The Baba Yaga (Signs of Life) - Part Three

Pressure felt as though it were building up behind Jeremy's eyes – headache part deux? It didn't matter to him then, he just wished that it would go away. Go away and leave him alone, like the old crones that sat behind him.

The old man continued, speaking more slowly and in a more thoughtful manner than he had spoken in before. “Lemme tell ya guys, it smells really bad to me, and it should to you guys as well."

After that, thankfully, the conversation had all but died down behind Jeremy, but the damage had already been done. Unable to stop himself from doing so, his head lowered into his hands, his elbows resting on the cheap table top. His body shook uncontrollably, his breaths coming in in gasps.

He didn't know how long he sat there, but he was roused out of his shock by a hand shaking his shoulder gently. Looking up, Jeremy realized that the waitress had finally come over to him. She looked to be his age, which surprised him, because in his memory, the waitress who worked in the diner had always looked to be somewhere above forty whenever he had come to eat.

She was pretty; if Jeremy had been in a better mind, he might have tried to pull himself together so that he could make a good impression on the woman. Instead, Jeremy hoarsely asked, "I thought the waitress working here was a bit older."

The waitress had been frowning down at him, and his words only seemed to pull her lips down further. "You alright? You were worrying me."

Jeremy's mind grasped onto a weak, pliable lie, and he said it aloud. "I had a hard morning."

"Sorry I didn't come over earlier. There was a problem in the kitchen - are you sure you're alright?" Jeremy nodded weakly, and it was enough for the waitress to continue talking. "So, uh, you know what you wanna order?"

Jeremy ordered a coffee and took a chance by ordering the special, having not asked what it was and having no clue what it could be. After five minutes of waiting, staring blankly out of the window, and staring equally as blankly at the laminated piece of paper that was the menu, Jeremy kept glancing over at the salary man that sat facing him.

Jeremy stared rudely, trying to read the man's features and gait, but the man did not seem to take notice - or care - about Jeremy's staring. He looked tired, still shell shocked. It took Jeremy a moment to appreciate, darkly, the mirror image of himself who sat in the other booth, wearing a heavily creased and wrinkled suit, staring down at his mostly still full plate of food, taking a bite of it every once in a while. Jeremy supposed that every one his age wore a similar wrecked, tired expression as he and the salary man wore then. Even the waitress had looked haggard, near breaking in her own way.

It took a bit of self control to stop himself from turning around to face the group of old folks that sat behind him. He knew that the old timers wouldn't be looking haggard. It was as though their age groups had switched personas, general moods. The old man who had spoken last before still resonated in Jeremy's memory. His words struck a supremely bad chord in his mind, about how the rich and the old - and, soon, even the old and the poor - had a lot less to worry about than they ever had, historically. The fountain of youth existed, and the oldest were to be rid of their oldest enemy. And, what's more, he thought, darkly, hatefully, they were rid of less usurpers every time a batch of their beloved drug was produced.

The food, and the waitress, came by, dropping off his food. She was about to turn on her heel, when Jeremy's hand snaked out as fast as it could and grasped onto her slight arm. She turned around, looking shocked by the fact that Jeremy had actually touched her. Jeremy thought, quickly, of a way to begin talking to her, and he settled on a safe little question to begin the conversation. "What's your name?"

Looking a little nervous, but not simply a little annoyed, the woman pointed down to her chest. "I am wearing a name tag..."

"Can you tell me your name? Tell me it yourself?"

"Megan. "

"Megan. What happened to the last waitress?"

Megan yanked her arm back from Jeremy's grip, and said, "She got into a wreck, it messed her leg up bad, so she couldn't come back to work. She's still in the hospital, but she agreed to quit before she left."

"So she was getting old?"

Megan gave him a look that should normally have withered him on the spot. "She was in a car wreck, she was not getting old. Everybody here's gonna miss her, from what I hear."

