“Let’s get this over with.”
Alan stretched his hand out with his paper and Finch tore it out of his hands. Finch looked over the red paper, made some notes then began filling out the paperwork on his clipboard with the red slip guiding him. His pen marks were hard and swift, much like the rest of his actions. He didn’t have time for the new guy’s jokes. Jokes got people in trouble. Then they got shipped out to the processing center and had to deal with the board of directors. Finch didn’t like the questions those visits brought. It complicated things already complicated enough.
Alan noticed beyond the desk there was a door that led out into the courtyard of the complex. There were people hanging out in the green patch of land; the only green patch Alan could remember seeing in his journey to his new home. A few palm trees surrounded a circular grass area with an empty swimming pool. But Alan didn’t realize he was staring at a group of guys who were sitting in plastic lawn chairs in the courtyard, but they had noticed. The men looked at each other and got up from their seats, pushing their way into the lobby.
“Hey, baby bird, who’s the new guy?” the leader of the group - a muscular man with rough facial hair and piercing dark eyes - asked Finch in a unsettling polite tone.
“Baby bird?” Alan asked quietly, setting a sideways glance at Finch. Finch shook his head.
“Shut up, new guy. I’m talking to baby bird,” the leader shot back. He rubbed his patchy facial hair and looked back at Finch.
Finch clenched his teeth and pointed at his clipboard, “I don’t have time for this crap, Castor. I need to input him in the system so I can clock out. Why don’t you take your little entourage back to the courtyard so I can do my damn job.”
Castor didn’t like that. He grabbed Finch by the arm, Castor’s hand turning red hot. Finch winced, his arm heating up and blistering. He let out a pained exhale.
“Don’t you ever tell me what to do,” Castor said angrily. Finch struggled, but Castor wrenched Finch’s arm back and tightened his burning grip. “You normies just think you’re better than us. I don’t like the way you look down on me.”
“Castor, let him go.”
Castor looked back at the courtyard doorway where a tall, muscular man was standing. Alan released his fist, and Finch’s desk gently came back down onto the floor without everyone noticing. Everyone, except for Marshall, the man in the doorway. He was subtly looking at the desk, when Castor finally let Finch go. Alan looked at Finch’s arm, red finger marks burned into his flesh. Finch picked up his clipboard off the ground and started making notes.
“That’s another strike for you, Castor. One more, and you’ll have to be processed.”
“Don’t threaten me, baby bird,” Castor sneered, and he nodded to his guys. “I’ll catch you later, newbie.”
Marshall watched, unmoving, as Castor and his friends went back out into the courtyard. Once they were outside, Marshall relaxed his posture and turned his attention to Alan, who was anxiously standing in the middle of the room.
“You’ll have to forgive Castor, kid. He wasn’t blessed with an abundance of intelligence. You okay, Finch?”
Finch nodded, exhaling a breath of relief. “I’m fine. But Castor? Castor’s on his last warning. And we know what comes after that.”
“Let me worry about Castor,” Marshall said, his eyes staring back at the courtyard. “So, who’s the new kid?”
“Alan Mitchell. Just got shipped here from…” Finch looked down at his paperwork, his mind wandering.
“The 305 I guess,” Alan replied, his tone carrying a pinch of detached confusion. It was just a bunch of numbers to him. He wasn’t from St. Louis, Phoenix, San Antonio, Chicago. He was a punched up zip code kid. It was best to forget he had ever lived anywhere else at all. Finch looked up from his clipboard, unamused by Alan’s interjection into the conversation.
“Yeah… the 305,” Finch said, his displeasure seeping out slowly with his drawn out words. He looked over to Marshall, who was standing with arms crossed next to them. “I’m going to file this paperwork. Alan’s in room 224b. Can you show him around, Marshall?”
Marshall looked at Alan, sizing him up with a discerning eye. “Sure thing, Finch. Come on, kid. Let’s see if we can get you into some trouble.”
“No trouble,” Finch chided as Marshall and Mitchell walked through to the courtyard, where Castor was still sulking. Marshall put a hand on Alan’s shoulder and pointed around the area. It was more a sign to Castor that Marshall was looking out for the kid than a genuine act of friendship, but Alan appreciated it anyway.
“The cafeteria is down at the end of the courtyard here. Mostly just the old high school stuff. Pizza day on Friday, so that doesn’t completely suck. We go grocery shopping in groups on Wednesday, so you’ll want to use your credits to get snacks then. They’ll bring you soap and toothpaste and that kind of stuff, so don’t waste your credits on it in the store. Your room is on the second floor.”
Marshall ushered Alan up a metal staircase blasted with white paint, chips of it flaking in well-trafficked areas. They finally got to his room, and Marshall showed him in. The room was a single bed, wrapped in white sheets with brown carpeting on the floor and a small bathroom. It was about as dingy a hotel room as Alan could remember seeing before. He looked back at the front door.
“No lock?” Alan asked.
“Nope. Nobody has locks. It seems kinda pointless since we’re not allowed to leave and there’s cameras all over the place. If someone steals your stuff just let me know. We tend to take care of matters on our own. Keeps the board out of it.”
