Greedy Pigs

by Matt Wallace

  “Chef Luck isn’t here with our other truck, Mr. Allensworth,” Nikki informs him, and immediately feels stupid for treating him like he doesn’t already know everything all the time.

  “Byron and the others were unexpectedly delayed on the road. They’ll be along any time now. In the interim, we have a schedule to keep. I’m sure you can manage on your own to start.”

  “We’re down half our staff and half our food!” Nikki protests.

  “Miss Glowin,” Allensworth begins, unruffled, “you do, as a professional catering company, put redundancy measures into place to prepare for unforeseen circumstances, do you not?”

  Nikki sighs. “Yeah. Yes. We have extra food. We can . . . I guess we can probably manage for a couple of hours as long as there isn’t a rush.”

  Allensworth’s smile never falters. “Then please set up to begin service.”

  “Why can’t I call anyone?” Nikki asks, holding up her phone.

  “Powerful magic dampen such worldly signals,” Allensworth explains, effortlessly. “And we are, as you can see, surrounded by all manner of very powerful magic.”

  Silently, he beckons Bruno and the two of them retreat before Nikki can question him further.

  She’s left cursing inside her head. Rollo, Chevet, Tenryu, and James all gather around her. Darren continues to lurk somewhere in the background.

  “All right,” she says resolutely a moment later. “All right. We don’t have servers, so some of you are going to have to carry hors d’oeuvres.”

  Rollo snorts. “Why you get to tell us what to do? If Dorsky is not here, I am in charge of line.”

  Nikki digs her fists into her hips and her eyes become Old West gunfighter slits. “Rollo, laughing at all of Dorsky’s stupid fucking jokes doesn’t make you his understudy. I’m the only one with any kind of title here, and I’m the only one Chef Luck would want running things and you damn well know it. Now, does anybody else have a problem with that?”

  Rollo looks around for the support of his comrades and instead finds a bunch of strangers in white smocks staring at the grass.

  “Cowards,” he mutters.

  Nikki nods once, grunting. “Okay, then. Start setting up and then we’ll get prep done.”

  They all disperse, even Rollo. Nikki is quick to take James by the arm, pulling him aside.

  “What’s wrong with him?” she asks, nodding toward Darren, still slumped in the shadow of the truck near the tree line.

  “I do not know,” James quietly answers. “He will not talk to me. Since he finally began talking to me, I could not make him stop, but now . . . nothing.”

  “Can he work?”

  James nods. “But it is like he’s not even knowing he’s doing it. The rest of him is . . . far away.”

  “Well, that’ll have to do for right now. I’m sorry, James. I’ll get Lena to talk to him when they finally show up.”

  James nods, trying to put on an optimistic expression because that’s who he is.

  Nikki forces herself to smile back at him, kindly, because that’s who she is.

  OFF THE RACK

  Plating soup trios for hundreds of people is almost enough to make Lena forget they’re in Washington, D.C., catering the actual, real presidential inauguration. It’s enough to keep her from thinking about why the rest of the Sin du Jour crew hasn’t arrived, or why they haven’t been evacuated, or why they were diverted here in the first place.

  It is not, however, enough to distract her from the tumbling feeling of dread stretching endlessly from the pit of her stomach.

  The kitchen in the U.S. Capitol they’ve been given for prep and cooking is a utilitarian palace of immaculate brass fixtures and appliances. Lena could live here happily forever. A trio of ramekins sits on a single plate beside her stove. She ladles chili pork verde into one, clam chowder with bacon into the second, and a spicy miso pork ramen into the third.

  She carries four plates of the three-way pork soups over to the large marble island they’re using as their expediting station and finds it’s already covered edge to edge in identical plates.

  “I got no more room over here!” Lena yells back at Dorsky. “Why isn’t this shit going out?”

  “I gave the stoner five minutes to dump his ass and it’s been almost fifteen.”

  “Dammit, Pac,” Lena mutters.