Jeremy's mind spun. He tried to place a face and a body to his vague memory of the ex waitress who had served him his lunches before he had stopped coming to the diner. Black hair, always tightly bound, with streaks of silver.

Jeremy, all of a sudden, realized how rude he must've seemed to the waitress. And what's more, he also realized that he was being stared at by some of the other tables. His face reddened as he thought of other people eavesdropping on him.

He murmured something to the waitress akin to an apology, and he tried not to take her glare so personally that she gave him before she walked away stiffly.

I'm like a fucking nut case, Jeremy thought bitterly. What the hell is wrong with me, lately?

That was, of course, a false question, for he knew what was wrong with him. He had lost his appetite for the second time that day, and he did a lot more drinking from his glass than eating from his plate, and even then, he usually only took another bite after he played with his food with his fork. He kept trying to put a name to what it was that he was eating, but he couldn't quite stay focused enough to do it. Omelete? Pancake? It didn't really matter; he couldn't keep his eyes on the plate and its contents long enough to care what it was, any more than he couldn't taste what he was shoveling into his mouth.

He was grateful to leave; the waitress only returned long enough to drop the check off.

Jeremy picked it up gratefully, fished in his wallet for a while, and withdrew a five-dollar bill, which he slapped onto the table as he walked over to the cash register. He figured that she had done more than her job, dealing with his insanity.

After paying the old man working the cash register (oh, how Jeremy had to force his eyes down and then away from his hands, as the old man counted out the change from the money that he had given him, and how disgusted he felt as he felt those old, leathery hands touched his, even momentarily) Jeremy was out on the street outside of the diner, feeling delirious from lack of sleep. He had hoped that eating at the diner would clear his head, but if anything, he felt more muddled, awful. He was regretting skipping work, and he was at a loss for what to do for the rest of the day.

He had lost a whole day of pay, and now he was not even in the mood to enjoy playing hooky.

The thought of seeing a movie was discomforting - all of that dark, and he wasn't fully certain that he could even remain awake, even during an action movie, he didn't want to show up to work, already so late in the day for it, and he didn't want to be so out in the open any longer.

He suddenly felt fragile, near broken as it was, and he wanted, he wanted -

Jeremy looked over and saw a bus sign across the street. he walked towards it, and even though he dreaded a similar experience like the bus ride that he had dived off of earlier that day, the thought of being home and out of the agoraphobia-inducing streets comforted him.

He nearly fell asleep, resting against the sign, and was awoken when the bus driver herself was yelling at him, ordering him to tell her if he was going to be a fare or not. Jeremy got off of the bus a few blocks from his apartment, and he was grateful to be in a less bustling part of the city. He very nearly ran home, grateful to be so close to his home.

When he got home, he staved off sleep as long as he could, and when he could no longer help it, he regretfully slid into a long nap, managing to crawl back to his bed. It had been six at night when he had fallen asleep.

He awoke at eight the next day, shocked awake by the sound of incessant buzzing. When he checked his alarm clock (seeing the time turned him as pale as paper) he realized that the noise that had awoken him had been his living room home phone.

Nearly tripping over a sheet that was wrapped tightly around his legs, Jeremy made it out to the living room and had grabbed onto the phone before the other end of the line could hang up.

Before Jeremy could ask who it was, a curt, somehow memorable voice spoke up. "You didn't come into work yesterday. You're late now."

Jeremy swallowed hard, and leaned over so that he could see himself in his living room mirror. Despite what he thought had been a sound sleep last night, his eyes spoke differently. He must have been so out of it that he had no memories of the nightmares that must have awoken him several times the night before.

"Yeah, I know, I was just having some difficulty -"

"Do you need to speak with your supervisor, when you come in today?"

Jeremy felt like he could finally breath, like a great weight had been lifted from him. "Could I?"

The other voice chuckled sardonically. "That could be arranged, Mr. Cutter. When do you think that you could come in, at the soonest?"

