Post by Dervish on Nov 6, 2012 10:53:50 GMT -5
"Alright, Mr..."
"Surridge," I supplied helpfully.
"Mr Surridge," the pretty young thing chirped, flashing me another bright colgate smile as she sifted through my paperwork with a cursory glance to each page. "All your credentials are in order. The first delivery goes out in an hour, and -"
She didn't look like she'd been reading very closely. I briefly wondered if she could read. Especially the big words like "manslaughter" and "zoanthropy" and "Damian's Isle".
She bubbled away, her surgically improved nose and artificial smile full of the sugary, artificial enthusiasm that most sane people didn't display around weres.
She prattled about their great loyalty scheme while I wondered if they were really that desperate for grunt workers.
It was her job to screen people and keep the out the undesirables. The common riff-raff who'd try to masquerade as decent, honest low-wage workers for a quick buck. If she'd let me in...
What if someone found out?
The company wouldn't try to dump a lawsuit on me for covering details up. They couldn't.
Animal Brute Terrorizes Defenseless Victim For A Job, story at eleven. The headlines flashed across my mind.
I wasn't going to take that chance. I coughed loudly into my hand to interrupt her spiel.
"Gesundheit," she replied. "Now, where was I -"
"I'mawere," I mumbled.
Her smile faltered, confusion creeping into the cracks. "Aware of what?"
"I'm a were," I said again, forcing myself to put measurable distance between each word. "Page five -"
"You're a... what?"
"Page five," I said again, again. She flipped to the relevant page. Five seconds later, her eyes were already getting wide.
Ever the helpful one, I narrated the details for her. "Convicted with manslaughter. Diagnosed with zoanthropy right after. Deported to Damian's Isle five years ago, just returned this morning." Her pupils were darting back and forth like pinballs now, so I began speaking faster to match her pace. "Certified in full control of beast form. Passed the mandatory psychiatric eval-"
"Ohmygod."She set my papers down. She slowly began to lean away from me, inch by inch, until she was firmly ensconced in the safety of her plush office chair. "Pleasedon'thurtme."
"Uh..." I shifted a non-threatening inch away, and she flinched as my chair scraped over the floor. "Gesundheit?"
"We're not." She squeaked. "Hiring."
"If it... helps..." I broke eye contact with her and turned to look at the nice, unterrified wall clock. "I don't actually turn into a wolf... or a lion... or a velociraptor... nothing like that... I'm a herbivore. The... non-threatening kind. That doesn't attack first."
I heard the sound of her breathing start to slow, but held back on my own sigh of relief.
"What... kind... are you?"
"A triceratops."
She was silent for a while.
I looked back at her after watching the second hand make a complete lap around all the numbers. Her eyes were tightly shut, she was leaning as far back as she could, and she had both hands up, clenching two pencils in the shape of a plus sign.
Or, as some people like to call it, a crucifix.
God damn it.
I watched her knuckles turn white for the better part of a minute before venturing to speak again.
"I -"
"I'm sorry," she whispered like a prayer. Her eyes remained shut. "Please leave. Now."
"I'm not gonna - "
"I'm sorry," she said again. "Sorry. Very. Very sorry. We don't... hire... w-weres... can't." She steeled herself. "I'm... sure... you deserve a job... somewhere, but... not here. Please. I can't. Th-the management..."
I sighed. "Right. I understand..."
She heaved her own much more heartfelt sigh of relief, then had the decency to look ashamed. "Sorry," she offered again, in the loudest whisper she could manage.
I reached for my papers and carefully slid them off the desk and into my hand. "I'll just... be on my way then..."
I handed my fact sheet over the counter, turned to the fifth page in advance. "I'm a were. Just thought I'd get that out of the way in case... you're not fine with that."
The librarian glared at my data through her inch-thick, horn-rimmed spectacles for ten seconds, before turning her gimlet eye on me. "I see. Thank you for your honesty."
Then she said nothing.
After a minute of silence, I got the hint. I left.
Fresh out of high school with a grudge on his mind, the poindexter stared down his nose at me from his remarkable height of five and a half feet. "I get your point, Mr Surridge. You're certified sane, and that's all well and good, and -" he flipped back to the page on my high school records. "We could really use the help, but with your qualifications -"
"I'm applying to be the janitor," I grated out. Gently.
