

“Just do your duty by us and we’ll take care of you.”

“So when, exactly, do I start?” she asked.

“You already have, my dear.” the demon said, his liquid mercury eyes boring into her, even though she could not see his pupils. “You already have.”

Wednesday, April 27, 2011

Personal Space

This is a work of fiction. No real people, places or events were used. Copyright ã 2011 Plot Roach.

Personal Space

By Plot Roach

Between the classical music and the droning of the bank teller, Samantha was nearly asleep on her feet as she approached the front of the line. Just drop the check off and you can go home, she told herself. A thump in her belly told her that her unborn son seconded the decision. I can only pray that the line moves faster than my due date. From behind her came a sound of two men arguing.

“Ever hear of personal space, buddy?” a man in a suit said, glaring at the man who began to push against him.

“Yeah, I have. And I ain’t your buddy, buddy.” said a man in a dark jogging suit. He flashed a grin at the man as he pushed him aside and pulled a gun from his pocket. “There’s no such thing as personal space in a hold up. Now everybody get down on the ground, don‘t try anything funny and we‘ll all get out of this in one piece.”

Most of the inhabitants of the bank’s lobby fell to the ground, Samantha dropped to her knees before lowering the rest of her body on the beige carpet. A few people, including the security guard who had been caught too busy gossiping with a buxom young blonde to do his job, were still on their feet and acting as if this was a staged skit by a local drama club.

“Everyone down!” the man with the gun said. He waved his weapon at the guard who tossed his own gun on the floor. He gestured to the tellers to come out from behind their glass encased counters. If someone had tripped an alarm, it must have been silent, for there was no noise except the sounds of the tellers feet on the carpet as they took their places next to the customers on the floor.

At least I didn’t pull the cash out of the account, yet. Samantha thought. She made a mental tally of anything she had of value on her. Her purse contained mostly over the counter medications to deal with the pregnancy like multivitamins and anti nausea pills. Her wallet held an emergency twenty dollar bill in a back pocket, just in case she needed to take a cab to the hospital, since her insurance would not cover the ride in an ambulance. But if he took her purse, would she be able to save her insurance card from her wallet? She hoped that he would not take it, since she doubted that they could mail her a replacement before her son was born.

But as she was having this internal debate, the man was busy unloading each of the teller’s registers and ordering the bank’s manager to open the safe vault. The manager tried to argue that the safe was on a timer and that he could not bypass the security measure, but a bullet in his leg changed his mind for him, especially when the gunman aimed his weapon higher.

“We’re gonna die. We’re gonna die. We’re gonna die.” whimpered a man near Samantha. It was the man in the suit who had complained about his personal space being violated.

“We’re not going to die.” she whispered.

“And how do you know that?”

“If he wanted to hurt us, he would have done it by now. The only ones he’s hurting currently are the ones not doing what he asks. So lay there and shut up and he’ll leave us alone.”

“Hey! I said no funny stuff in here!” the gunman yelled. He walked over to Samantha and the man in the suit. By now the man in the suit was whimpering and tears slid from his eyes like a toddler caught with his hand in a cookie jar. “What’s his problem?” the gunman asked Samantha.

“He thinks that you’re going to kills us all.”

“And what do you think?”

“I think if we do what you say, you’ll leave us alone.”

“And what makes you think that?”

“You haven’t shot anyone unnecessarily yet. If they’ve done what you asked, you don’t shoot them.”

“Good lesson. I hope everyone else here is taking notes.” the gunman beamed at her. “But why aren’t you laying on your belly?”

“I’m thirty seven weeks pregnant. I no longer have a belly, I have a baby condo attached to my ribs.” The gunman smiled, and Samantha knew that everything was going to be okay. While the bank manager and the security guard may have put the man in the mood for chaos and destruction, she had made him smile and thus had lightened his mood considerably. He lowered his gun.

“What should I do with that guy?” he asked, gesturing to the weeping man in the suit.

“I think he’s learned his lesson on personal space, don’t you?”

“And what am I going to do about you?” he asked, his seriousness returning like a cloud passing over the sun.

“I have no issues with personal space.” she joked. “Once you get pregnant, there’s no such thing anymore. He needed a little pep talk.” she said, gesturing to the weeping man. “But I promise that I’ll be quiet and play nice, as long as you don’t shoot me.”

And as suddenly as it had vanished, his smile returned, thawing the ice of fear that had collected in Samantha’s veins. “Maybe I should take your driver’s license so that I know where to pick you up for a date tonight. Do you like Italian?”

“Lately I’ve had more cravings for Chinese food than I care to admit.” she said. The stress of the situation passed with the release of tension in her body, but a new wave of fear crept over her. “You’ll have to make the reservation for three, however. Since my water just broke.”
 

Tuesday, April 26, 2011

Hollywood Brains

This is a work of fiction. No real people, places or events were used. Copyright ã 2011 Plot Roach.

Hollywood Brains

By Plot Roach
 
“I can totally see where they were going with that.” Sandra said, squinting against the harsh sunlight as they exited the theater.

“Then could you let me in on it? ‘Cause I’m totally lost.” Jacob asked.

It was a summer film, the usual blockbuster Hollywood used to lure in the public and fleece their wallets. The previews showed the best scenes, and the movie was little more than overdone posturing done by desperate actors. Still, Sandra had had hope for the film, since it was directed by one of her favorite independent talents that Hollywood had yet to tempt with money and stardom by producing a special effects heavy, plot light fluff of a monstrosity. Until now, that was.

They settled down at a local fast food restaurant, having already spent the bulk of their pocket money on the film. She took a bite of hamburger, waiting for the right words to channel through her brain as she attempted to defend this farce of a film from her friend. She chewed thoughtfully, trying to ignore the scene that popped into her head where an alien warrior had chewed one of the main characters into hamburger in its truck sized, razor toothed maw. She winced, it was not working.

“The monster chewing scene with the Edward character, am I right?” Jacob asked.

“Yeah.” She sighed, taking a sip of watered down fountain soda. She looked into the Styrofoam cup and asked: “Is it just me, or is everybody getting cheap nowadays?”

“Everything from overpriced movie tickets to buckets of popcorn, more vegetable oil than butter.” Jacob admitted. “What were you expecting in this economy?”

“Something a little better. At least from Hofferstein. “ she scoffed and dipped a French fry in ranch dressing. “His last three films were so good, and he only had a budget of about ten thousand for each. Now he was given sixty million and he chose to make ‘The Alien Equation’?”

“Ever stop to think that maybe he made the big budget film like that because it was expected of him?”

“I know, it just seems unfair. He did such good work before. With better actors and an actual plot.”

“Maybe because he had to skimp on things like special effects and big budgets, that he became so good. I mean, think about it. If you’re broke, you write mostly cerebral scenes that won’t ask for a lot of action, special effects or lots of physical background. You’ll hire on actors trying to prove themselves, so they’ll take the job seriously and not give you over the top acting like the big cats pulling in millions per movie.” he said.

“You’re right.”

“Yes, I know. But now it’s your turn to redeem Hofferstein.”

“What?” she asked.

“Prove to me that the last two hours wasn’t a waste of ten bucks per ticket. Save your director by defending his movie.”

Sandra set down her burger and pushed away the watered down soda. She stabbed a French fry into the blob of ranch dressing in its tiny paper cup and organized her thoughts. “Okay, what didn’t you like?”

