I Am The Local Atheist (25 page)

I grabbed as many supplies as I could carry – health packs,
ammo, batteries for my suit – “
Power
restored
” – shoving them in my loot bag and
desperately filling the overall bag to the brim with the dirty
laundry from this area.

I knew the
creature was still waiting around the corner but there was no other
way out so I ran full bore back out into the crate area and dodged
to the right, hitting the end of the shed and dropping the full bag
of overalls in the open space ready to be collected later. Holding
on to my loot bag, I dropped off the ledge but fell awkwardly
hitting the ground and falling on my shoulder.

“
Major fracture detected.”

“
Automatic medical systems engaged.”

“
Morphine administered.
”

I felt fine,
but who was I to argue with a hazard suit designed to repair
me?

I got back up
and ran across the road towards the slaughter sheds, jumping up
onto the raised concreted area, ignoring the cattle as they
curiously watched me sneak past. Here I found two laundry lockers
filled with dirty overalls. I didn’t wait. The overalls were shoved
into a spare bag as quickly as possible and left at their pick-up
spot as I bolted out of the dimly lit area, around the corner into
the black morning, and away from the dangers lurking over at the
loading shed.

I needed to
reach the elevator that would get me back up to the office complex.
There were some large box crates that could be hopped across to
reach a door on the other side of the slaughter shed. I carefully
jumped across, fearful of the fatefully long drop below that the
dew-stained grass not far from my feet represented, reached the
door safely, went through and turned down a couple of dark
corridors before hitting the elevator that took me up to the
offices.

The door
opened and there I was facing a stingy and badly lit hallway with a
faulty electrical circuit flickering on the ceiling. A couple of
crab-like parasitoids dropped out of nowhere but were zapped dead
instantly by random bolts of electricity. To my right on the floor
was a grating, but there was no way I was fitting inside that so I
decided to take my chances and sprinted past the faulty circuits
just as the lanky homeworld slaves with their big red eyes and
hunched backs began zapping in and firing green lightning at
me.

A couple of
bolts smashed into me draining power from my suit, but there was no
time to rectify the situation so I dived for the swinging doors to
Ed’s room, landing harshly, but rolling behind the desk where I
fumbled through the draws for his spare key, found it and quickly
unlocked his locker, shoving my loot bag in for safe keeping on top
of his belongings and next to the random crowbar (but pausing to
carefully position it so the contents would fall out when the door
was opened again).

Homeworld
slaves were zapping in with full force down the hallway and pouring
in through the open doors, but I was completely out of ammo and
could not hold up against this onslaught of green electrical bolts
slamming me.

“
Warning: Life signs critical.
”

Oh Shit.
I was starting to panic and
could feel sweat puncture through my skin over my eyebrows. The
overalls, I mean hazard suit, I wore was already stained with
enough blood, I didn’t want to have to be smearing that shit across
my forehead just to wipe away sweat.

Green bolts of
lightning were flashing everywhere, attacking my suit, draining my
power and hitting my life-reserves as I tried desperately to swing
as many attacks with my crowbar out in front of me, smashing bodies
blindly with as much speed as possible, alien parts splattering
through the air as often as their attacks were landing themselves
against me.

“
User death eminent.
”

Blood rushed
across the screen as I fell to the hard floor beneath, my breathing
laboured, my vision blurry; life slipped away as the last thing I
heard was the death-tone of my hazard suit.

Beeeeeeeeeee…(p)

Game Over!

Chapter 5:

Mein Ego
gehört zu mir

Part I

–
An end
–

I finished
that job on the Friday following the Monday that I started and the
stupid idiot of a boss left me there by myself until I finished
from about twelve o’clock onwards. It was practically an open
invitation to steal something.

So I did.

He hadn’t even
checked his locker yet, which I was kinda thankful for but someone
came in asking about reporting lost property. I told him to check
back with Ed at two o’clock, “as he’ll be finishing up then and
grabbing his stuff before he goes, but will be happy to talk to you
about it. I’m sure.”