To his credit, he only took one step back.
"We have standards," he retorted, secure in the knowledge that the law finally protected him from the wrath of big dumb jock dropout types like myself.
"And what standards does it take to be a janitor in a warehouse?"
"Well..." He tugged at his collar. "You have to understand. We don't know how zoanthropy... affects the mind..."
Must. Not. Crack. Skull. "As humans go, I'm officially sane. Says so right there."
"A month ago, maybe." His eyes shone, triumphant at his chance to tell off a big thug without repercussions. "But I've seen the documentaries. You know, the surviving weres say it's not easy..."
Obviously, high school hadn't been kind to someone.
You don't need to fucking tell me. I've lived it. I didn't say.
"Some describe it as living with two minds. Human and animal. Both struggle with each other. And the animal... it's not always good at following instructions..."
I lifted my right hand, carefully examined it, and began cracking my knuckles one at a time.
"Complicated things. Like stacking a set of boxes on the third shelf in aisle five, or clearing up the foam packaging and moving the trash to the dumpster out the back, or multiplying twenty-eight by nine hundred and fifty-three."
I took the time to crunch the numbers while he stood there looking smug.
"Twenty-six thousand, six hundred and eighty-four."
He blinked. "What?"
I told him the answer again.
He frowned. Dug into his shirt pocket for a calculator and tapped in the numbers.
He frowned more.
"So, about that job..."
"We're not hiring today." He shoved my documents against my chest, turned on his heel and stalked back to the counter.
"You took out an ad yesterday."
"We don't hire weres." His hand strayed ominously towards a covered button on the counter top. "We have a long-standing policy of safety first. Exposing employees to potentially infectious workers would compromise that. Now, if there's nothing else you need to do here, I'll have to ask you to leave. Before I page security."
I walked a few steps away before remembering one last straw to grab at. "Where's your manager?"
He bared his teeth like a triumphant squirrel. "Oh, would you like to speak to my father? Just a moment."
"Never mind."
I walked out, seething. My shadow got snagged on a fire alarm on the way to the door.
In a sharp, almost-convulsive jerk, the grandmotherly old woman brought her hand up from its hiding place under the desk. It held a handgun.
I had a moment to react before she began pulling the trigger.
I jerked away, shadows already moving at the speed of panicked thought, and everything vanished into black, blotted out by the solid dome I'd called up around myself.
The gun barked thunder across the small office. I felt something tiny and sharp slam into my shield at high speed, stabbing a tiny spike of psychic feedback into my head. And another, and another.
Silence.
I picked myself off the ground, grateful the dome kept anyone from seeing me curled up in the fetal position. Rising to a crouch, I flexed my thoughts and cautiously let the dome thin out, opaque black turning see-through.
Thinking I'd dropped my defenses altogether, my ex-prospective employer opened fire with the shotgun. The pellets slammed into shade made solid and dropped to the floor as their kinetic energy diffused in ripples across the barrier.
She kept shooting. I glanced at the antique cat clock on the mantelpiece, now shattered by a ricochet.
The gun jammed. She let out a curse that would have curled her grandchildren's ears and began wrestling with the pump handle.
"Let's just agree to disagree," I suggested.
"Get out of my office!"
"Yes, ma'am." I reached out with a shadow tendril to retrieve my resumé from the desk. "I'll be in at the warehouse to start work first thing in the morning, ma'am."
She slammed her palm down on the intercom button. "Security!"
The other worker had been glowering into my back for an hour now. He waited until I had my hands safely occupied with a box marked "fragile" before he finally spoke, loud enough for everyone in ten feet to hear.
"So... Ollie. I hear you're a werewolf."
"Triceratops," I corrected him as I lowered the box to the floor. "I eat plants."
"Great." He snorted. "A wiseass."
"No," I said, taking great pains to sound reasonable. "I'm a triceratops."
His scowl got even deeper as he followed me to get another box. Thankfully, he was silent.
I was just getting used to the peace and quiet when he spoke up again. "You ever kill anybody?"
A dark, ugly thing twisted into my gut like a knife. I didn't say anything. My expression changed for a split second before I could get it under control.