“You might as well start with what I did like, the list would be smaller.”

“Seriously. What were your major problems with the film?”

“It lagged in the middle, when they were hiding from the aliens in the abandoned apartment building. It seemed to take forever.”

“It would seem to take forever, if you were actually there with them and hiding out. So maybe the director was trying to give a sense of realism to the movie.”

“Nothing else did.”

“What else?”

“What the hell was with the ending? The last ten minutes made no damn sense at all.”

“Let me recap: the two survivors get sucked into the mother ship. They pull out his brains to put into an alien robot looking thing and he fights to save her, one drone against potential thousands.”

“Something like that, yeah.” Jacob said around a mouth full of nacho chip. “How come the guy at the end of the film wasn’t turned into a drone like the rest of them?”

“First, the main male character had been infected since almost the beginning of the movie, maybe that gave him time to be immune against the powers of the alien virus.”

“So why couldn’t he blow them all to Hell with his new powers?”

“For the same reason you can’t expect a Mac computer to hack into alien technology, it isn’t believable.”

“Quit mixing your movies.”

“It was an example, okay? He was just one person -one brain, actually- against a bigger system. So he could only do what he could with the one alien suit.”

“And why human brains? That was just gross.”

“I think the alien drones were like a parasitic suit of sorts. They could think and act on their own, but they needed something extra. I think human brains ran the suits like batteries, what with the synapses and electrical currents and all. So when the brain that they were using ran out, they had to put new ones in. Remember that scene where the drone pulls off the guy’s head that was shooting at him and replaces its bullet riddled brain with the shooter’s?"

“That was disgusting.”

“But it made sense. And maybe some of the human memories helped the drone aliens to understand how humans thought and acted in order to harvest more of them.”

“Still gross.”

“Yes, but effective.”

“So why didn’t the guy’s brain turn again?”

“Because he had been building up a tolerance to the virus since the beginning of the film.”

“So you’ve got one all human brain trying to save the love interest against a fleet of alien-human warriors with hive mind. And it stops in the middle of a fight sequence, leaving you hanging. Why?”

“Hofferstein is setting it up for a sequel. And if it never gets funded, then idiots like me will defend it as a cult classic and say that ‘he was ahead of its time’ twenty years after he’s dead.”

“The brain sucking thing still freaks me out.”

“It’s new, I’ll give that to Hofferstein. Who knew Hollywood could make a film with brains, and still screw it up?”

“Mmmmm, brains…” Jacob said, arms out ahead of him and head cocked to the side in a mock zombie pose.

“That’s a different genre entirely.” Sandra said, chewing a bite of burger and washing it down with weak soda. Then an idea blossomed between bites of salty fries. “There was a ten minute alternate ending that no one saw yet. And it probably won’t be seen until the director’s unrated cut of the film hits DVD.”


“What’s that?”

“The main male lead wakes up the morning after the big party and realizes that in his drugged out state that he dreamed the whole thing.”

“That’s cheating!”

“No, wait. Give me a chance here. He’s so upset at the thought of losing the primary love interest and his unborn child that it gives him a massive guilt complex in the form of a nightmare.”

“And the aliens?”

“They’re a metaphor for the job that he was offered there in Hollywood. He was afraid deep down inside that the place where he got a job offer would be run by brainless drones looking to suck out his creative soul because they have used up all of their own. So-”

“They need his brains, I get it. But what about the whole ‘me against the world’ thing?”

“He has to take her back home to their small town life and keep her safe before she gets sucked into the big Hollywood hive mind and tempted to become another mindless creature of the system.”

“I hate to admit this, but I like your ending better. Maybe you should write a screenplay and see if it sells.”

“Naw, I’d rather keep my brains to myself, thank you.”
 

Monday, April 25, 2011

Etiquette for the Undead

This is a work of fiction. No real people, places or events were used. Copyright ã 2011 Plot Roach.

Etiquette for the Undead

By Plot Roach

I thought that it was hard working a retail job during the economic collapse known as the Second Depression. Had I realized then that I had it made compared to what my “life” would later become, I wouldn’t have complained so much. Sure, it was tough, standing in lines for food handouts, trying to decide which utility to let go unpaid in order to keep the others working. Standing on my feet all day in the hope that Uncle Sam wouldn’t tax the hell out of it so badly that I couldn’t pay rent for the month.

A lot of us lived out of cars, abandoned buildings and even in tents on city land. It was hard to keep a job that way, always smelling of depression and homelessness, no matter how hard you worked to maintain a civilized façade. Summer passed into winter, the worst the country had seen in a hundred years. People froze in their homes, or else died when they started barbeque pits in their bedrooms, but forgot to let the smoke out. A lot of us living ‘on the road’ died of weird diseases not seen since the time of our grandparents that mutated into new threats untreatable by modern medicine.

And just when you think that things couldn’t get any worse, that’s when the zombies came crawling out of the sewers, abandoned buildings and hospital morgues. It was a little trickle at first, nothing to really alert the media about. But it was hard to keep under wraps when the city’s mayor was attacked while giving his usual speech that the economy would turn around and that we all needed to do our part to keep the city together.

His stern lecture turned into a pig’s squeal when a dead homeless man that looked like Abraham Lincoln in a jogging suit took a chunk out of his cheek. The mayor survived -but never recovered, he turned into a zombie a few weeks later and attacked three of his personal aides before his wife put him down like Old Yeller. By that time, the streets were overrun with the undead. The living humans eked out a living by dashing from one safe haven to another. But found that they couldn’t stay long, since the dead knew where to find them almost as soon as they settled into a new location.

And what about me? I should have left when my roommate did. By that time the landlord had quit collecting the rent and the utilities only worked every other day of the week. I kept listening to the “officials” who promised that everything was under control. She was wise enough to see the signs of complete social collapse like a rat that knows when the maze experiment is over and the scientist wants to put slices of its brain under a microscope. She left after the mayor got bit, but before he could become a biter.

I was the idiot who continued to pay the bills, stand in line for food at the local churches and try and do my part during the neighborhood nightly watches to patrol the area for ‘undesirables’. I was at work, trying to sell a woman a pair of earrings I knew that she couldn’t afford, but wanted anyway, when I was bit.
It was somebody’s kid. Some snot nosed punk that looked about eight years old, dirty blonde hair gelled into spikes, whose clothes looked in better shape than mine -even if he had been a zombie for several days. He ducked behind the cash register area and my boss yelled at me to grab him and toss him out of the shop. I excused myself from the customer, another one of my coworkers swooping in to take my place and, no doubt, my commission. Grabbing the kid wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be, which should have warned me. He bit my arm as I pulled him out into the open. That’s when we saw that he was a zombie. My boss brought out the shotgun and aimed at the kid, who dashed out the door. Then he aimed it at me, and fired. At least the bastard had bad aim, because he missed me and took out the plate glass window at the front of the store. I ran back to my apartment, cursing the fact that I would not be getting my severance pay. Halfway home it hit me that he would probably call the cops to come and get me or else wait until dark to come and shoot me himself.

I used the last of my money to get some medical supplies from the nearest pharmacy, even though I knew that they wouldn’t do a bit of good. Still, I had to try. I spent the night in an abandoned building, hoping not to get eaten or shot as I lay in my feverish state. I knew that I was going through the ‘change', and was afraid at what would become of me.

