The PET - Chapter 1

Sunshine

It was unmistakable. . Clear, there in the mirror, reflecting the harsh bathroom light; hidden beneath a sea of auburn, only to be revealed with the unforgiving sweep of the comb.

A single white hair.

Twisting the offender around her finger, she yanked, tearing it out at the root. Holding it there, her finger suspended purposely over the sink, she examined this morning’s herald of things to come. There were, of course, many ways to die. Quick. Slow. Painful. Blissfully forgiving. But none so desperately bleak as the deliberate march of time stealing away, piece by piece, all vitality, strength, and hope. To this point, her life had been wholly unremarkable. There had been marks of tragedy, yes. Some, perhaps, worthy of poetry or prose had she been anything more than one of the ranks of the unseen masses, just another face on the street. But she had been born, and raised, in the common man’s blight of obscurity. There had always been in youth the hope of escape, the bright and expectant dream of rising above one’s circumstances to a form of greatness, dependant upon the desire of the day. Not that that made her unusual. America was, after all, built on the notion of the common man’s dream. Built by uncommon men, yet, still, an inspiration. Though such things seldom came to pass, by the odds in most lives, so long as youth prevailed, so did hope. This one white hair, however, marked the end to all that. The end to that hope for the future that was reserved for the young. It was the proclamation of doom. 

Unwinding the strand from her finger, she drew out its length, pinching it between thumb and forefinger to hold, like a miniature tightrope, between her hands. It was a thin line with invisible arrows pointing back toward a lost and withered past and on toward a cold and bitter future. Staring at its translucence that blinked in and out of clarity over the white of the sink, she could almost feel herself walking the length of time before her, like a sentenced prisoner, released from a cell she had denied before this moment, to stumble the path to the execution chamber, sentenced for the crime of having been born.

All in one white hair.

Sighing, she dropped the strand into the bowl, washing it down the drain with the cold rush of the faucet. This was, surely, enough of a reason to go back to bed, turning off the ringer on the phone and covering her head with the blanket. There had been many such reasons lately, leading to the unemployment line for the third time this year. But the rent would be due in a week and all that was left in the fridge was half a loaf of soggy bread, three quarters of a jar of mustard, and a brick of some orange colored cheese that was turning white on one end. That and the crucial case of Dr Pepper, but that too would only last so long. With another sigh, she ran the comb through her hair once more, refusing, this time, to look too closely.

The street outside was peppered with rain. The showers had stopped just after dawn, but the morning was still too cool to dry the pavement. The clouds above threatened another downpour as she made her way to the aluminum and Plexiglas enclosure to wait for the bus, slightly more comfortably than on the rain-wet streets. Of course the over-sized tin can that doubled as a people mover was late. She sighed another hollow sigh. Could this day get any worse?

As usual, the local haven of the unemployed was packed within minutes of opening. It wasn’t even 10am yet and the line was already near the door. She breathed another long sigh.

The line moved forward by inches and she tried not to fall asleep on her feet. The surroundings were too familiar and the people too much the same to provide much entertainment. There was a slight bit of interest at the front of the line though, enough to pass some of the time. The man currently at the counter was having some unheard argument with the clerk. She could feel the anger flowing off of him despite his being out of her range of sight. It rolled in waves only she could feel, running the length of the line, crashing over and around the various stalks of boredom and discontent that were the waiting, scattered about the room. She didn’t try to tune it out. Not that she knew how. It was automatic. Stronger when she was tired or stressed. Or bored out of anything sane left in her mind. She sensed emotion. Likely some remnant of a violent past, like a protective guard. If you knew what was coming, you could get out of the way. But that was a long time ago. Now it was a useful tool at best, a mild preoccupation at worst.

Then there was the man who arrived to stand behind her. She caught sense of him as the man at the counter stomped away. She could be fairly certain from the instant he was close enough to feel, the same way the man at the counter had been close enough to ‘feel,’ that he had been ‘checking her out’ since he opened the door. Not that she thought her ass was much worth a second look. But it happened often enough that she had gotten used to the attention. Well, not used to it exactly….

Of course, there was only one thing he wanted. She shifted in line, trying to hold down her own wave of contempt. It was always what all men wanted. That could be an advantage, when it was possible to get something out of it without giving anything in return. Usually with the strays she took in, the men she occasionally felt sorry for, whose prospects were less than nothing. The geeks, the slow, the damaged. The damaged particularly. Whoever said opposites attract had no conception of human psychology. Opposites didn’t attract. Not once you bore past the surface. The well-adjusted, if they even existed, stuck together. In some cave somewhere, certainly, well protected from the rest of the less than angelic human condition. The damaged, to their various degrees, grouped as well. And the ‘strays’ she usually brought home were most often damaged beyond repair….

