Chronicles of the Mask: Episode 1
15 minutes
General Audience
It was a healthful, inoffensive day in the office, and the clock on the wall read thirteen. Wait…thirteen? No, that couldn’t be right. Shelton W. Simpson pushed the fleshy button hidden in his eyebrow, toggled the focus on his reading contacts, and saw that it was eleven. That wasn’t any better. Only thirty minutes from now — right before lunch, when people were cranky — he was to make the pivotal presentation of his career. He quietly cursed Karen Stump, his boss at the Brooklyn chapter of LIVES. Why did she have to give him the job? For that matter, why did she have an old-fashioned Roman numeral clock on the wall, the kind with the tiny little gold interval marks that you couldn’t even see? Who the heck could even read the thing? It stank of privilege, frankly.
Not that this had ever occurred to Shelton before, but now his butt was on the line, and he was wasting his time thinking of ways to push the sewage back uphill. Karen always made sure the buck that was supposed to stop with her, landed on him instead. Have to provide answers to tough questions that’ll make you look bad either way? Give it to Shelton. Let him test the waters!
In spite of this, Shelton felt that he was making some progress with the Problem. That’s what people were calling the local uptick in anti-healthful behavior. Social Butchery, to use the approved viral term. It was difficult to ignore the trend, even if recent official statistics from the Brooklyn chapter of the Local Independent and Voluntary Counsel on Equitable Safety had had to be, well, massaged toward a different interpretation. Anecdotally, health crime was on the rise. His phone rang off the hook with Concerned Citizen complaints. Citations and arrests were up four-fold. Nano violations, slashed safety corridors, smashed cameras, and check-in stations where someone had taken a lighter to the nano sensor, were becoming almost an everyday occurrence.
LIVES’ experts, following the strategy he’d developed, had explained this increase as an artifact of increased public reporting. The numbers weren’t really going up, you see. The V in LIVES stood for “Voluntary,” so it could not be the case that the public was generally displeased with health precautions. Therefore there could be no actual rise in reactionary displays. So it must be that public informants were simply more zealous than ever to inform on the last remaining reactionaries. And his official explanation had gone up the ranks, to CENTRAL. It had been his greatest accomplishment. I mean, it had really done the trick. For about a week.
In an unfortunate case of bureaucratic compartmentalization, an internal report circulated the same day that LIVES released his public report reinterpreting the rise in health crime. Buried in that internal report was a small but significant detail: reporting was up, but spontaneous reporting was considerably down. Professional informers were calling in violations at an alarming rate, while regular people were not. A common-sense interpretation of that data suggested that the public was indeed witnessing more health crime, but was beginning to look the other way. Then someone had leaked the internal report, and all hell had broken loose.
At the present moment, two contradictory scenarios were floating about in the public mind. Scenario One: ordinary, good people are so happy with the International Health Initiative that they are calling in violations at a record rate. Scenario Two: flagrant health violations are on the rise, and most people don’t care anymore. And the health officials know it. That was a problem.
Since all push-back against the IHI was, as a matter of official policy, to be understood in terms of local aberrations, this problem became a New York problem. Since the internal report was circulated by Karen Stump, that made it a Brooklyn Chapter problem. And since he was Karen’s professional human shield, that made it a Shelton Simpson problem. Somebody had to do the job of explaining just how it was that people were positively enthusiastic about the voluntary health regime, and at the same time keeping mum about attempts to sabotage it.
Shelton looked back at the clock. While he’d been thinking, the minute hand had moved several golden ticks forward. With irritation, he counted the unlabeled intervals, and realized that ten minutes had passed. He had only twenty minutes to come up with something.
Shelton smote his desk in frustration. The sound reverberated through the cramped office, and he made it worse by letting out a little yelp when his fist grazed the desk corner. Across the room, Allie, Jace, and William shot him disapproving looks.
“Eh…um, sorry. Was trying to hit a…”
Allie’s eyebrows shot up, and Shelton remembered that smashing bugs had been illegal since last Thursday.
“Sorry,” he said, looking down.
Shelton sank back further behind his desk. He racked his brains. He chewed his lips. He tapped his feet, as if the answer might come out in Morse Code. All those years studying Critical Theory Theory, and he couldn’t come up with a plausible explanation. He decided to go back to the basics.