As soon as I was done putting the last clean pair of overalls
into the last locker, I went back to the office, did a quick scan
of the room and decided to grab a towel, a cotton singlet, a clean
pair of overalls and a set of big black rubber gumboots. The boots,
however, wouldn’t fit into my bag. I had to shove the overalls in
so tight that the zipper nearly broke and the bag was almost a
round ball, but I didn’t care – I wanted a souvenir for having
stuck with this shit of a job for a whole week. I looked at the
boots sitting there on the floor as I shouldered my bag, looked at
the shoes on my feet, looked back at the boots… the shoes… the
boots.
Damn
. I
felt sad that I might have to leave the gumboots behind.

It must have
looked odd – it must have – but shit, no one stopped me. I just
waltzed out of there, down the front steps of the building, across
the courtyard, around the building that led to the front gates and
right through the front gates – giving a curt wave to the guard –
with a bulging back-pack over my shoulder, shoes dangling from my
right hand and big black rubber gumboots on my feet.

Fuckin’
idiots!

* * *

The job at the
laundry company had dried up over winter while the Freezing Works
wound down into its off season. The boss advised me to look for
other work, but told me that I was more than welcome to come back
in a few months when the hotel season started winding up again
around October.

“
I’m sorry about that David. We sure will miss ya,” she said
shielding her eyes from the sun.

I didn’t
really believe her, but thanked her anyway. I told her that I would
be more than happy to come back and left feeling a little dejected,
knowing that other work for someone like me wasn’t so easy to come
across. The work shifting laundry had been alright and I had
managed to lose most of those cheesecake rolls around my waist
while moving the bundled up sheets from their containers onto the
trolleys. The other jobs had mostly sucked but at least I had found
a way to enjoy them.

I walked away,
shouldering my bag and trying to avoid eye contact with the prison
across the road. I had the funny feeling that it knew what I had
done, despite the fact that it made no attempts to imprison me. I
couldn’t really excuse the thefts that I had got away with. On the
other hand, I didn’t exactly care and doubted that what I had
stolen would cause anyone else to care anyway.

As I crossed
the parking lot next to the a brick building around the corner, I
noticed two young kids sitting on the steps up to the footpath.
They looked highly suspicious and seemed to be hiding something in
their jackets, occasionally looking behind and over the steps to
make sure they weren’t being watched.

As I got
closer they pulled out a bag filled with donuts and sandwiches and
started munching down on the food while laughing about how no one
had seen them and that they had gotten away with it.

I gave them a
smile as I walked past and climbed the steps wondering if it was
boredom or hunger that had resulted in them stooping to theft for
something to eat.

Then I
suddenly realised what was lurking behind me, shadowing my steps as
a gentle reminder… A laugh erupted from my stomach as I turned
around and stuck both my middle fingers up at the prison that
loomed beyond. It seemed to diminish from view like a coward who
knows he’s beaten and slowly crawls away in the hope of not being
followed.

Fuck you! Fuck
you! You will not scare me any more!

Part II

–
Difference
–

As it
happened, Lucas suggested I start working at Southland Pastries
with him. Jobs were easy to come by and the work was pretty
straight forward. It seemed like another good opportunity to occupy
myself with something other than my past that Lisa seemed so keen
to drag up.

I just wanted
my body to do the work, not my mind. Plain and simple.

After my
initial introductory guided tour I was signed up and told to turn
up at six o’clock with the receptionist asking rudely if I could
handle that. After dealing with the early mornings at the Freezing
Works, I was relatively used to getting up and arriving at work
when it was still dark so I couldn’t have cared less. I shrugged my
shoulders and just said “sure”.

They started
me out on the factory floor wearing the same white overalls that
everyone else around me was wearing. We were like ants surrounded
by white walls, moving amongst silver machinery that mixed, kneaded
and shaped pastry along a conveyor belt system that stretched from
one side of the room, around two corners and half way up the other
side, but with enough space between itself and the wall that
several people could still walk past.