But that was the problem with men. The whole attraction thing had its moments of flattery. Certainly that should be the case today, after the horrifying white hair. But there was with it the haunting of the danger of the memories of horrors best left buried. And these drifted past, dangerously close, with this man’s insistent and unwanted desires.

“Slow day,” he said from behind. The slight drawl to his voice reminded her of Deliverance….

“Isn’t it always?” she said without turning. Yes, the unemployment office was clearly the best place to ‘pick up chicks.’  She was fairly certain that, if she turned around, the word ‘loser’ would be etched across the man’s forehead. Not that she wasn’t in the same line. But that was a thought better left unexplored. Particularly on the day of the white hair. The morning had been depressing enough so far and it would likely be hours before the line reached the desired point.

And it was. It was well past noon when she finally signed the ‘Ok, give me money now’ papers. Then it was off to find some way to fill the fridge. With $25 to her name that wouldn’t be easy. But she had friends that usually took pity on her. Not that she didn’t return the favor, when she could. Not that she hadn’t earned it.

Skipping the bus, now that the sun had burned off the rain, she walked the blocks to Harvey’s restaurant. Harvey could be a real bastard when he wanted to be, which was most of the time, so waitresses didn’t last long. As a result, there was always work to be had at Harvey’s. And he usually paid cash.

“Hey Sunshine,” he bellowed as she entered. Ironic that; some cruel sense of humor her parents had had. Well, cruel…. “You’re late.”

“I don’t actually work here,” she replied, her automatic smile pretending to have a sense of ease she never actually felt. Stepping around the counter, she grabbed a stained apron off the shelf underneath. “Who quit today?”

Harvey huffed. “Not even two weeks notice. The bitch.”

“Easy big fellow.”  Harvey was close enough to five foot nothing to be below it. “Maybe if you had any manners, you could keep someone more than an hour.”

Another huff. “Just don’t mix the tables.”

Not that that was so hard. Of the dozen or so tables, two were occupied, and the counter was empty. Still, it was work. She headed off to the first table, Harvey whacking her behind as she passed. Anyone else would have had a knee to the groin for that but, despite his surly disposition, Harvey was harmless. Thank God for gay men.

The afternoon passed with a forgiving dullness. The unemployment office had eaten the morning away to well past the lunch hour. While that meant missing the height of tips, before dinner, she really wasn’t in the mood for socialization, smiles and faked pleasantries, so she didn’t miss the money that much. And dinner made up for it with a decent crowd, for a cheep greasy spoon. Mostly families with children in the early part of the evening and cheep or largely out of work men, likely on their way to the local bar, once the sun had set. It was still summer, though this far north it was hard to tell by the temperature, and so the sun set late. Harvey closed up shop around nine but she offered to help with clean-up, for an extra few bucks, and utter darkness awaited her when, finally, she left after ten.

Street lamps were not a priority in the fairly small middle of nowhere place she called home. She had come here when she had some money, but not enough (never enough), to stay with some distant relative she didn’t see anymore. But without money, as seemed to be the one consistency in her life, she was stuck. Trapped. Well, at least she had a little money now to buy food.

Well, at most she had a little money now to buy food. The buses didn’t run past 10:30pm and the closest grocery store was not close. As she lived in a less than attractive neighborhood it was better to stay off the streets after dark as much as possible. Of course she knew the place well enough to know where to avoid. But it was better not to take chances. The prison, about ten miles outside the city limits, took all the rejects from New York City and spit them out here when their time was through. That, plus the occasionally amusing corruption of the local politicians, made this a haven for low-level drug dealers and gangs. Half the city, if you could call it that, had a night-fall curfew. That meant the under-age drug dealers had to do their business during the day. It didn’t stop anything, just made it into shifts. Nice of the local bureaucrats, really, to give the hung-over adult low-life’s the chance to sleep in.

The route she followed to her home was the long way, but the short way passed right through the most… colorful part of town. Where the pizza delivery people no longer delivered. Even the cops avoided the place when they could. The neighborhood watch there was pretty much equivalent to ‘distant early warning’ and ‘duck and cover.’  Not that the long way was really that long. The whole city, at least the urbanized section, was maybe twenty miles, from end to end. Not pleasant to walk the entire distance, but possible. She walked a lot. It kept her thin. Not that she really needed anything other than poverty to keep her thin. But it made up for the Dr Pepper breakfast and late night snack. It was how she justified the high-octane version. Which was necessary considering her gag-reflex to the diet kind.