The first thing I experienced, besides the fever, was a jumbled mess of memories mixed with nightmares. I woke one afternoon, the sunlight warming my stiff muscles. There was tingling itch in my brain, like it was being eaten alive by fire ants. I was sore and I tried to clear my throat, only to find that I couldn’t speak a word. I panicked, and couldn’t feel a heartbeat or the intake of breath into my lungs. The sensation of fear was washed out, like a black and white photocopy of a sunset. There was no anger, only acceptance of my current condition. The only thing important in my mind, above everything else, was the hunger inside me. I left the building, creeping around in the shadows to keep from being seen, lest someone decide to shoot me. But it seemed in vain, as the city appeared to be abandoned. How long had I been under? I asked myself.

“The change usually takes a few days to a week at most.” said a voice behind me. I would have jumped, if I had the reflexes to pull it off.

“I’m over here, by the dumpster.” said the voice. And then I realized that I hadn’t heard the voice with my ears, but in my mind instead.

“Can you hear me?” I asked with my itching brain, my vocal cords no longer under my control.

“Clear as birdsong.” the man beside the dumpster said. He wore a football jersey and a pair of cargo shorts. One of his shoes was missing, while the other foot featured a tattered white tennis shoe. “And you want to know the real bitch of it?” he asked.

“What?”

“You probably don’t speak a word of Spanish, and I don’t speak English, and yet here we are, talking to each other like we’ve been friends all our lives.”

I let the thought sink in for a while. It probably would have shocked me, but the urge to feed was a greater influence. “I’m hungry, anything to eat around here?”

“Ah, yes. First words from the newly dead.” he said with amusement. “Stick with me kid and I’ll show you the ropes.”

I followed him at a slight distance, I might be dead but I wasn’t taking my ‘unlife’ in my hands with a total stranger. As we wandered the city, I saw more of our kind in various stages of decomposition. There were quite a few clustered around a fresh corpse, feeding like sharks. My guide, who I now thought of as One Shoe, snagged a part of an arm that had fallen away from the main feeding frenzy and beckoned me to follow him onto a side street. “Here, you need to eat.” he said, passing me the body part. I looked at it in my hands, my hunger fighting my squeamishness. Eventually my hunger won out and I tore chunks off the bloody stump with abandon.

“Eat slowly” he advised. “Or else you’ll end up chewing your lips off.”

I touched my lips, or where they should be with my fingers. But every part of my skin was too numb to feel any sensation. “Don’t worry” he said. “They’re still there. But you need to be more careful with your body now more than when you were alive, since you can’t feel the damage as it happens.”

“What else am I missing?” I asked, eating slower and studying my companion.

“We ceased all major biological functions when our hearts stopped beating. We don’t need to breath, our blood doesn’t pump, and we don’t need to pee or poop.”

If I had had a voice box, I might have laughed at the last bit. “How do you know about the last part?” I asked. “Have you tried?”

“Yes. Let’s just say… it didn’t happen. Maybe what we consume goes to fuel our new bodies in such a way that there’s no waste leftover.”

I offered him what was left of the chunk of flesh that I hadn’t eaten and we continued to talk while traveling. He let me in on some of the “rules” of the undead. Which weren’t really laws to be enforced so much as zombie common sense.

If you were a smart zombie, or at least less dumb than your peers, you did not get into the middle of a feeding frenzy, but pulled off a piece of a body and ate it away from the crowd. A hungry zombie will eat anything in its path, including body parts of other zombies, thus the missing fingers, noses and other biological damage some zombies walked around with.

Zombies could smell one another as well as healthy -and still breathing- humans. We also had keen hearing. Something had to make up for the fact that we moved like, well, zombies.

We communicated telepathically within a certain range of one another. Evidently when you don’t need your brains to run the organs of your body or interpret unnecessary senses, it freed up a lot more gray matter to serve other purposes. The living could not understand why we could find them so fast and coordinate our movements so well. And now I knew why.

“Do different humans taste the same or different from one another? Is it taboo to eat your own ’kind’?” I asked.

“You know, I don’t know” he said. “It never came up at a feeding site. And no one seems to be asking these questions but you.”

“Is that a bad thing?”

“No, it might help our kind to have someone who can ’think’ like a human. And ask the questions that might lead to our continued ’survival’.”

“Don’t the others 'talk’?”

“Not much more than ‘I’m hungry’ or ’Get out of my way, I’m feeding’.”

I watched a zombie shuffled down the block before collapsing into a heap, maggots wiggled through its flesh. It was so damaged by violence and its own decomposition that I could not tell if it had been male or female. “Do we all end up like that?” I asked One Shoe.

“Some of us last longer than others. I’ve been around for a couple of weeks. But some ’newborns’ only last a few days. I think it has to do with feeding and keeping yourself intact. The bugs take their toll, though.”

“Is the whole city abandoned?” I asked.

“Why?”

“I have an idea.”

An hour and a half later, we found ourselves at a Super Wal-Mart. Living humans scattered like roaches when we threw the trashcan through the window to enter the store. “Guess we won’t be feeding here.” One Shoe said, a little disappointed.

“We’ll get something later, I want to try something first.”

I walked the aisles, pushing a shopping cart and filling it with various supplies. By the time I was done, I had us both change into full body work suits, heavy boots and hats we could pull down to cover our faces when necessary. I treated all the clothing with a stain resistant spray as well as bug repellant.

“I understand about the bug repellant -but the stain resistant?” One Shoe asked.

“When we’re done feeding, we can rinse ourselves off. If we look like ‘normal people’, the living might make the mistake of letting us get close enough to get them.”

“Get them how?”

“How good are you with a crossbow? Or wielding a baseball bat?”

“Why not use a gun instead?”

“And have every other zombie in hearing range fight us for the kill when we could quietly feast on it for days?” I asked.

“Speaking of which…” I pulled aside boxes of Ziploc and garbage bags, I threw in a few plastic tarps and a gallon of vinegar. “The bags we’ll use for storage, the tarp and the vinegar we will use to hide the body from other zombies. We’ll have to package the parts up fast though.”

“Why?”

“Do you really want maggots in your food eating you from the inside out?”

With our cart full, we left the store. I grabbed a crowbar from a nearby abandoned car and was testing its weight in my hands when the little bastard who bit me and changed me tried to scramble past, running after a stray dog. I tripped him and smashed his brains in with the crowbar, feeling an odd sense of fulfillment which overtook my constant urge to feed.

“Was that really necessary?” One Shoe asked.

“It was something personal” I explained. “And now it’s one less mouth to feed.”

“Where to now?”

“That depends on the meal you had in mind. Do you feel up to Chinese, or maybe some spicy Thai?” I asked. “And are Jewish people automatically considered kosher, or does it have to be the way that they were fed and killed?”

“I think it has to do with the type of animal, like no non-cloven hoofed animals and no scavengers.”

“Right then, lawyers and politicians are okay, but no bill collectors.”

Sunday, April 24, 2011

The Egg Hunt

This is a work of fiction. No real people, places or events were used. Copyright ã 2011 Plot Roach.

The Egg Hunt

By Plot Roach
 
“Welcome to the Mythic Tech Easter Eggstravaganza!” Declared a multicolored banner hanging over the entrance to the parking lot. Phil paid his parking fee and collected the paper ticket, displaying it prominently in the front window of his van.

“Do we have to go to this lame picnic, Dad?” Tyler whined from the backseat.

“Yes, son. We at least have to make an appearance.” Phil said, looking into his son’s eyes via reflection of the rear view mirror.