He saw it. He pressed the attack. "Maybe... I dunno, fifteen, twenty years back?"
Twenty years ago, when the Were War began. He was accusing me of -
"Maybe a soldier? A few dozen? One or two schoolkids and a grandma for dessert?"
Damn people. Damn them all to hell.
I waited until the box of glassware was out of my hands before I answered. "No."
"Liar."
I chose not to dignify that with a response.
He still kept following me. Up the ramp to the van, down to the store room where the boxes were piling up. Back and forth, back and forth, choosing his next dagger and deciding when to stick it into me.
The other workers were beginning to watch us. Had been, from the moment he said "werewolf".
"So... you're a were. What happens? You get angry, you go bugfuck and murder things?"
I rolled my eyes. "No. I get really big and turn green. And eat plants."
"Ooh." He took a step back, eyes wide with mock fear. "I'm real scared now. You gonna bite me, tough guy?"
I leaned against the side of the half-empty van and took a deep, calming breath. "No. You're not made of plants."
A glob of liquid, fired from his mouth, landed inches away from my left foot. "Pussy."
"We've been over this already. I'm a triceratops."
"You're a fucking animal. That's all you are."
I tightened my shadow around an unimportant rock on the ground and squeezed until it was dust. "It's not mating season."
We had a small audience by now, other workers clustering around us, ready to shove either of us back if we tried to retreat from the argument. Only age, dignity and wisdom kept them from the inevitable chant of "Fight fight fight".
"You," the other man snarled. "Bastards like you. Go around crying about what poor things you are. Nobody loves you, everybody without their heads up their ass knows you should be shipped away and locked up on that island down under, so that gives you the goddamn right to tear up our country?"
"I'm not looking for trouble." I started backing away. Slowly. Carefully. Deliberately not clenching my hands into fists, even though the blood thrumming in my eardrums was screaming for me to gear up for bloody war.
"Like hell you're not." He closed the space between us, inch by inch. "Like hell you weren't. You are trouble."
"I'm not trouble. I'm Oliver."
"You're a disease," he spat. "Everything you touch turns into another monster. You kill and you destroy and you just won't die."
He was in my face by now, and still raising his voice. I took another careful step away and resisted the urge to wipe his spittle off my face.
"Good men died to stop you." His expression turned nastier. Bitter, like he was clawing on old wounds for more pain to blame on me. "You know who my dad was?"
Fuck turning the other cheek. He'd just spit on that one too.
"Can't say I've met this charming guy. Does he know he's got a son?"
Gasps, murmurs, and assorted curse words leapt at me from all around, driving away any doubt that I'd just said the wrong thing.
"He was a soldier. He was there, on the first night when you attacked this town."
I began to back up again. "My... condolences."
Open mouth. Change foot.
"He was a good man." The worker's face was turning a robust shade of maroon. "He was a good husband. A good dad. But to you, he was just food. They found his dog tags in a lion's stomach!"
I could feel the glares on me, all around, from people who, five minutes ago, couldn't have given a rat's ass if I was a giant toadstool.
"I know this doesn't help any..." I let my focus center on that fascinating vein on his left temple, wondering why it hadn't burst yet. "But I'm not a lion. I'm a -"
Someone shoved me from behind, catching me off balance and making me stagger closer to him. Close enough for him to grab me by the collar and snarl in my face.
"You're a monster. Get the hell out of my country. And stay the fuck out."
Then he punched me. Hard.
I managed to lift my head and tilt it an inch to the side. The blow that should have caught me across the nose glanced off my jaw instead.
There was a loud, wet snap.
Pain flared in my chest as my inner monster clawed its way to the surface. I doubled over with a grunt, clutched at my own body and forced it back down, leaning on my rage and fear with everything else I had until the brown tint faded from my skin.
I opened my eyes to see him clutching his dislocated wrist and howling in pain.
Nothing to it. I was bound to get fired for this.
I wound up and knocked him clear across the room with a gentle tap.
He landed to the sound of wood crunching apart, giving way for his ample hindquarters to meet the contents of a box marked "fragile".
Rubbing the small bruise on my chin with one hand, I pushed my way through the gaping onlookers. "I'll let myself out."