“Let me see,” he mumbled, because talking helped him think. “We know that everyone wants to be healthy. Everyone knows that the Initiative keeps them healthy. Reactionaries are a disgruntled minority who are mentally ill, and/or hate everybody. The Initiative is voluntary. Only confused, or very, very bad people resist it. But the public cannot be very, very bad or the Initiative isn’t voluntary. And they can’t be confused, because the Initiative is an enormous success, and LIVES performs a vital public service deserving of a continual flow of public funds. Hmm…but lots of things are getting broken, and the public isn’t reporting on it. But the Initiative is voluntary, and the public is very grateful for it…Yes, so, where does that leave us?”
Try as he might, Shelton could not puzzle it out. The imperious clock glared down at him, ticking away his professional credibility. Critical Theory Theory had never failed him before. It always reached the right conclusion, which was why he’d majored in it. Shelton had a knack for finding the acceptable range of truth.
He groaned, and leaned back in his chair. He tried driving his large fingers into his temples, and swirling them about, as if the pressure alone could pop the answer from his brain. He looked at the clock. Ten minutes left. Ten minutes, and he’d still written nothing down. An hour earlier he’d resigned to the fact that he wouldn’t have slides. Now he’d be walking to the podium without so much as a handout.
“Think!” he pleaded with himself, “THINK!”
“Shhhh!” came Allie’s voice from across the room.
Shelton felt a flash of anger at his predicament, followed by embarrassment. He was about to make a fool of himself. Worse, whoever leaked Karen’s report might be in attendance at his presentation. If he flopped up there, and it got out, he’d be out of a job. He might have to work at a coffee house or something!
He strained. Crunched himself into a ball. Slapped himself in the forehead a few times for good measure. Suddenly it came to him. Well, almost.
The beginnings of the beginnings of a solution danced around the edges of his brain. Strands of several thoughts were just on the point of solidifying into an idea, when he saw the spider.
Shelton froze. He was terrified of spiders. Wicked-looking things, formed out of human nightmares. This one crawled out boldly from behind his monitor. It tiptoed toward him. And if that wasn’t horrifying enough, even if could summon the courage to kill the little jerk, its devious little existence was now legally protected.
“Go away,” he whispered, pleadingly. “Go away!”
The hairy little monster paid him no mind. It crawled right up onto his keyboard, then quickly scampered down onto the space bar. There it stopped, settled, and began cleaning itself, looking up at Shelton with defiance in its tiny black eyes. The little jerk acted as if it knew about the legislation, and was rubbing it in his face.
Shelton couldn’t breath. His mouth was dry. All thoughts of his presentation fled from his mind as he gazed at his haughty tormentor. Something clamped down on his shoulder, and Shelton screamed. He jumped backward, knocking over his chair. He turned quickly, and almost clotheslined Allie, who’d come up behind him.
“What is wrong with you?!” she snapped.
“You’re the one who snuck up on me!” he said, voice cracking.
She shut her eyes in long-suffering irritation; then, looking past him, saw the spider, and suddenly laughed.
“You’re wanted in the presentation room,” she said, not bothering to hide the amusement in her voice.
“What? Now?”
“Yes, it’s eleven twenty-five. Karen called me to remind you to be there on time. And, Shelton, please do be timely. It’s almost lunch, you know.”
She glanced once more at the spider, than back at Shelton. Wordlessly, she shook her head, turned on her heal, and left him. Shelton waited for her to go, then started meekly toward the corridor that led to the presentation room. He had absolutely nothing to say.
You could hear a pin drop. Shelton didn’t know how long he’d been standing there. A hundred people looked up at him, waiting for the next paragraph of stuttering, incoherent babble. And there was a journalist. What the heck was Karen thinking?
“So,” he began again, “so, as I was saying. We all know why we do what we do. We all believe in it. The public knows too. Oh, yes. They know. They appreciate it. Truly. Truly. And we appreciate them! Yes, I like to think that we love them. Is that too strong a statement? Somehow, I don’t think so…”
Crickets. Karen Stump was boring holes in his eyes.
“But back to those numbers. Those, frankly, confusing numbers. Let’s all just admit that we feel a certain amount of confusion over the numbers. But, you know, numbers are not people. They don’t get sick. They don’t leave behind loved ones, because they didn’t keep their nanos current. As I always say, ‘Numbers don’t need nanos!’”
He chuckled loudly. In the deathly quite presentation room, his chuckle was thunderous. Shelton cleared his throat, and consulted a printout that he was pretending was his notes.
“You always say that?” said someone, loudly enough for him to hear.
“Well,” he said, scanning the crowd for one sympathetic face. “In a manner of speaking…”
This was terrible. He was maybe ten minutes into his presentation, and hadn’t uttered a single comprehensible thought. In his desperation, he began to think out loud. Maybe if he just put it out there, the answer would come to him.