“You might have fun! Give it a chance.” Sarah, Phil’s wife, said from the front passenger seat squeezing Phil’s knee and winking at him.

Their other son, Michael said nothing, too busy punching the buttons on his handheld electronic game to notice the world outside his headphones.

Phil lurched the car into the next available parking space, which seemed a mile and a half from the park itself. He vowed once again to get and earlier start next year in order to get a better parking spot, only to remember that he had made the same vow last year. He sighed, pulling out the hand wagon and loaded it with chairs, the cooler and the picnic basket full of food that they would need that day. Sarah was busy with the boys, pulling Michael’s headset off and pocketing his electronic game and trying to get Tyler out of his seat and into a better mood.

“It will be fun, and maybe you’ll make some new friends.” Sarah proclaimed, her eyes squinting against the overpowering sunlight as they made their way to the park. The boys both rolled their eyes at her and promptly began fighting one another as all boys do when deprived of anything else to take their anger out upon. Sarah yelled to another of the families, strolling ahead to gossip, leaving Phil to struggle with the overloaded handcart and two boys scrapping in the dust laden parking lot.

Maybe over by the duck pond? Phil thought, thinking to score a spot next to some shade. But no, he remembered that Sarah had a thing about wild fowl. Something about the bird flu or was it that she watched the “Birds” as a kid and never got over her phobia of being pecked? Phil decided to head toward the barbeque pits and stopped himself halfway there, remembering that Tyler had asthma and that the smoke would set him off for sure.

Unable to make the right decision, Phil decided to drop the handle of the cart where he stood. They would set up here, and if anyone complained about it, they could move the cart themselves. He sighed and pulled out the four lawn chairs, setting up each one to look over the rest of the park, specifically where the games would be held. He set up the beach umbrella, using a sand weighted base rather than attempting to anchor the thing in the grass, just in case he should happen to break through a sprinkler line and upset the park employees. He opened the cooler and pulled out Sarah’s signature Jello salad, he reached over to hand it to her only to notice that she was already halfway across the park, talking to yet another family. He sighed, setting down the bowl of wiggling foodstuff and asked his sons to help with the rest of the gear. He looked up to find himself alone, as his sons had split up and were now talking to their peers, no doubt trading tales about how lame their parents were for bringing them to an event such as this.

So Phil unloaded the rest of the cart, setting up a picnic oasis that his family would never appreciate, or ever use. Once unloaded, he walked Sarah’s dessert over to the main food tables set aside for the potluck feast. He spied several other gelatinous concoctions and set Sarah’s contribution among them.

He spied the games list and signed up for the three legged race with Tyler, put Michael and Sarah’s names down for the egg toss and signed both boys up for the egg hunt. By the time he made it back to the rest of the family, they were all in agreement that they should move the whole mess over to a shaded spot thirty feet over.

Phil told them of the games and events he had signed them all up for and they responded with the usual moans and complaints. “We are here as a family and we need to act as a family.” he told them.

“Can’t we have fun on our own?” Tyler moaned, his brother agreeing with him for once.

“Maybe we could do things a little different this year, dear.” Sarah suggested.

“Fine” Phil said, pulling a beer out of the cooler. “Then you can all move the chairs and the rest of this crap on your own, if you want to try something different. I’ve worked for this company for fifteen years, you never bitch about the money I bring home. But you’ll complain when I ask you to volunteer a little time of your own?” Phil did not wait for a response. He merely twisted the cap off the beer bottle, tossed it over his shoulder and strode back to the games clipboard to scratch his family’s names off the lists.

Once at the table, leafing through the games lists a coworker, Bernard, pulled him aside with a panicked look. “I need your help, Phil.”

“It’s my day off, Bernard. Even the family doesn’t want to be around me.”

“I’m deadly serious about this.”

“What could be so bad?”

“The eggs in the egg hunt.”

“What, did you run out of chicken eggs and use the ones in the hatchery?” Phil joked, swigging his beer. He nearly chocked when he saw the pale look on Bernard’s face. “Please tell me that you didn’t…”

“I didn’t, but the new guy in sector seven -Ryan, I think his name is- did.”

“What kind of an idiot?…”

“Evidently one who is the nephew of the Big Boss Man himself and can’t get fired, or even blamed for his actions.”

“But we can?”

“Right you are, old boy. If we don’t get all sixty seven eggs back in their incubators by sundown, we’ll lose countless millions in research.”

“He didn’t boil them, did he?”

“No he was smart enough to only paint the outside of the shells with vegetable bye. But we have to find them quickly, or the embryos will die.”

“How many have you found so far?”

“Only thirteen. Evidently he was really good at hiding things.”

“And he can’t find the other eggs?”

“He’s too stoned to remember.”

“Great. So which types of eggs did he take?”

“All of them.”

“All-?”

“All the ones in the hatchery, slated for ‘birth’ in the next few days.”

“Dad! Come here, quick. I found an egg and it hatched -can I keep it?” Phil turned toward the voice. It was Michael, clutching a lizard like creature covered in the remains of the shell it had incubated in. The dark grey mass attempted to chew on Michael’s thumb, but did not have much in the way of teeth since it had just hatched. It was covered in what looked like sharp pink freckles, which Phil knew were only bits of the shell that had adhered to its skin.

“Well it is a pygmy tyrannosaur, so it won’t grow any bigger than a Great Dane…” Bernard said, looking over to Phil. “But you probably should have the teeth pulled about the time it comes into adolescence unless you want to wear a full suit of chain mail every time you need to take it out for a walk.”

“Let’s just find the others.” Phil sighed. “What was in the hatchery at the time?”

“Everything from endangered to extinct and a few mythic cross breeds as well.”

“Can you be more specific?”

“Some condors, dinosaurs, a couple of hydras and at least one basilisk and a cockatrice.”

“No gorgons? A phoenix or maybe a Pegasus?”

“No. The phoenix needs higher heat to hatch properly, and is incubated in an incinerator. The Pegasus needs a cooler temperature, and was in the secondary incubator. As for the gorgon, it lays a leathery like egg that hatches within hours, so there’s no need for outside incubation.”

“That’s some good news at least.” Phil said, scratching his head and eyeing the grayish lump that struggled in his son’s grasp. “Get as many men as you can and equip them with earplugs and mirrored sunglasses, we won’t know which eggs belong to the basilisk or the cockatrice, so we’ll need to take all the precautions we can. Close off the park and evacuate all nonessential personnel. But be sure to keep a couple of the kids, since they have a knack for finding stuff that they shouldn’t play with. It’s going to be a long day."

“Yeah. And an Easter we’ll never forget.”
 
 
 
 

Saturday, April 23, 2011

Cultured Freaks of Nature

This is a work of fiction. No real people, places or events were used. Copyright ã 2011 Plot Roach.

Cultured Freaks of Nature

By Plot Roach

Smith was a great guru, a captain behind the wheel of modern literature and art. His paintings sold for millions of dollars and his books lasted for months on the New York Times bestseller list. He looked at himself in the mirror, checking his immaculate reflection and running a tongue over his sharp even teeth. In a few minutes he would be giving the lecture of his life, in fact it was to be his farewell address to the world and the people who supported him for many years. He felt a slight twinge of guilt at what he was about to do, but knew that it was all for the best. He just could not keep up appearances anymore. And sooner or later they, his adoring public, would find out the truth. Better to find out from him than from a graduate student with an ax to grind thirty years after his death.

