He lingered in the break room for a quarter of an hour, hoping she would wander in. Finally, he gave up and made his way back to the house where he’d first met Kohl and found there were two other men inside getting ready to sit at the dinner table. They were both seriously old, in their fifties or maybe sixties, and they had a grizzled look about them, like they’d worked in coal mines or lived out in the desert all their lives.
One was an enormously obese man with no hair and a long beard like a biker—but no mustache—who introduced himself as Lester. The other old timer, Gregory, was a black guy.
“So, you’re the new guy,” Lester said.
“You’re the one who shot that kid,” Gregory said.
“Don’t any of that matter,” Lester told Gregory in a kind of lecturing voice. “Past is past.”
“I wasn’t making any trouble,” Gregory said, holding up his hands. “Just observing that this is a white guy who likes to shoot black kids.”
“Don’t observe so much,” Lester said. “Let’s eat.”
There were pots on the stove set to warm—stew and potatoes—and a large bowl with dressed salad in the middle of the table, next to a basket of warm rolls covered by a cloth napkin.
“Who makes all this?” Chip asked as he sat down to eat.
“Don’t nobody know,” Lester said. “It just gets done while we’re working.”
“And what do you guys do?” Chip asked them, though he was looking at Lester. He still didn’t trust Gregory not to bring up the shooting.
“We don’t talk about the work,” Gregory said. “It’s best that way. They don’t want anyone here knowing too much about what’s going on. We start talking about it, we start to put too much of it together.”
“So, you don’t want to know?” Chip asked.
“Nothing to be gained by knowing,” Lester said. “They’re paying us a ton of money, and we’ve got it good in here.”
Chip understood that, but he still didn’t like that he wasn’t supposed to leave. “You guys don’t ever get stir crazy, just want to get out and do something?”
Gregory grinned. “You want to go out? You just got here.”
“I mean, I don’t like that we don’t have the choice,” Chip explained. “I’m a big believer in liberty.”
“You were free not to take the job,” Lester said. “But you’re like the rest. They hired us because they know we don’t have anywhere to go.”
Chip didn’t like being lumped into any category that included a couple of old guys. “What is that supposed to mean?”
Gregory shrugged. “You know, man. Me and Lester here have spent our time away from the world. I was inside, and he was just tucked away where no one could find him. When I went inside, you had to push your fingers around a little dial thing a bunch of times if you want to call someone. Now, people are walking around with supercomputers in their pockets that the government can use to track their movements. It’s crazy out there now. I don’t like it. In here, I get up, go to a job that doesn’t take any time to get to, put in my eight hours, then come home to a hot meal. After that, I can watch TV and drink beer until I fall asleep.”
Chip looked up. “There’s beer?”
“Guess you haven’t checked out the fridge yet, huh?” Lester said with a grin.
Chip didn’t know how he felt about sharing the place with a couple of criminals, but he liked the idea of a well-stocked refrigerator.
His first night inside turned out to be pretty great. Chip thought Gregory was going to be a problem, but he didn’t seem preoccupied by Chip’s past, and pretty soon they were all joking around. “Hell,” Gregory said, “I’ve killed more people than you have.” Then Lester shot him a look, and he stopped talking.
There were at least three or four cases of beer in the refrigerator, and Lester told him that it was restocked every night, as were the snacks. They had an unlimited account for ordering movies online, so the only real discussion each night was about what to watch. Chip didn’t much care, as long as it wasn’t the news, so Gregory put on a reality TV show about a former child star, and they watched as she made a complete fool of herself and wore clothes that showed off how fat she’d become.
“What a dumb bitch,” Lester said.
“Yeah,” Gregory agreed. “But I’ll tell you what. As soon as this show is cancelled, she’ll probably end up in one of the girls’ houses they’ve got here. We’ll be passing her in the halls.”
*
Chip woke the next morning hung over, but ready to go. He fixed himself a breakfast of cold cereal, milk, and juice, which he ate sullenly with Gregory and Lester, who were just as uncommunicative as he was. There was a kind of camaraderie in the silence that Chip liked. They’d had too much to drink together, and now they were suffering together. There was also the knowledge that tonight they were going to do the whole thing all over again. There was a bottomless supply of beer and snacks. Things were pretty good in the house.
There was a duty roster by the fridge, and Chip saw that today it was his turn to feed the lizards, but Lester said he’d show him the ropes. As soon as they walked toward the back doors, the Komodo dragons scrambled to their feet and rushed to meet them. They knew it was feeding time.
Outside was a fenced in area—a sort of lizard run—and along the side were hutches filled with rabbits.
“These ain’t the dangerous kind,” Lester said, “so just grab ‘em and throw ‘em in the pen. All of them. They replace the rabbits every day.”
“Why don’t they just feed the lizards when they replace the rabbits?” Chip asked.
“Because that’s our job, numb nuts,” Lester explained.
Once the lizards were locked in the pen, Lester opened up one of the rabbit hutches, grabbed a little gray bundle, and tossed it inside. There was a flash of movement and a puff of fur and blood in the air, but then it was entirely gone.
