[FICTION] – Know Your Product, part 1

For those of you familiar with the NoSleep subreddit, this is the first part of a short story that I put up there a while back. For those of you not familiar with it, just know that this is a more horror-leaning story.

CONTENT WARNING — language, mental illness

Do you ever wonder why you’re feeling a certain way? Like, you feel way more sad or freaked out or pissed about something than you should? I dunno, maybe that’s me right now. Maybe I’m more freaked out than I should be. I don’t know that anything technically illegal or even dangerous is going on down in that basement unit. But it still feels really weird.

So I work for a medical tech company. Guess I shouldn’t say the name, but it’s kind of a 360-degree business. We do R&D, manufacturing, fulfillment, the whole deal. It’s… small but big at the same time. Small enough that not many people in my hometown even know it’s there, but big enough that they’re surprised when they find out it’s there. There’s maybe 300 employees altogether, and we make a few very specific products — IV infusion and EEG units are some of the biggies.

We’re in this building that used to be a grocery store, tucked away on a side street just off the interstate. You’d think that a grocery store off the interstate would have done well enough to stick around, but I guess that one didn’t. Like it was just far enough out of the way to miss the sweet spot. Anyway, that’s where we are now — this “hidden in plain sight” kinda thing. Big building in a busy part of town, but there’s no other businesses next to us and no one really knows we’re there. It’s like our own private dead zone.

So it was weird when the homeless people started showing up.

I’m a fulfillment coordinator, which means I spend most of my time at the back of the warehouse by the loading docks. They face almost directly into the path of the sun this time of year and it gets hot as fuck, so I was surprised to come back from lunch one time and see a bundled-up figure hanging out in the back lot. They were just smack in the middle of the pavement with the sun blazing down, wearing a hoodie on top of a tee on top of a sweater, basketball shorts over cargo pants, stuff like that. And this thick knit beanie with sweaty straggly clumps of hair sticking out. Looked like an absolutely miserable outfit for July.

I just stared at them for a minute, and they seemed to be staring back but it was hard to tell because their eyes were so squinty. I couldn’t even be sure if it was a man or a woman; everything about them was just wrinkled and covered in grime. Finally I called over and asked if they needed help with something. They jumped a bit, and I realized they’d been spacing out and hadn’t even noticed me there.

“Uh yeah. Yeah yeah.” Their voice was all phlegmy and I still couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman. “Sssimonound?”

“Uh — sorry?” I asked. Totally didn’t understand.

“Simon round?” they repeated, a little more clearly and insistently.

“Simon who?” I asked, ninety percent convinced this was just a tweaker babbling nonsense but wanting to make sure.

“I dunno. ‘Z name’s Simon. Works here.”

I knew there was a Simon who was some kind of managing director in the research division, but I’d never formally met him and we hardly ever crossed paths. I sure as hell wasn’t about to go run him down to tell him a scruffy wino was out back asking for him.

“I uh… I don’t think Simon’s here, sorry,” I finally said.

They began to shuffle away. But after a moment they stopped, as if remembering something, and turned to face me again.

“Tell him nine’s gone long; we spuss and lit that summer street.” They looked at me, and I saw a smile somewhere in the folds of clothing and wrinkled skin covering their face.

“Sorry, uh… say that again?”

“Nehemiah n eyes out, such. I’LL TAKE THEM TOO-RA-LAY!” They shouted that last gibberish phrase, almost singing it, then turned and continued out of the lot.

I didn’t relay that message to Simon, and quickly forgot about the weird encounter altogether. But then, a few days later, another homeless person crept up to one of the open docks and scared the shit out of me as I was shrink-wrapping a pallet.

“Hey buddy,” he rasped.

“Goddamn — huh!?” I stuttered in response, spinning around.

This one was definitely a guy, youngish but grizzled and wafting that nasty back-alley funk of piss mixed with beer. For some reason my nose felt sure it recognized the smell of the Natty Light that I always keep in the fridge back home. I guess shitty domestic beer all smells the same and I was probably imagining it. But now I can’t really drink Natty Light any more.

“Is this the place for going away?” he asked. His eyes were strange; he looked at me but at the same time it seemed like he didn’t. Thinking about it now, I’m not sure his eyes were pointing in quite the same direction. Not like a lazy eye. It was more like both eyes were pointed slightly away from each other, and neither directly at me. I had no idea what he was talking about.

“I dunno man, I don’t think so.”

“Naw man, this’s gotta be it, he told me.”

I’d heard enough. I made some kind of excuse and headed back to put away the wrap roller and hopefully shake this guy off. The afternoon pickup was due pretty soon, and I only had Marty on the floor to help me prep it that day. No time for weird shit.

“Wait, wait man.” There was a scrabbling sound, and I turned back around to see the guy heaving himself up into the warehouse.

