Special Orders Preview: Alive in the Pressure Tophet

Friday was the busiest night of the week for the Colonel’s Secret Coterie cell, all five of them crammed into the restaurant awkwardly sandwiched between the community college and the interstate. Fonz at the register, passing out freebies to the cops who always swung by for a magickally charged pick-me-up before a high risk warrant service, mouth always two sentences ahead of his brain but making them laugh and smile all the same. Mick on the drive through, employing his best customer service accent and killing the mic to lisp out the orders in his natural deep southern falsetto. Orlock, stripped to the waist, mesh vest like a hairnet for his torso as he slaved over the fryers. Nadia weaving neatly between them, never shouting if she didn’t have to, speaking just loud enough to be easily heard over the endless machines that shrieked and hissed and buzzed and chimed.

And at the heart of it all, the Loyal Laborer, the hero of the scene: Ozzy Packard. Thin sleeves of plastic plastered to his hands with sweat, which melted on contact with hot metal and had to be painfully scraped free and replaced. The snap of boiling oil where it leaped to kiss his face, always narrowly missing his eye. Enormous sacks of potatoes, bags of drink syrup, ice, chicken, bread, so light they might have been air. The actual air heated to the temperature of blood so that it felt like his own body, the noise blending so that orders for fries and sandwiches and cardboard buckets filled with chicken melded with his own inner monologue. A mop detaching congealed fat from the tile. Enlightenment. Oneness with the world around him. The headache gone. The bone-deep weariness gone. The pain so thoroughly obliterated by devotion to the task that he didn’t feel the oncoming fit until he was already on his back. 

 

Ozzy kicked at the clouds. His leg struck a shelving unit and from a great distance he saw Orlock barely catch a heavy steel tray before it fell on his neck. The welter of grease and soapy water smeared on the floor closed over his head. Ascent to shore was pointless, led only to a realm where the shift would end and all the familiar aches would return. The images which flashed before his gaze were the true reality, swirling around the shining light of the drain below. The drain which grew closer as he drifted further down. Grew until it filled his vision completely and closed over his head until the nigh-forgotten light of the compact fluorescents reflecting off the concerned faces of his coworkers was a small globe like the moon, then a pinprick like a star, then-

The report of the gun snapped Ozzy forward, out of the sunless realm and the impossibility of escape. He tried to sit up and slipped backward, and by that point Nadia had already stuffed the Tokarev back into its bulky holster and from there back under her clothing. The hole bored by the cartridge was indistinct among the speckled and water damaged milieu of the ceiling tiles. Mick casually fished for the bottlenecked casing with a broom under the pressure cooker. The police had already departed and would not return. In a moment it was like nothing had happened at all.

“What the fffffFFUCK?” yelled Fonz from the register.

Then Orlock and Nadia helped Ozzy off the floor, and Nadia took him under his arm and went barging out the side door into the parking lot. She held him tight so he wouldn’t slip, on the floor or on the wet pavement where it had rained. A part of him was still underwater, still drowning. The blast of cold air and the warmth of the shoulder under his dangling arm buoyed it back to the surface. A feeling of flight, floating. Comfort, safety, then immediate wretchedness. He had fallen down on the job, let himself slack off while meaningless visions danced in his head. Now he luxuriated in his own laziness, forcing his boss to take care of him and enjoying the feeling of closeness. Her hand just below his ribcage holding him up. His first conscious action was to wipe his face, convinced it was covered in blood. His hand came away soft and dry, without even a sheen of sweat.

Nadia sat him down on the plastic bench under the eave, behind the paddock which held the dumpster. Where Mick dragged it outside, so he and Orlock could sit while they smoked by the back door. She sat beside him and pressed a plastic cup into his hand, which he hadn’t seen her pick up. Honey peach Mountain Dew, dispensed from the Colonel’s fountain, filled with enough ice to stop it immediately melting and diluting the drink. His favorite.

He sipped it and the taste immediately recalled what he had seen at the bottom of the well. A vision of his own heart exploding. The sugar or the fat or the stress or something else would catch his heart in its fist and he’d keel over and die.

What did he feel, knowing this? That the cup of gold in his hand would eventually kill him? Something like happiness, if he was honest. No more fear of missing out. No more endless grinding stress, wondering if there was something better for him out there. The result would be the same no matter what he did, and therefore he was free. He could enjoy the rest of the cup, the feeling of Nadia’s leg pressing into his thigh as she fished her notebook out of the shirt pocket of her uniform. The notebook where she wrote little self-criticisms nobody read, and about the people’s war and Marxism-Leninism-Colonel Sanders Thought, and all the problems other people were having and ways she could solve them as self-appointed morale officer. The notebook like her scarf, red like the sun viewed through a curtain. Like the light on her face from the bloodred sign up above.

This is why he wasn’t upset, knowing he’d somehow die on the job of a heart attack without accomplishing much of anything. Placid like a brainless animal walking down the chute. Like a chicken with its head cut off. The certainty that there must be other moments like this, in between this one and the end. He hadn’t seen this one, with safety and comfort and closeness that likely existed only in his head, but here it was.

He realized how disgusting he was. His uniform was smeared with grease and soapy water and whatever else was on the floor. He would have to change before he went back inside and touched anyone’s food. He would get it all over Nadia just sitting here while she rubbed his shoulder and tapped the notebook on her knee. And that association, Nadia and grease, forced him to acknowledge the other thing he saw when he went drowning. The moment when, to avoid giving up information to the enemy under interrogation, she tossed a sack of ice into the boiling oil of the Tophet (which the Coterie insisted on calling the fryer) and killed herself instantly in the resulting plume, incinerating friend and foe and restaurant alike. Vision of her death. A guarantee she’d meet up with a suicide bomb.

She spoke to him.

“I told you what I’d do if you came to work sick again.”

She stopped tapping the notebook. Held it open with the stubby pencil between two fingers. Frowned.

“So do I need to shoot your knees, or do you want to tell me what you saw?”

She reached, slowly, meaningfully, for her gun. Desperate to be taken seriously. To back up her threat with steel and lead. Of course she knew the place he had been. Her business was to pry and it would all have been communicated to her when he was recruited. The visions of soap and blood. It made him almost sick with laughter, though he held it all back for fear she’d shoot him right there. Not lethally, but enough to hurt. She scraped him off the floor and held him like a child and now he was to suffer a struggle session under her care.

But what to tell her? How to tell her? His vision was, alas, silent on the subject. Ozzy wished in that moment he was back in the kitchen, with Fonz and Orlock and Mick. Cursing and burning himself on every exposed metal surface. Serving up the magickal revolution, finger licking good and demanding nothing of him but his sweat and blood and pain, with no thought to how it was going to end.

But his manager wouldn’t let him. She demanded that he be there, with her.

He finished his drink with a slurp. Straw on ice. Nothing left to delay the inevitable. To save them both from the fires.