"Surridge," I supplied helpfully.
"Mr Surridge," the pretty young thing chirped, flashing me another bright colgate smile as she sifted through my paperwork with a cursory glance to each page. "All your credentials are in order. The first delivery goes out in an hour, and -"
She didn't look like she'd been reading very closely. I briefly wondered if she could read. Especially the big words like "manslaughter" and "zoanthropy" and "Damian's Isle".
She bubbled away, her surgically improved nose and artificial smile full of the sugary, artificial enthusiasm that most sane people didn't display around weres.
She prattled about their great loyalty scheme while I wondered if they were really that desperate for grunt workers.
It was her job to screen people and keep the out the undesirables. The common riff-raff who'd try to masquerade as decent, honest low-wage workers for a quick buck. If she'd let me in...
What if someone found out?
The company wouldn't try to dump a lawsuit on me for covering details up. They couldn't.
Animal Brute Terrorizes Defenseless Victim For A Job, story at eleven. The headlines flashed across my mind.
I wasn't going to take that chance. I coughed loudly into my hand to interrupt her spiel.
"Gesundheit," she replied. "Now, where was I -"
"I'mawere," I mumbled.
Her smile faltered, confusion creeping into the cracks. "Aware of what?"
"I'm a were," I said again, forcing myself to put measurable distance between each word. "Page five -"
"You're a... what?"
"Page five," I said again, again. She flipped to the relevant page. Five seconds later, her eyes were already getting wide.
Ever the helpful one, I narrated the details for her. "Convicted with manslaughter. Diagnosed with zoanthropy right after. Deported to Damian's Isle five years ago, just returned this morning." Her pupils were darting back and forth like pinballs now, so I began speaking faster to match her pace. "Certified in full control of beast form. Passed the mandatory psychiatric eval-"
"Ohmygod."She set my papers down. She slowly began to lean away from me, inch by inch, until she was firmly ensconced in the safety of her plush office chair. "Pleasedon'thurtme."
"Uh..." I shifted a non-threatening inch away, and she flinched as my chair scraped over the floor. "Gesundheit?"
"We're not." She squeaked. "Hiring."
"If it... helps..." I broke eye contact with her and turned to look at the nice, unterrified wall clock. "I don't actually turn into a wolf... or a lion... or a velociraptor... nothing like that... I'm a herbivore. The... non-threatening kind. That doesn't attack first."
I heard the sound of her breathing start to slow, but held back on my own sigh of relief.
"What... kind... are you?"
"A triceratops."
She was silent for a while.
I looked back at her after watching the second hand make a complete lap around all the numbers. Her eyes were tightly shut, she was leaning as far back as she could, and she had both hands up, clenching two pencils in the shape of a plus sign.
Or, as some people like to call it, a crucifix.
God damn it.
I watched her knuckles turn white for the better part of a minute before venturing to speak again.
"I -"
"I'm sorry," she whispered like a prayer. Her eyes remained shut. "Please leave. Now."
"I'm not gonna - "
"I'm sorry," she said again. "Sorry. Very. Very sorry. We don't... hire... w-weres... can't." She steeled herself. "I'm... sure... you deserve a job... somewhere, but... not here. Please. I can't. Th-the management..."
I sighed. "Right. I understand..."
She heaved her own much more heartfelt sigh of relief, then had the decency to look ashamed. "Sorry," she offered again, in the loudest whisper she could manage.
I reached for my papers and carefully slid them off the desk and into my hand. "I'll just... be on my way then..."
* * * * * * * *
I handed my fact sheet over the counter, turned to the fifth page in advance. "I'm a were. Just thought I'd get that out of the way in case... you're not fine with that."
The librarian glared at my data through her inch-thick, horn-rimmed spectacles for ten seconds, before turning her gimlet eye on me. "I see. Thank you for your honesty."
Then she said nothing.
After a minute of silence, I got the hint. I left.
* * * * * * * *
Fresh out of high school with a grudge on his mind, the poindexter stared down his nose at me from his remarkable height of five and a half feet. "I get your point, Mr Surridge. You're certified sane, and that's all well and good, and -" he flipped back to the page on my high school records. "We could really use the help, but with your qualifications -"
"I'm applying to be the janitor," I grated out. Gently.