“Woah dude.” I held out a hand to ward him off. “Can’t come in here without an ID badge.” I fished out my phone and flicked through it, cursing myself for burying the security hotline in my notes app.

“Please,” he said, and maybe his voice was trembling. “Please, he said to come here, to come here and he’d make everything go away.”

Son of a bitch, where’d I written down that hotline?

If I hadn’t been looking so intently at my phone, I would have seen him approaching. But then I caught a gust of that dead beer-can breath and looked up to find him right in front of me, his face hardly a foot from mine. His eyes were pointed toward the ceiling, still out and away from each other, and the whites were turning yellow at the edges.

I yelped and fell on my ass but he just kept standing there, gawping at the ceiling and sucking in air. I looked around frantically but couldn’t see Marty anywhere. The guy was muttering, fast breathless words that were nonsense but somehow familiar–

“Ballast the gobe and night night tah night wreck… FUCK!” Suddenly he lurched down and looked right at me with an expression of fury and pain. He got to his knees and lunged, grabbing my shirt in one fist.

“It’s not working!! Why isn’t it working??”

I couldn’t speak, couldn’t move, tried to keep from inhaling. There were lots of blunt objects around I could use to beat him off, but I was frozen and couldn’t grab or even look for them. And he could use any of them to break my skull if he wanted to.

“Hey, Donny, hold on!” A voice rang out from the other side of the warehouse, and we both looked toward it. A tall fortysomething guy with a rust-colored beard jogged toward us. I recognized him, but it took a moment for his name to click. Simon, from R&D.

The homeless guy let me go and got to his feet. “Hey, hey brother! Knew this was the right place.”

“Yeah… no, I mean… leave him alone, Donny.”

“This is it, right?” Donny stammered. “You said… you said…”

“Listen, now’s not a good time,” Simon replied, coming over and reaching to help me up.

“I was doing it. The thing you said, the nothing words…”

Simon dusted me off with an apologetic look, then turned to Donny.

“Donny, you head back to Warner ok? We’ll talk later.”

“You said today. You said today.” Donny’s hands were shaking.

“No,” Simon replied firmly. “We’ll talk later.”

Donny didn’t look right at Simon, instead somewhere past him, his eyes still not picking one point to focus on. He looked so angry and sad, but shrugged, obediently slumped back to the edge of the dock and hopped down. He looked exactly like the other person had a few days before, shuffling across the lot.

I just watched him for a moment, feeling like my brain was stuck. Simon put a hand on my shoulder.

“You okay?”

I looked at him, but was too weirded out and embarrassed to meet his eyes for more than a second.

“Uh… sure, yeah I’m fine.”

He sighed a bit, like he didn’t quite believe me but was letting it slide.

“Really sorry about Donny. I volunteer over at the Warner Center a couple times a week, and you could say he and I have gotten to be friends.”

I just gave a stiff nod.

“But he has his, you know… stuff he’s working on,” Simon continued.

“Yeah no shit,” I said before I could stop myself. I walked away from him and went to take the brakes off a nearby pallet jack. “We just don’t need his stuff here, know what I mean?”

“Yeah, yeah I know,” Simon agreed, rubbing his hand over the back of his neck like he was tired. But he looked weirdly unbothered by the whole thing, like he was used to it. He turned and moseyed out of the warehouse without saying anything else.

That was maybe two weeks ago. I was worried that Donny might have blasted corona into my face, but symptoms never showed up so I think I’m in the clear there. And I was never approached by any other rando vagrants… but a lot more started coming around. A couple new ones appeared in the back lot the very next day. They stood there for a while without looking at or talking to each other, and went away after maybe an hour. Katy at the front desk actually had one or two come into the lobby, and they also asked for Simon.

Eventually it was like a handful of them would wander through the back lot every day. Some of them were the really freaky types — big eyes looking at nothing, yelling at nobody in particular, covered in psoriasis. One was a lady whose foot was so swollen up and infected that it wouldn’t fit into any shoe. It looked medieval. She didn’t seem to care. There was a friendly older guy who actually had it pretty well together. I chatted with him for a bit; he told me how he likes to feed birds in the nearby park and didn’t say anything about Simon.

The security guys didn’t seem too concerned. Sometimes they’d come by and shoo away the hobos, but sometimes they didn’t. Cops never showed up. After a while I gave up complaining about the whole thing to Jerry, my warehouse manager. He pointed out that our visitors weren’t bothering anybody or even getting close enough to violate the social distancing policies, and technically he was right. I decided I didn’t care either, so long as they didn’t hassle me for cash or try to jump me.

But it didn’t take long for me to notice that the same people never showed up twice. That was weird. Hobos usually have their beats they like to stick to, you know? But it felt like our back lot was becoming some kind of… waystation for them instead. I wondered about that. Why were they coming, and where were they going?

Last night I got my answer, although I still don’t really understand it. And now I don’t know if I can stay here.

[continued in Part 2]