She was about to reach her personal detour point when it hit her, a prickling on the back of her neck and that unsettling feeling that she was not alone. She had learned long ago to trust such instincts. It had saved her once in her car, when she had had a car, when it warned her of an accident that hadn’t happened yet. She’d put on her seatbelt then, not her normal habit, and came out of the car totaling experience with nothing more than a bruise. She knew what was coming before it happened, saw it nearly detail for detail. Of course, she didn’t entirely believe it at the time, or she would have taken an alternate route and saved her car. But she believed it now. It told her when to move, thus avoiding two area crippling natural disasters, and it told her who not to trust, though she was still working on heeding that one, and it told her, now, that something… someone dangerous was behind her. Following her.

Her heart thumped uncomfortably against her ribcage. She’d met monsters before. She knew some personally. Too personally. Women who were angry enough to take it out, constantly, on the weak, usually their children, and men who were uninterested in the word ‘No.’ The first she only knew at a distance, anymore. But the second swarmed this place. She picked up the pace.

It… he… couldn’t be close. She sensed no emotion. There was a range to it. Usually reasonable proximity, but strong emotions could reach her from across a room. So, what… who-ever it was had to be further than a few blocks back. She itched to look over her shoulder, but didn’t dare.

Still a block from her regular turn-off, she passed under a streetlight and risked a quick glance back. The light behind her should have illuminated anyone close enough to see her, but there was nothing. Ok, just an overactive imagination here. Be clam. Less than a mile from home. But something persistent inside her was screaming “run!”

Her feet moved faster, without her permission. Her heart was racing and her breathing working its way to a pant. This was not good. She was panicking. Panicking was not good. Panicking tended to rob one of reason, just blow it away, quickly. But this… whatever it was… was getting closer. The fear was unbridled and unexplainable. Instinctively, she turned down a cross street to try to shake this invisible tail. But the more she swerved, the closer the thing got, as if it was anticipating her movements before she made them.

Then all reason was abandoned. Reason left, the coward it was, about the time she realized, comprehended, that she didn’t think… feel… this threat as a ‘who’ but a ‘what.’  That should have been the point of argument to calm her foolish mind. This place was small, run-down, and utterly uncivilized, but it was urban enough to have driven out anything like the bears and occasional mountain lions that were sometimes seen by hikers in the distant mountains. There were men here who barely fit the term, but her invisible sense, if not her more rational mind, always characterized them as a ‘who’ not ‘what,’ and she could usually see them before she sensed them. That sense had kept her from getting in the wrong car or agreeing to let the wrong man buy her a drink. But it was never this strong, this urgent. Life or death urgent.

That urgency, too, should have been, to some degree, calming. She’d spent the last year, or was it two, generally obsessed by death. Her own mostly, though the Discovery Channel had enough programs on killer meteor strikes, pandemic viruses, super volcanoes, and the effects of global warming to keep her occupied. Most days she hated her life. Hated it. Hate to the point of thinking better of throwing it away. Though she was never that focused, about anything, she did have a habit of taking excessive risks. If she followed the trend, she should have turned into this whatever it was. But the fear she felt over-powered all the rest and destroyed any sense of reason. Maybe it was the darkness, the inability to see the threat and identify it, that sparked this primal urge. Whatever it was, her feet no longer obeyed her and her thoughts were blank but for the constant chant of “run.”

Instinctively weaving through the streets, randomly changing direction, she lost all awareness of where she was or where she was going. Getting away was where she was going, or at least where everything in her wanted to go. Reasoning that out was, of course, completely impossible by this point. She was so preoccupied with the unknown danger behind her, that she completely missed the danger ahead, until it was on her.

She’d made a wrong turn somewhere, placing her smack in the middle of drug turf. One of the many dealer hangouts, a broken down place that was supposed to be a bar, had its door open and a small cluster of men stood outside to escape the closed in heat.

As she saw them, reason came back like a freight train, hitting her from behind. Abruptly she slowed her steps, trying to race through options on where to turn or how to back track. If she reversed her path, she would head right into the whatever it was, and her body wasn’t about to let her do that. She thought about crossing the street, but the light there was out, and if the could barely be called men were intent enough, they’d have a better shot at her in the dark. There was a turn-off, maybe a block up. If she could make it that far…