To his credit, he only took one step back.
"We have standards," he retorted, secure in the knowledge that the law finally protected him from the wrath of big dumb jock dropout types like myself.
"And what standards does it take to be a janitor in a warehouse?"
"Well..." He tugged at his collar. "You have to understand. We don't know how zoanthropy... affects the mind..."
Must. Not. Crack. Skull. "As humans go, I'm officially sane. Says so right there."
"A month ago, maybe." His eyes shone, triumphant at his chance to tell off a big thug without repercussions. "But I've seen the documentaries. You know, the surviving weres say it's not easy..."
Obviously, high school hadn't been kind to someone.
You don't need to fucking tell me. I've lived it. I didn't say.
"Some describe it as living with two minds. Human and animal. Both struggle with each other. And the animal... it's not always good at following instructions..."
I lifted my right hand, carefully examined it, and began cracking my knuckles one at a time.
"Complicated things. Like stacking a set of boxes on the third shelf in aisle five, or clearing up the foam packaging and moving the trash to the dumpster out the back, or multiplying twenty-eight by nine hundred and fifty-three."
I took the time to crunch the numbers while he stood there looking smug.
"Twenty-six thousand, six hundred and eighty-four."
He blinked. "What?"
I told him the answer again.
He frowned. Dug into his shirt pocket for a calculator and tapped in the numbers.
He frowned more.
"So, about that job..."
"We're not hiring today." He shoved my documents against my chest, turned on his heel and stalked back to the counter.
"You took out an ad yesterday."
"We don't hire weres." His hand strayed ominously towards a covered button on the counter top. "We have a long-standing policy of safety first. Exposing employees to potentially infectious workers would compromise that. Now, if there's nothing else you need to do here, I'll have to ask you to leave. Before I page security."
I walked a few steps away before remembering one last straw to grab at. "Where's your manager?"
He bared his teeth like a triumphant squirrel. "Oh, would you like to speak to my father? Just a moment."
"Never mind."
I walked out, seething. My shadow got snagged on a fire alarm on the way to the door.
* * * * * * * *
In a sharp, almost-convulsive jerk, the grandmotherly old woman brought her hand up from its hiding place under the desk. It held a handgun.
I had a moment to react before she began pulling the trigger.
I jerked away, shadows already moving at the speed of panicked thought, and everything vanished into black, blotted out by the solid dome I'd called up around myself.
The gun barked thunder across the small office. I felt something tiny and sharp slam into my shield at high speed, stabbing a tiny spike of psychic feedback into my head. And another, and another.
Silence.
I picked myself off the ground, grateful the dome kept anyone from seeing me curled up in the fetal position. Rising to a crouch, I flexed my thoughts and cautiously let the dome thin out, opaque black turning see-through.
Thinking I'd dropped my defenses altogether, my ex-prospective employer opened fire with the shotgun. The pellets slammed into shade made solid and dropped to the floor as their kinetic energy diffused in ripples across the barrier.
She kept shooting. I glanced at the antique cat clock on the mantelpiece, now shattered by a ricochet.
The gun jammed. She let out a curse that would have curled her grandchildren's ears and began wrestling with the pump handle.
"Let's just agree to disagree," I suggested.
"Get out of my office!"
"Yes, ma'am." I reached out with a shadow tendril to retrieve my resumé from the desk. "I'll be in at the warehouse to start work first thing in the morning, ma'am."
She slammed her palm down on the intercom button. "Security!"
* * * * * * * *
The other worker had been glowering into my back for an hour now. He waited until I had my hands safely occupied with a box marked "fragile" before he finally spoke, loud enough for everyone in ten feet to hear.
"So... Ollie. I hear you're a werewolf."
"Triceratops," I corrected him as I lowered the box to the floor. "I eat plants."
"Great." He snorted. "A wiseass."
"No," I said, taking great pains to sound reasonable. "I'm a triceratops."
His scowl got even deeper as he followed me to get another box. Thankfully, he was silent.
I was just getting used to the peace and quiet when he spoke up again. "You ever kill anybody?"
A dark, ugly thing twisted into my gut like a knife. I didn't say anything. My expression changed for a split second before I could get it under control.