“So, as I was saying, the numbers — those numbers we put so much stock in, as if people were just numbers to us; but I digress — the numbers, considered by themselves, appear to suggest that the public is either misinformed, or unhappy. But of course we know that they can’t be misinformed, because of the good work that all of you do. And I do mean all of you.”
He smiled at the journalist, who looked away from him, as from a bad accident.
“I mean, I couldn’t ask for a better team. But anyway. And speaking of misinformation, the very idea that the public at large is unhappy with the Health Initiative…I mean… that’s impossible. I mean literally impossible. But the numbers. Well, the situation is complex. So what’s the explanation?”
His gaze took in the whole audience, giving the impression that his question was rhetorical. At the back of the presentation room, two Behavioral Soldiers guarded the door. With their gas masks and glistening body armor, the BS men reminded him of angry robot gorillas.
“We…we can’t say that people are unhappy. Because they’re not unhappy. Healthful lives make happy lives. And we all know this. You don’t have to tell us this.”
Shelton grimaced. Karen Stump’s eyes were narrow slits.
“But!”
Yes, he had it!
“But someone is unhappy!”
Karen shot him a cautioning look. He pressed on. The strands he’d lost before were coming together. A flash of insight bubbled up, like prophecy, and he let the words form themselves.
“Someone who is not misinformed. Someone who is, in fact, very, very, very bad. And selfish.”
Now he had their attention. Yes, this had to be the right answer. It was the only possible answer.
“My friends, some very disturbing information has come to my attention! I…eh… should be careful about how much I say here. We don’t want to put more lives at risk.”
He waited a moment, for effect.
“We talk about Social Butchery,” he continued. “But we talk about it in the abstract. As if it were some kind of a force. But that’s not the whole truth. Yes, it’s time people knew the whole truth. We have an enemy. A really bad guy. And his name is…the Butcher.”
That got a reaction. His bored, hangry audience suddenly sat up. The journalist looked intrigued, if a little skeptical. Karen scowled openly. Shelton pressed on, too deep now to do anything but keep shoveling.
“It wasn’t easy to learn what I’m about to tell you,” he said, gravely. “I had to go to some dark places, and talk to some very unpleasant people. My sources must remain, for the moment, anonymous.”
Now he had their attention.
“That’s why, if I seem to be hesitating up here…well, there are things we try to keep from ordinary, health-conscious people. And mental health is not entirely outside our purview, after all. We don’t want the public walking around afraid. But I think,”— he nodded, as if he were just now making a fateful decision — “I think there’s no use hiding it anymore.”
He watched their reactions, and stalled for time. He felt a little guilt over the bold-faced lie, but he had nothing better. And the fact was, what he was saying was practically true. It might actually be true. No. Better. It was true. It necessarily had to be true, because it was the only explanation that fit demands of the situation. He thanked his education for again getting him out of a jam.
“There is a man in the underworld. We don’t yet know his name. This man, this Butcher, goes about creating chaos. He’s not alone. The Butcher has collected a small group of anti-socials, real misanthropes. I mean big time jerks, every one of them. Possibly members of a death-worshiping cult, though, admittedly, that last part is just one of several theories…”
Shelton let his eyes pass over the audience. They were buying it. Even the journalist. Karen Stump was not buying it. But since she’d circulated the memo, then dropped him in a public meat-grinder when it leaked, he didn’t much care. He’d been doing public information dispersal long enough at this point to know that it didn’t actually matter if there was a Butcher. If people believed in the Butcher, then there was a Butcher.
“Unfortunately,” he continued, letting a little sadness enter his voice, “that isn’t even the worst of it. We have reason to believe that this Butcher, along with his minions, has been threatening and intimidating the health-conscious public. Promising to harm anyone who calls in a health violation. As you can imagine, our own people in the field have not been personally threatened. That would give the Butcher away, especially since his group is currently so small and insignificant in a numerical sense, that the arrest of a single of its members would be a great blow to the Butcher’s destructive cause. The good news is that once we find the him” — and Shelton serenely hoped, at that moment, that they never would, — “the intimidation will stop. In the meantime, the public is afraid to out him. That’s why the numbers don’t make sense.”
There was a moment of silence, and then it was pandemonium. The lunchtime crowd, already ravenous, was quickly working up an appetite for outrage.
“The Butcher!” said a voice.
“What a monster!” said another.