Jeremy didn't know why he felt bold - maybe it was the day at work, maybe it was his curiosity, but he spoke up, "Why are you so worried about me?"

"Mr. Cutter, I hope you've been aware of how difficult it is to keep staff lately. We have had to resort to keeping tabs on our employees, when they exhibit signs of emotional fatigue. Are you emotionally fatigued?"

"When can I see my supervisor?"

"...Whenever you come into work today. He should be in the work area. Just get ahold of him, he will have been alerted to your situation, prior to you coming in."

Jeremy said a polite good bye to the voice, and he placed the phone back in its cradle, and then began to joyless process of getting ready for work.

The Baba Yaga (Signs of Life) - Part Two

Work was done for the day, and Jeremy immediately came back home. He was uninterested in catching up on the sleep that he had been missing all week, and he showed littler interest in any dinner that he could prepare for himself. Instead, he contented himself with drinking one of the beers from the back of his fridge, and then a second, and then, finally, a third. He finished off the third as he ran the shower in his bathroom to a scalding-hot temperature, and he stepped into the shower, washing himself a good second time for the day. Finally, at sometime after one that morning, Jeremy succumbed to sleep, his gangly body splayed out in his only piece of furniture in his living room, his moth-eaten chair.

He was up at five, but he had woken up three times before that. He had been tormented with awful nightmares, and the only cure for them was insomnia. A few cups of coffee later readied Jeremy for the bus ride to work, and he did so begrudgingly, walking to the bus stop in the near-dark of the early morning.

He had brought no reading material, and it would not have mattered, anyway, since the pitch dark of the bus shelter would not have done well for his already itchy, temperamental eyes. Bored, Jeremy leaned over, so that he could see beyond the filthy, smeared clear plastic wall of the bus shelter, and watched as a small group of children readied to pass by the shelter, most likely on their way to school. Unable to help himself, Jeremy succumbed to the desire to stare, blindly, down at his shoes.

It might have been his imagination, but he got the suspicion that there were less children in the neighborhood every year. It hadn't bothered him at first, but thinking of what he did every day at his job...

Jeremy also had another thought that had been in his mind for the last year, before he had the inkling that he would work at the facility, but it had amplified after he had begun working. There seemed to be more old people in the neighborhood, and they only seemed to become more insidious to him with every day that passed. He hated it, almost as much as he hated himself for how pitiful he had allowed himself to become, but he shuddered a little every time he saw one.

The bus came, and Jeremy felt himself being shuttled back to the middle of the bus, where he found his seat to be next to a very old man. Jeremy flailed for a moment, his physical exhaustion metting it out with his repulsion to the old, bent creature who sat next to the window, and whose gaze had rose to meet his. A small, craggy smile formed on the man's mouth, and despite the disgust that rose up in Jeremy like vomit, Jeremy could feel his own weakness forming in his legs, and he, regretful, took the only available seat next to the old man.

For two minutes, Jeremy was comforted by the sound of the bus as it noisily slid through the suburb streets, once stopping to drop someone off, as he focused his gaze ahead of himself, trying to make out the shapes appearing in the dark outside of the bus' windshield. After a second of dismay and annoyance, Jeremy realized that the old man had been addressing him.

“Hm?” Jeremy murmured, not turning to face his companion.

“I was just sayin' – how long have you been here, in the city?”

Jeremy could already feel that sensation he had recently been getting when he was adressed – hell, even LOOKED at – by an elderly person. A creeping, icy sensation that made him shake ever so slightly, just enough that he always had to hide his hands from sight. Which he did then. “Oh, oh, uh, I've been here all of my life.”

The old man spent what seemed to be near five minutes digesting this fact, before he spoke up again. Jeremy imagined the awful smell that emanated from his mouth, which he was grateful that he didn't have to breathe in that often. “I moved 'ere when I was... when I was fifty-three.” How long ago could that have been, Jeremy wondered. He wasn't willing to take a closer look at this man, and even if he did, he doubted that he'd be able to accurately guess at how old the man was, anyway. “It was 'ard, moving 'ere alone. I suppose it's always 'ard, when you're alone, to do anything. Whaddaya think?”