  Mr. Mirabel, a more portable oxygen machine slung in a leather satchel from his shoulder to keep his hands free, wheezes his way back to the island and grabs several more plates. It allows Lena to offload what she’s carrying.

  She turns and almost slams into Dorsky, who reaches up and gently takes her by the biceps to stabilize her.

  “I’ll run,” he says. “You go find Pacific and drag him the hell back here.”

  Lena looks down at his hands, the way he’s holding her and their proximity taking her back to that closet where they first hooked up, while they were hiding from their coworkers who’d been transformed into crazed sex lizards.

  It shouldn’t be an erotic memory, and yet.

  Lena nods, slipping free of his grip deftly. “Yes, Chef,” she says without irony.

  She jogs out of the kitchen and finds the nearest set of bathrooms, checking both without hesitation or shame. She finds each one empty, much to her exasperation.

  Rather than returning to her station, Lena decides to search the nearest rooms beyond the facilities. She finds several locked doors and open rooms with the lights out. Anyone that takes notice of her seems to only need to spy the logo on the breast of her smock to dismiss any further interest. Lena supposes if she’s been given clearance to know secrets about the world forbidden to 99 percent of the population, she’s got clearance to wander around the U.S. Capitol.

  Lena is ready to give up and is literally turning around to walk back to the kitchen when he skirts past her. It’s not Pacific. It is possibly the farthest thing from Pacific she could conjure to mind.

  Lena recognizes the man instantly and on sight, of course. There’s no mistaking that red face or the hideous hay-colored rat’s nest of a rug she’s always wondered if he wears ironically.

  An immediate, empty loathing fills her stomach and a more active, seething hate bubbles atop her brain.

  The newly elected president of the United States brushes by without even seeming to notice her. He strides down the hall, unencumbered and unescorted, which Lena immediately finds odd.

  She’s following him before she realizes she’s doing it, and once she becomes fully aware, somehow Lena can’t stop. She maintains a comfortable distance, but he still seems completely oblivious to his surroundings anyway.

  Lena asks herself what she’s doing and no answer is forthcoming. Is she going to assassinate the asshole? Somehow, it seems perfectly plausible as long as she doesn’t think through it thoroughly. That’s one of the problems with working at Sin du Jour: everything you experience starts to make you believe anything is possible, but that “anything” is rarely a good thing.

  Usually, that impossible thing is hideous.

  She watches the soon-to-be president enter a room with its double glass doors pulled open. The space beyond is brightly lit. Lena knows she should turn back now, but it all seems too easy, too weird and rare and inviting to stop now.

  She follows him inside.

  The half of the room she can see is empty. Tall black curtains partition off the other half of the room. Two attendants, hulking men in steel-gray tunics with buttons the size of silver dollars, are stationed where the folds of the curtain meet.

  As she looks on, the president-elect removes his suit jacket and hands it off to an attendant. He then flips his tie over one shoulder and proceeds to unbutton the four middle buttons of his dress shirt. Lena thinks he’s going to keep undressing, but instead he just stands there, silent and still. Then, a moment or two later, his back arches sharply in one jerking motion. His arms are thrown back, and his eyes go wide and dead.

  Lena feels her every muscle tense a
s she watches something begin to push its way through the open fold in the president-elect’s shirt. She squints, wanting to close her eyes, every horrific thing she’s witnessed since coming to work for Sin du Jour flashing through her mind all at once.

  The thing forces its way out of the president-elect’s body, through his unbuttoned shirt, and unfurls down his body.

  Lena prepares to look away, jaw clenched, but she stops.

  It’s a ladder.

  It’s a tiny rope ladder.

  Lena is now squinting in confusion rather than horror or terror. There is simply no denying the fact that a miniature rope ladder has been deployed from inside the president-elect’s shirt, and is now hanging down to his knees.

  It’s somehow far less shocking when the little green creature crawls out through the president-elect’s shirt and begins descending the ladder, making a noise that sounds to Lena like an old man forced to traverse a flight of stairs. As its clawed hands and feet grip each wooden rung, Lena notices the rungs have been carved with crude designs and slogans in English. They remind her of pictures she’s seen of the way soldiers decorated the stocks of their shotguns in trenches during the First World War.