Shelton basked in the glory of his achievement. He took one last look at Karen, this time to gloat. But it was a measure of his success that Karen Stump had already tasted the flavor of the room, and was now falling over herself in displays of civic-minded distress. Shelton smiled, but on the inside. It’s not all baloney, he told himself. After all, where there was butchery, there must necessarily be a butcher. And speaking of baloney, he was famished. He’d endured a week of stress in a day, and he’d better go out, and nail some things down anyway before fielding any questions about the details. He stopped by Karen’s chair to let her know that he was going home early. She and Allie were embroiled in an angry shared monologue over the evil times, and she paused just a moment to nod at him. Shelton left the presentation room, skipping past the BS squad, and onto glory.
“Come on! My money’s as good as anybody’s!”
The woman at the grocery store checkout was making a scene. Four boisterous children of various ages bounced around her, their mother occasionally shooting out a hand to keep them in place. Shelton stood awkwardly with his small cart, which was stuffed to the brim with greasy, delicious foods. The man behind him kept ogling his snacks, undisguised envy in his eyes as they darted about over the top of his mask. But Shelton had the obesity credits to spare. He’d been saving them up for a day like this. News of the Butcher was already making the rounds. Shelton was a massive success. But he studied the unfolding scene at the register, becoming hungrier by the second.
“I’m sorry for the inconvenience, ma’am,” said the cashier. “But you know I can’t sell you the food until you update your nanos.”
The mother pulled at her hair in exasperation.
“I already told you,” she said, in a voice she likely reserved for small, cantankerous children, “I can’t update my nanos! They won’t let me. I went to the registry and they sent me to the HMV. The HMV told me they couldn’t help me until I updated my nanos. But I can’t update my nanos at the registry unless it’s authorized by the HMV!”
She broke off to slap away a child’s pawing hand. The cashier, a girl in her twenties, surveyed the domestic drama with a certain apprehension. Yet she looked at the mother with genuine sympathy.
“Look, I know. It’s very frustrating. But I can’t take your money if you can’t pass the sensor test. They’ll fire me.”
“I’ll pay you double!” shouted the mother.
“No. No. And my manager’s right there anyway.”
The cashier nodded at the humorless man who stood ten feet behind her with his arms crossed. The mother turned to him, and repeated her appeal. Shelton was embarrassed on the woman’s behalf, feeling her obvious desperation. At least there weren’t too many people in the store. He thought he might take the woman’s name down, and attend to her case the next day at the office. But at that moment, the manager charged forward. He placed the cashier firmly behind him, and glared down at the woman.
“Everyone knows the rules,” said the manager. “Now please leave the store, or I’ll be forced to call the BS squad.”
“You wouldn’t dare!” said the woman. “Don’t you have a mother? What kind of person are you?”
The manager scoffed, and shook his head.
“A person like you,” said the manager, “with a family to support. And if you cared so much, why didn’t you update your nanos, hmm? As I said, leave the store, or I’ll call.”
“No!” shouted the woman.
The defiance in her voice shocked Shelton. He couldn’t recall ever seeing this kind of thing. Granted, he was very hungry, but this was getting interesting. The prospect of getting hauled off by the Behavioral Soldiers was more than enough to make most people compliant. This tiny woman with her four cubs was the first, genuinely dramatic event of his life.
The manager shook his head. “That’s it. I’m calling them.”
“Not yet, you’re not!” shouted the woman. “Not until you see this.”
For a moment, Shelton thought she was going to pull out a weapon. But what she did was far, far worse. The woman reached up, and took of her mask.
“Look at me!” she said, tears now running down her face. “Look at me. Look at my face! It’s a human face! The face of your own mother. And my children are hungry, and I’m hungry, and I don’t have the time or the energy to run back and forth for one place to another just so I can buy food!”
The manager covered his own face with his arms. The poor, frightened man did not seem to have enough limbs to block every possible entry point for a determined virus. He stumbled backwards, then, with a colossal effort, reached out to hit the large, red button that called the BS squad.
They arrived quickly, bursting through the automatic doors just as fast as they’d slide apart. Probably at the donut shop next door, thought Shelton. With so few people in the store, it took them only a moment to identify the unmasked threat, and charge toward her. The mother ushered her brood behind her back. She stood in the breach, face set in a mask of defiance. It was, Shelton had to admit, quite beautiful.
