Terror in a Small Town

What follows is the first few pages of my NaNo (and, no, that isn't a dirty word)... Curious to know if this grabs your attention.

Monday, January 9, 2006

In the small town of Oxford Junction, Iowa, a white van pulls up to a post office located just off Main Street. The post office isn’t much more than a counter along one wall of the corner market. There are still towns in America where the postal clerk doubles as the grocery clerk, triples as the weekend librarian, and quadruples as the emergency dispatcher when needed. Oxford Junction is such a town. The security of a big city post office doesn’t exist in small towns.

A man steps out of the van. Not having showered or shaved for most of the previous week, he looks horrible and smells worse. The dank stink of an addict in desperate search of a fix oozes from his every pore. When he makes his way to the counter in back, Sylvia Griffith, the postal clerk-grocery clerk-sometimes librarian-emergency dispatcher, crinkled her nose and, not for the first time, regretted that she wore so many hats.

The man, whose name is Jesse Garfield, waits at the counter for Sylvia to finish with a customer. His hands shake slightly so he stuffs them in his pocket. She’s taking too damn long. He looks out the door. It is cold out there, warm in the store. The sun is out, reflecting brightly off the snow that has accumulated over the past few days. It’s a beautiful day outside, but he doesn’t care. The brightness of the sun hurts, it penetrates his brain and makes him want to scream. All he wants is a dark room and a needle in his arm. The man who approached him that morning made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. $500 in cash and the hit he needs. There is a motel room with his name on it. All he has to do is complete his errand.

In front of Jesse are eight envelopes bearing no return address. Each envelope contains one videotape and nothing more. “I need to mail these out by overnight,” he says, sniffling and trying to keep his hands from shaking, when Sylvia finally comes over to help him. If she could, she would have a nose plug and handkerchief over her mouth and nose in an effort to keep the stench from her. Just as the sun penetrates Jesse’s brain, his stink penetrates her brain. She’s afraid she will smell this stranger for days or weeks the stink is so powerful.

And he is a stranger. Sylvia knows every resident of Oxford Junction. What self-respecting postal clerk-grocery clerk-part-time librarian-emergency dispatcher wouldn’t make sure to know everybody in town? Normally, she might stop and ponder why a strange man is dropping off eight plain brown envelopes with no return address. But Sylvia wants nothing more than to take his packages, his payment, and then see him walk out the door. So, she does her thing, quickly, without thought. She weighs the packages and slaps the postage on the envelopes. “That’ll be $64.56,” she says, handing the receipt to Jesse.

He hands four $20 bills to Sylvia and accepts his change. “Thanks,” he mumbles, turning to leave. Sylvia has already stepped back from the postal counter, placing the envelopes in a box that will be handed to the courier service that picks up the town’s mail every afternoon at 4:00, give or take fifteen minutes.

His job done and his shakes barely under control, Jesse gets back in the van and drives it two blocks down the street, turns right, and parks in front of a small, two bedroom house. While Jesse makes the short drive, Sylvia makes a quick trip to the store’s restroom and washes her hands and splashes water on her face in a desperate effort to rid herself of the stranger’s smell. The truth of the matter, though, is that she will be stuck with a ‘memory smell,’ one that will bring her back to that afternoon on a cold, sunlit day in January, when she accepted eight plain brown envelopes from a man who seemed to smell of death.

As he was instructed, Jesse leaves the keys in the van and approaches the front door. Later that day, the van will be driven to a lake several miles outside of town and pushed in to sink to the lake’s depths, never to be found.

Jesse knocks three times on the door, pauses, and knocks two more times. The door opens and a hand reaches out holding an envelope. Jesse can see nothing more than that hand reaching around the edge of the door. The interior of the house is dark except for the sliver of light the slightly opened door allows in. But Jesse doesn’t care about what’s in the house. What he cares about is what’s in the envelope. He grabs it and rips it open. Inside are twenty $20 bills and a small packet containing the most potent heroin he’ll ever experience. For the second time in a matter of minutes, Jesse mumbles, “Thanks,” as he turns to go.

By the end of the day, Jesse Garfield will find himself in Room 112 of the Blue Moon Motel, a seedy place at the edge of town where you can get a room with “Cable TV for just $29.99 per night.” For Jesse what the room and the heroin, the purest heroin he’s ever had, will get him is dead. As dead as can be before the calendar loses a day and January 10, 2006, dawns.

Jesse will die not realizing that his need for a fix, for another hit to soothe his inner demons, for one more night of bliss floating on the waves of drug-induced euphoria, will land him in the center of an incredible event. Sylvia will go to sleep that night, confident that she did her job that day, not realizing that her desire to rid herself of Jesse’s presence prevented her from remembering her training--a stranger comes in, eight envelopes with no return address, obviously in some state of stress, and she does nothing to try to identify him, to stop him, to find out what he was doing.

Who Is Maureen Nesbitt

This is a story I wrote for a contest in which we were provided with the theme and then given 48 hours to write the story. The required theme was that the story had to include "Rock, Paper, Scissors" in it -- either the game or the objects.