  The creature is two to three feet tall, bipedal, and has the face of a French bulldog without the charm or humanity. Its skin is dry and cracked, and its color has the dusty, faded appearance of once-vibrant paint long dried. It leaps from the last rung of the ladder and hits the ground with a triumphant hoot.

  The attendants bow respectfully to the creature, then they each take a fold of the dark curtain partition and begin peeling them back to open up the rest of the room.

  In the next moment, Lena finds she’s relocated her sense of horror.

  In fact, it’s far deeper and much, much worse than it was just a few seconds ago.

  As the creature pads casually away, the attendants pick up the president-elect shell it was wearing and carry it over to a dangling cradle. The cradle is hanging from what resembles a large dry-cleaning rack. The rack is filled with them, their leather shoes swinging a foot above the ground.

  It’s an entire rack of ghastly realistic human puppets.

  There are several copies of the president-elect. There is an equal number of his primary opponent. They’re surrounded by what must be every recognizable politician Lena has ever glimpsed on CNN. There are hundreds of them, slabs of meat on hooks, wearing designer suits and staring at the ceiling with inanimate eyes.

  A rising chorus of nasal chattering begins to register in Lena’s ears, and her instinct to follow the sound to its source is probably all that keeps her from turning and running away. To the far left of the human-puppet rack, a dozen of those same creatures are crowded around a folding table. They’re drinking mugs of coffee and snacking on frosted pastries. The entire tableau is engulfed in a cloud of thin, wispy, herbal smoke.

  And they’re not alone.

  “Pac?” Lena asks, and shock doesn’t even begin to cover it.

  This is like waking up inside a surrealist’s painting.

  “What up, Lena?” Pacific greets her warmly as he passes one of his joints to the nearest green-skinned puppet operator.

  The creature clips it between the ends of two claws and tokes expertly.

  “What the fu—”

  “You never quite get used to it, do you?” an instantly recognizable baritone voice asks.

  Lena spins around, and what she sees is almost as shocking as the scene she’s left behind.

  He’s a full head taller than her, and up close, the lines in his face run deeper and the stark gray consuming his hair appears more ancient than in any picture.

  Everyone’s always talking about how eight short years in the White House aged him fifty years.

  They’re righter than they know.

  It’s him.

  It’s the outgoing president of the United States.

  “I uh, apologize,” he says. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”

  You almost said “fuck” in front of the president, her brain remarks.

  “No,” Lena manages. “No, it’s fine. Totally fine. I just got . . . lost.”

  “You’re the caterer, yes?”

  “I . . . um . . . one of them, yeah. Yes.”

  He laughs. “I, uh . . . I really enjoyed the all-pork theme to the menu tonight. I’m not, uh, sure a lot of folks here . . . you know . . . got the joke, as such, but the First Lady and I really got a kick out of it, let me tell you.”

  “Oh, thank you. That . . . I . . . It was actually my idea.” Her brain sends a signal that is the equivalent of someone kicking you underneath a table, and she adds, “Mr. President. Sir.”

  He lowers his voice, as if confiding in her solely. “It’s not exactly a, uh, pleasant occasion for a lot of us. What with . . .”

  He waves his hand toward the lifeless, dangling husks of the president-elect on the rack.

  “ . . . that,” he continues, “being sworn in tonight. So I, uh, genuinely do appreciate the levity you all brought. It was needed.”

  “Sir, what . . . What is . . . What are . . .”

  Lena tries to mimic his wave, indicating the entire rack behind her.

  He stares down at her in brief puzzlement. “Oh, you must be, uh, new to the company, then? Catering these types of events?”

  Lena just nods dumbly.