“I heard Finch mention them earlier. They don’t sound great.”
Marshall stopped for a moment, looking out the curtain-draped window of the room. Castor’s friends had left and they had been replaced with a group talking down at the empty swimming pool, their legs dangling over the edge. Marshall seemed to be thinking about something far off.
“No. They aren’t ‘great.’ If you see the board, then you’re screwed. So don’t get yourself into trouble. Anything else?”
Marshall asked the question more for himself, his eyes pensively looking to the popcorn ceiling trying to muster another thought. He snapped his fingers and pointed at Alan, a big grin on his face.
“Marshall and Mitchell. I just realized that. That’s us, kid. Anyway, that was the whole show. You need anything from me?”
Alan shook his head, so Marshall went for the exit.
“Wait. What do we do here?” Alan asked. No one had ever told him. Since he received his red slip, no one had told him what exactly he was in for. Marshall turned around, his lips curled down and his eyes blinking slowly.
“It’s a work camp, kid. We do what they tell us to do.”
Marshall’s voice was deflated, realizing Alan didn’t know what he was in for and sad for all the people working in the 308. It was a work camp; there wasn’t anything more to it than that. Alan didn’t respond, so Marshall broke the awkward silence.
“Dinner’s at 6. Don’t be late. If you can believe it, the food gets worse.”
three
“Get up, Mr. Mitchell!” Finch’s voice rang like a morning bell inside Alan’s brain.
Alan felt Finch’s gravelly tone bounce between Alan’s ears with thunderous resound, shaking his weak bones to life. Alan hardly slept at all his first night in the 308, and now Finch was shouting for him to meet the new day.
“It’s still dark out,” Alan said with one half-open eye, his voice scratchy and strained.
Alan pulled his upper body up out of bed, leaning on the bed with his forearms. The courtyard was still dark, with fluorescents providing sickly, white light. Alan looked up at Finch, whose mustache was bunched up to one side, his eyes narrowing at each passing second. Finch cocked his head to the side, then shook it.
“Bus comes in twenty minutes, and you’re going to be on it,” Finch said gruffly and then he pulled his bottom teeth against his mustache while he adjusted
the brown leather belt in his beige pant loops.
Alan rubbed his eyes and looked around at his new home. Cracked drywall. Patchy carpet. Dripping sink faucet. Alan scrambled his hair and got up out of bed. He pulled his sheets back over his lumpy mattress. Then he bent backwards and felt his back audibly pop. He groaned and walked over to his dresser.
“That’s the spirit. We’re meeting down in the lobby when you’re dressed,” Finch responded, his voice trailing off as his mind began moving on to the next worker on his checklist.
“What should I wear?” Alan asked, looking into his sparsely packed dresser.
Finch - broken up from his workflow - exhaled an exasperated breath and checked Alan’s name off his clipboard list with one violent pen stroke. He pointed with his thumb at the open doorway.
“Just wear what you got, kid. We’ll have uniforms on-site.”
The lobby was filled with the rest of the occupants of the complex. There were plenty of new faces that Alan couldn’t place. He recognized a few people from the swimming pool, and Castor - his unkempt facial hair hiding thin, frowning lips – rolled his eyes when the two made eye contact at the front entrance.
Alan finally saw Marshall, who was socializing with a group of people around Finch’s desk. Marshall gave Alan a big grin and waved him over to their group.
“Hey Alan, meet the guys,” Marshall shouted, his mouth stretched with a humongous smile. Alan closed the distance between them and looked around at this new group of neighbors.
“Guys?” a girl in the group chided, her head cocked to the side as she stared Marshall down with a raised eyebrow and sideways grin.
Marshall acknowledged her, his hands raised to the air,d “People? Persons? Humans? You get what I’m saying, Athena.”
Athena smirked back at Marshall, a bounce in her shoulders from a silent laugh. Her brown eyes were soft and they jokingly rolled at Marshall’s backpedaling. Marshall shrugged his shoulders and laughed in a jovial tone. Thank goodness for a group who appreciated a little humor. Maybe he could fit in that way.
“...or freaks? The government stooges seem to like that one,” Alan joked, his voice trailing off as he saw everyone’s face shrink from smile to disgust at the sight of him.
The group was silent. Their faces were long with flattened lips, and sunken eyes. One of the men, a gray-haired man named George, looked at Marshall with raised eyebrows and an insistent nod. The group slowly started taking steps toward the lobby entrance, and Marshall hung back. He gave Alan a pat on the back and leaned down to Alan’s eye level.
“Yeah, maybe not bring that one up next time, kid,” Marshall said under his breath, and then addressed the group that was walking away, “Anyway, you guys ready for another day at the construction site? I hear we’re building the frame today.”
Most of the gathered friends groaned, while others just nodded weakly. Nevertheless, Marshall continued to smile and bring the rest of them together as their typical morning ritual moved along. He was about to start with another one of his patented Marshall motivational speeches when Finch erupted.
