The Baba Yaga (Signs of Life)
It was on the sixth day in which Jeremy had been to his new job that he got to thinking about what it was that he was doing for his paychecks.
He stood up from the fold-up chair and walked to the vending machine, making a visual, enthused search of the contents of the machine. He had the mood of a man choosing his own coffin, as he tried to choose between the chocolate level in the machine and the cookie. He wondered, hoped, that the contents of the vending machine would be changed every now and then. He would prefer to eat something with caramel, or nuts, in it, and he had no taste for what the machine could offer him at the moment.
Not caring for any of the items in the machine over any of the others, he picked a candy bar at random and carried it back to his seat, unwrapping it in the far too quiet room as he walked. The noise of the wrapper was too loud, and Jeremy found himself wanting to quickly finish opening it so that he could be done with the thing.
As he sat down, he told himself to take a bite of the thing. He did so, mechanically, his eyes fixed on nothing.
Before Jeremy had left his station for the break room, he had vainly hoped that his supervisor would've been in the room before he had come into it. The man often took breaks at odd times, and Jeremy had thought that he had timed his own at a moment in which he would, as well.
Jeremy sighed, feeling as though he had been defeated, again, by the facility.
The break room looked an awful lot like a prison. There were no windows in this room, no outside scenery to lift his, or anybody else's, spirits. There were no windows in the whole of the building, save for in the entrance.
The nice face of the butcher shop.
The walls where white, looked unwashed. Disgusting. Jeremy figured that the problem revolved around the fact that the facility lost members of its staff in all fields often. The janitors must have a revolving-door career here, Jeremy figured, working a few weeks until they couldn't take the stress any longer.
Jeremy stared down at the candy bar in his hand, realizing that in the time that he thought that he had been eating, he had only had a few bites of the thing before he had given up. Having no taste for it any longer, he threw it into the trash.
He had to get up, he knew, he had to go back to work. The supervisor that Jeremy had been hoping to see hadn't made an appearance, so there was no point in lingering. He didn't have anything for lunch, as he had given up on having any appetite while at work after his second day.
Jeremy walked out of the break room, and made for the locker room, where he mutely put on his equipment and the scrubs. Waling further through the locker room, Jeremy readied to walk into a room that was labeled, “Extraction”.
His job started soon after he had been propositioned by a very widely-smiling man at the Downtown Job Fair. He had been a grandfatherly-type, the kind of man that reminded Jeremy of the type of old man that would strike up a conversation with anybody and give away hard candies.
God, how Jeremy wished, where he was now, that he had known exactly what the man had been offering at the time. The only thing that he had paid attention to, from the man's pitch that he extolled, was that the job was a highly profitable one, and one that required no previous training whatsoever. With all of those desperate, hot bodies that bore down on him, Jeremy took the application that the man was offering and filled it out as quickly as he could. Money was the only thing that he cared about then.
Jeremy had had no clue about just what the facility he had a job interview in was all about, but while he was scanning a newspaper one day, and he came across an article that had the name of the place right in the article's title. Interested, Jeremy had begun reading it, and not soon after he read the first couple of sentences, he got the sensation of an empty pit appearing in him..
He had heard of the new drug – everybody had. It was a cure for mortality, in a sense.
The company had marketed the drug as “Life-Shot”. Jeremy had to admit, the name certainly had a way of putting transparency over how the medical procedure worked. Through a series of shots, a person could keep regenerating almost anything that was going wrong in their body. It was surely too good to be true, and he had believed it to be a scam, until he learned more about it.
Very experimental research had been employed in order to bring about the drug in the first place – it HAD to be ghastly, in order to even BE in the news to begin with – and it was exposed to the public by an employee who used to work at the facility.
The drug, miracle that it was, needed to come from an extraordinary, terrible source. The man had told a reporter that what his job had been involved the extraction of various body fluids and tissue samples from the corpses of not only fetuses, but also from the bodies of what he described as babies, some that had to be newly born at the time of their deaths, and some tragically close to toddlerhood.
It would be a lie to say that the news didn't rattle Jeremy, it almost made him consider staying unemployed for a while longer, with no possibility of working at the disturbing facility. It was his hunger and his desperation that got the better of him, in the end.
Since the first day that he had arrived at the facility, he had been on the ground floor of the most ghastly part of the process of the most disturbing drug to ever pass approval for mass-distribution. This fact brought no pride to Jeremy, moreso after a hard day that he spent extracting the main components of the drug from the cold corpses.
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