“Cool,” Chip said. “Let me try.”
After they were done with the lizards, there was time to drink a couple of cups of coffee, cooled with plenty of milk. Then Chip joined the two men in heading for the basement door and keying themselves in. They went to the break room, punched their cards, and then nodded at each other and headed off in their own directions. Chip picked up his roster and began to make his way to the animal cages. It was mindless work, but he didn’t much feel like thinking. The only thing he wanted to reflect on was how glad he was that the Limbus people had found him. Beer and food and privacy. Now he had pretty much everything he’d wanted. Maybe the only thing left on the list was a girlfriend, but it was good to have something to aspire to.
By lunchtime, the girlfriend problem had begun to occupy more of Chip’s attention. It had been just a throwaway complaint at first, but now he realized that it was actually fairly serious. You can’t ask a man to be solitary his whole life, after all. It wasn’t as though he was in prison. Back when he’d been living with his mother, finding companionship had been too challenging, and he’d given up, but now he was seeing things differently.
Right after the shooting, there were some women who would throw themselves at Chip, but they tended to be a little weird for some reason. Then, as the case dragged on, and there were all those unflattering portrayals of him in the media, even those women tended to treat him like he was radioactive. The weight gain hadn’t helped. He understood that, but he needed women to understand that he was a work in progress.
By any reasonable standards, he was progressing very nicely. Last week he’d been broke and living with his mother. Now he had a job and a place to live with a perpetually stocked beer fridge. He was, quite clearly, moving up in the world.
When he went back to the house for lunch, after a disappointing morning of not seeing Janice, Lester and Gregory were already sitting at the table, eating grilled cheese sandwiches, which had been piled up on a big plate in the center. There was a large pitcher of lemonade, as well as a basket of potato chips and a green salad.
“You
really don’t know who makes this stuff?” Chip asked, as he bit into his sandwich. It was good. It wasn’t even American cheese, but something fancy, like cheddar or Munster.
Gregory shrugged. “No idea. I gave up wondering a long time ago. It gets done, and that’s good enough for me.”
“What happens on the weekend, though?”
“Weekends we’re on our own,” Lester explained, settling into his role as grand old man of the dinner table. “There’s always plenty of cold cuts and frozen stuff and some vegetables if you’re feeling adventurous. They’re big on vegetables. I never ate salad in my life, but they have it out at every meal, and it finally got to me. They’ve got this dressing business down, I’ll tell you that much. Now I’m like a salad junkie.”
“He’s got a problem,” Gregory said.
“I need an intervention,” Lester agreed.
The both laughed like this was hilarious, and maybe it was, but Chip was still thinking about his girlfriend situation. Maybe he was just too single-minded for these guys. “How do we know there isn’t some really pretty girl making all of this stuff?” Chip wanted to know. “Like one of those hot Russians or something, with an accent?”
“And one of those sexy uniforms?” Lester prodded.
“Those are French maids,” Gregory said. “Russians can wear whatever they want.”
“You’re going to complain if a hot Russian wears a French uniform? Is that against the code of whatever?”
“The point,” said Chip, “is that we don’t know who is coming into our house.”
“It’s not really our house,” Gregory said. “Besides, who cares? They clean, they cook, they do laundry. They don’t want anything in return. It’s like marriage, only a hundred times better.”
“I think our friend is lonely,” said Lester.
“Let him whack off like the rest of us,” Gregory said, finishing a quarter of his sandwich in a big bite.
“I know you guys are old and everything, but don’t some of the younger men want to have girlfriends?” Chip asked.
“We’re old, but you’re fat,” Lester said. “You tell me which is worse.”
“Old,” Gregory said philosophically. “You can always lose weight, but you can’t lose years.”
“But you gain wisdom,” Lester said. “Anyhow, I’m both, which means I have fat wisdom.”
Chip was coming to understand that these guys were not going to be a whole lot of help to him when it came to the big issues.
After lunch, Chip was making his way to his next lab when he saw Janice walking through the hall. He couldn’t help but think she’d grown more attractive in his mind since seeing her last. The reality, with her hard lines and brittle cast, struck him as unappealing. Still, there was something about her, and he hadn’t seen anything better in the facility. He’d passed a few lady scientists who were kind of pretty, but he knew overly-educated women would never go for him. They all thought that a man who fired a gun in self-defense had to be some sort of a savage. If any of those sexy scientists, with their lab coats and horned rimmed glasses, had been there when Chip had been pretty much almost attacked, they would have seen things differently. Now, in their ignorance, they judged. It was just how things went, he supposed. His time in the lab had already made him more introspective.
“Hey, Janice,” Chip said, catching up to her, determined to soldier on, even if she was less attractive than he liked. “Thanks for showing me around the other day. It was really nice of you.”
“They told me to,” she said, not bothering to slow her pace.
“Still, you did a good job. I really feel like I know what I’m doing.”
“Great,” she said, raising her wrist to look at the time, though she was not wearing a watch.
“So, listen,” he began.