I'm thinking that I want you to shut up. I'm thinking that you are as wretched as you look. “Oh, I would believe you.” Jeremy lied.

“Uh-huh. It's worse, when you're older, too. I, I would 'ope that nobody as young as you would have to think about going through what I've gone on through. It's awful, jus', jus' awful.”

Jeremy stiffened, angry at the man's assumption that things were going great for him, just because he was younger. You mother FUCKER, Jeremy thought angrily. I have problems, I didn't cause mine, unlike yours. If just some of you old bastards would die, let some of us try to make better things out of the garbage you're set to leave us with anyway...

Jeremy's thoughts took over, and he took to staring solidly through the front windshield, not wanting to think of, let alone look at, the man next to him. His mind reeled with all of the things he wish that he could tell not only this man, but to all of the old that he ever saw, would ever see. It's true that he hated them, but what he did not want to admit to himself was that he was frightened of them, and had been for awhile. The shaking in him increased, and a slow, throbbing pain signaled the beginning of a migraine in his head.

The old man spoke up once more after a long reprieve. “You seem bothered. You shouldn't be so bothered; you 'ave your whole life a'ead of you - “

And then Jeremy couldn't take it any more. Unable to muster the strength to reach across his companion to pull the string to signal the bus driver to stop, Jeremy rushed off of the too-small, bucket-y seat and pressed through the throng of annoyed people, until he reached the front of the bus. After a quick word – and a withering glare from the bus driver – Jeremy got off of the bus and began to try to understand where it was that he had been dropped off.

His mind, still hazy in anger and dull pain, eventually recognized some of the signs that he was quite a walk from the facility. He could get to work on time, but it was more likely that he would ten minutes late.

“Fuck it.” Jeremy said, not meaning to say it aloud, but instead to think it. He told himself that he didn't want to go to work because he would only be late, and not that he was dreading the work day.

Taking in a few deep breaths, Jeremy tried to steady his mind on the simple task of what he should do next. He was hungry; yeah, he could go with that. Suddenly, with his escape from the bus, and his emboldened decision to skip work for the day, Jeremy was happy to realize that his appetite had returned. The question of where to eat stopped him for a while, until he quickly decided on a diner that he had stopped in a couple of times before.

The diner was a small place, and back in happier times, Jeremy had felt a certain fondness for the place; its smallness, its "design" (it looked as though the owner of the place had neglected to update anything in the place since the seventies - including the spider-webbed decor and the items on the menu themselves), and back when he had a likeness for people watching, he used to sometimes love sitting in a far booth from the entrance and watch who would come in during lunch. Walking up to it, Jeremy still wasn't quite certain if he was still as fond of the place as he always had been.

Opening the left of the twin doors that lead into the diner, Jeremy walked in, and had a hell of a time trying to locate a booth that was empty. He managed to find one, a good way in to the building, sandwiched between a table full of old timers and another one with a tired-looking salary man who looked as though something had fallen ass-out through for him, and the best that he could do for himself was to eat what looked like a patty melt and drink a large glass of urine-colored soda.

Jeremy took a seat in the booth between the two that he had eyed earlier, and waited until the waitress could come over to him.

She was taking a long time; and where WAS she, anyway?

From behind him, Jeremy couldn't help but eavesdrop on the conversation that ensued from the group of old men and the one woman that sat at the booth behind him. "Didja hear the news yesterday? " A wheezy voice softly asked.

"No, what was it about, Ben?"

Jeremy strained to find where the waitress was. She should've made her rounds by now, and she should have come to take his order by now. He began grinding his teeth in anger, his spine stiffening. And the old, withered voices continued their slow, grating conversation.