“Alright, bus is here. Everybody out,” Finch shouted at the front door. The workers walked out the door. Finch grumbled under his breath, “I Swear the only peace and quiet I get is when you all leave.”
The bus was an old commuter transport that had been refitted for the specific task of shipping workers to job sites. The windows were tinted jet black, and the driver seat was taken out in favor of a self-driving computer. The seats were upholstered in old colorful patterns, splashes of color in a gray, concrete world, clearly leftover from whatever their original purpose was.
Alan uncomfortably bounced from row to row, his body not used to the small clearance in the aisle between seats. Alan bumped into one of the workers trying to argue over a window seat. It was Castor. Castor let out a low growl, and a hand grabbed Alan’s and pulled him forward down the row.
“Maybe you should give Castor some space,” Athena said, and she looked at morose Castor’s sunken gaze, “A lot of space.”
“You’re probably right.”
The ride was a twenty-minute trek of several city blocks. Alan could see people passing on the sidewalks; people who couldn’t see him or anyone else in the bus. They were invisible, migrant workers etching out their day apart from the rest of the world. Not one person on the outside made eye contact with the bus as it traveled to the work site. Not one made notice of the people working to build their streets, office buildings. They all just carried on, blissfully unaware that there was a second set of citizens underneath the veneer.
Alan was woken up from his thoughtful trance by the bus brakes hissing. The vehicle halted in front of a large fenced-off lot with large yellow construction signs and angry red warning letters: Government Work Zone. Keep Out.
“Please exit the vehicle,” the bus computer chimed, and everybody shambled down the row in a rhythmic left-right-left-right beat.
The chain link gate opened, and several supervisors walked forward, hard hats and glaring faces ready for their rebellious employees. Alan found himself funneled into the construction site, a concrete slab foundation with metal beams, rebar, and a small collection of construction tools strewn about for the day’s work.
A food truck - a banged up, off-white, repurposed ice cream truck - was parked off to the side where they would be getting their meals during the work day. Alan noticed Castor, with heaving breaths, push his way through to the food truck. He presumed Castor was famished after a long night of bullying, but then Castor got into the truck.
“Wait, Castor’s the cook?” Alan asked, jokingly.
“Government employment at its finest,” Marshall replied. The pair chuckled.
“What’s wrong with being the cook?” Athena retorted with a smirk, pushing her way out of the work line. Athena began walking toward the truck and turned back as she pedaled backwards toward the truck, “Some of us find serenity in eggs and bacon.”
“Won’t argue with that,” Marshall shouted his reply through a cupped hand at Athena. She rolled her eyes and hopped up into the truck with surly Castor.
Marshall and Alan were carried through the stream of people to the front of the convergence. A couple of supervisors were standing up on the concrete foundation, with a pair of clipboards and a single shared bullhorn.
“Quiet!” a supervisor shouted over the bullhorn, the sound bouncing around the open lot. “Give us your full attention.”
The supervisor waited for the clamor to die down, then his partner began again.
“Okay, today we will be placing beams around the foundation. Assignments will be handed out as such: Magnets will move beams. Eyes will weld pieces together. Muscle will be here for safety. If you don’t fit in these categories you are a floater, and we will find you something to do.
“Don’t idle. Don’t cause trouble, and we’ll get out to lunch on time. Troublemakers will be docked points. Extreme violators will be given a strike. A member of the board’s supervisory unit is on-site for those of you who are already on your second strike. Be careful, keep calm, and we will make this a great workday. Thank you.”
The other supervisor began barking names and designations. Most of the crowd seemed to be ignoring him. Dozens of voices broke out into humming chatter as the supervisor continued to belt out names over the din. Alan started to drown in the waves of vocal mixtures.
“A. Mitchell, Magnet!”
Marshall put a hand on Alan’s shoulder and pointed him over to a large trailer where the crowd was grabbing equipment. “Come on, A. Mitchell. We’ve got work to do. Grab your hard hat and orange vest. Safety first,” Marshall instructed sarcastically. “This part goes on your head.”
Marshall gingerly dropped the hard hat on Alan’s head, the orange plastic smothering his eyes.
“You may need to adjust it.”
“Gee, thanks for the pointer,” Alan replied sardonically, and he shifted the hat on his head so he could see again
. Marshall put on his yellow vest, denoting his status as an Eye. These individuals emitted concentrated light out of their eyes; light so powerful that it could melt metals and weld them together if carefully controlled. Another orange vested came over to Alan. His name tag: Nick.
“Hey, Nick.”
Nick looked down at his name tag with an unamused frown on his face, “Yeah, ok… We’re supposed to move the beams into place. I’ll show you where to go. Since you’re new, you’ll be a support staff for the movers right now. When you get the hang of moving beams, we’ll talk about bigger responsibilities.”
Alan nodded, and Nick showed him over to their spot. He wasn’t really interested in more responsibility. What did he have to look forward to: Head serf? No, he was resigned to do his time. It was what he deserved. But he didn’t have to enjoy it, and he certainly didn’t have to be invested in the system that was using him for labor.
The Department for Mutated Persons (Book 1): The Department for Mutated Persons Page 2