She stopped and stared at him. “No,” she said. “I don’t want to hang out with you or watch movies or eat a meal with you. I don’t want to socialize with you outside of work, and I don’t want to be any friendlier than I have to be at work. This is what it is, and whatever you think you know about me, you might as well forget, because I’m not what everyone says.”
Janice stormed off leaving Chip standing in the hall. It was only then that he realized why she looked so familiar. He’d seen her on the news. She was famous. More than that, she was infamous. She was even more well known, more despised, than Chip because her crime was sex.
Janice has been in Congress, a Florida representative who had campaigned against abortion and sexual immorality. Then it came out that she’d had three abortions in the past five years and went to sex clubs all the time, and had a torrid relationship with a neighbor’s son— only 17 years old at the time—which somehow meant she was guilty of rape. That still confused Chip, as had many aspects of the case. He hadn’t even known that sex clubs were a real thing, and he wished he’d had back when he was the sort of person who could go places without anyone noticing. Now it was too late.
Clearly Janice had treated him badly because she figured he thought she was easy, and now that he knew who she was, he did kind of think that. Of course she would be on her guard now, so he had to act like he didn’t care about her past and that he wasn’t just trying to have sex with her. Once he convinced her of that, she would have sex with him for sure since, obviously, she wasn’t shy about that sort of thing.
Chip was surprised to discover how excited he was to have something to look forward to. It was a project, something to occupy his time beyond cleaning animal cages, something more exciting to anticipate than hanging out with Gregory and Lester, drinking beer. The beer, of course, was going to become a problem in terms of his weight, but Chip remembered seeing the stories on the news about Janice’s sexual antics, and she’d been with guys way fatter than he was. Besides, he was masculine. He knew how to take care of himself, and women loved that. It was, he believed, just a matter of time until she became interested in him.
His campaign was pretty simple. When he saw her in the hall, he said hello, asked how she was doing, and left it at that. He knew his friendliness would sink in, and she’d begin to see him in a new light. But after a few days of this he hadn’t made any progress, and Chip began to grow impatient. He’d been nice to her constantly, and she still treated him like he was the mean kid at school. The truth was, she was being mean to him by refusing to talk with him. Obviously, she was way into sex, and if she wasn’t showing any inclination of spending time with him, that meant she’d chosen someone else—maybe lots of someone elses.
That was the insulting thing, really. She would have sex with other people, but not him? How was he not supposed to take that personally? He remembered from the stories he’d seen about Janice on TV, the newspaper headlines he’d read in the supermarket checkout stands, that she didn’t exactly stick with one guy at a time, but clearly there was someone, someone who was not Chip. That meant he had rivals, and Chip knew how to deal with rivals.
The first step, then, was going to have to be figuring out who the enemy was. Chip had come to that conclusion while sitting in the living room of his house, drinking beer. Gregory and Lester had already gone to bed, but he’d stuck around for a few more cans so he could think. Maybe he didn’t have fancy degrees like some of the scientists, but Chip was a guy who liked to use his brain. He liked to plan ahead, and a few extra beers always helped him settle into his groove. He’d come up with a plan, and when he woke up in the morning, if it still seemed solid, there was no good reason not to stick with it.
When he saw Janice that morning, he said hello to her as usual, and she mumbled her greeting in return while looking away. Chip kept walking, but for some reason her reaction made him angrier than it usually did. Maybe it was his headache and dry mouth, but he didn’t think so. He was used to people judging him, after all. People thought he was a gun nut, a killer and—this was what really made him angry—a racist. They thought he hated minorities.
People, he understood, were ignorant, and they jud
ged what they did not understand. The media told the world that they should hate him, so that’s what most people did. But Janice had tasted the business end of that kind of hurt. She hated even though she knew how cruel the liberal press could be. That’s what made Chip so angry.
After she’d spoken to him like he was something disgusting (even though a lot of Americans considered him a hero, whereas no one thought she was anything but a slut), Chip walked on, but then he stopped after he rounded a corner. He let her advance down her hall and then turned around, walking quietly on his sneakered feet as she proceeded, head down, along the corridor. She passed several scientists, men and women, and they ignored her entirely, like she wasn’t even there. They also ignored him, and he was fine with that, but the larger point was that he was nice to her when the scientists were not. He ought to get something for his efforts.
Janice reached her door and keyed it unlocked. As she passed through it, Chip hurried after her, his own key card out so that if any of the scientists saw him advancing, they’d think he was merely being lazy, trying to catch the door before it closed rather than sneaking in where he didn’t belong. Why, after all, would anyone sneak around? It wasn’t like he was looking for more work. All he wanted was to get a better sense of how she spent her day, so he could have more to say to her.
Chip—as a certain thuggish teenager had discovered to his dismay—was faster than he looked, and was able to get his foot into the door just before it swung shut. He then turned around, like he’d done something to his back, but he was really checking to make sure that no one was watching him. There were a few scientists moving around the halls, but no one gave him a second glance. The assistants were all invisible or, at least, interchangeable.
Limbus, Inc., Book III Page 12