He saw it. He pressed the attack. "Maybe... I dunno, fifteen, twenty years back?"
Twenty years ago, when the Were War began. He was accusing me of -
"Maybe a soldier? A few dozen? One or two schoolkids and a grandma for dessert?"
Damn people. Damn them all to hell.
I waited until the box of glassware was out of my hands before I answered. "No."
"Liar."
I chose not to dignify that with a response.
He still kept following me. Up the ramp to the van, down to the store room where the boxes were piling up. Back and forth, back and forth, choosing his next dagger and deciding when to stick it into me.
The other workers were beginning to watch us. Had been, from the moment he said "werewolf".
"So... you're a were. What happens? You get angry, you go bugfuck and murder things?"
I rolled my eyes. "No. I get really big and turn green. And eat plants."
"Ooh." He took a step back, eyes wide with mock fear. "I'm real scared now. You gonna bite me, tough guy?"
I leaned against the side of the half-empty van and took a deep, calming breath. "No. You're not made of plants."
A glob of liquid, fired from his mouth, landed inches away from my left foot. "Pussy."
"We've been over this already. I'm a triceratops."
"You're a fucking animal. That's all you are."
I tightened my shadow around an unimportant rock on the ground and squeezed until it was dust. "It's not mating season."
We had a small audience by now, other workers clustering around us, ready to shove either of us back if we tried to retreat from the argument. Only age, dignity and wisdom kept them from the inevitable chant of "Fight fight fight".
"You," the other man snarled. "Bastards like you. Go around crying about what poor things you are. Nobody loves you, everybody without their heads up their ass knows you should be shipped away and locked up on that island down under, so that gives you the goddamn right to tear up our country?"
"I'm not looking for trouble." I started backing away. Slowly. Carefully. Deliberately not clenching my hands into fists, even though the blood thrumming in my eardrums was screaming for me to gear up for bloody war.
"Like hell you're not." He closed the space between us, inch by inch. "Like hell you weren't. You are trouble."
"I'm not trouble. I'm Oliver."
"You're a disease," he spat. "Everything you touch turns into another monster. You kill and you destroy and you just won't die."
He was in my face by now, and still raising his voice. I took another careful step away and resisted the urge to wipe his spittle off my face.
"Good men died to stop you." His expression turned nastier. Bitter, like he was clawing on old wounds for more pain to blame on me. "You know who my dad was?"
Fuck turning the other cheek. He'd just spit on that one too.
"Can't say I've met this charming guy. Does he know he's got a son?"
Gasps, murmurs, and assorted curse words leapt at me from all around, driving away any doubt that I'd just said the wrong thing.
"He was a soldier. He was there, on the first night when you attacked this town."
I began to back up again. "My... condolences."
Open mouth. Change foot.
"He was a good man." The worker's face was turning a robust shade of maroon. "He was a good husband. A good dad. But to you, he was just food. They found his dog tags in a lion's stomach!"
I could feel the glares on me, all around, from people who, five minutes ago, couldn't have given a rat's ass if I was a giant toadstool.
"I know this doesn't help any..." I let my focus center on that fascinating vein on his left temple, wondering why it hadn't burst yet. "But I'm not a lion. I'm a -"
Someone shoved me from behind, catching me off balance and making me stagger closer to him. Close enough for him to grab me by the collar and snarl in my face.
"You're a monster. Get the hell out of my country. And stay the fuck out."
Then he punched me. Hard.
I managed to lift my head and tilt it an inch to the side. The blow that should have caught me across the nose glanced off my jaw instead.
There was a loud, wet snap.
Pain flared in my chest as my inner monster clawed its way to the surface. I doubled over with a grunt, clutched at my own body and forced it back down, leaning on my rage and fear with everything else I had until the brown tint faded from my skin.
I opened my eyes to see him clutching his dislocated wrist and howling in pain.
Nothing to it. I was bound to get fired for this.
I wound up and knocked him clear across the room with a gentle tap.
He landed to the sound of wood crunching apart, giving way for his ample hindquarters to meet the contents of a box marked "fragile".
Rubbing the small bruise on my chin with one hand, I pushed my way through the gaping onlookers. "I'll let myself out."