He walked the long and narrow hallway, feeling as though he was a condemned man living his last seconds on the earth before facing the dark face of death. He waited at the edge of the stage as a man, a president of a local independent writing community, announced his presence followed by a long string of accomplishments, awards and credentials, none of which Smith felt that he deserved.

On cue, he took to the stage, shaking the announcer’s hand on the way to the microphone. The man had a sweaty but strong grip and Smith had to wonder if the man was nervous because of Smith’s celebrity or if the man thought that he would flub his lines in front of the audience before Smith’s big presentation. Little does he know what I have in store, Smith thought. If he did, he might have called in sick and let a lesser person in his organization take the fall.

Smith cleared his throat, waiting for the applause to die down before launching into his farewell address. He looked out among the audience. It was the same at every gathering, be it an independent lecture, a book signing or party: women dressed in their best gowns, dripping in pearls and others gems worth a small fortune and bought by the sweat of third world laborers who broke their backs to bring such treasures up from the earth so that old and dying shells of women could use them as a means to feel more attractive where plastic surgery and Botox had failed. Men, only a margin better than their female counterparts, tucked into suits that barely covered their bulbous bellies, noses red from alcoholism and eyes bloodshot from whatever drug of choice they had used to get up enough courage to face the day and follow their shrewish wives into an event such as this, all in the name of 'culture’.

“Let me begin” Smith said, looking into the eyes of these tired human beasts, “by saying that I am fraud.” He paused a moment to let the words sink into their drug and alcohol addled brains. He could smell the perfume of the women and the sour smell of tobacco waft off of them like an anxious musk of an animal that has been trapped and stands to face its hunter. “I know nothing, have come from nothing, and deserve nothing. Not a thing from the likes of you, too caught up in what to wear, what to eat and what to think of your neighbors you deem too ‘common’ to have the same ’culture’ as yourselves. You throw money at problems that will never go away. Yet never ask yourself if they might be solved if you lent a hand helping in solving them yourself. But of course you can’t, you’re too busy being ‘cultured’ to give a crap. You talk a good talk, amongst your peers. Saying that you would do it if you weren’t tied up in a current project. But we both know that the thought of being in the same room with -even talking to- a person of lesser ‘culture’ than yourself scares you more than a diagnosis of cancer from your doctor. Yet cancer is what you have become. Everything you have and enjoy, comes at the cost of others. The clothes on your backs stitched together in sweat shops, the drugs you take to conjure courage smuggled in by men and women who have no other reasonable financial alternative to support their families back home in third world countries, and let us not forget the expensive perfumes you slather upon yourselves gathered from the glands ripped from the corpses of endangered animals.”

Smith paused, letting his eyes bore into eyes face in the crowd. The silence was like an aftermath of bomb explosion. His audience stood, dumbfounded and frozen in place. Well Smith, he told himself. You wanted to end it, and this sure as Hell ought to close the deal. He took a deep breath and continued.

“And if none of this made any sense to you infants, let me continue in a babble that you will pretend to understand and eat up like the tripe I have fed you over the past forty years. The purple hippos have agreed to play croquet today. Thought the marmot, in his cursing, will undoubtedly rue the day…”

Smith continued with this nonsensical speech, which reminded him oddly enough of “The Jabberwocky” which he had loved as a child. Twenty minutes into it, and his audience still stood transfixed. What is wrong with them? He thought. Why haven’t they left the auditorium? Why haven’t they thrown things at me, booed or even stormed the stage looking to bathe in my blood for making them look like fools? “And to conclude this lecture, might I say that hamsters have laid eggs in my pants and I must now go and change into a crimson tutu.”

He left the stage as quickly as his legs would carry him, shaking so badly he thought that he would collapse in the hallway long before he reached his dressing room. The steel handle of the door slipped in his grasp and he leaned against the wall, trying desperately to catch his breath. That was when he heard the roar of the audience. Not yelling for his blood, but applauding him.

Applause? he thought.

His agent ran up to him and clapped him on the back, smiling like he had won a million dollars for being named ‘the sexiest man alive’. “I don’t know where that came from, Smith. But they loved it -LOVED IT! They want an encore.”

“It will cost them." Smith said with a weak smile. Yet his agent continued with the complements that the audience had asked to relay to him. Smith just nodded his head and barely made it to his limousine before collapsing in a heap. This was not at all what he had expected.

The next day Smith’s phone service was overrun by requests of reporters wanting interviews, talk show hosts who wished to feature him on their programs and book publishers vying for the rights to his ‘farewell lecture’.

Barnum (or was it Hannum?) was right, he thought, looking at his perfect reflection in the hotel mirror. There’s a sucker born every minute. And in my case they come looking for ‘culture’ instead of gawking at two headed livestock and human freaks of nature.
 
 

Friday, April 22, 2011

We All Fall Down

This is a work of fiction. No real people, places or events were used. Copyright ã 2011 Plot Roach.

We All Fall Down

By Plot Roach

I consider the measure of civilization of a place and its people by the amount and quality of painkillers available to the common man. Hot water is nice, essential for a good tea or a luxurious bath. Soap, also good for said bath as well as keeping things like infection and germs at bay. But a good painkiller is an optimum tool to keep in your pack when facing the end of the world.

Everyplace I go, I kick in the windows of abandoned shops, homes and drug stores to fill up on wonderful little things like Ibuprofen, Naproxen Sodium, Acetaminophen and their cousins. I stock up on antidepressants and antibiotics as well, they come in handy on the road. Sometimes for trade with other Breathers, sometimes for myself when things get a bit too hairy.

There’s two kinds of people left on the face of the planet: Breathers (the uninfected, run of the mill human) and Shamblers (semi undead humans who crave flesh like a diabetic loves chocolates). Of the two, I have found the Breathers to be more dangerous, simply because I know a Shambler only wants to eat my flesh. The last scraps of humanity, fighting for survival, will do anything to anyone who gets in their way. In fact I nearly got killed once over a package of rancid beef jerky. And I can tell you that it wasn’t my worst day by far while walking the road.

I keep a few weapons handy, not nearly so much for the Shamblers as for the humans that get out of hand and the occasional feral dog that wants to take a bite out of my ass. Guns are too loud, and there’s always some jerk ready to fight me for it and then try to use it on me. I’ve carried baseball bats and golf clubs, which I found were too awkward when trying to lug around the wilderness. A crossbow might work, if I could aim worth a crap. And I was always afraid I would cut off my own leg by mistake while trying to wield a machete or other long blade. So my weapon of choice is a good old Craftsman wrench about the size of my forearm. It's lightweight enough, has a pronged end and a blunt end and doesn’t need to be reloaded or sharpened. And with a world filled with sporting goods stores and pawn shops filled to the brim with guns and ammunition, who the hell would want to mug me of a wrench?

When people dropped liked flies and then began to writhe like worms, was when I came into my own so to speak. When I’m around, Shamblers tend to drop to the ground. Like those pygmy goats that faint when they get too stressed. One minute they’re headed in my general direction, moaning and slavering for human flesh. Then they get within ten feet of me and their eyes roll back into their heads (kind of hard to tell unless you’re up close since the white of their eyes looks a lot like the white cataracts death brings to a corpse) and then they flop down like a pile of wet laundry.