"It was about some heathcare changes. They're talking about things that'll change in the next few years."

It was the woman who must have spoken then, for the next voice sounded gravelly, but with a feminine undertone to it. "What kinda stuff are they talking about?"

"They're talking about letting that miracle drug - the one that makes ya live a lot longer, n' re-creates organs - they're talking about making it available to almost anyone above the age of fifty."

"Oh, you couldn't have heard right, Ben, those drugs are expensive. And with what I heard they're made of... That'll be hard to mass-produce. You believe me on this one."

"I'm just telling you what I've heard... Believe me or don't."

"...Don't you think it's a bit... eerie?" A new voice spoke up, sounding hushed, serious.

"What're you referring to?" Asked the main old man. "

“The way things are changing right now. I mean, I ain't complaining, but what is the future going to be like, with people like us being able to live a lot longer. I mean, the younger generation..."

"There's no reason to think like that," A stern, male voice said. "You've got to have hope in the whole grand scheme of things. God'll protect everyone, I've always believed that, and don't you, Don?"

Don hesitated, and then spoke in an even drearier voice. "Oh, I have a belief that God is good; the only problem is that people ain't so good. And lemme tell ya something else - if I had more money than I knew what to do with, and I was like one of those really rich, really old men out there, I would do anything to keep all of that money, I would do anything to keep alive, so that I could enjoy it. Ya'll can't tell me that you wouldn't be really excited to have the answer to the oldest problem in the entire world, sitting right there, buyable and open to being bought at any time.”

Edited - The Baba Yaga (Signs of Life) - Part One

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.

Notice

Terribly sorry for the delay, am transcribing the first "real" story of this collection into a Word document, as I have it in physical form before me, but alas, not in a way for any of you to be able to read. I am pretty close to the end of the transcribing process right now, so please be patient, and I should have the first post of the new story up in short order.

I almost left this one out, worried that this one didn't fit in any theme I was devising for this collection, and then I had to remind myself that this collection is a bit theme-less, in a sense. And it fit in better than I could give it credit for. I think the only thing I will be taking out of the original collection is an impromptu poem I wrote in it, right after I wrote the first story in the collection. I suck at poetry, so suffice to say, it will remain OUT of the finished product. I will, however, be adding a story that was never in the original collection, because, baby, it just FITS. It actually creeps ME out, when I think of it.

Ah well, I suppose I should be going back to finishing this project up, so I can post the first part of the damn thing.

The Boogeyman: Chapter One, Part Four (End)

The the medication was actually a shot, and it came three days later, via an orderly who had shown exceptional kindness to Prascher during the time that he had been there.

Eventually, when the orderly got to explaining what to expect from the puzzling medication, he learned that he would only be receiving this one shot, possibly only this one time. This confused Prascher, to which the orderly only could give him a sympathetic shrug, admitting to the fact that he didn''t know much more about the mysterious medication, outside of what he had been told about it. After a beat, the orderly readied the package the shot came in, and Prascher, feeling a sense of panic, asked him if he had any way of knowing why it was that the drug had not yet passed the finish line to become patented. The orderly shrugged, offering his earlier excuse, that he was just supposed to give him the shot today, and that he did not know its history.

The orderly handed Prascher a syringe, wrapped in a thin plastic and filled with clear liquid, and stared expectantly at him, his eyes locked onto Prascher's hands, onto the syringe.

“So.. I guess I should do it now, right?”

The orderly shrugged noncommittally, which Prascher took to mean that he should.

Unwrapping the plastic, Prascher pulled the syringe free from the packaging, and begin to roll up his left arm sleeve, readying to stick the needle in the muscle that he had been shown on his arm. Wincing, Prascher quickly sank the needle in, and slammed the plunger into the bottom of the syringe casing. As he took the needle out, the nameless orderly give him a bland congratulation, and directed Prascher to the nearby biohazardous waste disposal bin.