Who is Maureen Nesbitt? A thought passed through my mind in the early morning hours, bringing me awake in a flash. I awoke wondering where the thought came from. Maureen Nesbitt? I’d never heard of the person. After ten or fifteen minutes of tossing and turning, trying to void my mind of her name, I gave up and walked out to the kitchen.

There was only one way to find peace. I went to ask Cal. At such an early hour, I was sure I’d have him to myself.

* * *

Through an odd quirk of quarks, neutrinos, artificial intelligence, and pure blind luck, a leap forward had occurred two years prior, pushing the Internet Age dramatically forward. Computers with internet connections, Google searches, and wi-fi hot spots had given away to Information Zones, or izzies. The technology, although still in its infancy, had revolutionized how people acquired information. Every building had an izzie--homes, offices, restaurants, schools.

To learn something, all one had to do was enter an izzie and ask a question. “How do I get to the pizza place at the corner of Clover and Griffin streets?” The izzie would provide the answer. “What is the capital of California?” “Sacramento,” the izzie would spit out.

The odd thing was that nobody really knew how izzie’s came to be. One day, a man by the name of Malcolm McPhee, standing in the lobby of a hotel, muttered aloud, “Where the hell’s the damn bellhop when you need him?”

“At the moment, he’s on the john, trying to push one out,” said a disembodied voice. “And you don’t have to have such an attitude.” Mr. McPhee was so startled by the response that he fell to his knees and suffered a fatal coronary event. Before he breathed his last, he was able to pass on what he had heard. Initially, people thought he was crazy as a loon even though the bellhop had, in fact, been trying to push one out at that very moment. Soon, reports of similar incidents from all over the world began to accumulate and izzies were everywhere, every single building had them. They would suddenly just be there.

The benefit izzies brought to businesses was incalculable. Stores no longer needed clerks. Customers could simply ask a store’s izzie questions about where merchandise was located and how much it cost. Servers were no longer needed at restaurants as orders could be placed with the izzie.

Some izzies developed personalities. The izzie that serves a friend’s apartment is a twenty-four-year-old woman named Elsa. Before answering any question posed by a man, she insists that he describe a sexual act he would like to perform on her.

The izzie at my apartment claimed to be thirty two years old and named Cal. Before he answered a question, he insisted that the questioner play something with him first. The other day, when I asked for a sloppy joe recipe, Cal insisted on playing “I Spy With My Little Eye” before he would provide me the recipe. It wasn’t until twenty minutes later when I finally figured out that the green object he spied was a fern in the northeast corner of the courtyard that I got what I wanted. Oh, how I wished I had Elsa for an izzie.

* * *

Now, sitting on the bench in the building’s courtyard, I popped the question. “Who is Maureen Nesbitt?”

“Rock, paper, scissors. Beat me, two out of three, or I don’t answer.”

“Fine,” I muttered. We began the game. The first round, Cal and I both said “paper.” The second round, Cal’s “rock” beat my “scissors.”

“You lose,” Cal said. For a brief second, I thought about what I was doing, playing “Rock, paper, scissors,” with an artificially intelligent, inanimate . . . aw, hell, there was no real way to even think of what Cal actually was.

“Let’s go again. You said two out of three,” I replied.

Again we tied, and began again. My “paper” covered his “rock.” Immediately, I began the third round, growing impatient at not getting an answer to my question. I stuck with “paper,” knowing Cal would expect me to change to “scissors” and he could defeat me with “rock.” Cal fell into my trap, repeating “rock” and I was victorious.

“Three out of five,” Cal whined.

“No way.”

“Then I don’t answer.”

“Fine.” Nobody could make an izzie answer a question unless the izzie wanted to.

I won again. As Cal whined for more rounds, I won the next five in succession. When Cal begged for one more, I had had enough. “No,” I yelled. “Answer my question now. I’ve played enough. You know I can just go to another izzie.”

“Actually, you can’t, young man. You’ll need an izzie that can tell the future. Like me.”

“Huh?”

“Some izzies can see the future. Don’t ask me how. I won’t tell you. Your Maureen Nesbitt is somebody in your future. You’ll have to find an izzie that can see the future to find out who she is. There aren’t many of us. One more game. You win, I tell.”

I began to pound my fist on my hand. On the third pound, I blurted out scissors as my fingers made the familiar shape. I sensed a second’s hesitation in Cal as he said, “rock,” and immediately began making the sound of a rock smashing scissors.

“You cheated!” I screamed, rising from the bench and shaking my fists at . . . well, there was nothing to shake my fists at, so I just shook them.

“Did not.”

“Did, too.”

“You mother . . .”

“Hey, no swearing at me. The user agreement you signed, paragraph 13, clearly states any information inquiry is voided by the use of abusive language.”

Cal was right. I was defeated. Maureen Nesbitt would remain a mystery until she entered my life at some unknown point in the future.