It’s not permanent, though. It takes a good sized Shambler about two hours to recover and take back to its feet. I know this because I’ve gone back to look for the downed corpses and found none. And since no Shambler eats it own, and animals will not feed off the corpse, it only stands to reason that the corpse moved on in its own time and on its own feet, or knees, or stubs…

I tried for a while to kill everyone of them that I brought down, but in the end I spent more time killing the things than trying to keep myself alive. So it was a choice of letting them be or dying myself. I made my choice and I live with it.

I used to have this effect on other things back when the world was “normal” and the dead didn’t walk about trying to munch on the living. I could stop a Ouija Board just by walking into a room. It was kind of a buzz kill at Halloween parties. And it didn’t matter whose company I shared, if they suffered from epilepsy or multiple personality disorder, I flipped the switch on them within ten minutes. It’s not something I can control, or trust me, I would have turned it off long ago. And it earned me the nickname EMP (as in electro magnetic pulse).

Nicknames mean a lot when traveling the road, they often say more about you than your real name ever did. I once met a man so in love with his truck that he called himself Ford, only to have to abandon it when the car broke beyond a simple fix and he traded it for a Ram. Others come by the name of Doc, Bullets, Hunter and Cook. I am EMP and probably will be until the last human expires on this little planet of ours.

My skill for downing the dead, even temporarily, comes in handy for raiding small places of food and supplies. As far as I can tell the dead have no use for stale Twinkies, penicillin and gasoline. So I go in, take what I want as the Shamblers take a rest, and trade it to people I pass along the way.

I’ve tried bonding with people, and becoming one of the pack. But it always ends up the same. Either someone I care about goes and gets themselves eaten before I can take care of all the Shamblers in the area, or else people look to me as a freak worth caging and exploiting for their own profit.

I have never been, and I will never be just a normal human being. That’s not to say that I don’t socialize whenever I can. For to live in this world, or what’s left of it, like a hermit would make me no better than a Shambler myself. And hell, even they travel in packs on occasion.

Last week I bumped into a man, named Speed, who decided to travel a bit with me as I headed to the next city to pillage what I could. He was about five years my junior and aching like hell to prove himself in this new world. He was lean and wiry. And I could tell from the color of ink in his tattoos that he had spent a fair amount of time in prison before the collapse of modern civilization. We spent a few hot and heavy nights together. Like I said, I distrust humans -but I still have my urges. And he was all whispers in the dark of “ooo baby, I’ll be with you forever. You’ll be my girl and I’ll watch over you.” followed by the inevitable: “But why do I need to wear a condom?”

And why is it, even at the end of the world, surrounded by zombies and bloodthirsty marauders, that a man will try and do anything to get out of wearing a condom? I explained that I didn’t want to die of gonorrhea in a world ruled by zombies. And that until I could reach a ’civilized’ place, I didn’t want to get pregnant either.

So he started in on this long story about how the next city has all the good perks, like hot water, soap and self sustained farming. And I tell him that unless they have a fully trained, thoroughly stocked anesthesiologist, there will be no love without the rubber glove. Under no circumstances am I having a baby without an epidural. Rule number one in my book, civilization equals painkillers and plenty of them.

So the next day we head off on a side trip, raiding one of the smaller shops in search of food and condoms. And like clockwork, the Shamblers make an appearance. To his credit, he puffed himself up and strode forward with his weapon in hand to be a “man” and protect me. When I told him what I could do, his didn’t believe me. So I showed him. I walked forward to the first group and mumbled a little nursery rhyme, “Ring around the Rosie”. By the time I get to “We all fall down”, the Shamblers have all hit the dirt and I can proceed as usual. I know it’s a little ironic, what with the rhyme being based on another plague that nearly wiped out mankind, but it’s got a good sense of timing between when the dead are walking toward me and when they’re busy eating dirt. When I called Speed to my side, he looked like I’d kicked his puppy or something. He made the excuse that we should split up to cover more ground, so I wasn’t surprised when he disappeared the first chance he got. I should have known with a name like Speed that he wasn’t one for staying around.

So I gathered what I could for supplies, knowing that I can trade what I don’t want in the next town. I felt a little down about my predicament and self prescribed a few pills and a stiff drink. Like I said: I have never been, and I will never be just a normal human being. Eventually the Shamblers will fall apart and meet their final death. The Breathers meet their end in the jaws of the Shamblers and at the ends of each other’s weapons. If I don’t overdose myself one night in a drunken stupor, get killed by my “fellow man” or get chewed up by a wild animal, I might be the only human on the planet left to die of old age. In any case, the rhyme is closer to the truth than anything else. Eventually, we will “all fall down.”

Thursday, April 21, 2011

The Biter

This is a work of fiction. No real people, places or events were used. Copyright ã 2011 Plot Roach.

The Biter

By Plot Roach

“The subject in 4-C is cribbing again.” the lab tech reported over the intercom.

The doctor sighed and pushed his glasses back on the bridge of his nose. “Sedate until we can find out the reason why.” he ordered.

“It this a usual problem?” the general asked, looking through the clear glass and into the lab. “My men aren’t going to start chewing on each other out in the field, are they?” he laughed, but there was a seriousness in his eyes that the laugh lines could not quite cover.

“No, sir.” said the doctor. “It’s just a minor setback with one of the subjects, that’s all.”

The two men walked away from the glass window that looked into the lab, the smell of rubbing alcohol and the glare of the florescent lights hounding their steps until they came to the outer lab area where the paperwork was stored and things were not so… sterile.

The doctor launched into his usual speech about the life form called X-309, that they had found in cellular form in the heart of a comet. Once brought back to Earth, clones cells were injected into a number of creatures. And the benefits were out of this world, the doctor thought. It increased the natural abilities of any animal it was injected to, while banishing illness and lengthening the lifespan. They had just finished clinical trials on apes, pigs and rats. The next step was experimentation on human “volunteers”. But the FDA was stalling their project in court, deeming the experiments too dangerous and inhumane to be used on prisoners with no hope of parole.

The men at the briefing nodded at the appropriate times, flipped through the booklet he had prepared for the seminar and applauded at the end. All of their questions having already been answered earlier by himself or the text provided. They patiently waited for the court to place the project into their capable hands. All to make the next “super soldiers”.

But the doctor heard rumors, funding would be cut, the animals and research destroyed, if he could not provide actual proof that it would work on a human. It’s not my fault I can’t continue with the research, he thought. Blame the damned bleeding hearts in the FDA. Even if they could not proceed with their research on prisoners, there were plenty of subjects to be had in the military, or even the private sector -if the price was right.

The meeting ended, the doctor headed out into the pristine hallway of his facility to look over the paperwork concerning 4-C. The behavior of the creature seemed odd, when compared to the others in its group. But these things happened, and must be explained before they could infect others and ruin his project entirely. Fury raged, even inside his well maintained and manicured façade. How could he continue with his research without getting caught?

That was when he saw the janitor, James, come around the corner with his cart. The man was cleaning up a small spill one of the general’s men had accidentally made by dropping his coffee upon leaving the lecture. And the thought came to him: an accident. He could stage an accident. Set an animal aside, one particularly territorial that had been infected with the X-309 cells. And when the animal bit whomever he put in contact with it, they would have their human guinea pig. Of course his lab would do everything possible to make sure the subject/victim recovered fully, but in the meantime they would not have to wait for the green light from the FDA.