They descended upon her, dispensing with the usual pleasantries when they saw her provocative facial nudity. They grabbed her, and she struggled. The children were crying for their mother. Shelton was forced to look away. He turned sheepishly toward the man behind in him in the the lane and shrugged, but the old man did not seem the share his sentiments. The veins in the man’s temple bulged. His white hair bristled. His eyes smoldered red over the white mask. Shelton wondered which of the combatants was the target of the old man’s rage. It made him doubly uncomfortable, and he looked away. As it turned out, that was the most fateful decision of his life.
When Shelton turned, he saw it. Something dangled in the air before him. It was a spider, hanging by a thread from some high-off place. It was perhaps the largest spider he’d ever seen, and it was directly in front of his eyeballs. Just beyond the spider, the mother bear was locked in mortal combat with the human gorillas, but that hardly mattered to Shelton. The hairy beast froze him where he stood, and leered at him through tiny, black lenses. Then it leapt on him.
Shelton screamed. He waved his hands around wildly, spinning through the checkout lane like a deranged windmill. The spider crawled about his body, over his head, and finally down into his shirt.
“Help! HELLLLP!” cried Shelton Simpson, grabbing the little black checkout lane divider, and slapping himself with it.
No one came to help. Then the thing that Shelton had most feared came true. The spider bit him.
Shelton went mad, screeching, and slapping himself all over with the plastic divider. His flailing arms knocked over chewing gum, candy bars, and tabloids, until the firmly clenched divider came into contact with something much more solid. Shelton looked up with a sinking feeling. He’d struck a member of the BS squad. Hit him real hard. The man turned a gas-masked face in his direction, then collapsed on the floor. Shelton looked toward the other, trying to explain. But the spider, which was now down his left pant leg, bit him again. Shelton howled, and lunged forward, accidentally tackling the second BSer, who knocked heads with the startled grocery store manager. Both collided with the side of the checkout lane, and then collapsed on the ground.
Shelton could hardly take in the devastation he’d wrought. He was still trying to find the spider. Finally the little beast exited his pant leg. It looked back at him once, claiming victory, then skittered away.
Shelton pulled up his pant leg to survey the damage. There were three bites on that leg alone. It occurred to him that he might be tried for attempted spider murder. Just then, he heard a strange sound. It was one he’d heard before, though usually given in a perfunctory way after a presentation. This was different. This was spontaneous. The handful of people in the corner grocery store were clapping. And they were clapping for him.
He looked up, his eyes first falling on the old man, who nodded, and slapped him on the shoulder. Then he turned to the mother. She beamed at him, and gathered her children in an embrace. The cashier approached, and, looking around carefully, turned to him, and winked. The mother slapped her money down on the counter, and began to bag her own items. The cashier looked the other way, whistling. Shelton felt something very deep stirring in him, but he didn’t know what it was. He tugged at his mask to get some air, then stopped himself. Not knowing what else to do, he waited patiently to pay for his items.
“No, just get out of here,” whispered the cashier.
“But I have to…”
“Get out. I won’t tell anyone what you did,” said the girl, winking again.
With that wink, Shelton felt as if he’d been invited into a secret club. His pride stirred, but he didn’t know why. He felt a tug on his hand, and looked down.
The person tugging was very small. A little boy; one of the woman’s children.
“Hey, aw you a supa-hewo?”
“Umm…my name is…”
“Are you the Butcher?” asked another child, the boy’s older sister.
“What? Me?” he sputtered.
“Supa-hewo’s gotta have a mask!” said the boy, cutting in.
“Yeah,” said the older sister, in a precise, know-it-all voice. “And not that kind of mask.”
The girl looked around, her gaze coming to rest on one of the prone soldiers. She stooped, and, none too gently, removed the gas mask. With a certain gravity, she handed it to Shelton.
“Here,” said the little girl. “This is your mask. Now you can help anybody.”
Shelton looked down at gas mask, thinking mainly of the need to sterilize the inside of it. But there were some alcohol wipes on the floor, by the spilled candy bars, so…
He turned the mask over in his hands. He looked up at the cashier. At the old man. At the mother who, with her children, fawned over him. The little boy grit his teeth, and nodded. A look of understanding passed between them. Shelton felt something he’d never felt before. It was new. It was powerful. It was danger. And he kind of liked it.
“Maybe it’s true after all,” he whispered to himself.
Shelton faced his admirers. A tense atmosphere of expectation permeated their corner of the checkout aisle. Then, without even bothering to sterilize it, he put on the gas mask. A voice transfigured spoke to the people from within that dark helm.
“It’s true,” he said. “I am the Butcher.”
TO BE CONTINUED
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