  “Well, individual, sentient candidates went ‘out of style,’ as it were, quite a long time ago. It seemed redundant, I suppose. Since, as I’m sure you do know, there’s no real difference, on a practical level, between either major party. The Sceadu sets most of our overriding policies and legislates all watershed-type matters. What we do is largely for the masses, not that we don’t try to make changes where and when we can. But to avoid personality clashes or any one candidate ‘rocking the boat,’ they started running what we call on the Hill ‘meat puppets.’”

  “Okay. And what are they?” Lena asks, pointing at the creatures getting high with her busboy.

  “Oh, them? Gremlins!” the president proclaims, a genuine affection underlying the power in his voice.

  “Like . . . Gizmo?”

  He laughs again. “No, no. Uh . . . gremlins are actually some of our nation’s oldest civil servants. Dating as far back as the Revolutionary War. They sabotaged ships of the British Royal Navy in aid of the Continental forces. During World War One and Two, elite gremlin squads were actually responsible for the destruction of more enemy fighters and bomber planes than our own pilots. Highly patriotic, gremlins. Highly.”

  “So they . . . they, like, operate . . . the meat puppets?”

  “They’re good at taking direction, but also improvising within parameters, actually. They tried to break into Hollywood at one point, but the goblins squashed that right away. You know, I, uh . . . I actually hear it took three gremlins just to operate President Taft?” He laughs then, loudly, genuinely amused by the thought. “He was, uh . . . he was a large man, to be sure.”

  “But wait, you’re not . . . ?” Lena asks, trailing off, unable to even consciously choose the right words.

  “A meat puppet? Oh, no. No. I am . . . or was . . . the first human candidate to take the White House in over a hundred years, I believe. You think the, uh, you think the American people were surprised I won? Well, let me tell you . . .”

  He laughs, long and jovially at the memories obviously flooding his mind’s eye in that moment.

  “Okay,” Lena says. “All right. But I mean . . . what do you . . . like, what do you actually do, then? Or what did you do? As president?”

  He sighs. “I mean . . . you do what you can, right? Most of the, uh, the big decisions are influenced or outright decided by the various factions comprising the Sceadu. They’re so deeply interwoven through politics and private industry. I tried to help humans, American humans, in ways that didn’t threaten the Sceadu. Was, I uh, overly optimistic? Probably. Probably. But I tried. I purely did try. And there’s a lot of which I’ll leave this
office proud.”

  Listening as he speaks, sharing thoughts so private and personal, has the exact opposite effect on Lena she might’ve otherwise expected. That deep sense of dread returns, the feeling that’s been spiraling down into the pit of her stomach since she first saw the freeway signs for Washington, D.C. If anything, that feeling is even more pronounced now, more impending and terrifyingly real.

  “Sir, may I ask you kind of a personal question?”

  “Please,” he encourages her without hesitation.

  “What about all that shi—” She pauses. “Uh, all that stuff you don’t think you can change? What do you do when you feel . . . I don’t know, like a train barreling down and everything is bolted to the tracks in front of it and all you can do is watch, knowing what’s about to happen?”

  The president takes a deep, contemplative breath, sliding his hands into his pockets, as he seems to very seriously consider the question.

  “I would say . . . at that point, you make a choice. And in aid of that choice, you ask yourself a question. ‘Is it worth it?’ That’s the only question that matters, really. If it isn’t worth it, if it’s not the hill on which you’re meant to die, you choose to let it go and deal with the fallout. If it is worth it . . .”

  Lena waits, his answer seeming in that moment to mean more to her than any answer to any question she’s ever asked.

  “Yes?” she presses.

  “Then, I suppose, you have to hope against all reason that your body is enough to stop that train.”

  It takes time for that to fully settle with her, but when it does, a calm overtakes Lena.

  “Thank you, sir,” she says. Then, turning around and yelling to Pacific: “Pac! Get your ass back to the kitchen! Now!”

  “Yeah, boss! On my way!”

  Lena very politely excuses herself and runs full-speed back to the kitchen.

  She finds Bronko puzzling over plastic bins filled Nikki’s churro chicharrónes.

  “I don’t recall exactly how Nikki wanted to finish these—” he begins, but Lena cuts him off.