That night the doctor reviewed his files, both on the humans and the animals in his care. He set us his trap and waited for the results. It turned out that 4-C was a feral cat that had been shipped to their center to test against some of its tamer cousins. Not only did the creature become more territorial with its gene therapy, but it had also become stronger and smarter. It seems a shame to lose the creature, he thought. For once it attacked the human he placed in the cage with it, it would have to be terminated for a full screening of its brain and body tissues due to its current abnormal behavior. But it would definitely stop C-4’s cribbing behavior.

And as for the human? The doctor leafed through the files. He needed someone nonessential to the experiment. Someone who knew next to nothing about what the animals were carrying and what his experiments were about. Someone without immediate family. Someone that the world would never miss.
Then the doctor’s eyes fell on James’ folder. And his plan was finally complete. He set up an extra cage in the primate lab that was scheduled to be cleaned the following morning. At the back of the room, he placed the cage, and a heavily sedated 4-C on the ground. He made sure to wedge the corner of the cage open so that the cat hybrid could escape its confines and take its vengeance out on the first person it made contact with. In this case, the janitor.

That night the doctor’s sleep was the best that he could remember since the project had begun. In the morning, he would have the answers to two of his biggest problems solved, all he had to do was wait. He expected to be woken up in the early morning with frantic phone calls about a missing 4-C and an injured janitor, but nothing came.

He took a leisurely drive into work, and even spent more than his usual time in his personal office going through updated status reports on the project at hand. Eventually his curiosity got the better of him and he went to the primate lab. Surely the creature had attacked the janitor by now… Had no one on his staff notice the man’s cried for help?

But as the doctor arrived at the lab, he noticed that the janitor was in no immediate danger. He was, in fact, scratching the feral cat hybrid under its chin and feeding it bits of a sandwich. The doctor burst through the door, livid at the results of his 'experiment'. “What is the meaning of this?!” he yelled at the top of his lungs, pushing empty cages down in his wake. The cat arched its back and hissed.

Now, the doctor thought. Attack him now!

And the doctor received his wish, but it was not entirely what he had wanted. For the cat crossed the space between the janitor’s lap to the doctor’s neck in one long jump, sinking its teeth into the man’s neck. The janitor pulled the animal off of him and set it inside one of the empty ape cages. The doctor’s vision became blurred and he reached out to steady himself, pulling even more empty cages across the floor. By the time his medical team was able to reach him, it was too late. Cells from the cat’s saliva had reached his bloodstream and began bonding with his body. He caught small bits information like a scent on the wind as drifted in and out of consciousness.

The janitor had fared the event with nary a scratch. 4-C had been transferred back to its original cage and was no longer exhibiting any unnatural behavior. The doctor, however, was not so lucky. When he woke, and could recognize where he was kept, he found himself in restraints. It seemed that 4-C’s destructive tendencies had somehow been transferred to him along with the saliva and the X-309 cells. He was kept under constant surveillance and the military requested updates on his condition on a daily basis. The bad news was that the X-309 cells had only been tested on animals in their youth. Their healing properties and longevity would not be conveyed to the doctor in his ’mature’ state. But he was strong, his IQ raised to the point where he could not convey a coherent thought because he was too busy flitting form one thought to another to ever finish a sentence. And then there was the anger. It chewed at him endlessly from within, like some creature stuck inside a cage. The smallest thing would set him off. The smell of food, the sound of laughter and even seeing his former colleges walking around free while he was strapped to a padded bed and sedated within an inch of his life.

He was transferred to the primate lab, where human tests would be conducted shortly. A male nurse asked for the janitor to accompany him while transferring the former doctor to his new home. James patted the old man on his shoulder, he remembered the doctor as the head of the project. And now he was the head of the experiment.

“Hey, James! Don‘t get too close to him, okay?”

“What’s up?”

“You better keep this man’s mouth where you can see it.”

“Why’s that?”

“It says in his paperwork here that he’s a biter.”

Wednesday, April 20, 2011

She Filled The Night With Little Stitches

This is a work of fiction. No real people, places or events were used. Copyright ã 2011 Plot Roach.

She Filled The Night With Little Stitches

By Plot Roach
 
“You can put the ten on the jack over there.” said John. He pointed to the card on the screen, reaching over Mary and disturbing her concentration.

“Yes, I know. Thank you.” she said through gritted teeth. John moved away from the computer and continued to give her “pointers” on how to win her current hand at computer solitaire. Frustrated, she closed the game and pretended to be too busy eating her lunch to answer him in conversation. Something about his boring life and how he thought that it would be important to her. She nodded, pretending to listen, and opened a computerized jigsaw puzzle.

She sighed and began to enjoy herself once John got the hint and left her office. All she wanted was a peaceful moment to herself. Just a few minutes where she did not have to deal with office gossip, maniacal managers or boring coworkers. She tried eating out at the local fast food places, but always ended up either eating with coworkers who invited themselves to her table or else strangers would come up to her out of the blue and tell her their life stories.

She asked a psychiatrist once what made her such an easy target, and he told her that she just had that kind of personality to attract those less fortunate. And that she should seek a career helping those that were drawn to her. So she picked a job in Social Services. And boy was that a mistake, she thought, glancing at the piles of papers she still had to work through before she went home for the night. She did not know who was in worse shape: the people that the office was trying to help, or the workers who processed the paperwork.

She tried eating her lunch in the office’s lunchroom, only to be waylaid by Mary Kay cosmetic Nazis trying to push their products on her. Or else getting the hairy eyeball by the Mothers for Jesus clique who decided to hold daily Bible studies at the only table available. Once she was even accosted by a coworker because she refused to buy ten pounds of "school spirit" chocolate to help the woman’s daughter get a new cheerleading uniform.

There are some real freaks out there, she thought as she eyed a neighbor’s cubicle. It was decorated in a fluffy kitten motif meets Jesus being tortured on the cross kind of thing. And Mary often wondered how the woman would react if she left a sculpture of a crucified stuffed animal kitten next to the woman’s computer monitor. She let out a small giggle at the mental image and returned to her computerized jigsaw puzzle, now halfway completed.

Her own desk was sparse, only because she could not find a theme she liked that the sticklers in County would approve of. She tried “Nightmare before Christmas”, but was told by her supervisor that it was too morbid. Then she brought in a brightly colored beta fish, only to be told that pets were not allowed in the workplace. Plants were also banned, even the silk ones, because they were deemed a potential hazard to anyone with allergies. Living plants, she could understand -but fake ones? It was brought to her attention that the dust that settled on the leaves could allow a colony of dust mites to breed and cause problems. So finally Mary gave up, she used the freebie crap that the county gave her as a “reward” for doing her job as the only decorations in her small office.

“Oh, you do it with the edges first? I always start in the middle.” Kathleen, her immediate supervisor said, leaning in through Mary’s office door. “Are you back from lunch yet?”

Would I be playing on the computer if I was? Mary thought. She shook her head, reminding herself that others did far worse things when at their desks and on company time. “I’ll be back on in ten minutes.” She told Kathleen.

“You can put this piece here.” Kathleen said, tapping the screen.

“Thanks.” Mary said, logging out of the computer and heading to the timecard machine. It was no use trying to finish the puzzle, all serenity she had found in its mundane movement was long since gone. If only I could find a way to make people leave me alone.