My first job
was to stand by an attached conveyor belt and pack twelve thin
slabs of wrapped pastry into a box at a time as they came down the
belt off a wrapping machine. The boss showed me how he did it by
boxing three at a time which made the counting “so much easier” but
I wanted to smack him in the face for assuming that I could even
count to twelve in lots of three in the first place (I can, but the
assumptions he kept making really pissed me off); so I packed them
in six lots of two just to be a dick.

I ended up
doing this with every new job they gave me – listening to how they
said to do the job, then doing it a completely different way but
still getting the same result. Some of the bosses didn’t care,
others were starting to get pissed off because they knew that I
wasn’t following their orders. But knowing they were pissed off
only helped me to enjoy the job a little more, otherwise I would’ve
been bored shitless.

So many of the
jobs at Southland Pastries seemed so pointless. I wondered why they
hadn’t created machines to do them, save mind-numbing boredom and
save me from having to debase myself in such pathetic work.

And here was
the most pointless job ever: Packets of sauce that had taken a full
20 minutes to be transferred from where they got packaged above me,
falling into the troughs of water, slowly cooling down and slowly
being passed from bucket to bucket before, finally, reaching the
spot where I was standing, falling onto a short conveyor belt that
would slowly, but surely, drop them onto another conveyor belt and
take them around to where the two boxers were standing ready to
place twelve in a box and put it through the tape machine ready to
be frozen and then shipped off to Japan. It was my job to ‘pat’ the
packets of sauce down when they fell onto the second conveyor belt.
Why? Apparently the owners of the food being produced wanted it to
be perfect when it was boxed, yet the second conveyor belt had two
places where the packets fell and landed on their opposite sides,
either undoing or redoing what I had already done. Not only that,
but the people boxing the packets of sauce were practically doing
this job themselves anyway. It was completely pointless! I couldn’t
even imagine myself in some other role waiting for those packages
to reach my patting hand. Maybe I was a factory worker in a drug
cartel, a cocaine or heroin producing factory in Tijuana with a
wife and kid waiting at home for me to bring my meagre earnings
home so we could scrape up another plate or two of nibbles from the
fridge. The heroin packages came through the conveyor belt for me
to pat. No they didn’t. It was sauce. White sauce. Fuck. Not even
imagining Mario running around on the conveyor belts did anything.
It was like I was standing there in my own skin watching myself do
a mindless job that anyone could do and provided absolutely no
entertainment or job satisfaction whatsoever.

But I had to
do it.

I wanted the
money without the responsibility.

So I stood
there at the conveyor belt dressed in my white overalls, patting
packets of white sauce as they slowly came to me via the slowly
turning water buckets, and slowly made their way onto the conveyor
belt giving me ample time to sit and wait before finally standing
and smoothing them out with a good solid whack from my thinly
gloved palm.

I had no way
of thinking my way out of this job.

Part III

–
Library
–

I don’t
remember how I got to the library – and I certainly don’t remember
meeting up with Lisa there, or at what point she began talking to
me in a heated ramble, but either way I had the feeling that either
I was smoking way too much pot lately or someone had mixed some
funky chemicals in with that last lot of cabbage I had bought.

I specifically remember the moment I got bored with the
computer game though. I was on this stage where my character was
trying to wield a large sword in front of a demon with several
tails that would flick about behind him, occasionally stabbing
forwards at the victim (in this case, me). There was a lot of talk
beforehand about what the demon was going to do to me, stuff like
‘rip my body apart into thousands of pieces while I was still alive
and then banish my soul to the deepest darkest recesses of hell’.
That last part didn’t really scare me – I was pretty much convinced
I was going there anyway. There was also a lot of cut-scenes that
tried to evolve the storyline in a way that I really didn’t care
about – I just wanted to get to the next stage where I got to fight
more and harder demons; who cares about why the great crystal of
Rohrn has allowed access to the worlds above releasing all kinds of
demons and bringing forth a new apocalypse? Not me. I just wanted
to slaughter more demons. That was
my
mission.