Mary stopped by a local craft store on the way home. It was more on a whim than out of necessity. She had received a coupon at home and decided to check the place out and see if she might pick up a new and interesting hobby. She wandered through the jewelry supply aisles, the racks of yarn and the sewing section, but still could not find anything to tempt her mood and make her open her wallet. She stood in line, waiting to purchase a roll of Cherry flavored LifeSavers when her eyes fell upon the book section. And there it is, she thought, reaching out to an oversized, soft cover volume that depicted handmade dolls. She flipped though the book as she waited in line, more and more convinced that this might just do the trick and start her on a new project that would allow her to forget the woes of her workday.

She smiled as she laid her items out on the front counter, happily planning her first project. Once home she searched through her closet for a box of fabric scraps she knew she had there. They were leftover from the scrap quilting hobby she had tried a few years earlier. She laid out some of the pieces and read the instructions in the book, paying careful attention to the details. It was this same attention to detail which brought her such success (and a certain amount of freebie crap) at work.

She looked at a few of the photos she had in a shoebox sitting on her end table. The box contained the fruit of yet another project, photography, that she had experimented with and tossed aside several months earlier. Inside were pictures of loved ones, animals at the park, and even her coworkers at various “team building” events.

She picked up a picture of Tyler, a man from another section of her building, as he was posing for the camera at a Christmas function. She sifted through the fabric scraps until she matched his clothes, skin tone and hair as close as she could. The she filled the night with little stitches and a few curses as she stabbed herself with the needle.

The next morning, she brought the finished doll into work with her as well as a few extra bits and pieces to start in on another one during her lunch break. As she was assembling the next doll, a woman named Hanna, who worked in Tyler’s section, came over and asked if she wanted to come and wish him goodbye, since they were now celebrating his retirement from Social Services.

She nodded, sticking the needle she had been working with into the Tyler doll she had made, before she left with Hanna. Once done with lunch, and the festivities, Mary returned to her desk to find Kathleen bent over her dolls.

“It’s a new hobby.” Mary said, scooping the piles of fabric and miniature people back into her shoebox to set them in her desk drawer.

“Interesting.” was all Kathleen would say, before heading down to visit with other office workers. A few hours later, a memo circulate throughout the office. Tyler, the man whose career they had just celebrated, was now in the hospital. He had suffered a heart attack after the party. And though he was in stable condition, his doctors were baffled. He was in prime condition, with no predisposition of heart disease.

As Kathleen told Mary about the incident, she glanced multiple times at the desk drawer that held Mary’s new hobby. Mary could not understand why the change in attitude until she pulled the box out at the end of the night and saw the needle resting in the heart of the Tyler doll.

She pulled the needle out and set the doll on her desk. It’s just a doll, she told herself. Nothing to get freaked out over.

But then Kathleen came by her office to wish her goodnight. She came no further than the edge of the office doorway and kept her eyes on the doll the whole time. John had the same reaction when he poked his head in to ask if Mary needed a refill of coffee from the break room.

Mary set the box of scraps back into the desk drawer, determined to make more dolls on her lunch break in the days to come. At last finding a way where she could get a little peace and quiet from her coworkers.

Tuesday, April 19, 2011

To Give and to Take

This is a work of fiction. No real people, places or events were used. Copyright ã 2011 Plot Roach.

To Give and to Take

By Plot Roach

Like leaves in an Autumn breeze, his memories fell from his consciousness. Other than being aware that they left his mind, the process did not hurt at all. If anything, it provided a brief numbness that he enjoyed. It was almost like having his mind misted with a cool solution of peppermint and ice water. The colors swirled in front of his eyes and he concentrated on them. It was how the computer determined that he was purged of the necessary memories he had come to sell. A few minutes later a high pitched whine was followed by darkness and the memory retrieval technician pulled open the door to the surgical pod he was sitting in.

“No need to move yet, Mr. Thurston” the young man in the pristine lab coat said. The tech, probably no older than his late twenties, began to disconnect the wires from the plastic discs that dotted Mr. Thurston’s head.

I was once that young, he thought. He winced as the tech pulled the plastic discs off of his face, a little too roughly for the old man’s taste. In earlier years, he never had a problem with it, but now that he was older, and on numerous medications, his skin felt paper thin and ripped easily with the adhesive on the medical discs.

“There you are, Mr. Thurston. Free and clear. I’ve been told that the receptionist already credited your account. Did you want to make an appointment for next week at the same time?” The tech asked, tossing the used medical discs into the trash bin standing beside the memory chamber. The old man wondered if his memories were tossed aside as easily once they were used.

“I always do, Todd.” the old man said, lurching to his feet and thankful that he did not yet have to rely upon a wheel chair to get around.

“We’ll set it up then.” the tech smiled. It was not out of genuine affection for the old man and he knew it. It was what he was trained to do. All part of the process, from signing the medical waiver to pulling the memories out of his head, to giving him a pat on the shoulder and ushering him out of the medical suite so that the next victim could be harvested of his memories.

Mr. Thurston smiled at the receptionist on the way out and wondered, not for the first time, what she thought of him and others like him. He took the elevator down to the ground floor, too tired this day to attempt the stairs.

Once home, he swallowed the second series of the thirty pills he took daily to keep him alive. He noted that the bottle for the medication he used for his blood pressure was running low. He called the pharmacy and arranged to pick the refill up in an hour. In the meantime, he ate a meager meal of bland rice, boiled vegetables and a thin slice of lean chicken. I remember the good old days of greasy hamburgers and stinky cigars, he sighed, chewing the last of the rubbery cauliflower. But old age and poor health had robbed him of the last pleasures of his life.

Why would anyone want an old man’s memories anyway? He asked himself. He flipped through the channels on his television and wondered just how many of the shows he watched were based off of the memories of real people, also desperate for the cash. He turned the television up as loud as it would go, though he barely paid attention to the program, instead he sat thinking about the past, what memories he dared to keep for himself against the darker days of old age.

Once at the pharmacy, he spoke to the man behind the counter as he would a long lost friend. Though Mr. Thurston doubted that the man remembered him as anything beside one of a hundred customers he provided service to on a daily basis. The man smiled out of courtesy, much like the lab tech back at the memory harvesting office. But a look in the man’s eyes said that his patience would only last for so long. Mr. Thurston glanced sideways at an ad for the memory removal clinic he went to. “Have you ever been there?” asked the old man.

“Once, a few years ago.”

“Selling or….?”

“I had an implant.” he said, looking over his shoulder to make sure that no one heard him speaking on his personal life, no doubt. “It was a gift from my mother. She was dying of cancer and wanted to give me the memory she had of us walking along the beach when I was a toddler. I couldn’t remember it because I was too young. But she held onto it for forty six years before giving it to me.”

“That was nice.” the old man said, a lump in his throat, his eyes misted over with tears.

“Have you given away any of your memories?’ the man behind the counter asked.

“Sold them.” Mr. Thurston said. “Most of them anyway.”

“I’m sorry to hear that, sir.”

“Don’t be. They were doing me little good. And I needed a way to pay for all my pills and my bills. They have the technology to give and to take.” he motioned to the ad. “At least it‘s something to be grateful for, right?” the old man walked away from the counter and passed the information kiosk as he exited the store. On display was an ad for a new movie coming out in a month or so. It featured a happy family holding hands under a warm sunset. And Mr. Thurston felt drawn to the image, almost like he remembered it. After a few minutes, he wandered down the aisle and off to his apartment, wondering -and not for the first time- if it had been based upon a memory of his own.